The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  He remembered the first time he’d taken Kate out, seven years ago this coming Christmas Eve. He’d felt superb, his body tingling with the gallons of after-shave he’d splashed everywhere, his skin tanned after three months in Southern Africa. He’d felt gloriously strong.

  But the man in the bathroom mirror, sipping his lukewarm tea, felt a grandfather to that memory. His eyes glazed until the reflection in the mirror was out of focus. He threw the remainder of the tea into the sink and jumped up, the stool crashing to the floor. He slammed the bathroom door shut, walked back into his bedroom and began looking for his shirt and trousers.

  He looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes to twelve. He began dialling the Malmö code: 010 46 40, and the six numbers Hampton had given him. At the second attempt all twelve numbers hit the target. At the third double signal there was a click and Hampton’s voice began.

  ‘Good morning, Tom!’

  Tom began to answer, forgetting for an instant that he was listening to a machine.

  ‘Go ahead, Tom, with whatever queries you have after your reading last night. Speak now.’

  Tom hesitated, trying to hustle his thoughts together.

  ‘Hampton,’ he said, ‘there are things you know about this setup you haven’t told me about. That’s fact. Now, why shouldn’t you tell me things if you are paying me to help you? Doesn’t make sense, does it? Why didn’t you tell me, for example, that you knew the organisation that did the bank and the rig also clobbered Scammill? You do know, and you’re bloody well going to tell me and save all the running about the houses. You’ll also tell me, Hampton, why you or your bosses thought it necessary not to be straight with me from the start. I think the people you’re after are a neo-Fascist bunch - and what’s more, you know they are! Now the money’s in the bank just as you promised, and it’s a bloody great temptation to let it stay there. But if you’re going to piss me about you can have it straight back. And where were you last night? I rang you back about an hour after I’d left you and you’d checked out. And how the hell did you get back to Malmö? You missed last night’s flight, and you couldn’t have made it back by midday today. I’ll ring the same time tomorrow, Hampton, so you’ve plenty of time to sort yourself out. I mean what I say, Hampton! Sort yourself out or I’m out of it!’

  He put the phone down. A bit of bravado might serve a useful purpose. He wasn’t a fool. He knew it; Hampton ought to know it too.

  He went back into the bedroom and began tidying up the papers on the floor. It took him half an hour, shuffling them together into the order Hampton might have recognised. He switched on the twelve o’clock news summary; bullion, bombing and Scammill still led the bulletins . . . endless authoritative post-mortems, denial by the IRA of any responsibility, a statement in the House this afternoon by the Prime Minister and a backup speech by the Home Secretary. More about the negotiations leading hopefully to peace on the railways . . . still fighting in Southern Africa. . . another Midlands car component factory closes down but the workforce sits in.

  Christ, he thought, I’d rather be an undertaker than a newsreader. He left his flat and walked to the Italian House in Tottenham Court Road for a pizza and a cup of Espresso.

  Two men fell into step behind, neither realising yet that they were both following the same man. It was a cold bright sunny day, the first in a fortnight, and the early morning wind had all but dried the pavements. The man furthest from Tom still carried his umbrella.

  The Department was now housed in Victoria Street, SW1 - a wide, grossly expensive alley of glass and concrete, stretching from Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station at the northern end. Victoria Street was once a friendly hotchpotch of a London street but highly-paid architects had turned it into a glasshouse, its windows reflecting only the sky - curtainless and lifeless.

  The Department had moved to Victoria from the elegance of Cornwall Terrace, Regent’s Park. There they had quiet, a view and a pub across the gate in Park Road that served braised lamb hearts and stuffing most lunchtimes.

  It was twelve-thirty. Kellick and Fry were viewing their lunch at the ‘good food’ pub in Old Pye Street, dark brown armoured sausages, tinned baked beans and a half pint. Across the other side of St James’s Park, Tom was beginning his pizza and coffee. Fry’s meeting with Kellick that morning had been brief and unfriendly. Kellick admitted that he’d had Tom tailed in response to Fry’s uneasiness last night

  ‘For insurance reasons,’ he said, ‘to cover ourselves. Good sense, no panic. Remember,’ he told Fry, ‘not to overlook the small things. They have a habit of getting bigger. Remember the pennies and the pounds!’

  Fry had a headache and a sore throat and said nothing. He remembered only last night. He eased the top of his polo-neck white sweater closer to his ears to protect his throat from the draughts. He felt sour.

  Last night he’d been drunk and worried - worried enough to go to Kate Cathcart at her Chelsea home straight from the hotel and tell her what he’d seen from the window. She’d offered him Dutch Geneva mixed with hot water and lemon and he’d relaxed. It helped him speak easily to her, and she helped him along. He’d told her he was out of his depth - he was not a field man. This was the first time he’d left the inertia and waxed floors of the Department.

  Kellick, he had told her, sounded grand at his pre-contract briefings and callbacks but he knew and Kate knew - everyone knew - that Kellick never left the Department, let alone England, unless it was on holiday to his grotty breeze-block bungalow in Alicante. What the hell, he’d said, does Kellick know about people like McCullin? Or me?

  All this to Mrs Cathcart last night. She was sympathetic and generous with the hot water and gin. He hadn’t really had to make such a pig of himself alone in the hotel. She’d listened and she’d poured.

  This morning as he hurried through her section he hadn’t even had the nerve to look at her. How much did he say last night? He questioned himself. He could remember her living-room, the copper kettle on the goat rug, the signed Russell Flint over the fireplace. He could remember she wasn’t wearing stockings or tights. And for the first time he was surprised how long her thighs were - attractive and brown. But what else had he said? He was depressed.

  Both men had listened to Tom’s taped message at midday. It had been rerouted to the Department through the automatic exchange by the combination of the six numbers Fry had given him to dial. Those six numbers had reversed the Malmö code, and Tom had given his ultimatum to a recording machine on a direct line to an annexe of Kellick’s Department in London, SW1.

  Kellick and Fry had been both pleased and displeased at Tom’s tone. Displeased that he had jumped ahead of their schedule, come to his correct conclusions quicker than they’d anticipated. Pleased because he had obviously taken the bait, had worked through much of the night, was anxious to get on with it.

  The excuses could wait. The most pressing thing now was where to guide Tom next.

  Both men read and re-read the mass of information around them. But the more they read the more convinced they were that the starter clue was to be found elsewhere.

  ‘Sanderson . . . It’s got to be Sanderson!’ Kellick got up and walked to the window and looked down at the tops of die red buses in Victoria Street.

  ‘We could spend weeks, months, looking for the tiniest mistake these people made last Friday and still get nowhere. The computers have already saturated us in data. Do you know, Fry, how many qualified helicopter pilots there are in this country? - assuming that the one who took that bomb to the Temax rig was British anyway.

  ‘And where do we begin to look for 126 gold bars? What part of London, what part of Britain, or Europe? We know we’ll get no help from informers. Except Sanderson himself.’

  For the next three and a half hours Kellick and Fry went over Sanderson’s interview word by word; sometimes playing back the tape, sometimes reading only the transcript. Sometimes, if pa
ssages were ambiguous, they would read them out aloud. Fry reading out Sanderson’s replies to Kellick’s repeated questions - both men acting the parts of inquisitor and inquisitioned.

  Somewhere in the forty-seven minutes of tape, somewhere in the nine thousand words of transcript, was the tip-off, deliberate or accidental, that would point the way. They were acting out the interview for the second time when Fry stopped.

  ‘Fascio di Combattimento!’

  ‘What of it?’ Kellick was standing by the window again.

  ‘Sanderson mentioned it. What does it mean?’

  Kellick thought back thirty years. Second class Honours, Politics, Philosophy, Economics. R. Palme Dutt’s Fascism and the Social Revolution, three questions on the same Finals paper.

  ‘It was the beginning of Italian Fascism proper; the new start for Mussolini after the First World War. Early 1919, a confused, chauvinistic, republican, revolutionary-sounding programme - understood by very few at the time including that idiot Mussolini himself. Why do you ask, Fry?’

  There was a mention of it in The Times. . . a letter; the computers dug it up.’

  He picked up a folder and pulled out three sheets of computer typing, two hundred and seventy-eight references to Fascism made in public during the past thirty months. He flipped through the papers, running his finger down the columns.

  ‘Here it is. . . Times, Monday, 5 January.’

  Kellick moved from the window and stood behind Fry who was sitting at the desk with the computer sheets now laid across it.

  ‘Let me read it to you. The first few paragraphs . . . the need to find industrial and social peace . . . permanent solution . . . all of one nation and so on . . . Here’s the bit we want!’

  He quoted: ‘We all appreciate that the future of this country can only be safeguarded by a strong popular government - whether it be this present one, the Opposition or a coalition of the best from all three parties. But we must have strong government soon, for there are men in this country who are at this very moment rejoicing in the disasters we are bringing on ourselves. Men whose strength grows from mass unemployment, strikes, our crippling borrowing and the exacerbation of race relations. Men who thrive on the growing frustration we all sense around us.

  ‘These men are not the Marxists, Trotskyists, Maoists or International Socialists the media is full of. The menace is from the Right, the Far Right. There are men who are banding together even now to bring Fascism back to this country. Their shibboleth is Mussolini’s ‘Fascio di Combattimento’; meaningless mumbo-jumbo but powerful meat to the discontented!

  ‘We must all of us urge this Government to move with haste. The alternative I know to exist is too dreadful to contemplate.’

  Fry handed the photocopy of the letter to Kellick.

  ‘It is signed,’ he said, ‘by Lord Bremmer - Chairman of the British Heritage Trust.’

  Kellick said nothing for a full minute. . . merely stared at the letter attached to the computer data sheets.

  ‘. . . the alternative I know to exist,’ he repeated the last words, ‘. . . is too dreadful to contemplate: I know to exist. . .’ the voice trailed off.

  He leaned across the desk and pressed down the SPEAK switch of the intercom to his secretary in the office next door.

  ‘Get News-Information to bring me everything they have on Lord Bremmer - directorships, companies, clubs, what his children do, his close friends. . . Oh! and let me have the names of the Committee members of the British Heritage Trust.’ He looked at Fry.

  ‘That letter was written on 4 January, published on the 5th. Lord Bremmer was incinerated in his car the following day, the 6th. I remember. The chauffeur died too. Car ran straight into a bridge support on the M4 just before the Bath turnoff. Bremmer lived there. The bodies were almost completely destroyed in the fire. Bremmer was identified only by his teeth!’

  He sat down at his desk, cupped his hands over his mouth and began blowing into them - something he did whenever he thought he saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

  ‘What was that line Sanderson used? “On twenty-seven occasions in eight years CORDON has had to issue an execution order on people, because a mistake was made on the first approach.” So Bremmer was one! An acceptable mistake,’ Kellick went on, talking really to himself. He stared down at the leather-covered desktop and the unmarked blotter between his resting elbows.

  ‘Lord Bremmer was not renowned for his Liberalism. . . in fact one of the most vicious “hang ’em, flog ’em, send them back to their own bloody country” campaigners I’ve ever met! A promising candidate for CORDON, I’d have thought. Wonder why he said no to them?’

  ‘He sounds quite different in his letter,’ Fry interrupted. ‘He sounded quite reasonable; quite out of character if he was as you say.’

  ‘Bremmer sounded terrified!’ Kellick said. ‘He’d learnt something . . . something that really frightened him. Don’t you remember Sanderson’s words, “I have seen the Spectre of a Britain under CORDON” . . . remember what he said next. . . “I died the moment I saw that vision”.

  ‘Bremmer saw it, too. No doubt had it explained to him in detail and then funked it. He’d always insisted publicly that the hardliners should take a stronger hand. Then they stared him full in the face and he couldn’t actually do himself what he’d been preaching others to do for almost his entire lifetime.

  ‘So they burned him alive. If you are still alive, that is, after hitting twenty feet of concrete at ninety miles an hour! We’ve got our starter. Fry. We’ve got it right here with Lord Bremmer. I want you to check out every member of that Trust . . . complete backgrounds. Compile on everything they touch - immediate families, in-laws, the lot!

  ‘You can be certain,’ he went on, ‘that some of them have connections with other offshoot nationalist-type organisations . . . bet your life some send cash to the National Front and this new one . . . the Fight for Freedom Fund!’ The door to Kellick’s office opened and two smartly- dressed women came in. One carried a stack of folders from News-Information. The other carried two plastic cups of tea.

  Kellick carefully placed his, dead centre of the blotter, dropped in a saccharine and stirred with a chrome spoon he kept for himself hidden in a tin in his desk drawer.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who is the present Chairman of the Heritage Trust? Who took Bremmer’s place?’

  ‘General Sir George Meredith,’ Fry answered.

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Fry. ‘One-time adjutant to General Sir William Tendale who scalded himself to death, drunk on neat gin!’

  ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Kellick was bubbling. That’s the best bit of news yet. A starter AND our first piece of the jigsaw puzzle . . . General Meredith! Mrs Hayes,’ he spoke into the intercom, ‘send me in a currant bun, buttered both halves, the usual way.’

  He wiped the spoon clean from the box of tissues on the desk and closed the drawer. He pulled his chair close to the edge of his desk, sat very erect, sipped his tea and waited for his buttered bun. He smiled.

  Kellick, after seven most unpleasant days, was beginning to fell quite himself again.

  McCullin was on his way back to his flat, walking north up the Charing Cross Road from Leicester Square underground station. He’d gone there out of curiosity, morbid as well as professional, to pace out for himself the last moments of Reginald Scammill’s life. How easy it had been!

  After lunch he had telephoned a friend who was also an investment broker for Reed-Walker. The friend confirmed that Temax International Oil, like so many monopolistic American Corporations, had a thousand and one fingers in as many British pies. Its financial control of them all was absolute. Its real ownership of dozens of familiar British household brand names was not widely known, ownership of companies that produced everything from television sets to toiletries, children’s toys to telephones; it held ma
jority shares in three British television networks; it owned garage and supermarket chains and four major drug and chemical companies. It also had direct access, by virtue of the money it had invested, and the men nominated on the Boards, to research projects of the British aeronautical and electronic industries. It had once bought and then closed down two car factories and five supporting component companies in the Midlands and Scotland.

  Many years ago Ethics had joined hands with Honour in a suicidal leap off the White Cliffs of Dover. How had his friend summed it up? ‘Capital has no conscience and no fatherland,’ quoting Buchan.

  The sun had gone and the sky was an even grey. A typically British phenomenon, rain to sun to the prospect of snow in less than twelve hours. The weather had turned around and a north-easterly was moving down the centre line of the Glaring Cross Road. Tom turned up the collar of his jacket and pressed the lapels flat against his chest. He was now less than thirty yards away from St Giles’ Circus, passing a string of porno shops. A flourishing market, evidence, he thought, of the growing number of impotents, nymphomaniacs and psychopaths who’d turned to rubber suits and leather when rhino horn and everything else had failed.

  McCullin felt a sudden tingle of shock, followed a fraction of a second later by a terrible scream . . . only yards away, a man’s scream. He instinctively jumped across the pavement so that his back was against the wall.

  The scream, guttural and shocking, was then joined by others, women’s high and piercing. People criss-crossed in panic in front of him and he saw just to his right a London Transport bus veering across the road.

  Then only the women were screaming and Tom saw, just behind the massive front wheels of the ten-tonner, a crushed head, blood spurting, still under pressure from the mass of red and white pulp. Then the man’s legs appeared, naked except for his short socks and shoes - brown shoes dragged within inches of the broken head.

  The bus jerked to a stop. The driver jumped from his cab and ran round the front of his bus to the near side. He stopped abruptly as he came to the wheel and retched violently. He could not stop the heaving of his chest; clutching his stomach through his heavy black uniform with one hand, he guided himself, like a blind man, back to the front of his bus and clung to the radiator.