“And she doesn’t exist — up here, that is.” I kept my eyes on him. “How did you fool the police?”
“They fooled themselves. Mrs Chartner’s up here, all right, and she wanted to see you. That was genuine.”
A tap on the hotel’s line, I thought, and said so. The answer was no, and if I was thinking — which I was — that my non-arrival at Tenbury House would be notified to the police at Peterborough, I had better forget it. The woman who had called me was not Mary Chartner, she was the blonde currently holding her automatic where it would blow Miss Mandrake’s brains out. Her looks belied her voice. Mary Chartner had intended calling in person at my hotel.
“How did you know all that?” I asked.
“Use your brain,” the man said, and laughed. I suppose it was really quite simple: the real Mrs Chartner would have been taken either to the interview room at the nick, or, more probably in view of her husband’s status in life, to the Chief Superintendent’s room. It would be tricky, but not impossible, for phoney workmen or such to place bugs in both rooms, and the ordinary police forces don’t often think in terms of bugged nicks. Nevertheless, I was wrong. The man, who seemed to be a mind reader, laughed once again and said, “You can forget bugs too.”
“Then what — ”
The revolver moved a trifle closer. “You’ll find out. For now, wrap up.”
I sat silent, thinking and getting nowhere. There was, of course, no possibility of a break-out. There were too many guns … and, as if once again reading minds, the man with the blue cap told me to fetch out my own gun and Felicity’s and pass them through the window. If I did not, the end would come for Miss Mandrake. We complied, and the guns were passed back to the other three men in the rear by the doors. The pantechnicon drove on, accompanied no doubt by the Volvo and the car that had been behind it; the Volvo would be under the control of another driver in place of the blonde. It was easy to assess the moment when we joined the Al: the traffic sounds and the increased speed gave the clue. And the route was south; so much had been physically transmitted to me by the direction of swing and the pause in what was obviously the central reservation. It was equally easy to assess when we began to enter the big city, which for my money was London. But from then on, of course, I was lost. When at last the pantechnicon stopped and the engine was switched off, I had no idea where we might be. And when the rear doors were swung open and we were pushed astern to roll powerless back down the lowered tail-board, I was none the wiser. The surroundings were anonymous and enclosed a big warehouse with its doors shut and a lingering smell of, I fancy, baled wool, though there were in fact no wares of any description in sight.
“Out,” the blue-capped man said, and we climbed out into a ring of guns. There were no other vehicles; the Volvo and the second car had evidently peeled off somewhere en route. My car, once we were out, was rolled away to the far end of the warehouse and I watched it disappear down a ramp. Whatever happened to Miss Mandrake and me, I didn’t expect to see the Scimitar again, but then, like the bacon salesman’s, it was the effing firm’s car and no skin off my bank balance or insurance. Gun-surrounded, Miss Mandrake and I were led away towards the side of the warehouse, through a doorway, along a passage, down a flight of greasy stone steps to be halted by a large trap door set into concrete. One of the escort pushed past me and operated some mechanism and the door swung up silently on a counter-balancing weight.
We were ushered down a vertical steel ladder like a ship’s. We went into a stench of sewers and another passage, one that dripped water: maybe we were not so far off the river, or maybe the surroundings really were leaky sewers. The man who had worked the trap door went ahead again and reached up and did something to the left-hand wall of the passage, and amazingly a section of it lifted, as silently as the trap door, into the overhead regions to emit blackness. As we came abeam the blackness was replaced by bright electric light and we entered yet another passage with a door at the end. This door was opened and the whole party went through. It was a very ordinary and sparsely furnished room we entered — it stank like a drain, but it was ordinary otherwise — and scarcely a fitting backdrop for the extraordinary cloaked and hooded apparition that sat behind a cheap deal desk: an enormous figure that, had its wrapping been of white, could have passed for a ghost. But the covering, hood and all, was of a royal purple hue. Two slits in the hood showed eyes, and these seemed to flicker from side to side in the bright light while the rest of the purple mountain remained quite still. It was somewhat like, I suppose, being brought before Cardinal Wolsey with his biretta pulled down over his face.
Pressure of gunmetal urged us towards this seated figure, and it spoke. The voice was deep and I fancied I could detect a trace of a German accent. The English was otherwise flawless, though I admit the opening statement gave little scope for a full judgment.
The figure said, “I am CORPSE.”
“Yet you speak, therefore you live.”
The hood moved slightly. “We shall dispense with jokes. Commander Shaw. The time for that is past, as your country will discover.”
I apologised.
“I am the Chairman of the Committee of Responsible Persons for Selective Eradication … CORPSE.”
“Yes, I see,” I said.
“You do not, and you should not be flippant. CORPSE has remained unknown until now. Whilst unknown, it has grown large and powerful. The time has come for CORPSE to be known to the world. What it means to do cannot be done secretly, as you will soon understand, and it would be better that it were not done at all. If your government can be made to understand, to appreciate the power of CORPSE, Commander Shaw, then it will be well for Britain.”
A hand appeared, very white against the all-over purple, and made a gesture. The light changed: it went purple, like the garment. It was really quite dramatic. The hooded figure, so large, weirdly emanating so much power, seemed to become one with the atmosphere, with the underground room itself. Somehow — as, of course, was intended — the change of lighting leant weight to the words that emerged from behind the hood. In spite of that muffling hood the voice seemed to boom out at me. to surround me as though in stereo. It was a grotesque situation, and the purport of the figure’s message, the message of CORPSE, was no less grotesque; but I had no doubt of the sincerity, the determination behind the doomful words, nor did I doubt the ability of CORPSE to put their threat into terrible effect.
*
No harm came to us; we were treated with consideration and politeness, for we were to be the messengers of CORPSE, the heralds who were to bring the truth home to Whitehall and the British people. Naturally, CORPSE knew all about 6D2, even had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Focal House; and they had respect for our organisation as being more effective and more readily listened to than the official organs of government: no red tape, no political reputations to worry about, no need to woo the voters. No bullshit. And they knew me: CORPSE had my career taped from the word go till the moment I was brought before the Chairman. CORPSE were good at their horrible work. Miss Mandrake and I spent upwards of an hour listening to the boss, then we were led away, back along the same underground route for a while, then along a different track that also ended in the warehouse but on its other side. The pantechnicon had gone, and a plain mid-blue van awaited us. Still under the guns of three men, we were embarked and we were driven around the streets of London for one hour and fifteen minutes approximately, twisting and turning just to make sure that any sense of direction I might have, which I hadn’t, was well and truly fouled up. Then we stopped, the guns were kept out of sight, and we were told to step down. I had no idea even then w here we were, but after walking a while after the van had moved away into the traffic, various signs told me we were in the borough of Hackney.
“Now what?” Miss Mandrake asked. She was moving in a dream, as though she couldn’t bring herself to believe that CORPSE was real and was embodied.
I said, “The nearest tube, and FH.”
Outside the tube station, when we found one, was a news stand and the early editions of the evenings were already on sale. Catching sight of a headline. I bought the Standard. BODY, it read, IN LONELY FEN. Felicity and I read the report together while London milled about us, pushing and shoving and smelling of summer sweat. A body, so far no name released by the police, had been found dumped in ten country between Ramsey and Chatteris in north Cambridgeshire, near Forty Feet Bridge. It had been a woman in her forties and she had been run over by something heavy: face unrecognisable. And below the right breast had been branded the single word CORPSE, which was a piece of information that certainly shouldn’t have reached the press. Murder most foul, and doubtless, I felt, preceded by a little persuasion to talk … I made a guess as to the body’s identity that later proved accurate and decided I knew, now. how the man in the nautical cap had got his detailed information re the movements and wishes of Mary Chartner.
THREE
Max, of course, was livid: certain government departments had failed him. The directives to the press hadn’t gone out on time: no blame attached to the Standard, but Max was going to have some Whitehall official’s guts for garters. He said as much in my presence, down the telephone to Whitehall. He had not wanted CORPSE to reach print, and I was right with him. Neither Max nor I were believers in too much openness; it doesn’t help efficiency in tracking down the villains, and in the long run it doesn’t help the public either. They’re better left to suck their lollies. distribute their litter, and watch American domestic-situation funnies on the telly with their heads buried in the soporific sands of technicolour … what the heart doesn’t grieve over, the professionals can get on with and solve.
It was Max who gave me the confirmation of the latest victim’s identity: it was indeed Chartner’s wife, or widow. “Nothing else known,” he said briefly. “Can you help?”
“Not very much,” I said. “I’ve met the man who must have authorised the killing, but — ”
“For God’s sake, that’s — ”
“But I don’t know where he is, or rather I couldn’t ever hope to find the hide-out again except by the sheerest chance. In the meantime, I have a lot to report and it can all be said to impinge on Mrs Chartner.”
He nodded. “Go ahead, then.”
I did. I filled him in, in detail. I’d met CORPSE in person, I said, and CORPSE was to be taken deadly seriously. Deadly was the operative word.
“How deadly, why, and to whom?”
I said, “Well now, I’m only just taking in the implications myself. It’s big … to begin with, CORPSE is the enemy of WUSWIPP. At this stage WUSWIPP is not in fact involved, though personally I believe they could come in against CORPSE if we are not seen to be hitting back effectively. On the other hand, CORPSE is out to strike hard if we don’t play along with them. We’re between two stools or we could become so.” I was aware of Max reflecting on WUSWIPP, which is the World Union of Socialist Scientific Workers for International Progress in Peace, the progress and peace part being sheer bull. I’d personally had far too much war with them to be taken in by that, and the same went for Max. I told him what CORPSE stood for, adding that although ‘selective eradication’ could perhaps be a term applicable to Chartner, and possibly, in developing circumstances, to his wife, the unidentified girl in Peterborough looked, on the face of it, like a chance shot of non-selection albeit for some purpose so far unknown. Max said peevishly that that depended on her identity. Then I came to what CORPSE meant to do. and put in a few words it sounded as dead simple as I knew, in fact, it could be.
“Nuclear waste,” I said. “The stuff that’s already going to the storage ponds at Windscale for reprocessing eventually, even though they’ve not yet started building the main plant.”
Max looked shaken. “Be more precise.” he said.
“Right, I will be. A shipload many shiploads in fact sailed into British ports, with nuclear devices set ready to be triggered by remote control.” I added bleakly as Max stared back at me. “The area of actual destruction would be very great indeed, the area of nuclear pollution from widely scattered waste material would be even greater and would be long lasting.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Max looked as though he’d aged ten years. I could follow his thoughts: he was seeing Windscale and sniffing the pervading odour of ammonia that hung over the denizens in their white coats with radiation-detection badges at the lapels, their trousers tucked into their socks like clipless cyclists, the toe-caps of their special footwear painted red. Other workers swathed in sheets of PVC with film detectors and doseometers like pens of shining silver. Max spoke again: “I’ll tell you something, Shaw: it can be done. Make no mistake about that.” He thumped his desk, savagely, with a balled fist. “It’s always been my nightmare … that something like this would be threatened before I was turned out to grass! We’re paying for past short-sightedness … back in ’76 the Atomic Energy Authority decided it would be too bloody expensive and time consuming to develop techniques so that the nuclear reactors could burn up their own waste. Now we’re faced with the result! God in heaven, don’t we ever learn?”
A rhetorical question. I asked, “Do you want to know why all this is to take place?”
Max glared. “Tell me.”
“All right,” I said, and I put it baldly and without emotion. “A take-over of Britain. Dissolution of parliament, of the whole democratic system. Disarming of the forces, and control of the police to be handed over … and all that goes with all of that. The demand will be for total surrender.”
“God in heaven,” Max said again, and sat staring blankly as though he’d suddenly seen Armageddon. He didn’t say any more. Things went racing through my mind. You can’t hold up the shipping of a country like Britain, you can’t keep every incoming bottom waiting outside while a check is made, the more so when you haven’t a clue when the lethal cargo will arrive, nor where, nor where from. Daily a hell of a lot of shipping enters Britain’s ports — Southampton, Tilbury and the Thames, the Clyde, Liverpool, the Bristol Channel, the Tyne, the Humber, the Forth and all the smaller ports around a vast coastline from Shoreham by way of Aberdeen to Falmouth. All manner of cargoes from all the world. Imports can’t be clogged up, nor exports delayed until inward cargoes are cleared. Naturally the anticipated authorised shiploads of nuclear waste tor the temporary storage ponds at Windscale could be checked for strange devices and their crews third degreed. Or better the first thing to do might be to halt all such known cargoes and prohibit entry until we had dealt with CORPSE. But in my view, and this I put to Max, CORPSE would not be sending in their destruction via the authorised cargoes for Windscale. It would come unheralded, in any sort of vessel, the sealed containers loaded anonymously with mundane cargo-parcels as per manifest. From now on out, all and any cargo entering Britain could contain the deadly load and must be suspect.
Max said. “I’m not ruling out the big loads for Windscale. Shaw. All right, we can prohibit them, refuse entry, and I shall suggest this. What do we do if they enter notwithstanding? Do we send a bobby? Or do we send in frigates to blow the vessels up once they’re in the rivers, and do CORPSE’s work for them?”
“Stymied.” I said. “We can’t win. On the face of it anyway, we’re left with just the one alternative: comply with the bloody demands of CORPSE.”
“Balls,” Max said briefly. “Tell me how they mean to go about taking us over, will you?”
I said, “That, I’ll do.” I took a deep breath. “They have a highly-trained corps of … gauleiters I suppose you could call them. People well versed in the theory of government by force and decree. Probably some with practical experience under the colonels in Greece, and under the rightist regime in Chile. A dictatorship, foisted on the country to take over the vacuum, backed by a well-equipped military force that’s been in secret training for a number of past years. Some will be domestic, most will come from outside.”
“Where?”
“I don’t k
now.” I said. “CORPSE was not communicative, just dictatorial. The world’s their oyster.”
Max pointed a finger at me. “You’d better open up that CORPSE oyster, Shaw, and double quick. That’s the other alternative, isn’t it? This is a backlash of the Right — and it must be broken before it erupts. Before the boil festers to a head.” He blew out his cheeks. “At the same time, we don’t want to over-react — ”
“Can one over-react?”
“Yes.” Max snapped. “One can! Look at it rationally, for God’s sake.” He leaned forward, heavy and pugnacious. “Agreed CORPSE can do what they say if they mean to go ahead, but this country — a democracy for centuries — do you really think it’s going to give in to the imposition by outside force of a damn dictatorship?”
“The threat’s a big one.” I said. “That can weigh.”
“Nonsense. We’re not that pusillanimous.”
“A philosophy.” I pointed out, “that may appeal more to dwellers inland than on the coasts, where many of us do in fact dwell.” I added, “In any case, the real point is this: CORPSE genuinely believe it is possible, and the threat’s for real, never mind the chances of the result. They have it all worked out down to the last detail — what they mean to do when they take over, that is. You don’t go to all that trouble over many years if you’re not prepared to take the first step that can put you where you want to be.”
I filled Max in further.
*
By the time I left Focal House the wheels were being oiled anti-CORPSE-wise. Max had the ear of government and he called Downing Street direct. The Prime Minister was sceptical, naturally enough: as Max had said, England had been a democracy a long, long time and neither its ministers nor its people were orientated towards anything else. Every now and again the twin bogeys of communism and fascism loomed, but they always vanished like summer rain and left the bloom of England untarnished. Basically, they couldn’t happen here. Nevertheless the warning had been passed, and the PM passed it on: Defence Ministry was alerted, so was the Yard and all Chief Constables. The various port authorities, all of them from Thurso in the north of Scotland to Falmouth in Cornwall, would be warned to be on their toes pending detailed instructions from Whitehall. Trinity House would be brought in via their pilots: HM Customs would be extra vigilant in checking cargoes inwards. The positions at sea of all vessels known at any time to be bound for British ports would be estimated hourly. There would be consultations with the experts from Windscale and the Nuclear Inspectorate, all the brass assembling in the Home Office next morning. After that, further orders nationwide would be issued. In the meantime, the FEC governments and Washington, plus the Commonwealth governments, would be informed and asked to vet the loading of all ships leaving their countries for ports in Britain. At this stage, it was all that could be done. Fast developments were not expected: CORPSE would understand that time would be needed for decisions to be arrived at. A system of government doesn’t fold its tents overnight and steal away at dawn. I made this trite remark to Miss Mandrake as we drove away from Focal House in a Mercedes that I’d signed for as a replacement vehicle — bound for Corby, where I had unfinished business.
Corpse (Commander Shaw Book 15) Page 3