1990

by Wilfred Greatorex

  'So why should we worry?' asked Delly Lomas, with feigned innocence.

  'He signed Form P17,' Skardon growled. 'And he makes us look like incompetents.'

  She remained deliberately pragmatic. 'So we tighten up our port controls.'

  'I doubt if Scholes got out through one of my ports, sea or air,' Jack Nichols blustered. 'It would take a mouse to get out through the net we've got now.'

  'We seem to have a lot of mouse-sized runaways,' the Controller barked at him.

  Delly remarked, conversationally, 'When I was a girl they were all trying to get into this country.'

  'Africans and Pakistanis!' Tasker retorted, with all the scorn of a West Indian who has married a white girl and moved a long way from Brixton. The other three stared at him, but he was quite oblivious.

  Delly rattled on, 'And now even some of their kids are trying to get out. It's come to something when Jack, here, and his emigration officers are being made a target for the Race Relations Board.'

  The Controller looked weary. 'All that matters is that we seal these bolt holes. Otherwise the Home Secretary's going to have my guts for garters.'

  It was a recognisably accurate forecast. He waved a dismissive hand and the three trouped out leaving him gazing gloomily at the heap of newspapers on the table.

  Perhaps they had all moved too far from the grass roots, Delly Lomas thought to herself. They were personally out of touch : inspectors and surveillance machines apart, their only direct contact with activity at ground level was through idiots like Nichols.

  Although she enjoyed goading the Controller, she was also ambitious and conscious that trouble for him could affect all. A shift in power was not in her interest unless she was the one promoted.

  Returning to her office, she asked the male secretary to check through recent records. One of the files he selected was in her briefcase as she boarded a train for the Midlands the following morning.

  The court was intimate, informal and without any apparent panoply of authority. No bewigged lawyers, no dock, no witness box. Even the chairman was not robed, because he was not part of the judiciary, but a senior civil servant in the Ombudsman's department.

  Alan Vickers, the appellant, sat in a chair in the body of the court and the hearing had started when Delly arrived and took a chair beside the State counsel.

  The Chairman was speaking. 'So what it comes down to, Doctor Vickers, is an appeal on compassionate grounds?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'What you are asking this court to accept is that, because your child is subject to this alleged chest condition...'

  'She has bronchial asthma!' Vickers interrupted, trenchantly.

  'Do please control yourself, Doctor Vickers. We are trying to be fair.' The Chairman was elderly and would have preferred the sanctuary of wig and gown to protect him from young upstarts like this. 'One expert witness has told us that your child's condition is not serious and can be treated just as well here as anywhere else.'

  Alan Vickers sat rigid, trying impossibly to appear objective. 'The expert witness is a medical officer in the Public Control Department,' he pointed out. 'He has a vested interest. My child would be better off in California.'

  'And so would you. You'd be at least five times better off in salary,' the chairman stressed, obviously finding the other's demeanour personally offensive.

  Vickers glanced at his counsel, who rustled some papers, but said nothing.

  He turned back to the chairman, desperately, 'I thought this was an Ombudsman's Court. I thought it was to protect personal freedom.'

  'Within the law, Doctor Vickers,' came the pompous reply. 'Don't forget that this country saw you through your education as a doctor. And you signed an agreement to work for at least ten years here after qualifying.'

  'But Mary wasn't even born when I signed that!' he blurted out.

  Delly Lomas had heard it all before. The trouble with grass roots work was that it was all so monotonously repetitive. She idly scanned the room. A small section of the court was reserved for the public, a few chosen from the social security list. There were also twelve places for the media. All were filled and, among them, she was cheered to see Kyle.

  He caught her eye and returned her wink. At least that could mean an amusing lunch.

  The chairman had gone into a ceremonial whispered huddle with the man and woman on either side of him. All three were mature and tamed by years in the civil service. Their verdict was a foregone conclusion.

  'We have immense sympathy with you, Doctor Vickers. We believe, however, that your child's ill-health does not constitute grounds for the issue of an exit visa to you. We are prepared to grant your child a visa, so that she may be treated in a more congenial climate...'

  'And break up my family?' the doctor shouted.

  'We remind you that you signed form P17 and we must reject your appeal....This court will resume at two-thirty.'

  Kyle saw Alan Vickers' face crumple momentarily, before the man wheeled round and left the room. People began to scrape back their chairs and move out, and Delly Lomas found her way to his side.

  She looked glossy and alive against the drab background. He had intended to follow Vickers, but now he stopped.

  'What brings you here? Seeing the balls and chains are properly put on?' he teased her.

  'Come off it, Kyle. You don't like it any more than we do when anti-social people try to dodge paying their debt to this country.'

  'He did have a bit of a case,' Kyle responded, easily.

  'An excuse, no more. You're surely not going to splash this all over page one tomorrow?'

  'Inside page,' he reassured her, without rancour. 'Twelve lines. That's all they're worth these days.'

  'If that.'

  'And I don't want your heavy mob after me.'

  'Don't. You'll have me in tears,' she mocked. 'Nobody orders you what to print.'

  'No, they just bend our fingers back as we try to type.'

  She laughed, showing strong, even teeth. Everything about her was somehow seductively challenging. Her small-breasted, long body, her clever, sophisticated face. Dangerous, he thought to himself.

  'Anyway, you're on our side most of the time,' she was saying.

  'Till you get above yourselves,' he commented.

  They had moved out of the court and, almost guiltily, he saw Alan Vickers standing in the corridor with his wife and small daughter. The family looked tired and beaten. The two men regarded each other, betraying nothing except a mysterious interest, which did not escape Delly Lomas.

  'Don't tell me you swallowed his yarn?'

  Kyle shrugged. 'None of us did. We're all so conditioned now.' He steered her towards the door. 'I hear you're going to need more of these Ombudsman's Courts.' It was a deceptively casual remark.

  'What?'

  'I hear you're getting around five hundred exit visa appeals every week?'

  He felt her elbow stiffen slightly in his hand. 'You do hear some funny things.'

  'We have some funny things going on.' Her loss of composure tickled him.

  She seemed quite shaken. 'You can't run a rumour like that!'

  'Five hundred people a week is twenty-six thousand a year,' Kyle pointed out. 'And that's just the front runners who go all the way to the Ombudsman's Courts - wanting to get the hell out!'

  'To line their pockets,' she put in, as a matter of course.

  'That's right, love,' he agreed, coolly. 'Greedy, ungrateful sods, all of 'em.'

  She moved closer to him, pressing slightly against his side and turning her face so that he found himself looking directly into a pair of wide, bold eyes.

  A flock of lawyers wheeled past them, like starlings. Delly had switched to full voltage charm, hinting that he could help her - her department. She mentioned Scholes, the escaped nuclear engineer.

  'I was in court when his appeial was turned down...' Kyle gave her a mischievous glance. 'Feeble-looking bloke. I'm surprised he swam all that way.'

 
; She looked uncertain, then said persuasively, 'You were the one who got on to the Devon racket.'

  'Those Devon yachtsmen?'

  'You exposed them,' she emphasized: 'Our inspectors didn't blow their game. You did.'

  'The bastards were making a fortune out of human misery,' he pointed out, carefully.

  'They were spiriting out illegal emigrants. Under our noses.'

  He reminded her that her boss had maintained the PCD was on to the racket anyway.

  'Were we?' she gave him a wide-eyed look. 'Skardon's made a Whitehall career out of claiming other people's successes as his own.'

  He studied her, agreeably. 'I reckon you hate your boss more than I hate my editor. Toss you for who hates the mostest.'

  Diverted, she giggled and they walked on into the circular central hall, from which ten doors led, each to a different Ombudsman's Court. The lawyers scurried between them carrying important-looking files, bound in red tape. Very Kafkaesque, Kyle thought.

  Delly had directed the conversation towards his disappearances from the PCD's surveillance screens.

  'We know why you go underground, Kyle,' she claimed, with an understanding smile. 'We know you have to pick up so many official secrets, from civil servants. Especially from one in my own department.'

  He gazed at her with exaggerated lustfulness. 'Faceless? A figment of your department's neurosis,' he said absently, while issuing an unspoken but unmistakable invitation.

  'We didn't make up the name.' The tip of her tongue was showing against her lips.

  'You've only to nod and it's on,' he said it straight, and not simply to entice her from the subject. 'I could vanish for a month with you and still want more.'

  'Don't you be so sure.' Long, black lashes lowered over the warm eyes.

  In the main entrance to the building, the Vickers family was being pushed indifferently into position by a few press photographers. They looked helpless and the child was audibly gasping for breath.

  'Even a year ago, there'd have been at least fifty press men around them,' Kyle said irritably.

  Delly replied coldly, 'The Press was overmanned.'

  'So now we're down to three national papers, one State-run, and a couple of Sundays,' he said with some edge. 'The rest of that lot over there are working for foreign news agencies. All doing stories about poor old Britain with its identity cards and rationing and bully boy bureaucrats.'

  She gave a deliberately exaggerated sigh. 'You're back in your reactionary mood. I go off you when you revert...'

  By now he was fuming, watching the Vickers family being jostled and used. 'And your State-run rag will come out showing that poor sod looking like some rapist with toothache.'

  'You are in a mood.'

  'It's that bloody court,' he confessed. 'It gives me a desperate longing for fresh air.' He hurried her down the steps to the pavement.

  'You will help us, though?' she urged, sensing the slight softening in him.

  Looking down at her, he suppressed his anger. 'I'll help you,' he promised.

  The State-controlled British Gazette decided to promote Alan Vickers as an example of all that was rotten and ruining the government's brave new society. So the following morning saw photographs of the doctor and his family splashed across their front page. As Tiny Greaves pointed out, they had made Vickers look like a train robber and touched up Mary Vickers' picture to make her look as fit as a Russian gymnast. Having muttered and cursed over the report, he shoved it into the paper shredder near his desk.

  'Poisonous liars! They should be prosecuted as con-men!'

  Kyle laid his latest story on the desk and the news editor's mood began to improve as he read it. Soon he was chuckling, 'If the Home Secretary sees this, he'll bring back the death penalty just for you!'

  'But he's always stood out against capital punishment,' Kyle pronounced, solemnly, then added with suspicion, 'What do you mean, if he reads it?'

  'Tomorrow's edition,' Greaves confirmed, reading on. 'I can see the government cutting our State advertising yet.'

  'Or our newsprint ration,' Kyle suggested.

  'Not just yet, Kyle,' the big man assured him, eyeing the copy with delight. 'Twenty six thousand! I can see it coming! I can see the day when they'll have to requisition every one of London's hotel bedrooms as courtrooms.'

  'They'll find an easier way, by just announcing a blanket refusal to all exit visa appeals.'

  The news editor leaned back in his long-suffering chair and examined Kyle with a frown. 'I still can't make you out. Half the time you push the Public Control Department's lousy hand-outs and then...'

  'That's the half of me that's the good citizen,' Kyle said.

  'And the other half puts bombs under 'em.' He almost caressed the manuscript in front of him, and asserted, 'It's the bomber I like!'

  Kyle smiled broadly. 'You know something, Tiny? You've got violent tendencies.'

  He had crossed to collect his jacket from the line of hooks behind the door and was carefully examining his pockets. It was there, stuck under one of the flaps this time. He glanced round the busy newsroom, but no-one was watching him with special interest. All the reporters seemed to be occupied with their own affairs.

  Kyle returned to his news editor's desk and discreetly laid the radio bug on it. 'Whoever it is who keeps doing this to me, I wish he'd stop,' he said, very quietly.

  'I'll keep it,' Greaves offered.

  'No...Who's covering the Home Secretary's press conference?'

  'I thought you would be.'

  Kyle shook his head. 'It's only a whitewash speech. He's out to play up the new Inspectors of Culture as high-minded blokes who aren't really out to screw writers and artists and broadcasters. He's already said it all once in the House of Commons.

  There was a pause, before he added 'I have other things to do.'

  Greaves checked his big desk diary. 'I'll send Norton.'

  Kyle eyed the stocky, cheeky, young reporter bashing at a typewriter with two fingers, and nodded at Tiny Greaves. Then, moving towards the door, he brushed against the row of coats and neatly slipped the bug into a pocket of Norton's jacket.

  The two news cameras rolled in towards Dan Mellor, the Home Secretary, as he stood on the conference platform surrounded by his aides, notably the Controller and Deputy Controllers of the Public Control Department. Before them, a crowd of press men and women sat attentively, armed with notebooks and tape recorders.

  A powerfully built man, with thick, iron-grey hair, Dan Mellor knew he looked good on the screen. Half a dozen sessions at the government TV school, together with a natural aptitude, had equipped him well. He knew exactly how to get the best out of the medium.

  Barrel-chested and with head flung back, he had been standing carefully positioned to the cameras. Now he suddenly hunched forward, composing his coarsely handsome features into an expression of paternal rebuke.

  'What I'm saying is that some papers have been putting out lies about a responsible body of men and women, who are now a vital part of the public service. I refer to the Inspectors of Culture...'

  Behind him, Skardon's professional eyes swivelled over the group of listeners. Then the Controller turned sharply to Tasker, 'Where's Kyle?'

  Both Deputies began scrutinising the crowd.

  '...They pose no threat to the liberal arts...none to writers...none to artists...none to the drama...' the Home Secretary was insisting, with apparent sincerity. 'They are here to help, to see that the State does its duty as a patron of the arts.'

  Skardon whispered hoarsely at Tasker from the side of his mouth, 'He's certainly not here. Find out where the hell he is.'

  And, as Tasker crept towards the platform exit, Norton's voice was heard asking, 'What exactly are their duties, Home Secretary?'

  Dan Mellor looked at the young journalist with the hurt air of a man who feels let down that someone should doubt his integrity.

  Tasker made his way quickly to the Surveillance Room. The atmosphere, when he
arrived there, was hardly buzzing with efficiency. A group of checkers was gossiping in one corner. One of the operators had a transistor blaring and, at the central desk, Randall was engrossed in a paperback. It was obvious that none of them had expected any interruption during the Minister's visit to the building.

  Tasker stole up silently behind the supervisor, and said, with loud authority, 'Kyle, please.'

  Randall jumped visibly, blundered to his feet and hurried to a monitor showing a green blip in the centre of its screen.

  'Here, I'd say. On the premises,' he declared, blinking nervously. 'Here among us, in the conference room very likely.'

  'Oh no, he's not,' Tasker bullied. 'That's the one place I know he isn't in.'

  But the supervisor had regained his balance and stated, firmly, 'These sets don't lie, Mr Tasker.'

  Tasker slipped back into the conference hall, while the Home Secretary was still preaching.

  'We really are at the end of the road when you blokes suspect the State, even when it brings in the most progressive measures to improve the quality of life...'

  'Improve or control, Home Secretary?' Norton challenged, rashly. 'Couldn't this new inspectorate, these new Inspectors of Culture, be no more than censors?'

  'I can tell which paper you're from,' Dan Mellor retaliated with false jollity.

  The other journalists and TV men tittered and Tasker took the opportunity to murmur to his boss, 'Kyle's here. He's in this room.'

  'Oh no, he's bloody not!' was the angry reply.

  Suspecting what had happened, Skardon's stare settled, balefully, on Norton. The Home Secretary was replying, 'I'm sure some of you who are so sensitive about liberty now, would not be quite so free to ask questions if the Army had taken over four years ago, As they tried to.'

  'Home Secretary, you can hardly call two generals and one dotty Air Marshal a junta!' Norton needled, impertinently. 'All they did was meet secretly in a club for geriatric generals. Some putsch!'

  Dan Mellor's eyes blazed, his benign act publicly forgotten. It was obvious he would have had the independent reporter transported to the Tower, had that been possible. As it was, he threw a very menacing look at his supporting PCD cast. In turn, Skardon, Delly Lomas and Tasker eyed Norton vindictively, mentally marking him down for some black list.