The Partridge Kite (5 page)

‘Kate, let me repeat to you my little sermon of this morning. Tom’s already had a good run: at forty-one, a very good run indeed. But how long now before we must decide he’s too old, or cares too little? How long before his . . . retirement . . . is forced upon him by other people for quite different, even hostile reasons? Kate, this job we have for him is not dangerous. It’s hardly A.D. status at all!’

He looked quickly across to Fry, who was looking at nothing but his own hands clasped on his lap.

‘Mr Kellick’ - Kate sounded strained - ‘I’ve told you I’ll do as you ask. I have already begun to do it. I had only hoped to know a little of what it is I’m having to persuade Tom to do, that’s all. I want to help him, but I do not want to hurt him!’

Said with feeling, Kellick thought. Such a pretty woman. She’s been a little indiscreet in the past, but undoubtedly pretty. He could never understand how the sexes paired themselves up. McCullin did have a job that might seem attractive in itself to women. He travelled and when he wasn’t travelling he’d enough money to spend, more than enough. McCullin had taken Mrs Cathcart and caused her to throw away the pleasant, comfortable life she’d enjoyed in Regent’s Park Terrace with the Hon. Jeremy Cathcart, and the baby daughter, Sarah.

Kate got up to leave his office. And yet, he thought, watching the tall, neat blonde in the blue flared tweed skirt and tight blue sweater, she doesn’t seem the kind of girl to be attracted by the usual clichéd sex symbols.

Tom’s left hand rested high, between her legs, casually, gently fondling. Her legs, very long, were stretched out beneath the steering wheel. Her thighs were the longest Tom had ever seen, the skin always slightly brown, the soft blonde hair like a down on them. Tom remembered seeing those thighs for the first time many years ago. She was sitting, he was standing, in a coach taking them to a display of new Ministry of Defence weaponry at Warminster in Wiltshire. On the way he had tried to count the number of tiny blonde hairs on each thigh as she sat there reading Le Carré. He’d finished counting by the time they reached Salisbury, so he began an imaginary count up and beyond the seam of the scrubbed denim skirt. By the time they’d reached Warminster he’d promised himself he’d kiss - one night or day - every hair he’d counted and all those still out of sight.

Her head rested on the support on the seatback. Her face turned Slightly away from him, her blonde hair failing back unruffled. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply, regularly.

The windows have steamed up, Kate,’ he said, softly.

This isn’t the Serpentine!’

‘It’s just as good.’

‘It is,’ she whispered back, ‘it’s always good. . . sometimes it’s unbearable, it’s so good!’

He felt a slight tremor and the muscles on the inside of her thighs stiffened, catching Tom’s hand tight. He began to get cramp in it. She relaxed again. He felt relief, glad to exercise his hand again in and around her. He kissed her ear and blew gently into it. He knew she liked that. He knew much of what she liked: and she of him.

Tom had whored in many parts of the globe - Bangkok, Vientiane, Saigon, Hong Kong, Macau, Manila and all stations west. He’d once managed it for a bet in a cold bath in Reykjavik, Iceland, and again with a superb, well- bosomed Army lieutenant in a gunboat off the port of Haifa, Israel. But never, never had it been like Kate. English girls turned him on, anyway. In all the years he’d spent off and on in Asia he’d never managed to be attracted to any of their women. Saucer tits, saucer faces, shaved in all those places Tom especially liked to taste sweat, the sweet intoxicating smell of an excited woman. He remembered his first-ever Vietnamese whore, in Tu Do, Saigon. A thousand piastres she’d wanted. . . twenty dollars US in those days, or fifteen hundred piastres for a Special. He’d asked a friend what a Special was.

‘For fifteen hundred,’ he’d replied, ‘she’ll stop knitting!’

No, Tom had long been convinced that his adrenalin pump worked only for the English woman. Tall, blonde, eyes blue, green or grey, and always honey-coloured like Kate. The menopaused spinsters in die Department thought she sat her evenings alone under a sunray lamp. But Kate did nothing just to look good. In summer when she returned from her holiday in Greece, her hair was almost bleached white by the Aegean sun. Seven times in seven summers he’d stood in Number Two Terminal, Heathrow, to meet the Olympic Airways flight from Athens. Every time he’d been certain he would miss her in the crowds massing around the exit doors. He had never missed her, however chaotic the holiday crowds. Her tallness, her blondeness, her tanned skin that flushed so dark the moment she saw him.

She groaned softly, pressing her head hard against the window. The cold mist on the glass mingled with the sweat on her forehead. Tom could feel the rush in her thighs, could almost feel in himself the surge of pleasure run through her belly. In love she was often frantic, sometimes animal and

noisy. But at the final moment of orgasm she had no time for endearments or obscenities. She was always silent in her moment . . . only the slightest moan … always gentle at the end.

‘Kate?’

‘Not yet, Tom,’ she answered. ‘Don’t talk, not yet.’

They sat inside the steamy shell of the car for another hour. Little by little Kate came back from her private world of pleasure to the cold rainy world of Kellick and Fry, and the confidence trick she’d agreed to work on the man she loved. They talked together until it was time for her to go. Tom began to walk off, turned and came across the front of the car. Kate opened the side window and Tom handed her a parking ticket that had been stuck to the wiper blades.

Some warden, plodding the weary rounds of London pavements, hadn’t seen or hadn’t cared about two lovers who’d gone well into red penalty time.

The make-up men from the Department had done a very good job, just as Kellick had said they would. They were a team of specialist ‘props’ men who worked from what to passers-by was a small builder’s yard off the Uxbridge Road . . . the Shepherds Bush end. They were men who could ring the instant changes: turn a derelict shop into a busy bookstore for an anonymous, never-to-be-traced-again rendezvous point.

They did all the printing for the Department. Visiting cards, letterheads and the like - business that could not be sent to the Government’s own printers in the usual way.

They also looked after the production of much of the identification documents needed by the Department for its daily business of deceit. Documents like driving licences for men or groups of men not on the records of the Government’s Central Registration Authority in Swansea. They could supply pension books. National Insurance cards, cheque books, birth or marriage certificates, NUJ Press Cards, Union membership tickets, any number of stewards’ lapel badges to get into any number of private political meetings.

They had perfected an ingenious passport that could carry one man out of a country and bring someone quite unlike him just as easily back. In short, men were invented or demoted to a name on a file, given life or had it taken away, by their issue of bits of paper with date stamps and watermarks.

They’d had little work to do this evening. Merely to supply enough evidence that Fry was a bona fide Security Agent.

Tom McCullin went to the hotel in Cadogan Square just as Kate had arranged for him to do. He took the lift to Suite 814. It was exactly eight o’clock . . . three hours since he’d left her, when he knocked.

Fry opened the door. ‘Good evening, Mr McCullin. I am Hampton. You are punctual - something Mrs Cathcart had warned me not to expect!’

‘She’s my worst PR,’ said Tom.

‘She’s a beautiful woman, Mr McCullin, and she is your best PR - your very best, I can assure you of that!’

Something in Fry’s voice just for an instant caught Tom. His eyes turned grey and he looked straight at Fry, focusing on the bridge of his nose.

‘Kate said you were a Swede, Mr Hampton. You speak exceptional English!’

‘Mrs Cathcart told you I worked in Malmö, not that I was Swedish. I was born in Pitlochry near Perth, so I’m pleased to know my English is passable!’ He laughed at his joke, closing the door behind Tom.

Tom gave no applause, not even a grin. Fry was uneasy. Kellick had warned him of Tom’s party trick of looking right through you. How the hell could Kellick be so certain that McCullin hadn’t seen him at the Department? Fry had been there three and a half years . . . eleven years in the Service. How could anyone be certain that somewhere in some corridor they hadn’t passed, hadn’t borrowed a match, hadn’t stood side by side in the Department lavatory?

Fry walked to the drinks cabinet, a clumsy arrangement. A pressed cardboard imitation antique globe on a stand, depicting a sixteenth-century navigator’s world with sea-

horses and serpents ruling the five Oceans. Fry lifted the Northern Hemisphere.

‘What can I offer you?’ He was looking at Tom through the mirror on the wall above the globe.

‘A large Scotch with ice. No water, just lots of ice.’

Fry continued watching as Tom looked around him - the pile of Swedish newspapers on the bed, all carefully stamped with the stationer’s kiosk name at Malmö airport. Fry’s Samsonite briefcase was open on top of the television . . . letterheads embossed with the firm’s name, Trygg-Ö-Säker, could be clearly seen. An opened packet of Swedish cigarettes by the ashtray on the bedside cabinet, Swedish book- matches were on the floor nearby. Just enough, thought Fry. Doesn’t look too arranged. Too obvious if he was looking for something suspicious, but he isn’t.

Hampton, alias Fry, was dressed typically Scandinavian. A check sports jacket cut too short and square by British standards. He had a grey knitted woollen shirt done up at the neck with no tie and a pair of snubbed-nose shoes that looked as if they had started on the shoemaker’s last as moccasins.

Tom loosened his tie, untied the lace of his left shoe, and began his Scotch. Fry relaxed a little, and showed it.

‘Mr McCullin - Tom - as Mrs Cathcart will have told you, I run a reasonably successful security business in Malmö; small but select and therefore financially sound.’ He handed Tom a business card. ‘The name means “Safe and Sound.” We deal sometimes with industrial espionage - so close to the Russians, you understand, and therefore more vulnerable. But mostly our work is routine security, factories, offices, the transfer of monies, bullion and so on. You know the kind of thing.’

Tom nodded but said nothing.

‘We belong to what some of the more imaginative journalists here in England describe as the third power. They seem upset that security organisations like mine should have so many thousands of well-trained, disciplined men at our command. Maybe they’d be happier if our men didn’t wear uniforms. I must say, some of the outfits I’ve seen here at London Airport are quite outrageous!’

‘What is the job you have in mind?’ Tom managed to be direct without sounding rude.

‘Exactly! Let’s get to the point!’ said Fry. ‘I have been asked to investigate an organisation here in Britain by a Scandinavian group of merchant bankers. To begin with, large amounts of money, their money, are being funnelled away from companies they have financial stakes in. They have yet to discover how. They would also like to know the recipients. But that is not their main concern.

‘What worries them most is that some kind of organisation - might well be apolitical - has begun infiltrating their companies and associated companies right here in Britain. As far as we know - and I must tell you, it really is only an intelligent guess at this stage - it is the intention of this organisation to create distrust, envy, confusion, militancy among the work force, and - and this is what distresses us most - they have been successful in infiltrating the higher levels of management.’

‘So it must be the Russians,’ said Tom. ‘Who else? Unless it’s some nutters from the CIA out on a limb. Do you have another Scotch?’

Fry gave the bottle of expensive Malt to Tom and walked to the globe, pulling New Zealand apart for the icebox.

‘Could be, Tom: could well be the Russians, or maybe some kind of Fascist group.’

Tom asked, ‘Why should Fascists want to upset what is still pretty much a Right-of-Centre society here?’

‘I’m not a politician, Tom. It’s well outside my usual brief, but the way it’s been explained to me, by those who are paying the piper as it were, is that just as a Left-Wing organisation might well want to disrupt a society it considers not Left enough - as in Portugal some time ago - so any Right-Wing group might seek by any means to upset the status quo if it considers it not Right enough. There’s some logic there, you’ll admit. Especially if the Right felt itself also under direct threat from a Socialist Government, it might feel time was running out and its chances of survival diminishing.’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. He followed the logic. Politics at this level he could understand.

‘If such an organisation does exist,’ he asked, ‘Left or Right, why not go straight to the police? You must have some proof or you wouldn’t be so convinced they exist. And you are convinced, aren’t you?’

Oh yes! thought Fry - and why not go to the police indeed? Christ, he thought, if CORDON exists let everyone know. If we’re going to kill it that’s the only quick way to do it. Why this bloody silly charade?

‘Because, Tom,’ he said aloud, following the line of argument Kellick had given him that morning, ‘because my clients - always sensitive as you can well appreciate to the complexity of international politics and the - well, “hand in gloveness” of international finance - think it wise to establish first the identity of this group, its motives and its influence, by which I mean success so far, before going as you suggest directly to the British authorities. In Sweden, of course, this could all be dealt with in very much a different way without fears of repercussion. But you. . . we. . . have in Britain a Press with a very loose tongue. A sense of responsibility is not a harness it ever wishes to wear. Give them a snippet of this story, just a whiff of our suspicions, and they’d make what is probably just a collection of troublesome cranks into a national disaster! And anyway, Tom, you’ll understand that a complaint by Swedish bankers about subversive infiltration of British industry would do irreparable damage. My clients are trying to protect their money here, not lose it for good!’