by Peter Rimmer
Inside each of the tiny earphones, Frikkie Swart had installed a wedge of plastic explosive that was wired to detonate from the electricity generated by the small batteries in the Walkman. Her whole face had exploded like a pumpkin hurled at a solid brick wall.
Hector had parked his Jaguar in the lock-up garage at Heathrow airport and, having returned from Mozambique via Sweden in the best of spirits, he drove down to Surrey.
The seminar had been in the Ukraine, in a delightful dacha on the shores of the Black Sea. The weather had been perfect, the food good and the conversation stimulating, the only dark cloud being the war in Afghanistan where the Soviets had sent in their own troops. The next few yards of communism’s long journey were about to be taken and the green fields of England looked greener than ever before. The days of chaos, dissension and poverty were almost over. There would be a world fit for the nobler conditions of man where no one would grovel in the dirt. There would be order, discipline and plenty.
He turned into his driveway on the Saturday afternoon to find the courtyard in front of his house cluttered with cars. His annoyance at his housekeeper welled up instantly and, when he parked at the end of the jumble of vehicles, he slammed the door, something he never did to a car. The front door was half open and he pushed his way through, to find his house full of strangers.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he shouted over the chatter of people’s voices. No one took the slightest notice. At the end of the hall was a large brass gong that his grandfather had brought back from China, which was used at Christmas time to announce to the children it was time to open the presents. A large stick with a hard leather ball on the end was attached by a thong to the gong, and after a few sonorous notes the conversation tailed off and the people looked over to see who was making the noise.
“I said what the hell’s going on in my house? Where’s my housekeeper?”
“She’s locked in her bedroom with her husband holding her hand,” said a uniformed man, detaching himself from the crowd. “You must be Fortescue-Smythe.”
“Too bloody right I am. Who the hell are you?” demanded Hector, unusually emotional.
“Chief Inspector Holliday metropolitan police. Your girlfriend has been killed by a letter bomb.”
“Gilly! Who’d ever want to kill Gilly?”
“Maybe you can help us find that out.”
The two policemen questioned Hector for four hours, long before the end of which he realised the police thought he had murdered Gilly Bowles. They left him alone under the oak tree the blood of his mistress still visible on the crazy paving. First bewilderment and then pain overwhelmed him. Tears oozed from the corners of his eyes and he tried to wipe them away with the claw, forgetting his left hand was buried in Maputo. Then he staggered to his feet and was violently sick over the terrace wall on to the lupins.
For the first time, Hector wondered if the cause was worth all the pain. He knew perfectly well who had killed Gilly Bowles, but for some reason the police would not see it so clearly. Once again, his ex-father-in-law had tried to kill him. This time they had tried to blow off his head, not just his arm.
The policemen were watching him from the lounge, through a long sash window, while reporters asked an avalanche of questions and long-range cameras photographed the vomit spraying over the terrace to land on the flowers. There was an international feeding frenzy of the media.
The chief inspector nodded to his offsider and together they left the house. In the unmarked police car, they sat quietly for a few moments.
“What you think Fred?”
“Don’t know George. Don’t bloody know. You really think the South Africans would try and kill a British national on British soil? Not likely. We’re their third biggest trading partner, and though Thatcher let the commies take control in Rhodesia she’s still the best friend they’ve got.”
“Unless the South Africans knew that Miss Bowles was about to blow the whistle on our friend under the oak.”
“Then why the bomb? A discredited Fortescue-Smythe would have been worth more to the South Africans… Maybe the bomb was meant for the girl, that’s what I think. Sent from Johannesburg to look like their bureau of state security. Kill the girl, stop the story and still blame apartheid South Africa. Perfect commie hallmark, if you ask me.”
“Except you don’t vomit on your flowers when you’ve pulled off a double bluff. I say that bloke knew nothing about it.”
“I hate bloody commies.”
“So do I, Fred, but there’s no law in England that says you can’t be one.”
Ben Munroe had flown over on the Concorde. A mutual friend in Gilly’s office had phoned him the news. He had arrived at the country estate an hour before Hector keeping well in the background while he made his own assessment.
Within a short while, it was clear that the police had found Gilly’s briefcase in her Kensington flat, but he did not bother to tell them he was the only person other than Gilly who knew about the expositions. Or was he? To obtain her information she must have left a trail of some sort he argued with himself.
Then he thought for a while, and decided it did not matter. A public outrage could only be fuelled by blaming apartheid and the evil South African government. Gilly would have her name in Newsweek after all, the victim of an apartheid bomb sent to her boyfriend, the famous anti-apartheid activist. The story had all the benefits of racist-bashing. With luck he could find out enough to cover four columns. Special report by Ben Munroe.
Watching Hector, he was convinced the man under the oak knew nothing of the contents of the briefcase. But there were others. If exposed, Hector would say, so what? The South African communist party had always backed the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela. But what would the bishop say to the press? What would the bishop say to the Archbishop of Canterbury? That he was an atheistic communist, but still believed in God? His duties as a committee member of the anti-apartheid movement would not stand him in good stead with the squad of bishops in the Anglican Church. Without his power exercised through his position in the church, the Very Reverend Andrew Porterstone would be washed up in the garbage heap, no use to the communists, the AAM, the church or himself.
The black churchmen in South Africa would claim a South African government smear campaign and continue their work in Soweto and Guguletu. The man most affected by the briefcase was the fat bishop, and to take some of the piss and wind out of the pompous ass would give Ben great pleasure. He was a staunch Episcopalian, the American offshoot of the Anglicans. And he believed in God, which was more than the bishop did.
He looked again through the window at Hector on the lawn under the oak and decided to leave him alone. Pictures of Gilly leaning over a settee were not what the man wanted right now. Nor the treachery of a lady who had been part of his life for four years. Anyway, Hector would want to know how he had come to pitch up so quickly. God would take care of the bishop, of that Ben Munroe was certain. It never occurred to him that God might also want to take care of Ben Munroe. Ben would file his anti-apartheid story and leave it at that
Then he laughed as he left the home through the back door and came round to his Hertz car. Newsweek would not print an expose of the bishop any more than they would have exposed the AAM to a communist plot. However it went, his story had to blame apartheid.
George Holliday arrived at the bishop’s palatial residence as dusk was falling, to find the bishop at home, and quite overbearing in manner. Even if the policeman had not known the man was a fraud, he would have disliked the pompous sanctimony of the man. George Holliday believed in the Church of England in the same way that he believed in the laws of England. They were the best available, and God was well served by his church in England.
“Come in, dear man, come in. Late it may be, but God’s work is never done. What can we do for you?”
“Police work, my Lord Bishop, not God’s.”
“Oh, my dear. What’s gone wrong in the diocese now?”
“Terrible,” declared the bishop shaking his head in pious hypocrisy. “I heard it on the news. As a member of the AAM committee, I can tell you…”
‘We would prefer to have your views as a member of the communist party Bishop Porterstone.” The bishop paused for a split second too long and glanced over George Holliday’s head.
“What nonsense are you talking?” demanded the bishop, recovering the smile of being in the know with God back on his face.
“The young lady was about to expose you, my Lord Bishop. She quoted chapter and verse so meticulously that even you would find it impossible to refute her statements, to say nothing of your fellow bishops. But being both a member of an atheistic organisation and a member of the church is not against the law of this country, though it probably should be. We are investigating a murder, and you had a very strong motive to kill the young lady. That does break the law, and having you locked up with a bunch of thugs for the rest of your natural life would give me the greatest pleasure. I want you to promise me you knew nothing about the details we found in the lady reporter’s briefcase.”
The only satisfaction that day for George Holliday was the slow but total deflation of the man who called himself a bishop. “And don’t give me any crap about the wonders of communism,” said the policeman.
The pressure from the African lobby and the anti-apartheid movement reached George Holliday on the Monday week, after he had interviewed the twenty third person mentioned in the exposes by Gilly Bowles.
“I might have used the AAM to get my name back in lights,” said Sir Desmond Donelly, “but I am no bloody communist.”
“Your name has a question mark in her notes, but what can you tell us about the others? Particularly Bishop Porterstone?”
“Andrew’s not a communist. He’s a good man. Does a lot for the poor and needy. Together we have raised millions of pounds. It was the South Africans. All the papers say so. There should be a Nuremburg trial when apartheid falls. You’re not trying to tell me Andrew had something to do with this girl’s death? That’s crazy… Poor Gilly. Hector was lucky, but poor Gilly. We’ll have a Gilly Bowles concert at Festival Hall… I’ll sing for her… Compose a special song… Raise money… The Gilly Bowles benevolent fund. Everyone will come.”
George Holliday and Fred, his sergeant, had left the man sitting on the telephone, building up a storm.
“Never could sing,” said Fred with a certain amount of contempt, as they reached the police station.
“Sir Desmond bloody Donelly. Next they’ll give Boy George a knighthood.”
“He can sing.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
The memo on George Holliday’s desk was quite clear. “Stop investigating the AAM.” He put down the memo and smiled. “It wasn’t them, was it, Fred?”
Fred shook his head. “What beats me is why they posted the bomb in Johannesburg.”
Frikkie Swart was furious to hear that the bomb had killed Gilly Bowles instead of Hector Fortescue-Smythe.
“Worse than an own goal, man. Did their work. But I want that man.” They were speaking in Afrikaans.
“Wasn’t he married to your late wife?”
“He’s a bloody communist,” asserted Frikkie.
“What were you going to do about the Jo’burg postmark if we’d got him?”
“Leak the information she’d collected. Make her come out of the closet. Make it seem as though the bishop or one of his friends wanted her taken out. Muddy the water.”
“No comeback from the British, which is a surprise.”
“They found her notes,” Frikkie explained. “At least now they know that the bishop is a communist. You go away and have your team come up with another way to assassinate Fortescue-Smythe.”
“Does this come from the minister?”
“Minister Kloss knows nothing. That’s how they sound so righteous when they are interviewed on TV.”
“How did you know about Gilly Bowles?”
“I was paying the bitch,” Frikkie revealed. “Telling her where to go. How do you think she could have found out so much without my help?”
A week later, Hector’s mother died and was buried. When he returned to his lonely estate, he walked into his fields and down to the river, a sluggish water of leaves, twigs and minnows in the backwaters.
There was no sound of man down by the River Mole, and Hector let the loneliness engulf his spirit. She had led him in so many paths and guided his way. Her belief in equality was as real as her wrinkled smile, her calling his name, and her love of the dogs and cats that ruled her home. She had been a good mother to him but had he been the son he should have been?
Reminiscing over the years he had lived with her again, her wrinkles dropped away and she was once again a youthful mother thumping a tennis ball around the family court, exhorting him, her doubles partner, to play harder, to win. The flood of memories flowed as surely as the river, and the pain of loss ran away to the bigger Thames and the sea… And here he was. Alone by the banks of a river, quiet in the summer’s day. But alone.
His ex-wife had been shot to death, murdered he knew – Helena would never have killed herself. Her appetite for living was far too strong. He had used her and she had used him. How else could it ever have been? Her love for him had never been more than a flutter in the breeze. And Gilly Bowles, blown to death by a force that was meant for him; and prepared and ready to sacrifice their fraction of life together to make her fame. Why else the police questions and lack of British government pressure on the South Africans? She had been his Trojan horse. What irony.
Hector threw a pebble into the water, and watched the ripples vanish into the flow. Staring at the water, seeing deeper than his soul, he was no longer sure. Whatever doubts there had been before, there had been his mother to put him right, to keep him firmly on the track of the one last revolution that would make it worth the living. But were men ever right? They never had been before. They squabbled and fought and savaged the prize and, when the frenzy of change had gone, so had the prize. He was forty-five. No wife, no family and, if he asked himself honestly, no friends.
He stood up, stiff from squatting during his reverie, and traced the path through his fields, past the big, brown cows that meant nothing in his life, through the formal garden of flowers and sundials, lily ponds and roses that also meant nothing in his life, walking always towards the ideal that he now questioned would ever exist.
There was a man on the terrace, seated at the wrought iron table, in the same chair they had cleaned of Gilly’s blood. The floor had been washed clean, and the seated man was unaware of the memory. No one would leave him alone any more, the world press seeming to sense something deeper than the obvious; jackals, circling hyenas waiting for the lions to feed and leave them the carcass.
He remembered the lions of Africa from whence the blast had come, attached to the long arm of Minister Kloss. They wanted him dead and soon, maybe, he would go the way of Gilly, his mother and Helena. Did it matter? He doubted it… After all, he was not going to make the slightest difference. A normal life tossed away on the dreams of a cause!
The man rose to his feet as Hector approached; he was a middle aged man, but the eyes that searched for his own had nothing of the predator. They were soft brown laughing eyes, with a depth of understanding.
“You’re not the press, are you?”
“No… Forgive my presumption. No, goodness, I’m not the press. Those people I find always want something. I’m your neighbour, Richard Makepeace Williams.”
“You’re the priest!”
“A parish priest is all things to all men, even to atheists. I believe you are a communist, Mister Fortescue-Smythe?”
“Hector, please.”
“Well, Hector, come and talk to me. That’s why I’m here. I heard about your mother. You’ve had a bad time by all reports and need an ear to bend
. I always try in circumstances to do what Christ would have done. He would have come to give a sad man comfort. To listen. To show that not everything in life is loss… She was a good woman, your mother.”
“And a communist.”
“Does that make any difference?” The Reverend Williams laughed, a rich, mellow laugh, and Hector sat down at the table under the oak.
“Would you like some tea?”
“Why do Englishmen always offer each other tea?”
“It’s what’s expected… I don’t believe in God,” stated Hector, firmly.
“Would it come as a shock if I said I’m not sure if I do, either?” the minister replied. “But I believe in Christ. Jesus Christ. He was a good man, and I say I believe in God because He said that God was His Father and He never lied. Do the communists never lie?”
The soft brown eyes watched Hector for a long moment, and then lifted to look out over the lawns and through to the distant landscape pressed down by the heat of the day. “It’s a beautiful world,” he said at last. “If you want me to go?…”
“No, please stay. It was kind of you to come.”
“Good. I like to be welcome. Why don’t you start and tell me what kind of a communist you are,” and he spread out his hand to indicate the house, the garden and the fields of the estate.
Hector did his best to answer the question sincerely. It seemed an inadequate set of reasons to account for so many years of his life, but that was how it was. He had done what he could for the struggle.
“Those ideas won’t work without the fundamentals being in place,” the priest replied. “And Christ understood those. They are simpler than we make them. Some of the churchmen attach a far greater meaning, far more complicated, and in the process interfere detrimentally with the running of men’s lives. I wonder if some of them read the Bible… Now that is being disloyal, isn’t it? To my simple way of thinking, the only striving we have to do is to live our lives as closely as possible to the teachings of Christ, and if His promise of God comes true we will be part of His miracle. All we have to be is good. Be right, not wrong. To tell the truth. To love without motive. To give without being asked. To be good, like Him. That is my faith. If we were all good and lived as Christ taught us to live, we would not need your communism to solve our secular problems. Christ taught us how to behave.