The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  Gosling was looking into the fire; the pleasant scent from the burning yew sap was filling the room. Haig sat down in his armchair. Gosling moved to do the same, to the one where Tom had been sitting. Tom had left his pile of newspapers on the arm of the large floral covered wingback and Gosling began shuffling them together, to throw them into the log-basket on his left. But he stopped, pulled the Daily Telegraph from the top of the pile and stared at the crossword puzzle.

  He handed it across to Haig. The puzzle was nearly finished and in the blank margins of the page, Tom, during his train journey down, had filled them with anagrams, half- written words and doodlings. He’d put a line through each of the clues as he’d solved them. Fourteen across, an anagram, hadn’t taken him long. ‘Conrod broken in a roundabout way (6).’ He had rearranged the letters in turn until the right word appeared and in his doodling working on the next clue had surrounded it with snakes and flowers and a jagged herringbone pattern so that this one word alone stood out bold from the others. Few people would have distinguished the six letters from the fantasies surrounding them. But Gosling saw them. And so now did Haig. By a freak 14 across, CORDON stood out as large as life.

  Haig was on the telephone for a little over three minutes, giving his code and alert warning as CORDON Director Area 14.He informed Headquarters of the prisoner McCullin still unconscious upstairs. He assumed his instructions would be straightforward enough. They were, but not what he’d expected.

  He came back into the sitting-room slowly through the curtains looking puzzled and angry.

  ‘He’s to be released without further delay or further harm.’

  His silent adjutant looked up in surprise.

  ‘Yes, released,’ Haig continued. ‘I’m told the instructions came directly from the Chairman himself. It seems McCullin is an agent for SSO, Kellick’s mob of gangsters, but for Christ knows what reason we have to let him go.’

  He paused and began stroking his nose with the stub of his forefinger. Gosling stood up and walked to the side of his Colonel waiting for orders.

  ‘I must presume,’ Haig said, ‘that our alert will at least be circulated to other Area Directors so we’ve done some service today. But what their game is at HQ I’ve no bloody idea. Dear boy,’ he turned and tugged at Gosling’s sleeve, ‘find out the time of the next London train.’

  No one on Newton Abbot station was too put out as the two smiling pleasant-faced young men helped the older drunk along the platform. They were each side of him, his arms around their shoulders, their hands clasping his firmly. The older man looked white, and although his eyes were just open his head rolled from side to side in rhythm with the striding youngsters. They put him into a compartment on his own, a first-class non-smoker, and propped him up in the comer corridor seat. One pulled open his shirt collar and tie, the other emptied a quarter of a bottle of whisky into his open mouth; it splashed and dribbled down each side of his chin on to his chest and was absorbed by the cloth of his jacket. The return half of his ticket was placed in his top pocket for the ticket collector to see and take without disturbing him.

  As the 1643 Penzance-London pulled away the two smiling young men handed their platform tickets to the collector at the barrier.

  ‘One and a half bottles of whisky for lunch - not bad going, eh?’ They laughed as they shouted to him.

  The collector, ice cold in his unheated sentry-box, stamped his feet and nodded back wearily, wondering where on earth people got their money from nowadays, with whisky at £8.25 a bottle!

  In the granite Headquarters of CORDON and in the darkened room where only the Chairman was allowed, the leather folder had been opened and closed for the second time in two days, and a second name had been ringed by the red wax marker.

  Despite the arrival of Tom’s dragged and unconscious body at Paddington Station and the anonymous telephone call from a Dartmouth public call box alerting the Department of his estimated time of arrival, Kellick was still not convinced of the necessity to start dealing directly with Tom and to drop the charade of Trygg-Ö-Säker Security Malmö. That would mean crossing the Prime Minister and he would need much more persuasion to do that.

  It came within hours.

  Tom’s arrival at Paddington caused no commotion: the telephone call had ensured that. His body was strapped to a stretcher and carried the forty yards of platform seven into a waiting Departmental Rover.

  For the sake of the records and Kellick’s suspicious mind, having been told by the two pickup men that McCullin stank of whisky, a blood test was made. It showed only the slightest evidence of alcohol - probably no more than a sherry or two, according to the doctor.

  He also established the identity of the drug and said it would take another four hours, probably more, before Tom recovered consciousness. The bruise on the neck would cause some headaches for a day or two.

  Tom was taken shortly after midnight in the grey Rover back to his flat in Russell Street and put to bed fully clothed. The two pickup men checked the flat for rear entrances, were satisfied there were none and went back to their car to sit the night out, listen to a West German pop station and drink sugarless, milkless tea from a vacuum flask. Their instructions were to alert the Duty Night Officer by radio the moment Tom stirred.

  Neither knew the identity of this drunk who wouldn’t wake up. They assumed he was either an MP who, as one put it, had been caught ‘dipping his wick’ or a senior civil servant who’d broken up. And as Tom looked far too scruffy to be a civil servant, he became an MP. Either way they didn’t give much for his future.

  Kellick left the Department for his flat in South West London after he’d watched the Rover leave Victoria Street with Tom’s body huddled in blankets on the back seat. Fry was sleeping out what was left of the night on a bunk in the Duty Night’s office.

  For two days now the temperature had been five degrees below freezing, exceptionally cold even for a London December. The snow on the pavements was packed hard. During the day the traffic in the streets softened the surface slightly but at night it turned back again to ice. The taxi crunched its way across Parliament Square and over Westminster Bridge.

  The plastic seats in the taxi themselves felt like smooth black ice and the chill from them moved through Kellick’s trousers. He shivered with the cold and the sense of total frustration.

  His row half an hour before with Fry, and his own uncharacteristic loss of temper, was upsetting. He felt that everything he touched had been touched first by CORDON. Every move he made was pre-empted by CORDON. Every decision he took seemed to be working to their advantage.

  The taxi smelt of stale tobacco. He crossed his arms about him and leant forward on to his knees in an effort to keep warm.

  They’re playing cat and mouse with us,’ Fry had said in the office. ‘They could have held McCullin - they could comfortably have killed him. We had no idea he’d gone to Haig.’

  Kellick had said nothing.

  Fry went on, ‘Maybe they knew he was coming. Maybe they wanted to question him. The doctor said that drugs are frequently used during interrogation. Either way they’ve gone a few steps further forward and we’re marking time. We thought there would be a chase with us doing the chasing. We seem to have got it all wrong.’

  Still Kellick had refused to answer.

  Fry continued, ‘I suggest the pretence has gone on long enough. I suggest we go to McCullin the moment he wakes up and tell him exactly what it’s all about. I think he should meet Sanderson, interview him himself. I’m sure the Prime Minister would. . .’

  ‘You suggest! You think! You’re sure the Prime Minister will bloody well what. Fry?’ Kellick spat out the words staccato, spiteful. ‘Shall I go to him and say that my subordinate, Mr Fry, and his team of computer programmers are convinced that the British Heritage Trust intends a coup? That they’re about to send their tanks up Whitehall and lay siege to Number 10? What
else. Fry? That you recommend he sends in the Noise Abatement Society to keep the peace? Talk some bloody sense, for Christ’s sake! All we have are six names the machines say might - just might, mind you - be involved; that and a published letter from the imbecile Lord Bremmer; and our suspicions. That’s the sum total of evidence so far!’

  ‘Our agent,’ Fry replied quickly, ‘was beaten up and drugged today by Colonel Haig. Have you forgotten that? Doesn’t that mean something?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten a single thing. Fry. I haven’t forgotten, for example, a very precise instruction given me by the Prime Minister. I will not go to him now and say that he’s about to be done out of a job and that we are to be returned to our pure, pristine, Aryan state. I’m a generous man. Fry, and I try to be understanding but I suggest, once and for all, that you leave this decision to me.’

  Kellick spent the taxi ride home justifying his motives. The telephone was ringing as he opened the door to his flat - a white telephone that blended well with the coffee cream decor. It was Fry talking from the Duty Night’s office.

  ‘We’ve just had a call,’ he said. ‘Our two men at Holland Park have been killed. And Sanderson’s gone!’

  Friday, 17 December

  The meeting took place in Tom’s flat shortly after four o’clock that morning. The two pickup men, their car now cocooned in snow, let Kellick and Fry into the front door at the side of the bookshop and led them up the stairs to the cold green flat off the first-floor landing.

  Kellick sat on the edge of Tom’s bed and watched him sleep. Fry busied himself in the tiny kitchen and eventually made coffee after a desperate search for the kettle. He couldn’t make out why McCullin had taken such pains to hide it behind the pots and pans in the sink unit.

  The flat was cold and both men sat, one either side of the bed, shivering in their heavy overcoats, cradling the hot mugs of coffee in their hands. They sat like that for nearly an hour and a half, waiting for Tom to stir. In those ninety minutes neither spoke a word.

  It was all over by the time it got light, a little after eight a.m..

  Kellick talked non-stop for nearly two hours and Tom, from the moment he woke and sat up painfully in bed, fully dressed and totally confused, listened to him without a word.

  At the end of it, Tom was offered a find-and-kill contract and he accepted with a nod of his head. Tom then related his previous day’s events - Haig, Gosling, the classrooms, the chanting squad.

  A second meeting was arranged at the Department for midday. Kellick and Fry then left in the grey Rover to drive through the snow to Victoria Street. The hostility between them had gone, the immediate point of friction erased.

  Tom got up and immediately began shivering. He pulled the heater fan from under his bed and switched it on. Then he went into the kitchen and lit the three gas rings on the cooker and the oven too, leaving the door open. Gradually the warmth drifted into the bedroom and his shivering stopped.

  He still felt sick and dizzy. His head ached and he could not turn his neck. The many mugs of coffee Fry had made him rolled about in his stomach and he wondered why he reeked of whisky. He turned on the bath taps and began to undress: he stood in the bath naked, staring blankly at the water, feeling the warmth creeping around his feet, his ankles, slowly rising up his calves. He recognised an old mood, something he would always feel whenever he was on a kill contract. Crouched with his rifle in an attic room or parked lorry, finger gently stroking the trigger, waiting for the target to walk into view - the target he would kill with a single bullet. He’d never had to use a second.

  There was the same tight excitement now as he stood staring down into the steam. He raised his arm and looked down at his wristwatch. Five minutes to nine. The tiny date marker on the right of the dial showed 17.

  The kidnapping of Francis Sanderson had been simply done. The work of professionals. So simply and so well-timed that Kellick, Fry and Tom McCullin, sitting in the seventh-floor Victoria Street office, looking at the photographs and the brief report, were all agreed: there had been co-operation from the inside.

  It had happened when the two-man shift guarding Sanderson on the top floor of the white four-storey house in Holland Park had swopped over at midnight.

  The two night shift men had let themselves in through the front door with a pass key, had switched off the alarm on the wall of the black-and-white-tiled hall. . . an alarm set to go off with a thirty-second delay once the front door was opened, reset it again with a special key issued only by the Duty Officer Day or Night, primed it for the next entry and then walked the three flights of carpetless stairs to the top room overlooking the public recreation ground at the rear of the house where Sanderson was kept.

  Names were exchanged informally through the closed door - the only casual part of the whole shift change routine - and the door was opened.

  The two bogus night shift men fired together. The first guard in the room was hit through the left eye, the second, just behind him, through the jugular on the left of his neck. His body convulsed and began jerking about the floor, blood spurting from the torn vein. His murderer bent low over him and fired a second bullet into the nape of the neck, just below the hair-line.

  It took no more than four seconds and was over before Sanderson, in his pyjamas, had time to raise himself from his bed and focus.

  The alarm bell in the hall sounded thirty seconds after Sanderson, covered by one of the dead men’s overcoats, his kidnappers each side of him, left the house. He’d been held for exactly one week.

  The checks had been made. The two genuine Department night shift guards had been hijacked. Their car was found abandoned on the south side of Kew Bridge; their bodies in the mud just downstream from Kew Pier.

  Tom couldn’t help feeling that the only unprofessional part of it all was the loss of life. There had been no logistical reason why four men should have died so that Francis Sanderson could be taken. Nothing had gone wrong - they had not been panic killings. It puzzled him that the murders had been deliberately planned in advance, whether they had been necessary or not - whether the guards had offered resistance or not.

  This and the certainty of a CORDON agent on the inside provided the next step forward. Kellick and Fry hadn’t seen the significance. Tom saw it immediately. He began to reason it out, thinking aloud as Kellick and Fry listened. Three plastic beakers of tea and three packets of sandwiches were neatly arranged by Kellick in three separate rows on the top of his desk, dumped there in disarray some minutes before by his secretary, Mrs Hayes.

  She’d never shared his love of exactitude. In fact she had shared very little with him in the eighteen years she’d worked from her small office on the other side of the plywood door. She wasn’t altogether certain she didn’t loathe him, but hate was something she couldn’t be sure she’d recognise.

  Tom began. ‘CORDON wanted Sanderson back. They needed basic information to do it, information privy to very few people in the Department.’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Fry. ‘I’ve checked.’

  ‘So we have to assume,’ Tom went on, ‘the address, the key impressions, the timings, the alarm and the rest came from the inside. Now, to protect their inside man, to avoid any suspicion there was one, you’d imagine them to plan the kidnap in such a way as to avoid the give-away. That makes sense. They would build in clumsiness, make some timing mistakes, open the wrong doors. They didn’t! In fact, they went out of their way to show us that they could not have done it without help from somebody here in the Department. Conclusion, they want to advertise the fact. Question, why?’

  Fry interrupted, ‘Why did Haig let you go with the knowledge you’d picked up down there? Why did they kill your tail? Why are they pointing the way?’

  They are convinced of their strength and invulnerability,’ Tom answered. ‘But they are using us to help them. Somehow, for some reason, we are essential to their plan.’


  Fry looked across to Kellick. ‘Do you remember the last time you went to see Sanderson? I remember something you said when you got back. You’d gone over old ground with him, replayed the tape. He wouldn’t budge. You said, “It’s as if he’s been primed to say so much and no more!” ’

  ‘You’re saying he was a plant?’ Kellick asked.

  Tom answered, ‘Let’s assume that Fry is right. Let’s assume Sanderson was sent to set us up - a decoy.’

  ‘Except that it’s suicidal,’ Kellick said. ‘What kind of general sends his battle plans to the enemy?’

  ‘But they haven’t. All they’ve given us is a bit of background and a threat. We haven’t got a battle plan. Something is missing, something vital. We are being used. Don’t you see how clever your general is?’

  ‘And they’re so certain of themselves,’ Kellick asked, ‘that they’ve taken on the very Government Department that was invented to deal with exactly their threat?’

  ‘What’s the next best thing to your own opinion of your strength if it isn’t the opinion of your opponent?’ asked Fry.

  ‘You think it makes sense, then?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I think it’s beginning to.’

  ‘So it was planned,’ Fry said, ‘before he came to us. Once he’d given all he was supposed to, they would take him back.’

  ‘Exactly! Remember,’ Tom continued, ‘the care you say he took to make sure he was totally anonymous - new clothes, the hair wash.’

  ‘And,’ said Fry, ‘right from the start he said, “it’s on tape” . . . that. . . what was it? . . . “You really can’t expect police protection against CORDON . . . sooner or later they’ll come and take me”.’

  ‘You do have the most remarkable powers of recall. Fry!’ Kellick spoke from his favourite position by the window and the red-topped buses.

  ‘Our only progress so far,’ Fry replied, ‘has been because of our regard to detail on that tape.’

  Tie’s right again, Mr Kellick,’ Tom said. ‘The tape is the only thing we have now - and that’s how they want it to be. It’s put us on to Bremmer and the Trust. It was meant to. . . because it has led us to the six names, and that was meant, too. We must listen to the tape again and again, and move in whatever direction Sanderson points us. We must continue to act, especially in the daily routine of this Department, as if we’re unaware we’re responding to CORDON’S plan - even though we’re convinced we are: if you see what I mean?’