1990 (10 page)

'Steady on.' His visitor indulged in a little cosy spite. 'You'll soon be having me in the King's Birthday Honours for a ration of happiness pills.'

'That's not been approved yet,' Skardon sounded cross.

'This year, next year..?'

Kyle's knowledge of what went on in Whitehall was the only serious threat to his own ultimate inclusion in the Birthday Honours hand-outs. The PCD boss mentally lined up his staff - Lomas, Tasker, Nichols and the rest - and wondered which was the traitor. He looked at the journalist resentfully as the man blabbed on.

'...It's the bloody misery pills that would bother me. I mean, jail's bad enough without dishing out trash like that to the prisoners.'

'You make it sound vicious, when it's no more than a way of cutting prison sentences,' he felt obliged to reply. 'Which would you prefer? Six months? Or one with misery pills?'

'It'll not be long before I have to make the decision, no doubt...' There was no doubting the venom in Kyle's eyes either. '...when you get me inside for contempt of Parliament, or some Court, or some breach of the Official Secrets Act.'

'I hope you will see the light before any such extremes are called for,' Skardon's warning was undisguised. 'Think of the exclusives we give you.'

'You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God, the British journalist!' the bumptious Kyle recited. '...Except with a scoop or two.'

'You do all right,' his opponent commented, grudgingly.

'I'm greedy.'

The Controller realised he was getting absolutely nowhere. He looked as though he was about to explain something, then changed his mind and said instead, 'I was going to take you to lunch today. However, the Home Secretary needs someone to vent his sadism on. But worry not...'

He pressed a button on his sound/vision intercom and Delly Lomas' face appeared on the desk monitor. 'Delly, I don't know if you have a lunch date. But, if you have, ditch him. You're lunching with Kyle, if you don't mind.'

The woman's face smiled. 'I'd ditch Mr Universe for Kyle.'

The journalist leaned over the intercom. 'I'll take that as a compliment, if you tell me you didn't know I was here...'

'I knew,' she said.

'In that case, who's paying?'

'I am.'

'Isn't that an offence under the Sex Discrimination Reform Act?' the journalist joked.

'You pay, then,' she returned, promptly. 'I'll not feel humiliated.'

Skardon had been watching the exchange with a satisfied smirk. This was a much better idea. They all knew Kyle fancied her and it wasn't beyond suspicion that the attraction was mutual. The Controller knew she was far too ambitious to allow it to get in her way, but she might easily use it to get results.

'Come through as soon as you like, Delly,' he said, sleekly, before switching off the intercom. Turning to the newsman, he beamed, knowingly, 'You should be so lucky...'

But Kyle's face remained deadpan. All at once, he stood up and crossed to study the wall map, with its marked ports and airfields and ARCs, standing with his back to Skardon and his hands stuffed into his pockets.

'No new establishments you don't know about, Kyle, I assure you.'

'You'd never show the first concentration camp on here, anyway,' goaded the other, heeling round to face him. Pulling a hand out of his pocket, he gently dropped a radio bug in the Controller's ashtray and grinned, 'One of yours, I believe.'

When he had left, Skardon viciously kicked back his chair and strode to the window. Before long, an official car drew up at the main entrance below and a uniformed PCD chauffeur opened the nearside passenger door. Delly Lomas, and the journalist entered the car, laughing together.

Skardon paced to the intercom and pressed a button. 'Come up!' he ordered, as Tasker's face appeared on the screen.

'She's taking him to the Trattoria, and I don't want him lost for one minute,' he emphasized, as the man came into the room. 'I want him marked, Tasker. One or two of your best blokes. Not a regiment. Some M.P.s are saying we're overmanned as hell already.'

The restaurant was only minutes away, but the Deputy Controller decided to wait at least half an hour before making his check, in case Lomas and Kyle decided to stop off for a drink first. So Randall had just settled into his book during the lunch hour lull when Tasker materialised beside him. The supervisor looked up, disgruntled over the interruption and wondering if the Deputy did it deliberately, just to catch him out.

'Kyle, please.' Tasker made it obvious that he had noted the book.

Randall ran his finger along a line of names. 'He's not on today's list.'

'He's with Delly Lomas. He'll show up on her signal.' The man shot him a knowing look. '...They're only having lunch.'

The superintendent led the way to one of the monitors and pointed out the appropriate blip in a close-up of the London area.

'That can't be!' Tasker declared, staring. 'That bloody restaurant's not in Highgate! What are they doing in Highgate?' He regarded Randall, accusingly.

The supervisor threw up his eyes and sniffed. 'There's nothing wrong with the set.'

It was Friday and, as the car took them north through London, they passed numerous lines of women spending the lunch hour queueing outside butchers, grocers and greengrocers for their weekend shopping. It was odd, the way the small shopkeepers survived in spite of punitive taxation and competition from the State-run hypermarkets, Kyle thought.

He contemplated Delly Lomas and could not imagine her waiting in the cold, counting her food coupons; but she was compellingly interesting. He wanted to know more about how she lived, passed her time, what she was like and what happened when she discarded that sang-froid. He enjoyed her surprises, such as her response to his suggestion that they ate at her place.

'Why not?' she had agreed, immediately leaning forward to brief the PCD chauffeur.

It was a pity she was on the other side, but perhaps that was part of her attraction; the explosive element in the relationship.

The car glided to a stop outside a well-maintained mansion block of flats, obviously built in a more spacious age. Her apartment was on the first floor and he followed her through an elegantly proportioned living room to a tidy kitchen, where she quickly broke a few eggs into a bowl and began beating them, as butter sizzled in a frying pan.

'Wine in the fridge. Glasses in the top cupboard. Butter and celery in the larder, through there,' she directed him, as she produced a long French loaf and a pleasant selection of cheeses - Camembert, Brie, Dolce Latte, Esrom and Lancashire. He was relieved to notice they had not been ruined by refrigeration. Abstemious in wine, women and tobacco, Kyle nevertheless liked food - good food. In better times, he would have been a gourmet, but ration cards had made them an extinct breed.

Before long, they were eating her excellent omelettes with relish. 'It's your own fault it's not more exotic,' she said. 'I told you I was no cook.'

'You're modest,' he replied. 'And privileged. All this butter and cheese and vino -'

'Steady!' she said. 'Your envy's showing again.'

'And hunks of real meat in that freezer?' he badgered.

She looked faintly embarrassed. 'We don't get all that much over the ordinary person's ration.'

He looked round the well-equipped kitchen and through the door to the comfortable living room, with its stylish decoration and the one or two quite good Impressionists on the walls. From the kitchen window he could clearly see large private gardens belonging to the flats. She did all right.

"Don't feel guilty! You've worked for it! The new elite.'

'You only wanted to come here to see me over that stove,' she accused, lightly, while cutting off chunks of warm bread.

He gave her a lecherous grin. 'That's not the only reason.'

'I've told you often enough. Never.' But her smile made it unconvincing. 'Look somewhere else.'

'It wouldn't be the same, it's become a personal challenge.'

'Do your wife and kids ever see you?' she queried, pointedly.

'I try to make it Christmas Day and Pancake Tuesday, for the kids' sake.'

'And your wife?'

'A very tolerant lady...' He studied her carefully, all signs of humour gone. 'Don't kid me your bloodhounds can't make a computer cough up a total dossier on my visits home - dates, times, hours, even minutes spent there?' He began to grow angry. 'I bet it could even spout the nursery rhymes and bedtime stories I read to the kids, before we learnt to de-bug the house. Your pension-hunting voyeurs were even bugging our bedroom.'

She flushed fiercely and replied, defensively, 'Don't blame me for everything the Department gets up to.'

'Oh no! The virgin Delly!' he retaliated, acidly.

'Just a hard-working, unmarried mum.'

They stared at each other, both slightly dismayed at the turn their meeting had taken. He softened. 'Anyway, you cook a superb omelette.'

They sparred briefly over women's lib, she asserting that, in the seventies, men like him were called male chauvinist pigs. He drew her hand across the table and kissed it, gallantly.

'It's no use doing that.'

'You never know,' he grinned. 'I believe in knocking before entering...' He held her eyes for a moment, then suddenly challenged. 'Why all this hospitality?'

When she did not answer at once, he casually helped himself to Camembert and celery. She did the same.

'No comment?' he quizzed.

She filled his glass again and he watched, admiringly. She had got it together so well, the food, the wine, the clothes, the setting, the voice and the manner, especially that poised, easy manner. No-one would have guessed she was a back-street girl.

She began, 'Well, for one thing, we'd like to know how you came by those crazy figures in today's paper..?' He crunched the celery, noisily. '...Though one might as well ask a brick wall who built it.'

'I don't mind telling you where those figures came from,' he replied, between mouthfuls, watching her astonishment with amusement. 'They tumbled out of some civil service computer.'

'They tumbled out of someone's mouth. I never thought it was even worth asking you. It was Skardon's idea. And, as you know, he's not the greatest brain around.'

Automatically, Kyle glanced over his shoulder. 'Careful!'

She smiled, confidently. 'No bugs here, Kyle.'

'You sure?'

'Not even for this meeting.'

She relented, telling him at last the reason the PCD Controller had called him that morning and why he was now lunching in her kitchen. 'I'm supposed to give you an exclusive.'

He jiggled his eyebrows at her, like Groucho Marx, 'So where's the bedroom?'

'A kitchen exclusive...' She sauntered over to a cupboard and extracted a tin of fresh coffee. The small electric machine ground a couple of handfuls of beans and the room filled with their outrageously evocative smell, redolent of lovers and luxury. A shift to make him wait, because he was undeniably intrigued, and they both knew it.

Then she said, abruptly, 'We thought you'd like to know that sixty people a week are getting out of Britain illegally.'

'Is that all? Only sixty?' His disappointment was fake.

'It's sixty too many. They're people we need, like doctors and scientists and...'

'Writers and artists?' he queried, mischievously.

'You know very well, Kyle. They can leave when they like.'

'And you're glad to see them go, because they're always painting, composing and writing nasty things about you,' he needled, accurately. 'Sixty a week. That's about one in eight of those putting in appeals.'

'On
your
figures,' she stressed. 'They're obviously buying their way out and you got on to the yachtsmen's racket.'

Kyle broke off a piece of bread and buttered it, very thoughtfully, giving the message time to sink in. He knew he was the only journalist in the U.K. that the PCD would approach with such an offer - individual scoops first, then, later, probably editorship of one of the State-run nationals.... managing editorship. He had it made. But did he want it?

'I'll see what I can dig up,' he promised vaguely, covering her hand with his. She pulled it away. 'Some Mata Hari you are,' he grumbled.

'That's all in poor Skardon's mind.'

'And mine,' he put in, fast.

She drained her glass and stared into space for a moment. 'He's not good enough,' she said in a hard voice, all her ambitions written on her face. Kyle read them with a mixture of repugnance and excitement; suddenly recognising her aim.

'
You
? You, head of the PCD?'

'Why not?' she responded. 'It's 1990.'

A key sounded in the flat door and the newsman froze, interrogating her with his eyes.

'It's all right,' she said, and two children burst into the room. Delly hugged them warmly, arrestingly different from the ruthless woman of seconds before. Then she introduced them formally to Kyle and added, 'I'll not be long, darlings.' A nanny appeared, to shepherd them into the living room.

'I see now why we couldn't go to bed,' he said, in a low voice.

'Stop fooling yourself,' she snubbed him immediately, and, as he tried to fix her with a tellingly honest gaze, added, 'And stop trying to fool me. You chose omelette here rather than trout at the Trattoria because you thought the restaurant would be crawling with Skardon's bloodhounds.'

'Not exactly true, but fairly,' he confessed.

'Well, there'll be a few outside here now,' she warned. 'In case your next appointment is - er - personal.'

He looked puzzled, 'Why tip me off?'

'I'd expect you to know, anyway,' she professed. But as he continued to study her, she added, 'We need each other, Kyle.'

His eyes glazed with unmistakable hunger, wanting her very much.

'...and not that way!'

They both sat toying with their coffee. Then Kyle jerked his head towards the phone, asking if it was tapped. She was never sure of this and told him so. He hesitated before dialling the number.

'I'm with Delly Lomas at her place in Highgate. You have the address and phone number on our PCD list,' he said.