The Partridge Kite (8 page)

‘We must all of us urge this Government to move with haste. The alternative I know to exist is too dreadful to contemplate.’

Fry handed the photocopy of the letter to Kellick.

‘It is signed,’ he said, ‘by Lord Bremmer - Chairman of the British Heritage Trust.’

Kellick said nothing for a full minute. . . merely stared at the letter attached to the computer data sheets.

‘. . . the alternative I know to exist,’ he repeated the last words, ‘. . . is too dreadful to contemplate:
I know
to exist
. . .’ the voice trailed off.

He leaned across the desk and pressed down the SPEAK switch of the intercom to his secretary in the office next door.

‘Get News-Information to bring me everything they have on Lord Bremmer - directorships, companies, clubs, what his children do, his close friends. . . Oh! and let me have the names of the Committee members of the British Heritage Trust.’ He looked at Fry.

‘That letter was written on 4 January, published on the 5th. Lord Bremmer was incinerated in his car the following day, the 6th. I remember. The chauffeur died too. Car ran straight into a bridge support on the M4 just before the Bath turnoff. Bremmer lived there. The bodies were almost completely destroyed in the fire. Bremmer was identified only by his teeth!’

He sat down at his desk, cupped his hands over his mouth and began blowing into them - something he did whenever he thought he saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

‘What was that line Sanderson used? “On twenty-seven occasions in eight years CORDON has had to issue an execution order on people, because a mistake was made on the first approach.” So Bremmer was one! An acceptable mistake,’ Kellick went on, talking really to himself. He stared down at the leather-covered desktop and the unmarked blotter between his resting elbows.

‘Lord Bremmer was not renowned for his Liberalism. . . in fact one of the most vicious “hang ’em, flog ’em, send them back to their own bloody country” campaigners I’ve ever met! A promising candidate for CORDON, I’d have thought. Wonder why he said no to them?’

‘He sounds quite different in his letter,’ Fry interrupted. ‘He sounded quite reasonable; quite out of character if he was as you say.’

‘Bremmer sounded terrified!’ Kellick said. ‘He’d learnt something . . . something that really frightened him. Don’t you remember Sanderson’s words, “I have seen the Spectre of a Britain under CORDON” . . . remember what he said next. . . “I died the moment I saw that vision”.

‘Bremmer saw it, too. No doubt had it explained to him in detail and then funked it. He’d always insisted publicly that the hardliners should take a stronger hand. Then they stared him full in the face and he couldn’t actually do himself what he’d been preaching others to do for almost his entire lifetime.

‘So they burned him alive. If you
are
still alive, that is, after hitting twenty feet of concrete at ninety miles an hour! We’ve got our starter. Fry. We’ve got it right here with Lord Bremmer. I want you to check out every member of that Trust . . . complete backgrounds. Compile on everything they touch - immediate families, in-laws, the lot!

‘You can be certain,’ he went on, ‘that some of them have connections with other offshoot nationalist-type organisations . . . bet your life some send cash to the National Front
and
this new one . . . the Fight for Freedom Fund!’ The door to Kellick’s office opened and two smartly- dressed women came in. One carried a stack of folders from News-Information. The other carried two plastic cups of tea.

Kellick carefully placed his, dead centre of the blotter, dropped in a saccharine and stirred with a chrome spoon he kept for himself hidden in a tin in his desk drawer.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who is the present Chairman of the Heritage Trust? Who took Bremmer’s place?’

‘General Sir George Meredith,’ Fry answered.

‘Good Lord!’

‘Exactly!’ said Fry. ‘One-time adjutant to General Sir William Tendale who scalded himself to death, drunk on neat gin!’

‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Kellick was bubbling. That’s the best bit of news yet. A starter AND our first piece of the jigsaw puzzle . . . General Meredith! Mrs Hayes,’ he spoke into the intercom, ‘send me in a currant bun, buttered both halves, the usual way.’

He wiped the spoon clean from the box of tissues on the desk and closed the drawer. He pulled his chair close to the edge of his desk, sat very erect, sipped his tea and waited for his buttered bun. He smiled.

Kellick, after seven most unpleasant days, was beginning to fell quite himself again.

McCullin was on his way back to his flat, walking north up the Charing Cross Road from Leicester Square underground station. He’d gone there out of curiosity, morbid as well as professional, to pace out for himself the last moments of Reginald Scammill’s life. How easy it had been!

After lunch he had telephoned a friend who was also an investment broker for Reed-Walker. The friend confirmed that Temax International Oil, like so many monopolistic American Corporations, had a thousand and one fingers in as many British pies. Its financial control of them all was absolute. Its real ownership of dozens of familiar British household brand names was not widely known, ownership of companies that produced everything from television sets to toiletries, children’s toys to telephones; it held majority shares in three British television networks; it owned garage and supermarket chains and four major drug and chemical companies. It also had direct access, by virtue of the money it had invested, and the men nominated on the Boards, to research projects of the British aeronautical and electronic industries. It had once bought and then closed down two car factories and five supporting component companies in the Midlands and Scotland.

Many years ago Ethics had joined hands with Honour in a suicidal leap off the White Cliffs of Dover. How had his friend summed it up? ‘Capital has no conscience and no fatherland,’ quoting Buchan.

The sun had gone and the sky was an even grey. A typically British phenomenon, rain to sun to the prospect of snow in less than twelve hours. The weather had turned around and a north-easterly was moving down the centre line of the Glaring Cross Road. Tom turned up the collar of his jacket and pressed the lapels flat against his chest. He was now less than thirty yards away from St Giles’ Circus, passing a string of porno shops. A flourishing market, evidence, he thought, of the growing number of impotents, nymphomaniacs and psychopaths who’d turned to rubber suits and leather when rhino horn and everything else had failed.

McCullin felt a sudden tingle of shock, followed a fraction of a second later by a terrible scream . . . only yards away, a man’s scream. He instinctively jumped across the pavement so that his back was against the wall.

The scream, guttural and shocking, was then joined by others, women’s high and piercing. People criss-crossed in panic in front of him and he saw just to his right a London Transport bus veering across the road.

Then only the women were screaming and Tom saw, just behind the massive front wheels of the ten-tonner, a crushed head, blood spurting, still under pressure from the mass of red and white pulp. Then the man’s legs appeared, naked except for his short socks and shoes - brown shoes dragged within inches of the broken head.

The bus jerked to a stop. The driver jumped from his cab and ran round the front of his bus to the near side. He stopped abruptly as he came to the wheel and retched violently. He could not stop the heaving of his chest; clutching his stomach through his heavy black uniform with one hand, he guided himself, like a blind man, back to the front of his bus and clung to the radiator.

Tom was a spectator. He lowered himself, sliding his back down the wall, and crouched. He watched as the driver was helped from the radiator by men who forced themselves to look away from the gore. They sat him down within a couple of feet of Tom and covered him with overcoats. His face and chest were now covered in vomit. He made no effort to wipe it away.

There was commotion all around. Tom was looking only at the driver now but he could hear the din, the shouts and horns from motorists further down the street, impatient at the sudden jam, unknowing of the sudden horror.

‘It was murder! I saw him pushed. . . I saw it in front of me. . .’ It was the bus driver.

‘It was an accident,’ Tom said, partly to comfort the man, hoping to make him say more.

‘It was murder,’ he mumbled through the mess in his mouth. ‘He was on the pavement, he wasn’t going to cross. He was dragged down . . . I saw him pulled down with a stick. . .’

‘Did you see who did it?’ Tom asked as gently as he could.

But the bus driver would never remember. Shock erases. He would, over the next days, repeat his short story a dozen times to the police. And they would record in precise English the horror of one man’s recurring nightmare. Shock would take away the man’s sleep, creating again and again in the sweat of his pillow the football of gore that became a face and then a football again until his wife reached across him to the bedside table for the Valium.

And anyway, even as Tom had asked his question, the man with the umbrella - the umbrella that had dragged its victim by the neck to his death - was already in a taxi going south, to his favourite wine bar under the railway arches of London Bridge Station. There was always good cheese and draught sherry there.

Kellick had finished his buttered bun and was rearranging the various files News-Information had given him. Fry was preparing the list of British Heritage Trust Committee members for the computers. The Department’s programmers had already been alerted for a punctual eight o’clock start on the following morning’s shift.

The telephone rang at Kellick’s right elbow. Without looking he picked up the receiver and listened. For half a minute he said nothing.

Then he spoke, slowly lowering the receiver as he did, so that Fry could not be sure the caller heard all Kellick was saying.

‘No, nothing for the time being. . . I’ll call you when I’ve decided.’ Kellick spoke in a monotone and it alerted Fry, who stopped what he was doing.

‘That was the Duty Day Officer. The man he had tailing McCullin has just died in a road accident - the Charing Cross Road. Bus ran over him. Driver insists he saw the man pushed.’

The two men caught each other’s gaze. Fry felt a twinge of embarrassment but it went quickly as he sensed Kellick’s sudden fear.

‘It must mean,’ Fry said, ‘that they really are on to us.’

‘It means,’ Kellick replied, still looking directly into Fry’s eyes and in the same strained monotone, ‘it means that they want us to know it, too.’

Rules Restaurant would almost certainly have been demolished if there had been enough money to do it. Not only Rules, a pleasant, expensive place, but almost the entire Covent Garden and the streets surrounding it.

The demolition men at County Hall had wanted to clear the area - acres of it - for redevelopment. So when the Vegetable Market moved out to Nine Elms on the other side of the Thames, the planners moved in. They in turn were followed by the Conservationists.

There was much protest.

But it was money, or rather the lack of it, that eventually won the day. Redevelopment would have to wait. In the meantime the family grocer, the shoemaker, the theatrical costumier, the hardware shop, the pubs and the dining rooms with their steamed steak and kidney puddings carried on with their daily chores, grateful for the reprieve.

The clock in Rules restaurant showed twenty minutes past twelve midday, early for lunch by anyone’s standards. But the two men were important. More important than being important, they were also ‘well known’. So the headwaiter was not too put out at being asked for prosciutto, oysters and Sauvignon so soon in the day.

The tall man, aged about forty-five, was wearing thin gold- rimmed spectacles. He was impeccably dressed in various shades of blue; dark blue pinstripe single-breasted suit, light blue soft-collar Oxford shirt, a silk knitted tie in a blue that blended shirt and suit.

He was a financial adviser . . . an expert on money, the cost of it, things that were used in place of it; people it could buy. He was a director of seventeen different companies and was on the board of one of the City’s most famous merchant banks.

He had become ‘well known’, a public figure, when he’d chaired a Royal Commission on Penal Reform following the long series of outrages by the IRA and the sudden but prolonged spate of urban guerrilla warfare that spread across Europe during the late seventies.

His appointment, as a man not of the ‘Silk’, upset the Law profession. The findings of the Commission, named after him as is the custom, shocked the Government who had ordered it and the Left Wing and the Liberals who’d expected great things of it. For the Curran-Price Commission was accused of turning the clock back half a century with its recommendations for the reintroduction of the death penalty for acts of terrorism and certain murders if premeditation could be proven.

John Curran-Price became a celebrity overnight and after a series of television, radio and press interviews following his Report’s publication he also became very popular in the country. This more than anything else disarmed and angered his opponents.

The second man at the table was chairman of one of Britain’s nationalised industries. He was also a Knight of the Order of the British Empire. He’d been given it, it was said, as reward for reducing his industry’s output by half, doubling the price of its products and multiplying five times over its losses.

They were unlikely lunch companions. But the fat knight had much to say, much know-how to impart; information that would be essential should the running of the country be taken on by other men.

The other man, sipping his wine, gazing over the top of his expensive spectacles, had much to gain. Curran-Price was CORDON Director for London Area Seven. He was also on the Committee of the British Heritage Trust and godfather to the son of its Chairman, General Sir George Iain Renfrew Meredith.

Curran-Price had courted the bulky knight for several months now. Not for the purpose of recruiting - nothing was less likely - but to learn how it was governed, its relationship with Government, its associations with private companies, and the character, background and inclinations of those who sat on the governing board.