Overnight Express

by Philip McCutchan

Hedge reported.

  “That,” Rowland Mayes said heavily, “has just about torn it in shreds. What the hell are we going to do now?”

  “I’ve no idea —”

  “You know what’s going to be said? That this was rigged. A way out of a hand-over. That’s what the Third World countries will trumpet. So will some of our own people — and you know who, Hedge.”

  “Yes.”

  “The news has got to be held.”

  “I doubt if it can be, Foreign Secretary.”

  “Even if it can’t, it must be. The PM will obviously insist, and quite rightly. The hijackers would be maddened, simply driven to retaliation against those passengers. Something must be found, Hedge. You’d better find it. You’re the man on the spot.”

  Rowland Mayes, Hedge thought, had never sounded so nasty. He could see the point; but what was he to do, what could he do? A road crash was a road crash and this was a very big one. It couldn’t possibly be hidden, that was ridiculous. There was only one faint possibility and Hedge put it over the phone.

  “A blatant lie, Foreign Secretary?”

  “I dislike the use of that word, Hedge. Some economy with the truth, perhaps — speak to the local police chiefs’ involved. You’ll think of something.”

  “And the police and military escort, Foreign Secretary?”

  There was a pause, then Rowland Mayes said patiently, “I’m very tired, Hedge, very tired indeed. It’s up to you. You spoke of the military — use that. Army vehicles, with troops. Fudge it up somehow, stitch something together. I’ll call the PM and be in touch again if necessary.”

  *

  Mrs Heffer, whose mind always rose to the occasion day or night, was on the ball immediately. She had been dreaming of the Perth conference, hearing again, with a smile on sleeping lips, the faithful bidding her to come back again. In the face of incalculable horror, Perth was thrust aside. She at once endorsed the orders Rowland Mayes had given to Hedge.

  “So absolutely right, Roly.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister, but what happens when we don’t produce the terrorists?”

  “We were never going to, Roly.” That disposed of that. No more discussion was needed. Mrs Heffer cut the call and instituted three more: to the homes of Judge Prestwick, Judge Orp and Judge Bessell. She didn’t say very much: just passed the stark fact. Three of HM’s justices, currently in bed, were now very much on the line, though certainly she didn’t stress this.

  “It was no more than she was bound to do, my dear,” Judge Bessell said to his wife. “Just to let us know what’s happened —”

  “A warning, Bertie.”

  “Oh no, no, no, not a warning by any means! What is there to warn about? It’ll never enter her mind to — to hand us over to bestiality.”

  “Perhaps not — oh, I agree with you, Bertie, she wouldn’t. Not that.”

  “What, then?” Judge Bessell snapped, knowing what was in his wife’s mind. Noble sacrifices and so on were writ plain. He said it for her, sarcastically, repeating words she had used the day before.

  “What are people going to think?”

  “Well —”

  “They can think what they wish,” Judge Bessell said in an angry tone. “I’m astonished at your attitude, I may say. It’s scarcely wifely, is it?”

  “Oh Bertie …” She sat up in bed, her hair awry, face crumpled now, eyes full of concern.

  “It’s all very well saying, ‘Oh, Bertie’.”

  “I really didn’t mean …” Lady Bessell fluffed at the awry hair and pushed the sheets away. She smiled, lovingly. “Bertie … ?”

  “You’ve put me right off the idea,” Judge Bessell said.

  *

  Shard had dozed fitfully, suffering nightmares during those brief periods of sleep. Nightmares about deadlines, about his own inaction, about how Beth was bearing up down south in Ealing. Mrs Micklem loomed, a distorted evil spirit sowing seeds. Mrs Micklem taking a call from the Foreign Office to say he was dead, laughing like a hyena as she told Beth, adding that now her little girl was safely back in her clutches, claws and all. Mrs Micklem took on the aspect of a cat, a very large cat with glaring green eyes and a swishing tail, forked and steel-tipped.

  He awoke as if by instinct at 0400, the deadline time. Beside him Ian Costermaine was already wakeful, still worrying about the job interview in Edinburgh.

  Costermaine said, “Four a.m.”

  “Yes.”

  “And all quiet.”

  “Don’t speak too soon.”

  There was loud snoring: the two MacAllisters dangled open mouths, opposite. Susan, normally an attractive woman, looked a mess, with dank hair and make-up smeared, chin sagging. The atmosphere was terrible. The children, Fenella and Dominic, were also asleep, curled up together on the floor between the seats, lying on clothing provided by the adults. Shard couldn’t move his legs for fear of waking them.

  He kept looking now at his watch: the seconds ticked away from the deadline. Nothing happened; no more deaths, but there was time yet, of course. Cat and mouse? By four-twenty Shard had dismissed the cat and mouse theory: the deadline was being allowed to pass. In fact he was not surprised. Rumour had gone through the train an hour earlier. Someone going to the toilet compartment at the front end of the train had heard a distant radio, coming, he believed, from the cab, a BBC overseas broadcast: it was understood from unofficial sources that the three gaoled terrorists were being moved north.

  The hijackers, taking that in, would wait. Wait for a move from the authorities. They might not believe that Mrs Heffer meant to make any concessions, but they couldn’t be sure, so they would give her the benefit of the doubt. So long as that kept up, then the hostages might perhaps be safe.

  That was something; the time went by and no-one was selected for murder. Shard drifted off into disturbed sleep again.

  Farther along the train old Mr Irons just couldn’t take the stuffiness and stench any longer, just couldn’t. It was so terrible and he’d been giving a series of dry retching sounds which brought nasty looks from the passengers nearby. On an impulse he got up and went out to the space at the end of the coach where the toilet was and pulled down the window of one of the exit doors: lovely! The fresh night air, almost the dawn air now, came in and he breathed it deeply, down into his lungs. Just for one peaceful moment and then the angry shout came and the armed man on guard stormed along the aisle and got a grip round Mr Iron’s waist, and pulled.

  No-one interfered.

  Mr Irons hung on tight, all his Yorkshire fight-back coming to the surface. He stared down into the beams of the army’s searchlights, lungs still taking in the fresh air. He was silhouetted by the beams. He began shouting wildly, felt the strong tug at his waist. He wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t give up. He was a Yorkshire terrier and he hung on, still shouting. Something had happened to him, he didn’t know what, something in his mind. He was shouting for his son, as if Fred could hear him down in Wensleydale.

  “Fred! Fred! Weer are thee? Give these boogers what for. Fred!”

  On the fringes of the gawpers, just behind the police barricade, Fred Irons heard, loud and clear. He saw the figure at the train’s window.

  He moved forward, no idea what he was going to do, no idea what he could do — nothing in fact — but he wanted his father to know he was there and had heard and was going to stand by him. Blood pounded through his head, he saw as if through a mist; all attention was on the train, on the window and the old man clawing at it and still shouting frenziedly. Fred was through the barricade in an instant, and running. Running like the wind, never mind the cops and the army and their shouted orders to come back. They came at him and he dodged, one fixed idea in his mind. He went across the roundabout, skirted the viaduct and its net, pounded up the steps to the station approach and the train. He never made it: from the train an automatic rifle opened, raking the approach. Some of the bullets took Fred Irons, ripped his body apart, right down the back, and he fell flat, spreadeagled on
his face.

  The silence returned until it was broken by a shout from the train.

  “Nobody approaches, nobody. Shooting will be repeated if there is another attempt.”

  *

  After the first BBC news broadcast of the second hijack day, the local radio put out its bulletin and included the doctored report of the traffic accident near the Wetherby Turnpike. “A military convoy going north from Salisbury Plain was involved in a serious accident when two articulated vehicles travelling south came across the northbound carriageway … there have been a number of casualties … next-of-kin will be informed as soon as positive identification has been made …”

  This broadcast was received in the train’s cab. Looks were exchanged, then comment. Military convoys, other than on manoeuvres, didn’t happen very often. Times had changed over the years: once, the troops had marched in column; then they had been moved in vehicles; now they all had their own cars — or they went by airlift, if they were required to move as a cohesive body.

  “And there has been no further word of the men we want,” one of the hijackers said.

  Coincidence, or jiggery-pokery on the part of the British? The question was put to Sir Richard Cross, haggard in a corner, flinching before the guns. He really couldn’t say, he said, but doubted that there would have been any chicanery — the Prime Minister was a woman of her word, none more so. It was at this point that a low-voiced conference of the hijackers took place and then Sir Richard’s clothing was disturbed and the glowing ends of cigarettes were applied to certain vital and very painful areas until the Treasury man, self-admitted to have a low pain threshold, agreed to talk on the radio telephone to the local police IIQ. He talked, stressing that the situation was very real, that the hijackers were immensely determined men who were losing patience fast and that he, Cross, was in very imminent danger and the Prime Minister should be informed, personally and at once.

  In the meantime the hijackers were in truth not all that impatient. They could afford to wait and they had plenty of hostages. When full daylight came to Durham, there was another demand for food and water. As before, this was met without demur.

  Hedge, too, had heard the BBC news, listening to it with the chief constable who was as dead tired as he in spite of catnaps. Sir Richard’s pleas had been reported to Hedge, who heard them in growing concern. His mind was moving in circles now. He tried to formulate some kind of plan but it was no use. The chief constable kept urging patience, masterly inactivity: it was, he said, the only way.

  “All those hostages,” Hedge said, his mind working on similar lines to the hijackers’. “It’ll take them a long time to get through them all. This could go on indefinitely if we let it. But we can’t! The public won’t take it. And there’s still the overall threat — not only to the hostages but the city as well. I really think we ought to evacuate more of the immediate vicinity.”

  “A lot of disruption —”

  “Better than a lot of death,” Hedge said disagreeably.

  “Yes. But there’s another consideration: we can’t evacuate without it being seen. That could precipitate matters, ensure the blow-up.”

  “Yes, there is that.” Hedge rubbed at his eyes. Why didn’t someone bring coffee? It was breakfast time now. As if in answer to his thoughts a mobile police canteen drew up outside the Homestead Sleep Centre and trays were brought in, eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade, coffee. Hedge munched and drank and felt a little better, more able to cope. He was feeling his age: it wasn’t fair, so close to retirement, to present him with a problem of this magnitude. On the other hand, if he could overcome it … that was what he must strive to do. He wished he could make up his mind on the question of Durham’s partial evacuation; the chief constable had certainly had a point. The PM wouldn’t want to escalate, to precipitate anything at all. That wasn’t the way with hijacks. Procrastination … the chief constable had called it by a better name, masterly inactivity, but it was much the same really. It was a case of one side wearing the other down, in basis.

  And what was Shard doing? Nothing, presumably. In all fairness he couldn’t admittedly do much at this stage, but Hedge was already pondering some acid comments for when all this was over. If he was still alive: he was very close to the bomb, or bombs. So, he thought irritably, was the Venerable Bede, for whom evacuation would not do much short of the whole tomb being excavated from its bed and craned out of the cathedral, down perhaps to the Wear and a flat-bottomed barge … During the night Hedge had again been approached, attacked really, by the dean and by the London-based Hugo Pavitt bringing the strictures of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York both. Bede was a national monument, revered throughout the country and by American tourists.

  Not, although this Hedge didn’t know, by Mr MacCantley, who had never heard of him. MacCantley had other worries, recently brought to a head by an indiscreet remark loudly uttered when Jean Fison fainted while he was catnapping and woke him very suddenly with a brooch pin that had come undone and had penetrated his thigh.

  “Why, goddamn, lousy, limey son-of-a-bitch brooch …”

  His voice tailed away: one of the Middle East persons was standing close by. This person said softly, his eyes dangerous, “American, no?”

  “Why, not —”

  “You will not deny. You are American. Get up, American.”

  “Me? Why? Look, I’m —”

  The gun moved closer. “Come. You will come with me.”

  MacCantley got to his feet, looking green, certain that he was to be led away to his execution. He protested but in vain. As he disappeared Jean Fison turned to the Chinese

  “I’m so sorry,” she said in a weak voice. “It was all my fault. How dreadful.”

  “Not dreadful,” Sun Wun Foo said placidly.

  “Not? Oh — I’m sorry. I thought perhaps …”

  “No. I was to be mistress, not wife. For money, you understand?”

  “Well — yes. Yes, I see. But now —”

  “Now there is no money. But also no big, smelly man. I shall go back to London, then perhaps Hong Kong.” Sun Wun Foo smiled politely and Jean Fison shook her head in wonder at such swift changes of heart and such acceptance of what the girl evidently considered Mr MacCantley’s approaching death, which might turn out not to be the case at all.

  *

  “No, Roly.”

  “But Prime Minister, I —”

  ‘No, Roly.”

  Rowland Mayes tried once more, leaning forward with a despairing look behind his glasses, his hair falling over his face. “Prime Minister, the gaoled terrorists are all dead —”

  “Good!”

  “Goo … well, yes, I take your point, of course.” Rowland Mayes was in fact most surprised, but knew Mrs Heffer would be relying on him implicitly never to reveal that harsh utterance elsewhere. Currently they were alone, in Mrs Heffer’s bedroom in fact, she in her negligee, looking womanly and vulnerable; her hair-dresser had just finished and departed. There was a slightly haggard look that had not been noticeable before but Rowland Mayes knew that everyone grew older — though he did have a faint feeling of surprise that Mrs Heffer was not immune, an order to the Almighty … but he caught himself up and away from silly mental meanderings, for the PM was speaking again and there was some steel in her tone, more harshness.

  “It’s quite impossible, Roly, and I consider it an abominable suggestion to be perfectly frank and honest. Now.” Make-up was applied, skilfully. Wrinkles vanished. “Her Majesty’s Justices are sacrosanct. I will not for one moment consider ordering any interference with that —”

  “But the hostages, Prime Minister —”

  “I know all about the hostages, thank you. My heart goes out to them, of course it does. If only I could change places — but of course the Queen would never hear of that I’m quite sure —”

  “But really, I feel — that radio telephone call from Sir Richard, so very —”

  “Do stop interrupting, Foreign Secretary!”<
br />
  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “Everything Dickie Cross said we more or less knew already. There was nothing new in any of it. Apart from his personal danger, that is.” Dab, dab. A critical look in the mirror, jaw thrust out. Then a placatory smile: Roly was tremendously loyal, after all. “Well now. Naturally I take your point, up to a point. No terrorists available now for release — quite. And poor Dickie, I do feel so sorry for him and Hester, naturally. Hester’s such a strong woman if at times a shade too forward. Once at the palace — but never mind — a garden party. However. Certainly if there could be something done voluntarily … it would go down terribly well with the vot — with the country as a whole. Do you follow, Roly?”

  Rowland Mayes sat farther forward, attentive, the faithful dog. “I think I do, Prime Minister, yes.”

  “Good. Now, Roly, have you anyone in the Foreign Office with tact?”

  “Not in the Foreign Office, but I can find —”

  “Tact, Roly, coupled with an ability to put across one’s wishes firmly?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “Who, Roly?”

  “Lord Crax?”

  Mrs Heffer pursed her lips. “Oily.”

  “But with tact, Prime Minister. And charm.” Rowland Mayes, who knew very well what the PM wanted, pressed his case. “A peer, Prime Minister. And a Whip. House of Lords … that always carries weight with the law.”

  “Oh, very well, Crax — there’s so little time, we must make do. Get Lord Crax to talk very urgently with our three bigwigs.” She had made a joke: she smiled. Rowland Mayes smiled too, and went about his business without delay.

  *

  Durham Cathedral had been closed to the public now. So had the castle, the town council having done their own evacuation. No-one wished to be flattened by massive blocks of masonry if the worst should happen. The cathedral had stood a thousand years but it might not stand against the Middle East. Or anyway, it was wise to assume it might not. Masses of lead sheeting had arrived and workmen were busy about Bede, probably quite uselessly but the Very Reverend Hugo Pavitt plus the Dean of Durham, and indeed the Bishop, had prevailed and Bede was being sealed off just in case, because you still never knew. Excavation and removal had been rejected because it was totally impractical in Hugo Pavitt’s view and that of the cathedral surveyor; and also because Bede had done enough travelling since his death in 735, initially to join St Cuthbert in Durham, then shifted to the Galilee Chapel which was destroyed during the Reformation thus entailing the burial of the bones in situ. The tomb had been opened up in 1831 to reveal bones of a sort plus an iron ring and the bones had then been re-buried under their present splendid tomb. In Hedge’s view there was probably very little that was original left, but this was firmly denounced by Hugo Pavitt as near blasphemy. In any case, even one bone would constitute an important historic and religious relic.