‘So, what can we do?’
‘There is only one answer. There is only one way forward. We have to eliminate the people who act for and on behalf of the institution; we have to destroy the people who represent the institution, the people without whom the institution cannot function.’
‘The sprouts, the people who control our movements and who terrorise us on a daily basis, are the arms and legs of the institution. If we remove them then the institution will try to find replacements. But it cannot do this indefinitely. When it becomes clear that working as a sprout is a dangerous occupation there will be fewer applicants for the work. The institution may be able to protect the commissioners and the senior bureaucrats with guards and guns and razor wire and high walls. But it cannot protect the sprouts who represent it in our communities. The institution cannot protect the men and women who come into our homes, abuse us, take what little we have, sneer at us, invade our privacy and steal what little dignity we have left. Our only possible targets are those who work with and for the fascist Eurostate as its oh-so-willing servants of terror – they are, to us, the true terrorists of our age. Without them the State would have no teeth.’
‘I look around the world in which we now live and I want to scream in rage and frustration. I see poverty and unhappiness and hopelessness. I see rules and regulations created without thought, compassion or reason. I see corruption, prejudice and cruelty. I see a two-tone world in which the haves are the people who work for the State and the rest of us are the have-nots. I see good, honest soldiers dying in wars which are being fought so that politicians and bureaucrats and company directors can steal commodities from poor nations and make themselves rich. I see people being killed by the police officers who are paid to protect them. I see governments imprisoning innocent people and torturing them in our name. I see protests suppressed and protestors oppressed. I see all this, every day. I see it getting worse, every day.’
‘The time has come for a revolution. And we must not fail. We will not get a second chance. We must change things and not just rearrange them. We are at war with an invader just as much as at any time in our history. Those who work with EUDCE are collaborators and history will show them to be the traitors they are; as treacherous as any who worked with the Nazis in the Second World War. The fascist foot soldiers always enjoy the perks of their positions but they must now endure the vicissitudes and, if necessary, pay the penalty. If we kill enough of them then fewer will come forward to replace them and the power structure of EUDCE, built on fear and oppression, will slowly but surely crumble.’
‘During the Second World War our grandfathers and our fathers didn’t just try to kill Hitler, Goering and the other leaders. They tried their hardest to kill every German they could get their hands on. In a war there are no civilians. Possibly the greatest single military achievement of the Second World War, the one that inspired the loudest and longest lasting patriotic fervour, was the Dam Busters raid. Did anyone then stop to worry about the fact that the raid resulted in the flooding of vast acreages of German countryside and the inevitable death by drowning of countless German citizens? Did the pilots drown only German servicemen? Of course they didn’t.’
‘We, in contrast, are targeting and killing only those who are our active enemies. We won’t kill good people; only bureaucrats and state thugs. Ours has become an everyday story of gentle folk who have to kill. These aren’t just petty, low-level functionaries sent round to check that the labels in our underclothes don’t contain imperial measurements; these are the soldiers of an oppressive, invading army which has taken over our lives, our country and our world.’
‘If you believe that I have spoken the truth then you must stay and be with us. If you believe that what I have said is either untrue or unrealistic then you must leave. If you leave then I cannot and will not try to stop you reporting what I have said to the sprouts. But if you leave then you must accept the world as it is now; a world that is deteriorating still; a world which offers us no hope and no future.’
‘We are all here because we’re fed up of whingeing but doing nothing. It’s time to stop moaning and to start taking action.’
‘And we must ask ourselves two questions. First, if not us, then who? And second, if not now, then when?’
Tom sat down.
For a long, long moment there was silence.
No one spoke. No one clapped. No one cheered. Just silence.
He felt a hand holding his. He looked across at Dorothy and smiled. She squeezed his fingers.
Silence.
Suddenly, Tom’s aunt stood up and started to clap. She did so without warning and she clapped ferociously, with massive enthusiasm. Immediately, a short man on the second row stood up too. He was in his forties. He wore a sports jacket frayed at the cuffs and worn at the collar. The buttons which had once doubtless decorated the cuffs were missing. Two of the three buttons used to fasten the jacket were gone. He stood there and Dorothy could see that tears were rolling down his cheeks. He raised his hands high in the air and he clapped hard, loud and long.
And within an instant everyone in the room was standing and clapping and cheering. Many were crying. Some were smiling at one another. There were thirty people in the room. No more. But they made as much noise as a crowd ten, one hundred times, bigger.
Tom watched the back door to see if anyone left. If one person left the room they would all have to leave quickly. The moment and the mood would be gone. As would hope.
But no one left.
‘Bravo,’ murmured Dalby, who was standing next to Tom. He too was clapping. ‘Did you memorise all that? I didn’t see you use any notes?’
‘I didn’t prepare anything,’ said Tom, who was in a daze. ‘I didn’t have any notes.’ Tom was now the only person sitting. He wasn’t sure whether he should stand. But when he tried to get up his legs would not work.
Dalby bent down. ‘So, where did all that come from?’ he asked. ‘You said things which really struck a chord.’
‘Just from the heart,’ said Tom. ‘From the heart,’ he repeated. He had spoken with a passion even he had not known he felt and now he was utterly drained.
He had sold them a revolution.
A small one, perhaps, but a revolution nevertheless.
Chapter 31
There were questions, many questions.
‘Why can’t we fight them in the courts?’ asked Jan Stewer, a small man in an old but well-looked after suit.
‘We can’t sue them because they made the laws. They made all the rules. The Lisbon Treaty, and everything that came after it, took away all our basic rights. And we can’t sue them or take them to court because years ago, before it became EUDCE, the European Union gave itself, its officers and all its employees complete immunity from the law. The people who work for EUDCE have total authority without any responsibility. And so, since we are denied the opportunity to use the law we must go outside the law to find our answer.’
‘Let’s get down to practicalities,’ said a middle-aged woman called Edith Gurney who wore a floral print dress and a hat with flowers on the side. She looked like the sort of woman who would have been more at home making jam. ‘What, precisely, are you asking us to do?’ She asked this as though she were asking for a recipe for sponge cake.
‘There are only two aspects to the work we have to do. First, we have to kill the sprouts. And then we have to do something with the bodies. Of the two, getting rid of the bodies is the bigger problem. The killing itself you should aim to keep as simple as possible. The best way to kill a sprout is to hit them on the head with something solid and rather heavy – the traditional blunt instrument so beloved of detective story writers. This method has the advantage that if something happens between the killing and the disposal, the death can be more easily ‘sold’ as an accident than if you, say, resort to poisoning or electrocution. It would be nigh on impossible to persuade the authorities that a sprout had died after taking an accidental overdose of weed k
iller. It will be easier to persuade them that a sprout fell down some stairs or tripped over an uneven bit of pavement and hit his head on a kerbstone. It will be easier because that’s what they will prefer to believe.’
‘Why can’t we get guns?’ asked Peter Day. ‘We could steal them.’
‘There is no point in our dreaming of a revolution with guns,’ said Tom. ‘What can we get? Target pistols? A few double barrel shotguns? An airgun or two? Maybe even a machine gun? EUDCE has rocket launchers, bombers, gunship helicopters, destroyers, aircraft carriers, tanks, cruise missiles, nuclear submarines, chemical and biological weapons and an army, a navy and an air force. The bureaucrats within EUDCE have unlimited resources to throw at us if we declare war the way they fight wars. We cannot fight EUDCE with guns because we’ll lose. They will always have the biggest and most powerful weapons.’ Tom paused. ‘Now can anyone suggest suitable blunt instruments that might be lying around the average home?’
‘I think I heard someone mention saucepans. Is that because they have a convenient handle?’ asked a plump woman called Mrs Pearse. She wore a dress that was several sizes too small for her. Her husband Tom had been a bank manager in what most people now called ‘the olden days’. He, like Tom Cobleigh, now worked as a part-time allotment guard and was just as glad of the work.
‘A saucepan or frying pan is good as long as it’s heavy,’ replied Tom Cobleigh. ‘Don’t use a light aluminium one. It will probably just bounce off the sprout’s skull without doing him much harm. The last thing you want is a surprised and annoyed sprout who is still on his feet. And don’t pick a weapon with a flimsy handle.’
‘What about a shoe or heavy boot?’ asked Mrs Pearse.
‘No, I don’t think so. A heavy boot might give someone a headache but that’s not really what we’re aiming for here.’
‘A chair? A wooden chair?’ suggested Bill Brewer, a former sales representative for a motor car company. His job had gone when the car industry had died. ‘The sort of thing you might find in a kitchen or a dining room.’ He had hair that looked like a toupee but wasn’t. If he’d been a grocery item he would have long before passed his sell-by date.
‘A chair can be good but only if you have enough space to swing it properly. You’d probably be surprised to find out how difficult it is to swing a chair in an ordinary kitchen. There just isn’t enough room.’ Tom picked up a chair and showed what he meant by trying to raise it above his head. The chair clattered into a light shade. He lowered it amidst some uncertain laughter. ‘You’ll probably also find that chairs may be rather heavy and difficult to aim properly,’ he added.
‘A cricket bat? Baseball bat?’ This suggestion came from Harry Hawk. Once a professional violinist with a large orchestra, Mr Hawk now collected and sold firewood to earn a living.
‘Splendid!’ agreed Tom – who would only later realise how surreal it was that he had somehow become regarded as an expert on killing instruments. ‘But you might find a cricket bat a little too large for indoor use. And don’t forget that cricket is an outlawed game. So if you have a cricket bat in the house make sure that you keep it hidden until you want to use it!’
‘How about a golf club?’ asked, an elderly man in a Garrick club tie. Since no one played golf any more (partly because there were no golf courses and no way of getting to them even if there had been) there were plenty of golf clubs available. Many suspects used them as walking sticks and ‘defenders’; the best way to fight off stray dogs.
‘Maybe too long for indoor use,’ suggested Tom.
‘How hard should we hit?’
‘As hard as you can.’
‘Pity we can’t kill them with paper. A ton of paper suddenly landing on top of them.’
Everyone looked.
‘That’s what they do to us.’
Everyone nodded understanding. There were some smiles.
‘Strangle them with red tape,’ suggested Peter Day.
There were chuckles of approval.
‘Getting back to the use of blunt objects,’ said Daniel Whiddon. ‘Do you recommend that we hold the weapon in any particular way? As a former Health and Safety Executive Officer I am concerned that we might sustain wrist or lower arm injuries if we use ergonomically unsound methods when wielding our weapons.’
‘Just hold it tight and bring it down hard,’ said Tom, trying hard not to smile. Daniel Whiddon was one of the many former civil servants who hadn’t been employed as a sprout. Most of the plum jobs had been given to Europeans from the East of the new European Superstate.
‘Do you favour a one-handed grip or a two-handed grip?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about a two-handed grip,’ admitted Tom. ‘You’re thinking of perhaps holding, say, a saucepan in the way that some people used to hold a tennis racket?’
‘That sort of thing, yes.’ As far as Tom knew no one had played tennis for years. A few higher echelon sprouts probably still played on private courts. But there were no courts for suspects to use. Sports were considered too confrontational for suspects to take part in.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ admitted Tom. ‘I think it’s probably up to the individual to find a grip that he feels comfortable with. Maybe it would be worth doing a little practising beforehand.’
‘Or she,’ said a woman in the front row whom Tom did not recognise.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You said ‘find a grip that he feels comfortable with’. You should have said ‘find a grip that he or she feels comfortable with’.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. A grip that he or she feels comfortable with. But it all depends to a certain extent on the weapon you’ve picked up. And it’s not always possible to know in advance precisely what you’ll be using.’
‘What part of the body do you recommend as a target?’
‘Always the head. That’s your target.’
‘Front, back or sides?’
‘Sounds like a haircut!’ There was some sniggering from the left of the room.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Tom. ‘Whatever is easiest to reach. Don’t waste time trying to manoeuvre yourself into a position to hit him, or indeed her, on the back of the head.’
‘Should we kill female sprouts too?’
‘Of course. It would be against sex discrimination legislation for us not to kill female sprouts,’ said the woman in the front row before Tom could speak.
‘Just go ahead and hit,’ said Tom. ‘And make sure that you hit hard. The first hit probably won’t kill him but it should stun him. Then you can finish him off at your leisure. Or her,’ he added, with a glance at the woman in the front row. ‘Get a good swing and really bash him hard. You’re not patting him as you’d pat a dog. You need to get some real movement into your arm. And remember that female skulls can be just as thick as male skulls. So don’t hold back just because you’re killing a female sprout. And remember, you aren’t aiming to win marks for style. The aim is simply to kill the sprout as quickly as possible and to then dispose of the body.’
‘What about other methods of killing?’ asked Harry Hawk. ‘Electrocution, for example.’
‘I think that might prove rather too complicated.’
‘Poison? Give the sprout some home-made cake that contains arsenic.’
‘It would take too long,’ said Dalby, who hadn’t spoken for a while. ‘And if anyone did find the body and examine it they’d know that he was murdered.’
‘Inject him with a lethal dose of heroin.’
‘Where are we going to get heroin from?’ said Dalby. ‘And we’d have to hold him down while we injected him. If we’ve already got him under control why bother injecting him?’
‘We could run him over with a car,’ suggested Jan Stewer.
‘We’d have to steal a car first. And then persuade the sprout to stand still while we ran him over. Sprouts are not the world’s most intelligent people but I can’t see any of them doing that.’
‘We could arrange for th
e sprout to be bitten by a rabid dog,’ suggested Mrs Brewer.
‘Do you have a rabid dog?’ asked Peter Day.
‘Not at the moment, no. But there must be some around.’
‘I could seduce him and then tell his wife,’ said Harry Hawk’s mother, who had been in her eighties for as long as Tom Cobleigh could remember.
‘How would that help?’
‘She’d kill him!’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, I would if he were my husband.’
‘She might not care. She might even be glad he’s having an affair. She might be having an affair herself. Besides, it will take too much time for you to seduce him and tell his wife and for her to beat him to death with a poker or whatever.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘We have to keep this simple. We’re amateurs but they’re all arrogant bastards and none of them expects anyone to kill them. We don’t need any equipment or anything complicated. Just hit them hard on the head or push them down the stairs. One or the other.’
‘Or both,’ said Peter Gurney.
‘Or both, if required,’ agreed Tom with a quiet smile.
Chapter 32
At the end of the meeting they left the building one at a time, leaving at thirty second intervals. Tom, who was the last to leave, didn’t see the sprouts until the car screeched to a halt and the two of them leapt out and suddenly appeared in front of him. His first thought was relief that he had sent Dorothy home ahead of him.
Despite the fuel shortages some of the police sprouts still drove around in cars. They used a fleet of identical (and therefore easily identified) dark blue Ford Smegmas. In a vain attempt to confuse the public, and to disguise the appearance of the cars, some had dark green upholstery while some had dark blue. It wasn’t much of a disguise.
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