The Partridge Kite

by Michael Nicholson

  Tom kept looking at the fire.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to know whether it was possible to ski down the other side of the summit. Nothing more or less than that.’

  ‘Then why have you given me the fiver?’ He bared his uneven dull grey teeth.

  ‘You’re a cunning bastard,’ Tom said.

  ‘Canny, you mean.’

  ‘No, we call it cunning where I come from.’

  ‘What would an Englishman be doing up here without skis, asking about the top?’ he asked.

  He snorted in his nose, drew mucus into his mouth and swallowed it.

  ‘Now look, coalman,’ Tom said. ‘Say what you have to say and then get out. In fact you can piss off now before you put me off my lunch.’

  The porter stooped lower and almost whispered to Tom. ‘She was a top skier,’ he said. ‘The best they’d ever had up here. They say she was a champion, was on television and the Olympics. She didn’t come from this end of the valley, came from the far side of Grantown. Family lived there. They say she knew every inch of the mountains, used to walk and camp up there in the summer then ski the moment the snow came. That cow in reception was right in one thing anyway: you wouldn’t go over the top in the snow unless you knew it like the back of your hand in summer. And they say she did.’

  He stopped, hoping perhaps that he’d come to the end of his first fiver’s worth. But Tom didn’t move except that his forefinger began wandering over the map on his lap, tracing the contour lines over the peaks and into the valleys.

  The porter went on. ‘They say she would disappear for days on end. Caused quite a panic in her family when she began it, thinking that she’d lost herself. But she always came back.

  Then her family moved out, no proper reason, just moved out. Went south, I think. There was lots of talk, bound to be in a place like this. Something to do with their politics, seem to remember some people here didn’t like their politics, though I can’t for the fife of me think why that should make you shift house. She stayed for a while for the winter but then she moved on. We never saw her again.’ ‘Did they ever find out where she went to when she skied over the top?’ Tom asked him.

  ‘No. But there’s nothing over there except mountains and burns.’

  ‘She must have gone somewhere for something.’

  ‘If she did she didn’t tell anyone ’cos no one knows. And no one went with her, I know that much. No one could. She was the best there was and she went places I reckon no one else has ever been to.’

  ‘And always in the same direction over the summit?’ ‘That’s right. South to south-east . . . There’s no other way you can stay with the slope, they say.’

  ‘And do you remember her name?’

  ‘Do I remember her name. Yes, I do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I said I remember her name.’

  Tom passed him another folded five-pound note and waited for the man to repeat his intensive scrutiny. Satisfied, he then tucked it into his left-hand waistcoat pocket and dusted his hands loudly. Again the smell of coal dust. Tom wanted to sneeze.

  He felt a strong urge to pounce on the dismal man, slam him hard against the door, shake him and tie the long lobes of his long ears in a knot across his long face, like a gag across the long drooping mouth. Tom closed his eyes. That’s what he’d do. He would count to five and do exactly that. He’d got to three when the porter spoke.

  ‘Pilkington she was.’

  Thank you. And her first name?’

  ‘I’m not sure I remember that. Might have been Eva or Elva.’

  ‘Elsa?’

  ‘Elsa? Elsa it is. You’re damn right it is. That was her name. Elsa Pilkington.’

  He peered towards Tom, his tall thin body bending at the waist like a puppet, his face coming so close that Tom could smell his bad breath.

  ‘I bet you’re one of the family. I bet that’s what you are. One of them come back.’

  Tom pushed the man back, still refusing to look at him. ‘Then put the tenner I gave you on the table and bet on it,’ he said.

  The porter laughed shrilly, coughed up phlegm and swallowed it.

  Tom got up.

  ‘Now fuck off,’ he said quietly to the man, ‘before I take my money back. And bring me some tea.’

  But as the porter backed towards the door Tom saw the dribbling wet nose and remembered the revolting habits that surrounded it.

  ‘Forget the tea,’ he said, ‘just get out.’

  The man eased his way back through the door in the same fashion he’d arrived. Tom reached out with his toot and kicked the door shut. He looked down at the white-hot electric bars of the fire and watched tiny specks of dust explode as they touched them. So it was Pilkington, exactly as Fry had said.

  He remembered her voice, her despairing telephone call, a charred body in the Leicester fire, the face on the front page of an evening newspaper. He saw her in her kapok suit and tinted goggles pushing with her sticks over the four-thousand-foot hump, then plunging and swerving through snow that nobody else had ever touched, for a destination no one else would ever see. Skiing over ice and through powder waist high, but always moving by instinct in the right direction, independent of the first sense of sight.

  She had skied from the summit to CORDON’S Headquarters and had always kept her secret. Until she pointed the way that moment she committed suicide by setting herself on fire.

  There was a loud click and the white-hot electric bars turned red, the red pink and the pink into nothing. The room went dark and cold as Tom began fumbling with the coins.

  He had lunch, and then the girl. He ate the finest oxtail he reckoned he’d ever tasted, and finished with a very adequate gooseberry crumble. The girl was everything she’d promised to be and he hoped he had done well by her too.

  She was certainly athletic, and very clean-smelling, so that when he was obliged to comply with her many and very diverse requests he wasn’t put off. After Kate, her roundness and sheer weight made it seem as if he was having sex for the very first time. He couldn’t ever remember climbing on to a woman before. At least, that’s what it felt like in those last totally exhausting moments before their happily shared climax.

  Her lunch break over, she went contentedly back to her reception duties. The drooping porter stood just inside the front door watching her, well aware of the reason for her good humour.

  He had listened to their noisy love-making, standing in the dark corridor outside Tom’s bedroom door, his hands fumbling excitedly in his trouser pockets. What he had heard and the pictures he’d put to it would serve his own purposes in his own bed for many nights to come. And when that had outlived its utility he would exchange the story bit by bit for a dram of malt whisky in the local bar.

  Tonight, though, he would merely whet the appetite of those locals who wouldn’t normally pass the time of day with him. A little about the easy tenner and the Englishman who was one of the Pilkington family. The woman’s brother, couldn’t be anyone else. For what other reason should he come here asking about her? Or maybe her lover? Maybe that would make the story better. He would decide on it later.

  But why was the Englishman so worried about what the woman had been doing over on the other side? Well, Heavens knows! Probably someone in the bar tonight would know what it was all about. But it would be his story. He was looking forward to his drink this evening. He’d be quite at the centre of things.

  Tom slept as she’d left him, naked on the bed. He woke up with a start, cold and angry. He hadn’t intended to sleep, and swore at himself for being so energetic after such a heavy lunch.

  He had a quick wash down from the makeshift pink rubber hoses connected to the bath taps which passed as a shower, and stood in front of the wall mirror cupping his face in his hands. The beard was rough. He had shaved haphazardly in the tiny
sink of the sleeper early that morning and needed another but he couldn’t be bothered. He splashed after-shave and talcum powder over himself instead.

  It took him less than two minutes to dry and dress. The room was icy cold and he needed no other encouragement to hurry. He buttoned up his overcoat and tied Kate’s scarf tightly around the collar and opened the door to leave. He hesitated, went back into the bathroom and came out with the tin of talcum powder, knelt down at the door and pulled back the carpet.

  As he had hoped, it was foam-backed. He shook the talc on to the bare floorboards in an area eighteen inches wide, carefully replaced the carpet, stepped over it into the corridor, locked the door, pocketed the key and left the hotel.

  Kingussie is small, the neat little eighteenth-century capital of Badenoch, famous for its ‘black houses’. Typical Hebridean cottages that got their name because they had no chimneys, only a hole in the thatch, so thick layers of soot built up on the ceilings.

  The hotel and the post office were at opposite ends of Kingussie and it took Tom half an hour of gingerly walking through the snow to get to it. Three times he lost himself in the unlighted streets and three times he asked passers-by the way. He was directed in a language he did not understand, though by the accent he took it to be Highland English.

  The telegram he sent was short.

  ‘RECEIVED YOUR OVERNIGHTER WITH THANKS STOP SAFELY INSTALLED AND WAITING TO BE MET STOP MCCULLIN’

  He addressed it to a non-existent firm at an address in Victoria Street, London SW1. It would be received and opened first thing tomorrow morning by a Mrs Hayes, who sat long hours in a small office overlooking the red-topped buses, sipping tea, powdering her nose and not missing in the slightest her former employer who had died in mysterious circumstances some days before.

  The counter clerk added up the number of words and began what seemed a long involved procedure of multiplying the total by the recent increased inland telegram charges. Tom waited, resisting the temptation to look round quickly. The feeling was back again. He was being watched. The familiar sensation of eyes focusing on the nape of his neck, a watcher close enough to touch.

  He thanked the clerk, pocketed his change and turned slowly round, not looking at anything in particular, absent- mindedly almost. But every person in that room registered. A middle-aged woman at the far end of the counter buying insurance stamps; two men beyond her, father and son by their ages and looks, with a trolley full of parcels. Under the clock by the window on the opposite wall, a young woman in a blue headscarf and wearing large fur-covered snow- boots, a child in a baby buggy at her side, was filling in a form from a rack marked VEHICLE ROAD FUND LICENCES. By the door on the other side of a wicker basket on wheels was a postman throwing letters expertly into a wall of pigeon holes.

  Tom tied Kate’s scarf more tightly around his neck, tucked the ends into the top of his overcoat and walked out into the snow again. The young woman in the headscarf crumpled the application form into a ball in her hand, threw it into the waste-bin under the table, about-turned the baby buggy, pulled the child’s bonnet over its ears and followed.

  Tom didn’t know about Scottish licensing laws. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were not governed by the same absurd logic of English Parliaments that told a man when he should or should not drink. So he was just a little surprised to find the bars already half full at 5.15 in the evening.

  He hesitated outside the first he came to but only for an instant. If someone was behind him watching and waiting he reckoned it wouldn’t matter where he went or what he did within reason. They would stay with him.

  In one hour and forty minutes he went into seven bars, drank thirteen large malt whiskies, and ate a stale ploughman’s lunch. He would have made it eight bars had he not seen the grey hotel porter already drunk in one.

  At a few minutes to seven he had managed to slip and slide his way back the icy path to the hotel. He stepped into the lighted porch and began noisily stamping the snow off his shoes. Then he turned around and did a deep bow to whoever was out there, whoever had been his patient and anonymous companion.

  The young woman, still in her headscarf, parked her Mini estate on the verge by the side of the road just out of view of the main gates of the hotel driveway. The child was in a carrycot on the back seat. She reached across to the floor of the passenger seat for a vacuum flask and poured warm milk into the baby’s bottle. The baby began noisily sucking the teat, and the woman looked at her wristwatch. In just over twenty minutes’ time her shift ended and someone else would take over.

  She looked through the leafless hedge that separated hotel property from the public verge and saw the light come on in Tom’s room.

  Tom didn’t enter the room but switched on the wall light by the door frame and left the door open. He knelt down and pulled back the carpet. There, sharply defined, was the print of a left shoe, a size nine, possibly ten. A print going in. But none coming out.

  ‘You have been reading too many Alistair MacLeans, Mr McCullin. People don’t actually do that any more.’ The voice came from behind the door.

  ‘Obviously some people still do,’ Tom said as he stood up.

  ‘Don’t do anything hasty, Mr McCullin. I can see you quite clearly through the opening in the door. I am armed and I know you are not, so come in slowly and hold your hands out in front of you. Do not turn round.’

  Tom put out his hands clasped in front of him, and walked into the room looking like a preacher going up the aisle. It was icy cold. The window was wide open.

  ‘It’s a little chilly in here,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I close the window and put some money in the meter for the fire?’ He stood facing the window, hands still in front of him.

  ‘Put the fire on if you like but leave the window open,’ said the voice. It was not a Scottish voice. It sounded middle- aged and definitely upper-class.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit wasteful?’ Tom asked.

  The voice laughed. Pleasantly enough in the circumstances, Tom thought.

  ‘You’re spending Government money, Mr McCullin, so I shouldn’t worry. Fact is, I need the window open because I’m expecting to hear something.’

  ‘Do you have a ten-penny piece to spare?’ Tom asked.

  The coin spun through the air and landed on the bed less than a foot from him. The meter clicked and the electric bars went through their change of colour routine until they were white-hot again.

  ‘Are we waiting for something to arrive?’ he asked.

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Something or someone?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Would you like a Scotch?’ Tom asked.

  The voice didn’t answer.

  ‘Okay if I have one?’

  ‘I’d hoped you’d had enough tonight.’

  ‘Yes or no, please.’

  ‘As you like.’

  Tom reached forward for the whisky bottle and began pouring some into the pewter flask. Then he began sipping it.

  ‘Please remember, Mr McCullin, the hip flask is not a missile. I am holding a Colt at first pressure and I am aiming it at your right thigh. I have been instructed not to kill you but to maim, and only if it’s absolutely essential.’

  Tom took another sip. Thank you,’ he said.

  Nothing more was said for a full three minutes. The heat of the fire was burning into Tom’s left calf, but the rest of his body was slowly freezing up. His hands and his face felt numb and he began to worry about a cold forefinger held for so long at first pressure on the sensitive trigger of a Colt.

  ‘If I hear it before you,’ Tom said eventually, ‘I’ll let you know.’

  The voice didn’t respond.

  ‘May I know what it is we’re listening for?’ he asked.

  Still no answer.

  ‘May I have a pee?’

  ‘No need, Mr McCullin. Your
gun is no longer behind the bathroom door.’

  ‘But I still need a pee. There’s a lot of whisky inside wanting to get out and. . .’

  He didn’t finish. They both heard it, above the noise of the wind, a phut-phut like a distant outboard motor but with a stronger, deeper beat. Tom nodded to the window. So they’d come for him and they’d sent a helicopter.

  ‘Is that for me?’ he asked.

  Tor us.’

  ‘Can I take my whisky with me?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  He dropped the hip flask into his overcoat pocket. But the butt of the Colt bruised a small bone behind his right ear before he had a chance to see the Huey drop into the field just below his bedroom window, centring itself between the tall firs with only yards to spare in the circle of the rotor blades.

  A fox, terrified at the commotion, scampered from his earth, was blown sideways by the blast, recovered, and began leaping away across the snow, leaving his vixen to pull three cubs in her mouth after him.

  Friday, 24 December

  Tom had not expected to see it in such a place even at Christmas. But it remained a firm image long after his eyes had focused. A wreath of holly and vine covered in snow icing, red berries and red candles hanging from the ceiling. He tried to raise his head but felt sick with the pain.

  ‘Don’t move, Mr McCullin. You’ve no need to. You were hit overhard, I think, but nothing important’s broken.’

  Another voice in another corner but in another room. A warm room smelling of something sweet and familiar. And a voice he thought he knew.

  ‘You are at last where you’ve wanted to be, Mr McCullin. Inside CORDON. It’s something we hadn’t planned for, and something that must surprise even you.’

  Tom didn’t answer but closed his eyes. Keep talking, voice, he thought, keep talking and I’ll get your face and your name.