Two military men, both retired; one. General Meredith, only recently retired from the Imperial General Staff, that small committee of men who govern the British Army. And Colonel Haig.
Tom thumbed through the biographical detail Kellick, through the recording machine, had supplied. Colonel Gerald Haig, holder of the Military Cross for his extraordinary actions behind German lines in Hitler’s War, and famous or notorious depending on whether you were a Malay-Chinese for his unorthodox methods of counter insurgency during the Malayan crisis.
There had been stories of him in certain Sunday newspapers alleging how he had frequently, in efforts to make captured Chinese insurgents talk, tied an alarm clock detonator and six ounces of explosives to the stomachs of two of them. They were then tied facing each other, each seeing the clock face on the stomach of the other. And the crayon mark on the dial indicating when the electrical contacts would meet. He claimed many successes this way; said its deviousness appealed to the Chinese mind. His only regret, he was quoted as saying, was that it was a waste of explosive; ‘an ounce would have done the trick just as well!’
During the past two years Haig had made the headlines again when the Sunday Times revealed that he was canvassing for a private army from his farmhouse in Dartmouth, South Devon. Recruited from British ex-servicemen - many of them men from his old company, they were to be called the British Volunteers. Their duty was ‘to combat the threatening shadow of trade union power as the reins of government were being wrested from the elected Parliamentarians by a handful of working-class Mandarins’. They would help maintain essential services in a General Strike. Haig had problems with the Director of Public Prosecutions on whether a beret and an armband constituted a uniform.
Tom sat back on his bed, took some more Scotch from the large tumbler and rested his head against the wooden headboard. The angle hurt his neck but he couldn’t be bothered to move. He continued scanning the list of names, his own memory supplementing the background detail he’d been given. Thirty minutes later, relaxed by the Scotch, he felt he could almost touch the people on the notepad. They were no longer strangers. And Tom was no longer out in the cold.
Wednesday, 15 December
The suspicion had begun with Colonel Haig and his recruits, but bit by bit as the pictures grew Tom came very slowly to the truth. This was a Right-Wing Takeover. Hampton - or whatever his real name was - had given him the caucus of a coup.
Tom was feeling cold. It was below freezing outside and the fountains in Trafalgar Square, according to the evening news, had frozen for the first time in six years. The forecast was a prolonged cold spell, much frost and probably snow. The winds were sweeping off the Russian Urals thousands of miles away, crossing Northern Europe uninterrupted until they froze the ground like concrete in the coastal villages of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.
The last item on the television bulletin reported that on the A9 crossing the Cairngorms in Scotland, an old man had got out of his car to urinate, couldn’t open the car doors again because his hands were so cold, and had died of frostbite sitting on the rear bumper. Tom, hugging his whisky, felt a sudden uncharacteristic surge of sorrow as he glimpsed in his mind the old Scot slowly freezing to death on the rear bumper.
He leant down, pulled the fan heater by its cord nearer the bed and turned its switch to High.
Instructions over the telephone had been that Tom should use the six people as the means for finding who in turn controlled and directed them.
‘We know the six are actively involved in subversive activities contrary to British interests,’ Hampton had said, ‘but without direction they cannot move on their own.’
The orders were to check them out, in person if necessary, hopefully to panic them into a sudden move; to make them do something not in the plan - and find out who they answered to.
The previous day’s hassle about Hampton’s extraordinary timetable of Monday night - the schedule to Malmö and Hampton’s recalcitrance in not telling Tom all he knew - had been easily explained. The private Hawker Siddeley 125 Executive jet was not Hampton’s but his clients’ - the merchant bankers. It was, Hampton had said facilely, at Tom’s service whenever he felt the Scandinavian Airlines schedules were not convenient.
And as for recalcitrance. . . really no! Caution, certainly - but that after all is the first rule of security. When you are dealing with someone for the first time, Hampton had said in a supercilious way over the telephone, a little knowledge is the safest thing!
The fault was not Fry’s. The absurd platitude was Kellick’s, one of an inexhaustible stock.
Tom seemed satisfied enough. He felt anyway that he was getting close to the truth in his own way. He felt too that sooner or later . . . and it would probably be sooner than later. . . the aliases Hampton had busily built up for himself and his clients would have to be pulled away. It was only a matter of time, Tom was convinced, before he was introduced to his real employers. If the game was as big as it seemed to be, they couldn’t afford this double-act for long.
‘God!’ he said aloud. ‘What a bastard hole this is!’ He looked around him at the cold drab green-emulsioned bedroom; socks, shoes, newspapers scattered everywhere. Odd mugs on the floor half-full. It was at times like this that he was reminded he was alone. No family, few friends, no one he could ring up, no one just as desperate for a chat and a pint. There was no local pub to pop into to escape these moments of aloneness, knowing there’d be someone there he’d recognise enough to stand two pints on the bar and share the warmth and chatter.
So, more often than not, he’d open another bottle of Scotch, fill up a saucepan with ice cubes from the deep-freeze, pull the blankets about him and watch television - taking in nothing but Scotch until he fell asleep, drunk.
But tonight he wouldn’t get drunk. He would make an early start tomorrow. The sooner this was all over, the sooner ten thousand pounds would join the other five in his bank. And then Greece! A month, maybe two. A rented house on the Islands, sun, dolmades and sheftalia, cheap domestica and more sun.
The telephone rang. It was Kate.
‘I was thinking of you,’ she said.
Tom recognised immediately the timbre of her voice and was grateful. He knew what it meant.
‘And I was thinking of Greece, sweetheart.’ His cheeriness almost gave him away.
‘Are you alone?’ she asked.
‘Good Lord, no! I’ve a roomful of queer Italian waiters who’ve promised to perform acts of gross indecency never before seen north of Milan. In return I’m doing the Lebanese basket trick with my charlady! Of course I’m alone, Kate. I’ll be over.’
He heard her laughing as he put the phone down.
Within seven minutes he had showered, shaved, talcumed, cleaned his teeth and brushed his hair. Within twenty minutes he was in Chelsea warming his stomach with Kate’s malt whisky and his hands by Kate’s open fire which burnt evenly and with a welcome.
He was sitting on the goatskin rug directly in front of the fire, legs crossed. Kate was kneeling directly behind him, her arms clasped around Ins chest, her head nuzzling by his, blonde hair falling over her forehead hiding her face, her chin resting on his shoulder.
His eyes were closed and the heat from the fire made his face tingle. He could feel, he was certain of it, the malt moving into his blood, feel it leaving the stomach walls, pumped into the arms and legs. He smiled like the famous cat. Maybe it was the smell of her, the scent of her skin and her hair. Maybe it was the promise - the unsaid promise that always accompanied evenings like tonight.
She knelt motionless. Seldom in these moods would they talk. They were after all old lovers and thoughts were transmitted in other ways - the touch, the kiss, the warm concentrated breath from the nose on his neck, deliberately aimed. They were old, fierce lovers and at times like this they dwelt on their own, reminding themselves of previous moments, reliving the sex they’d
shared, acting out again the foreplay in their minds. They were comfortable together in this nest of white goatskin.
Slowly, as her blood rose, Kate began moving her hands backwards and forwards across Tom’s chest and down to his stomach, fingers pushing between the openings of his shirt undoing the buttons. Her nipples grew and rose hard. She pressed each in turn against his shoulder blades. She felt his back muscles tense and began kissing and licking his ear, running her moist tongue gently down his neck and up again.
Tom sat quite still. She expected him to; it was all established. She would enjoy his hard stillness, would finally go down to him groaning, grabbing with her mouth. And then Tom would take her, take his lips, his tongue to every part of her, tasting her, enveloped by her, covered by her hair, her writhing tanned soft body, the long thighs and the silk down on them. There was no world beyond her . . . nothing but her surrounding him. She was the womb; he felt suspended again.
They slept naked and exhausted, locked together on the rug as the fire slowly died. Sleepily Kate reached out and pulled the goatskins over them; and they slept cocooned in warmth.
Outside it was beginning to snow, large flat flakes that settled on the icy London pavements without melting. Across the river, on the south side of the Thames, a clock struck two. It was Thursday, 16 December. Nine days to Christmas.
Thursday, 16 December
Curran-Price received his instructions from CORDON sooner than he’d expected. A telegram arrived with the morning post. There was no signature, no other identification except the date stamp of origin. Central Post Office Cardiff.
It read simply:
‘YOUR ABSENCE REQUIRED STOP SUGGEST FIVE DAY EXCURSION YOUR CHOICE STOP ESSENTIAL REPEAT ESSENTIAL YOU RETURN AND CONTACT MORNING 22ND FOR FINAL BRIEFING.’
Curran-Price and his wife caught the Alitalia flight from Heathrow to Rome and three hours later, as the other passengers were clearing immigration and customs, he telephoned his London office to explain his unexpected and sudden departure. He told his secretary a relative of his wife was dying - only hours to go - there was really no time to explain from London, they’d only just caught the flight as it was. He gave her the address, telephone and telex number of the hotel - and said he’d give her the flight details of his return trip as soon as the funeral arrangements had been settled.
Curran-Price was a sensible and cautious man. It was essential that there should be no alarm at his departure from London. His explanation would satisfy his own employers for the time being. And there was nothing State Security Operations could do about him here.
Important too that if CORDON should need him urgently they had only to inquire through his office, using one of a multitude of impressive aliases.
So while his wife spent his money in the Via del Corso, he settled down in the comfort of the Hotel Nationale in Piazza di Monteciterio safe from investigation. He would spend the next five days completing his plans for the Transport policy he would present to the civil servants at his new Ministry in the first few days of the New Year.
The advanced passenger train was travelling at over one hundred and twenty miles an hour but there was no suggestion of speed, and it was virtually noiseless except for the whistle of wind through the faulty rubbers in the window, and the slight sway as it passed, compressing the air ahead of it, through deserted and derelict country stations.
Tom sat back, enjoying his first British ride for years, head against the white linen antimacassar, feet up on the seat opposite, a morning newspaper protecting the expensive pile.
Outside it was snowing. He felt he’d been breathing snow since the moment he’d left Kate’s flat early that morning. Sometimes there’d be a pause in the storm and he could see beyond the embankments to the English countryside - Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, now leaving Sherborne for the Somerset border.
He could vaguely remember Somerset as a child of five. He’d been evacuated from his home in South London to a farm near Wells. This train ride took him back to that platform on Paddington Station; a child with his head out of the window, the smell of coal and steam, the large manilla label, his only identification, tied by string and fluttering from his new grey flannel jacket. His mother, twenty-six years old, her navy blue raincoat tied tightly round her slim waist, her red check scarf covering her brown hair, surrounded by other mothers, waving and crying. She’d suddenly turned her back on him but he could just see, as the train pulled away, her arms high across her face, covering her tears. Sobbing, childless, she caught the bus back home to Streatham, to the endless lonely nights, the air raid sirens, the blackouts and the wardens shouting at escaping light, to the shrapnel and the fires and the V2 rocket that finally buried her.
This was the first time he’d been back to die country of cider and apples in all that time. It was less than two hours’ travelling from London but it was a foreign country. He’d been travelling most of his adult life - Africa, Asia, the Americas - but the only part of the British Isles he’d really got to know well was Ulster. And he’d never considered that a part of Britain anyway.
Where was Bradford, Boston, Diss, Dymchurch? Which side of Scotland was Perth? For a long time he’d assumed the Eisteddfod was a Welsh county town. Unknown, unseen, now strangely hostile geography.
The train moved through Yeovil Junction and gathered speed again. He looked out of the window on both sides. This was not the Somerset of that five-year-old. There were no Pakistani porters on the platforms then. The countryside had changed. This had struck him all the way down; the counties were so alike. One endless Salisbury Plain. Vast tracts of land, few hedgerows, the same patterned fields, no copses, no irregularities, nothing wasted, nothing untouched. Everything symmetrical, made square by the barbed-wire fences.
And what had happened to the trees? Somerset was once full of trees - he could picture them even now. A child with freckles, squinting at the sun, tumbling into the hay, as men and women walked ahead tossing pitchforks from side to side, turning over the damp grass and offering it to the warm air and sun to dry and seal into winter feed. The men always wore flat caps whatever their age, all except the gaffers who wore brown bowlers. They had baling string tied tight round their legs, just below the knees, like coalmen.
He could remember the trees all around him then. . . trees for shade, trees to climb for birds’ eggs, trees that sprawled across the country lanes after a night’s storm, trees to escape to the day the red and white bull broke his chain, trees that hid the scores of rooks, crows and wood pigeons that would rise with the noise of a thousand football rattles as the twelve-bore shotguns exploded at hares and rabbits.
But now, looking out, he could see that the Somerset he had pictured had gone. The dumpy oaks, the willows deformed with years of whittling, did nothing to break the dull monotony of the bare fields.
The elms, the tallest and grandest of them all, were dead and next year’s children would never know what they’d lost Only their grandfathers would remember. He slept and forgot.
The train stopped abruptly: Newton Abbot, Devon. Tom collected up his newspapers and walked along the cold platform to the ticket collector. A taxi to Dartmouth would take forty minutes and cost fifteen pounds.
Colonel Haig, MC, looked younger and was much taller than Tom had expected. He was fifty-five, which made him very young indeed to have parachuted into occupied France in 1944; young, too, to be such a successful torturer in Malaya in 1950. He had a hard, very square face. It was creased with lines so deep and so black they looked as if they’d been put on with a crayon. He had short crinkly grey hair, so short and crinkly it looked African. His eyes were light grey and moist as if he had chronic hayfever.
He looked relaxed in country clothes - a squire.
‘I’m sorry for the confusion at the gate, Mr McCullin,’ he said. ‘My guards have instructions not to let anyone through to the house without first contacting me. I hope
they weren’t too rude - I had told them you were coming. They are very security conscious - overso, I think, but it would be a mistake to caution them. They are so keen.’
‘No trouble. Colonel,’ Tom replied, ‘it was exactly what I’d expected; security is the byword of modem living. I wish I’d got into that line of business myself instead of what I ended up in.’
‘And what exactly have you ended up in, Mr McCullin?’ Haig was smiling very slightly; his eyes met Tom’s squarely.
‘I think I did mention it on the phone this morning. Colonel I’m a freelance television producer - mostly with ITV.’
Haig moved across the room to the sideboard, raised a sherry decanter and his eyes to Tom.
‘Thank you.’ Tom went on. ‘I think I said, too, that I’d like to do something on you, possibly a half-hour film; I’m pretty sure Granada would buy it for their “World in Action” series. In fact, I know they would.’
‘Why now, Mr McCullin?’
‘Why now what. Colonel?’
‘Why should you be so concerned about me now? Why not a year and a half ago when I was in the headlines? Why suddenly do you think I should be of any interest to people who watch commercial television?’
‘I gather your ideas now have some shape; that you have trained men and women who serve you on a kind of retainer and could at short notice be mobilised at a time of national emergency; a General Strike, for instance. The British Volunteers eighteen months ago was just so much talk. Today it is a very definite force - something tangible, something I can film.’
Haig handed the glass of sherry to Tom, beckoned at an armchair and sat down himself; he lit a cigar without offering one. The two men sat in front of an open log fire, Tom looking at Haig. The Colonel pulled one of the cast- iron firedogs towards him and rested his brown ankle-boot on it. Then, content, as if he had all the time in the world, balanced the sherry glass on the raised right knee.
‘You are an experienced producer, Mr McCullin? You have done things like it before - for Granada, I mean? Because if I agreed to provide you with my time and my facilities here on this estate, I wouldn’t want them wasted in the hands of an amateur.’
The Partridge Kite Page 8