Gant!

by Laurence Todd

  The author then explained about contact he’d had with figures inside the Greek Military who, in 1974, had overthrown the democratic Government and imposed martial law on the country. He claimed to have offers of support from an unnamed general in the Greek army who was prepared to come to the UK to oversee the author’s intentions and help put them into practice.

  This was incendiary stuff and went far beyond any traditional right-wing invective that was popular at the time. Whilst paeans for greater law and order were not uncommon in most of the newspapers of the time, none were advocating the deaths of trade union leaders or senior politicians. Even extremist anti-immigration parties like the National Front were simply arguing for no further immigration to the UK and repatriation of those already here back to whatever country they came from. They weren’t arguing for the extermination of immigrants.

  I logged on to Google and typed in the legend, Auspicium Melioris Aevi, and requested a translation into plain English. It came back as “Token of a better age” and had some kind of connection to the Order of St Michael and St George. After reading through the blurb, it would appear that the group in these pictures had suborned this maxim for their own purposes as I couldn’t see the connection between what this body represented and what was occurring in the pictures, and certainly not the sentiments expressed in the recommendations.

  Was this what Louis Phipps had stumbled upon? Was this what he was assuming was going to make him rich? This would presuppose he knew who took the pictures, who the people in the pictures were and where they could be found now. Who would he know with this kind of information and how would someone like him come across such people? If the pictures had also been in the bags Phipps claimed to have stolen from Debbie Frost’s car, what was her connection in all this? This also raised the question of why this material was in Debbie Frost’s car. Why would she be holding onto them? Was she connected to one or more persons in these pictures? Did she know who these people were? Assuming Phipps was being truthful, why would she be in possession of such incendiary material? It was essential to find out who the people were in these pictures.

  I looked at my watch and realised I’d been reading and examining pictures for more than an hour. It was now almost three and I could feel my guts rumbling. I poured a coffee and was thinking about lunch when DCI Tomkinson returned my call.

  I thanked him and began by asking how he’d become involved in the investigation into the theft of Debbie Frost’s car.

  “I mean, with all respect, it’s a routine car theft. I was just wondering what a DCI would be doing asking for fingerprints of the suspects in a case like this?”

  “What was I doing? My job, that’s what. Anyhow, why is this a Special Branch matter? As you rightly say, this was an ordinary car theft, no hint of espionage, so why do you need to know what I was doing?”

  “I don’t need to know,” I tried to keep the ire from my voice. “But Louis Phipps was simply a small-time criminal. Stealing cars wasn’t a new thing for him, or his brother. They’d been arrested for this before but they’d never had a DCI take an interest in their welfare. It’s odd that a senior officer should get involved in this kind of case. I’m told you authorised fingerprinting, and my experience of car theft doesn’t include routine fingerprinting. My interest is that the car was registered to someone who’s a senior official in the Conservative Party, and there’s a suggestion that blackmail was involved, so I wanted to know more about the suspect in case there was a wider agenda.”

  “And have you found one?”

  “As of yet, no. The suspect, Louis Phipps, was shot dead last Monday night so I can’t get anything from him. I’m also surprised MI5 was in on the interview. I’d like to know what this was all about.”

  “Sir,” he instantly shot back. That was me put in my place. “Sir,” I replied formally.

  “That’s better. Now, to answer your question briefly, Five were involved because, as you yourself said earlier, the victim in this instance was a senior official in the backroom staff of the governing political party, and there was concern about what might have been lost. And, as you well know, Five don’t get involved in day-to-day policing matters, which is why I was asked to become involved. But, as things turned out, the car was recovered and nothing of any substance was lost.”

  “Does that imply something was actually taken from the car?”

  “Apparently something was taken, according to the car owner, but only a case full of old papers that were destined for the scrapheap, so she wasn’t overly concerned at not getting them back.”

  “And MI5 were okay with this situation?”

  “There’s been no follow-up I know of, so seemingly they were.”

  “If that’s the case, sir,” I continued, “Who rifled Louis Phipps’ flat whilst he was awaiting trial?”

  “I don’t know,” he came back instantly.“Who told you this?”

  “The landlord where Phipps lived. He said some heavy guy, as he puts it, came and searched his flat from top to bottom. Sort of unusual for a routine car theft when the only thing taken was a bagful of old stuff nobody seems to want, isn’t it?”

  There was a pause for a few moments.

  “I wasn’t aware of any searching of premises but, given who the suspect was, it could quite likely have been one of his criminal friends. It was nobody official, I’m sure of that. That chap, Phipps, he’s dead now, isn’t he?” he said almost casually.

  “Yes, shot dead last Monday night.”

  “And you were there, I’m led to believe. You saw it go down.”

  “I saw them go down,” I said flippantly. “I just heard two quick-fire silencer type sounds and then both Phipps brothers hit the deck.”

  “DI Harrow said you didn’t see anyone pull the trigger, though.”

  “That’s correct, sir. There was nobody either of us could see. It was also dark in the area where the shots came from. Perhaps it was someone from the insurance company getting back at Phipps for all the hassles he’s caused them from stealing cars.”

  “Pardon?” He sounded bemused.

  “Nothing, sir, just a poor joke. No, I didn’t see anyone around at the time of the shootings.”

  “DI Harrow also says that, so far, they’ve been unable to identify who the gunman might be.”

  I resisted telling him that, so far as I was concerned, there was only one suspect – an American hitman who’d been present near the scene minutes earlier. I’d already raised this belief with Smitherman and, for the moment, didn’t want this broadcast any wider.

  “That’s true.”

  “CID has canvassed all around the area where the shootings occurred but have turned up nothing of any substance. Nobody seems to have seen or heard anything. Anyway, that’s why I was involved in the early part of the case. Does that answer your question?”

  Actually it didn’t. I didn’t doubt what he said was right. I just doubted I’d been told the whole story. Did he even know the whole story? Something was troubling me and I didn’t know what.

  “For the moment, yes it does. Thanks for the cooperation, sir.” I hung up.

  So, MI5 had been involved in the questioning of Louis Phipps after his arrest. They’d be involved if there was a security aspect to the case. But Phipps had only stolen a car, and whilst it was owned by someone high up in the governing party, albeit behind the scenes, who’d claimed she’d lost nothing of any importance in the theft, it didn’t make any sense to bring in the security boys, any more than it made sense that Phil Gant had been hired to go after and kill the Phipps brothers.

  It all kept coming back to the issue of what Phipps said he’d taken that was going to make him a shedload of money. I’d been looking at photographs of men training in military fashion and had read a garbled manifesto making the case for insurrection against the then Labour Government. Could this be something to do with it?

  I took a couple of the pictures to the photocopier and enlarged them. The soldier’s faces still
didn’t register with me but I could now see the targets being shot at. One was a head and shoulder image of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. A few others I took to be union leaders or Cabinet members because I didn’t recognise any of them, though I did recognise Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill.

  Richard Rhodes has said that Phipps was blackmailing someone high up in Government, which was why Gant had been hired. Leaving aside my disbelief at the notion of Louis Phipps even knowing the names of anyone in Government and that he’d even have a clue as to how to engage in such a sophisticated act, I doubted that was the real reason. Could Phipps have known something about someone that was the main reason for his being dispatched to the afterlife by Gant?

  I needed to know more about those pictures as they had to contain a clue as to what this situation was all about. I had to know who the people in these pictures were and, in particular, who’d written the manifesto I’d just read.

  I went onto the Branch database and typed the words “political extremism, 1970s” into the search engine. A whole swathe of pictures and links to other sites came up. There was lots of information about trade unions and far-left groupings like the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists, who’d now become the Socialist Workers Party. These groups mainly attracted the student activists who disagreed with the Parliamentary process and wanted immediate change in the social order by revolution. But I was more concerned about right-wing extremist groups as the manifesto was clearly written by someone with this constituency in mind.

  There were all kinds of right-wing groups. Mostly they had anti-immigration in common, though some were anti- Common Market, as the European Union was then known as, regarding it as a sell-out of Britain’s imperial heritage and a betrayal of the UK’s Commonwealth interests. There were splinter groups advocating White Supremacy, including one attempting to set up a KKK group in this country. And at the other end of the spectrum were the predictable smatterings of fascist groupings arguing against what it saw as the Zionist threat and the forthcoming takeover of the world by Wall Street and Jewish banking interests.

  But there was nothing listed about private armies contemplating armed insurrection against the Government of the day. I typed “Private Armies 1970s” into the database but, aside from information about private security firms, nothing was listed. I uploaded the picture of the officer addressing the soldiers on the parade ground into the system and requested recognition of the speaker but drew a blank.

  This was puzzling. Anyone proposing to oust the government in the UK by violent means would clearly be seen as a threat to public order, as well as to the nation, which would mean a security file being kept and their leaders placed under constant surveillance. British political culture had never experienced any kind of seismic changes, such as government being overthrown by armed means. In fact the British experience was that even hardened left wingers became very moderate once ensconced in the back of the ministerial limousine.

  But there was no record to suggest any surveillance had occurred. How could it be that a body like this, boasting of its contacts with senior and influential figures inside the Establishment and training up, ready for its attempted putsch, had escaped surveillance?

  Finding out who these people were was now a priority. I also needed to know more about how these documents ended up in the possession of Debbie Frost. I knew who to contact about the first thing.

  George Selwood was a self-confessed ageing fascist. His proud boast was saying he was the son of a man who’d marched alongside Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts in the 1930s and who had been present at the siege of Cable Street in 1936. His father had been interned alongside Mosely himself at the outbreak of war under regulation 18b of the Defence of the Realm Act, which provided for the incarceration without trial of those whose continued liberty was felt to be detrimental to the war effort. Upon release he’d continued espousing the fascist creed and had raised his son according to the same principles and beliefs.

  Selwood himself had an almost vitriolic hatred of Jews and was an unashamed holocaust denier, which had led to his dismissal from several positions, including the Civil Service. It was just as well he didn’t know I was a Spurs fan, a team traditionally associated with Jews. He had left the army after being told his views were inappropriate for an officer in the Queen’s army to hold. Following on from this, he’d also been denied a lectureship in Defence Studies at a leading London university after the students’ union found out about his political views and mounted a vociferous campaign against his being appointed. He’d sued the university, arguing his right to employ had been denied on the grounds of his political beliefs, which he said was unlawful, but the court had thrown the case out. He blamed the verdict on Zionist and Masonic influences at the top of the Judiciary.

  For my purposes, though, he was a font of knowledge about who was who on the extreme right of the political spectrum after having been actively involved for a large number of years. He’d been active in all the major right-wing causes of the last fifty years, including ceding independence to previous colonies and mass immigration to the UK, and he had gone to prison for four months after daubing swastikas on a synagogue wall in Hendon. He knew all the major figures on the extreme right and, despite now being in his early seventies, still had a razor sharp memory.

  I’d first encountered him when he was arrested at an anti- Iraq war demonstration after throwing a small plastic bottle filled with urine at demonstrators. I was one of the arresting officers and had taken him to Cannon Row police station. He was ultimately bound over to keep the peace and told not to attend any more such demonstrations. Since then I’d followed his career as a professional right-wing agitator and had picked his brain on a couple of previous occasions in the early days of my Special Branch career. I was hoping to do so again.

  He lived in a small flat in a hard-to-let council block in Elephant and Castle, living amongst, as he put it, “nigger junkies, welfare scroungers, black single mothers with bastard children sired by different fathers making no contribution to their kids’ upkeep, and general riff-raff,” whom he described as people with no reason to be alive. The flat was untidy and cluttered with memorabilia of a life lived at the political extreme. There was a framed picture of Hitler proudly displayed on the lounge wall over the settee. There were several books espousing extreme right-wing ideology, including one with the provocative title Did six million really die? plus a copy of Mein Kampf. I saw a copy of Hitler’s War by David Irving, a prominent historian and holocaust denier who’d claimed in the book that Hitler had not known about the holocaust. I expected to see a swastika displayed though happily I didn’t.

  He let me into his flat after I’d identified myself. He remembered me from his arrest and led me into his surprisingly neat and tidy kitchen. He made tea and put some biscuits on the table.

  “What can I do for you, Officer?”

  He was extremely well spoken, maintaining the English language was our greatest gift to the civilised world and must be protected because it was under attack from philistines who changed it to suit a politically correct agenda. To meet him for the first time, seeing how well presented he was and hearing how well he spoke, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a retired diplomat. You’d be very wrong. In his youth and throughout his active political life, he’d been a nasty piece of work. He had convictions for violence after attacking leftwing demonstrations and had written several highly inflammatory articles for extreme right-wing publications about how to solve what he saw as the Jew Problem. Despite his age there was nothing avuncular about him.

  “How’s your memory?” I began.

  “It’s good. Why?”

  “I’d like you to look at some pictures and see if you recognise anyone. Can you do that?”

  I took the pictures out of the padded envelope and laid them on the table.

  “Recognise anyone in these pictures?”

  He put his glasses on and picked one up. He looked carefully a
t it and shook his head.

  “Don’t know anyone there.”

  “What about this one? Recognise anyone here?” I handed him the picture of the officer addressing soldiers taken from the parade ground.

  He looked at it and smiled knowingly.

  “Where’d you get this from?”

  “You know who that is speaking?”

  “I do indeed.” He smiled at me, revealing several discoloured teeth. “Oh, my good Lord, this brings back memories.”

  “Well?” I awaited his reply.

  “I’m surprised you don’t recognise the speaker. He’s quite well known, you know.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “The man on the platform is the Honourable Mr Christian Perkins.”

  I looked suitably vague and shrugged, as if to say ‘Who?’ George Selwood looked at me as though I were being an idiot. Maybe I was.

  “Christian Perkins is a Tory MP, has been for years. You still sure you’ve not heard of him?”

  I had. He’d been an MP since the 1987 election and had acquired a reputation as an outspoken critic of the European Union and immigration. Some of the speeches he’d given over the years had been notorious in their impact. He worshipped Enoch Powell and peppered his speeches with references to his hero at every opportunity. No wonder I’d not recognised him. The Perkins I knew was an overweight man in his sixties with a beard and thick black-rimmed glasses. In this picture, the speaker was a young vibrant man in the very prime of life.

  “This is really him?” I asked, looking at the picture again. “Oh yes, there’s no doubt about it. That’s Perkins alright. Where’d you get these?”

  “That’s not important at the moment. What’s the story behind these? This doesn’t look like a scout camp jamboree.”

  He sipped his tea whilst considering what to tell me about the events in the pictures.