Noose

by Bill James

  ‘What about him?’

  Driberg didn’t answer at once. He gazed at some of the panelling. When he spoke again it was as though his mind and its topics had drifted. Or had they? This was an accomplished storyteller. Perhaps he’d give a fragment – enough to tweak the listener’s attention – then shelve that and switch temporarily to something else: tease tactics, salesman’s tactics. ‘Who was it said history is doomed to repeat itself?’ Driberg asked, sipping.

  Of course, he was the sort who wouldn’t put the question if he didn’t know the answer. Best get in before the pretentious old plaid-garbed prick: ‘Marx quoting Hegel. Not quite those words, though.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Driberg said. ‘How splendid that reporters read books and have degrees these days.’ He gave the panelling some more scrutiny. ‘Have you heard of a Lord Mivale?’

  Yes, he had heard of a Lord Mivale, from Emily and Bain: someone who might be installed as head of a ruling clique, in their portrait of the future. He said: ‘Should I have?’

  ‘Yes, you should have.’

  ‘In what connection?’ Ian asked.

  ‘A connection between 1936 and 1956.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Ian said, half-following and not liking it, half-longing to get out of this bar, away from this meeting, before he fell beaten unconscious by boredom.

  ‘When I was on the Express in 1936 I began to pick up rumours, whispers, hints, about a strange, organized, potentially insurgent force that was ready to step in if the king’s abdication threw the country into chaos. I say strange because it was an alliance between Left and Right, even extreme Right.’

  ‘Yes?’ Ian said.

  Ageing, maybe, but Driberg remained quick, perceptive. ‘You’ve heard something of this already?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Why I referred to the tag about history doomed to repeat itself.’

  ‘You see something similar now?’ Ian said.

  ‘Mivale is an Economics don at Oxford,’ Driberg replied.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You note the parallels between ’thirty-six and ’fifty-six, do you?’ Driberg said.

  ‘You want me to believe, and get an editor to believe, that Eden is comparable with Edward and that if he, Eden, goes the country will slide into revolution? You think Eden holds Britain together, and Eden only?’ Hell, Ian realized he was more or less quoting himself from that session in the Irish pub. He felt knocked off balance to have this bit of nightmare thinking put to him from two different sources – different and distant. Had he been stupid to dismiss what Emily and Ray Bain said about the possible future?

  ‘You think Mivale has been lined up as likely Supremo?’ Ian said.

  ‘Mivale or perhaps Mountbatten. This is the word that reaches me.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Some sources still consider me worth contacting,’ Driberg said, with a great chortle of self-pity.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘I think you ought to try and talk to Mivale. He’s probably an easier target than the arrogant, posing Mountbatten.’

  ‘Why don’t you? You’re a newspaper man, an eminent newspaperman still.’

  ‘Still? Was. I wouldn’t get near him. I’m a politician, a Left politician. This would be a Rightist conspiracy, one that made use of the disaffected masses, but allowed them no sniff of the leadership. He’d see me as dangerous, a kind of spy. He might talk to you. No form. Reasonably open, smiling face. An innocent.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Ian said. Was it? He longed to be considered as worldly, capable. How could this bloody has-been see into him like that? So, all right then. He wouldn’t approach Mivale yet. But he’d upend his resolution to ignore Emily’s and Ray Bain’s suggestions. And so, the badger hunt.

  As Ian and Driberg left the Strand pub, Driberg had said: ‘I sense a grand, powerful nothingness at the centre of you, Ian, a polished, powerful negation. I had some of that once. Guard it. This is the one essential for a great reporter. People observe the void in you, as they did in the former me, and subconsciously feel challenged to fill it. And so they talk all their secrets at us. I’m doing it myself, don’t you see? Something compels me to chat away to you. All you have to do is listen. You’re wonderfully null, inconstant, uncommitted, unstable, opportunist. Yes, negative capability. You’ll excel in newspapers.’

  Ian hated it when people who seemed so obsolete and discarded could suddenly produce such glistening, offensive, accurate insights. Walking back to Fleet Street alone he felt fierce resentment at Driberg’s profile of him as a nothing. Could a nothing get profiled? Moneywise he was not a negation, was he? Oh, no! Ian – or, at least, the paper – paid for all the damn drinks, yet Driberg had called the meeting. He told Lucy about Driberg’s civic chaos thesis, and about the character picture he’d drawn of Ian Charteris, reporter. She’d raged for a while about that last bit, called it ‘filthy backbiting and vilification’. This brought some comfort to him, but he recognized she might be biased. Ought to be.

  TWELVE

  The log extract read out in Mooney’s by Bain mentioned a country pub where badger hunt lads went and Ian had been there one evening and did what Emily suggested: talked himself into bogus friendship with Dill and the others by showing a good, intelligent affection for their dogs, tethered outside in the pub yard. Ian’s work seemed suddenly centred on pubs. He would go carefully. He’d let the hunters assume he might want to become one eventually, if he liked what he saw today.

  Playing the eager learner he’d asked which sort of dog he should get and train and how the men shared costs for the equipment. He said badgers were certainly very handsome and interesting animals, but a menace to health. He’d been going to describe them as ‘fascinating’ rather than ‘interesting’ but decided this would be flowery, soft talk and censored himself in time.

  Investigative reporters could get badly knocked about, or worse, if the people they meant to expose came to suspect the game. Ian had glanced around the country pub’s customers, wondering if one of them had Dill under surveillance, and Ian, therefore, under surveillance now, too. He didn’t see anyone who fitted, but could he really know how one of Emily’s people might look? They didn’t advertise. Could he have told from her looks what Emily excelled in, or from Ray Bain’s now, either?

  On the Saturday hunt, Ian could suddenly make out at the bottom of the hole the grey and off-white, blood-streaked pelt of a big badger, and Daisy with her teeth fixed into its neck. The badger’s paws flailed, trying to knock Daisy away. Malcolm let this contest go on for half a minute then leaned down and pulled the badger out by the tail. He held it high for a few seconds. ‘Over twenty pounds,’ he said. He was judging that by sight, not the weight on his arm, because Daisy still had her jaws clamped and was dangling. Malcolm dropped the badger. ‘A tough, ferocious sow,’ he said. ‘She’s pregnant. We’ll let her go. Unsporting not to. Have to keep up the supply. And above all else, we’re sportsmen.’ They didn’t unleash the Patterdales. Daisy released her bite and fell to the ground on spread paws. The dog had obviously done this often before and perfected the landing technique. Belle and Kate came out barking from the mouth of the sett and seemed to recognize the fight was over.

  The sow stood dazed for a moment, then ambled off, no basic hurt. It had a kind of dumpy dignity, like someone playing a dowager in a theatre piece, and gave a sort of groan or sigh as it went out of sight in the undergrowth. Ian could guess what would have happened if they hadn’t let her go. Most likely all the dogs would have been put on her. They’d be better able to subdue and kill her above ground. Malcolm said: ‘It’s simply a chance for dogs to flash their skills and courage. That’s their nature. They need the thrill. They deserve the thrill. It’s what they’re for, just as Frank Sinatra has to sing. A Saturday morning outing in the fields, like golf.’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Enclosed please find classified documentation. Return registered to PO Box 17. No name of addressee needed or wanted. I’ve lifted this lot
from the office safe. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Ray’s in hospital for routine check-ups etc lasting three days. Send back by time he returns. Repeat, send back by time he returns. There are no duplicates. Ray hot on security and redacting and a bit tight with information at Mooney’s I thought. I shall hand deliver. Why I wanted to make sure there was an adequate letter flap in your mauve front door. Repeat: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. E.’

  When Ian pulled the investigation file from its large white ‘Exclusive to Addressee’ envelope, the postcard had been drawn out in its wake and fluttered to the floor, her written message uppermost. She would have avoided stapling the card to the file cover, or even paper-clipping it, because either way a mark would be left, and Ray was sure to notice and know there’d been some fancy work. He might already feel there was something unusual in the Ian-Emily relationship.

  No ‘might’, in fact. At the OCTU, and over the airfield loudspeaker Bain had speculated about the letter from ‘E’. He’d seemed to assume an affair between her and Ian, regardless of age difference, and speculated about the reactions of a cuckolded Group Captain. He’d had that wrong, but he was right to identify a special closeness. The Sword of Honour adjustment away from Ray despite the points tally, and then what happened to his legs in Korea, would probably set him wondering even more strongly about the Emily and Ian connection. And, if Ray spotted Emily’s need to make recompense with the job in her select gang for having committed him to danger and the wheelchair, he’d realize more strongly still that she’d craftily favoured Ian, and now felt some shame for it. Maybe she should. Ian wouldn’t press this, though.

  It was an ancient sepia picture postcard, showing on its other side the King Arthur at what looked like full speed ahead in the Bristol Channel, flag flying, crowded with passengers. The caption gave the ship’s name, but no date. The envelope must have come overnight. He found it with the rest of the mail when he got up first to make a cup of tea for Lucy and him. He assumed the file was the one Ray had brought to Mooney’s locked to his wrist. Then, he must have restored it to the safe. Ian thought he wouldn’t mention the file or card to Lucy, as if they came from a lover and must be kept secret. They were secret, but only workaday secret, only Her Majesty’s Government secret. Had this project begun to make him furtive, sneaky?

  He scanned the file before going back to bed for ten minutes with the tea. He looked for the report on Dill, in case Ray Bain had cut out some material when talking about him in Mooney’s. Ian himself had discovered next to nothing of any use from Dill. After the hunt they went back to the country pub and Ian had made sure he sat and drank with him. Ian had tried to lead the conversation on to something like those wider topics Emily spoke of – wider, that is, than their sport. But it had been difficult. It had been impossible. And perhaps this impossibility did tell Ian something. He felt a calculated resistance in Dill to let their chat move away from the contained and containable matters of the day – from this day and the badger episode. On the return visit to the pub, Ian had still noticed nobody who might have been doing a surveillance stint. Perhaps Emily had withdrawn the watch so he wouldn’t feel supervised.

  He wondered if he had been too hurried, perhaps clumsy, in trying to get to other subjects with Dill, and eventually to one other subject. He was friendly enough when they first met and for quite a time afterwards, but then appeared to grow wary, even hostile. That might mean he had something to be wary about, and hostile about to anyone who seemed to get nosy. So, could Ian regard this as a discovery? Did the non-disclosure amount to a kind of disclosure? That looked a vague and slack deduction, but most likely the best he would get. Dill was clearly someone acute, subtle, tuned-in, probably capable of a big and special and confidential assignment. Might this be another of those half-discoveries for Ian, a positive from the negative? Not, however, the kind of revelations that would make a newspaper story stand up and earn publication.

  Some file details for Dill were as Bain and Emily had given them to Ian at Mooney’s: the factory job, the union position, bachelorhood, the weekend badger hunts. But these basics were preceded by what seemed to be a tabulated report from a surveillance team. It answered a major and obvious question in Ian’s mind: how had Dill been selected in the first place?

  OPERATION TITLE: Wallflower

  LOCATION: Outside 12 Feder Road, Chelsea, London, home of Milton Skeeth and subsequent visitor tracking.

  OBJECTIVE: Note and identify all callers to the house.

  ACTION TAKEN: Clandestine stalk of male visitor upon leaving. Subsequently identified via electoral register and local Post Office as Jeffrey David Dill. His name and biographical details already known to us. (See Paper Ht 834 /L, recording past interviews with two civilian informants coded Jimmy Cagney and Attila the Hun – first intimations that Dill might have role in potential nationwide junta scheme.)

  Ian thought he understood why Bain might want to conceal for now the bond between Dill and Milton Skeeth. Ray probably feared this would be to tell too much. After all, Ian was merely a journalist, untrained in the delicacies and careful, variable pace of the secrets business. In fact, journalists were trained in the opposite: if they wanted something from someone they went bull-headed to get it, because if they didn’t an opposition paper might swoop and scoop and leave them behind. How did these voices, Jimmy Cagney and Attila the Hun, know Dill, and realize he might qualify for the attention of people like Emily and Bain? Did they work with him, and hear some of his views? Did they go after badgers with him and hear some of his views? Did they drink with him in the country pub and hear some of his views? Did they decide these views might be dangerous and should be referred to the authorities?

  And, dwelling on the difference between Emily’s and Ray Bain’s type of work and his own, he changed his mind about showing the file and card to Lucy and discussing them. The concealment would be wrong, divisive. He’d decided a long time ago at Norton that he didn’t want to get sucked into the secrets network. He still felt like that. He disliked the melodrama and autocracy in those repeated injunctions, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. They sounded like the trite, teasing title for a new James Bond spy book. He flipped through a few more pages of the file and noticed further names he recognized: Lord Mivale, Daphne West, Anthony Eden, another actress, Fay Doel, additional insiders’ whispers from Cagney and Attila.

  As Lucy supped tea and read the card and some of the file alongside him in bed, he knew he had done right in not hiding the stuff from her. Pregnancy suited Lucy. Her skin glowed. She didn’t deserve to be blanked out from any part of his life. He wasn’t in that sort of career, and still didn’t want to be. She obviously liked the way he had ignored the FOR YOUR EYES ONLY label. It showed Lucy he considered his first loyalty was to her, and this brought comfort and reassurance. She would see that Emily was part of a possibly important and startling newspaper tale, and that the connection didn’t go beyond this. Lucy, herself a journalist, clearly shared in the excitement of a potentially enormous exclusive. By showing her the papers, Ian had invited her in to the assignment with him. That’s how a marriage ought to be. And, of course, it was about more than a possible page-one newspaper splash. The future of the country might be involved. This sounded inflated, maybe, and alarmist. Just the same, it was true. And they’d have a child’s prospects in that country to consider soon.

  ‘Did she buy up a sackful of these cards d’you think, Ian, to commemorate that escape from death?’ she said.

  ‘She thinks she commemorated it wrongly at first – crowing about the drowning of Corbitty for her sake. She put my father into second place. She’s been making up for that for years.’

  Lucy pointed at the file. ‘She takes risks on your behalf. Classified material slipped to you on loan.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s also looking for a benefit. Her daughter’s apparently tied up with one of the people they suspect. That’s Daphne West, the actress. We’ve seen her in plays on TV, haven’t we?’

  ‘Pretty girl, hardly out of her teens?’ />
  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From a previous marriage?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means no.’

  Lucy sipped some tea. ‘Oh, I see. My God, Ian. Your dad’s?’

  ‘Quite. I’ll probably have to interview her, as part of the inquiry.’

  ‘That will be strange for you, won’t it?’

  But he felt curious, naturally. Apprehensive, also, naturally. ‘Possibly a bit strange, yes.’

  In the afternoon he’d take the file into the box room he used as an office/study and go through it thoroughly. Now, sitting up in bed, Lucy did the kind of page skimming he’d carried out himself a few minutes before. ‘Here’s something fascinating,’ she said, ‘a note by Emily in person, I think. At the end comes her majestic “E”, like something from the Queen. It’s apparently an assessment of three informants on their list, someone called Jimmy Cagney, another is Attila the Hun, and another, Ivor Novello.

  ‘I think I might have met one of them out on the badger hunt.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Don’t know. There’s probably an informant at his works, and maybe another on the hunts – Attila and Jimmy Cagney. The hunt voice feeds them the insights, and then they want me to follow these up, find what else I can and sell it as a Press story – which would most likely kill the conspiracy. You can’t have a conspiracy when its existence is a splash in the Press.’

  ‘Attila she considers “enthusiastic, determined but inclined to fabricate and oversell”. He gets a B-plus. Cagney is “scrupulous but indolent” and is awarded only a B. Ivor Novello she finds “factual, bright, wide-visioned, systematic” and earns an A/B.’

  ‘I wonder how she’d rate me?’ Ian replied.

  ‘Oh, an “Incomplete” I expect.’

  ‘Are we told the genuine names behind the aliases?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She doesn’t trust me that much.’