1990 (14 page)

'And senior civil servants,' Skardon could not resist asserting.

'Naturally.
Per
privilege
ad astra
. Lawns like Wilton carpet, velvet-glove service and daily prayers to inner cleanliness,' his deputy controller smiled. 'Mayfield's just like that and Kyle will spit all the way back to London.'

'He'd better.' Skardon narrowed his eyes and was about to continue when a red light flashed on the console on his desk and there was a continuous bleeping noise. He jumped, visibly.

'The Home Secretary's on his way up. Trouble.'

'He's only a politician, Herbert,' Delly Lomas drawled, as she turned to leave. 'All you have to do is let him talk.'

The Controller stopped her with a lifted hand. 'In that case, Miss Lomas, you'd better stay.' He put her mockery at his momentary agitation in its place. 'If Dan Mellor needs scapegoats, you and Tasker are, after all, junior to me.'

At this, the Rt Hon Dan Mellor, M.P., Home Secretary in H.M. government, erupted into the room, the door slamming against the wall and swinging back to close under its own violent momentum. He was very angry and this manifested itself in a fake and heavy geniality.

Dan Mellor was a hard-liner, originally an official (appointed - not elected) of the Mineworkers' Union, who had become a loud backbench M.P., representing that union and had risen from there rather speedily to Cabinet rank as part of a productivity agreement with the miners in 1983.

His time in the pits had been very limited, but he liked to give the impression that his ablutions for twenty years were in pithead baths paid for under 'washing time', which he had negotiated. Nevertheless, he was a very shrewd politician, having learnt this theoretical trade by hard work at the institution, originally called Ruskin College, but now known as the Oxford Centre for Special Studies.

He scrutinised the civil servants from under shaggy brows. 'Hello, Herbert, how are you? And you, Miss Lomas?' A deliberately demotic speech pattern gave image emphasis to his working-class origins. 'And what's my key department up to this fine, public-spirited morning?'

'We were discussing a journalist's visit to one of the new Adult Rehabilitation Centres,' Skardon looked shifty.

'Oh, that's cosmic. Real think-tank and wet-towels stuff,' Mellors gave an angry, shark-like grin. 'Know why I'm here?'

'No, Home Secretary.'

The grin vanished. 'Because you didn't bloody come to me. First thing.' He took a video-cassette from his pocket and brandished it at Herbert Skardon. 'With this. Off the diplomatic pouch from New York an hour ago. And you had a duplicate.'

Delly Lomas decided another moment had come to use all her charm and reason. 'Our man on external affairs, Mr Tasker, is on leave, Home Secretary,' she cooed. 'His subordinate's thorough, but a little slow.'

'He'll be motionless when I've finished with him,' Mellor snarled. 'Behind the counter in a village post office.'

There was a bleep from the desk video-intercom and a man's worried face appeared on the screen. The Controller leant over it, ferociously. 'Yes, Grayling. I am aware that there is a matter of some urgency in the pouch,' he ground out. 'I believe it is about to be brought to my attention.'

'Damn right. With the volume up.' The Home Secretary snapped off the intercom rudely and slotted the cassette into the console, pushing a button and turning to watch the big television wall screen light up.

The film showed a man on a conference platform accepting handshakes and then in closeup, where he was seen to be about fifty-five and solidly built. Silver-grey hair was brushed back from a square and craggy face, with the lines of belief and experience on it. His expression was one of composure and determination, as he began to speak.

'Brothers and fellow union members. I'm supposed to be up here to oppose a motion from seventeen countries that Britain should, in future, be excluded from the Federation of International Trade Unions. I cannot oppose it.' His accent retained northern origins, but unselfconsciously. This was not the patter act of the professional prole.

Dan Mellor stopped the videotape on the close-up. 'Know who that is?'

'Of course. Charles Wainwright, General Secretary. of the Metalturners Union and next president of the T.U.C.,' Herbert Skardon said, looking slightly confused. 'He's addressing this year's Federation of International Trade Unionists in America. We arranged the British delegation.'

'You arranged more than that,' snapped the Home Secretary, restarting the tape.

Wainwright was seen again, his hands gripping a lectern. 'The motion says we're in violation of the Federation charter on fundamental human rights. I can't deny that. We are.'

He picked up a stapled speech. 'I'm supposed to read this... I can't. It's a load of mindless drivel, justifying a new form of oppression, and I wouldn't insult you with it. We've all believed too long in the real brotherhood of man for me to do that.'

He tossed the speech contemptuously onto the platform, and a shot of the massed audience appeared, differing from earlier trade union gatherings in that fifty per cent of the delegates were women. All were obviously attentive.

'First, I support the proposal to expel Britain from this Federation.' Wainwright turned to the committee seated behind him on the platform. 'Let that vote be so registered, Mr Chairman. Second, I'd like to make a proper speech and I'd better get it right, as it'll probably be my last.'

He took a deep breath, the passion beginning to show quietly at first and then gradualy increasing until his words were resounding with zealous fluency round the conference hall.

'I live in a country where freedom's just a word in a dictionary - like sewage. I live in a sceptred isle surrounded by barbed wire, where a British Parliament of 400, put in by that 20 per cent of the electorate who bother to vote, is a rubber stamp for a faceless Civil Service with the sort of power Genghiz Khan would have envied. I live in a country where, if you don't hold a union card, you starve: where jobs, food and housing are rationed.'

The Controller and his deputy caught each other's eyes, unified for once against the all too blatant threat to their positions. Dan Mellor stood glowering at the screen with his back to them, hands thrust into the pockets of his baggy trousers.

'This isn't the sort of promised land we signed on for, brothers. Not a land where the history books are being rewritten. Not a land where the best brains were driven out by penal taxation in the seventies and the few we've got left are forbidden to leave and have to get out through illegal escape routes. Not a land where every jack-in-office can walk into a citizen's home and turn it upside down; where
habeas corpus
is extinct and rule of law is wiped out by one signature under an Emergency Measure.'

His voice had crescendoed to a penetrating stridency. There was no mistaking the man's deep and real conviction. It by-passed the interpreters and cut through the multi-language barriers between the international delegates. Every now and again their silent and intensely concentrated reaction to him was shown on the screen.

Herbert Skardon, Delly Lomas and the Home Secretary were all on their feet now, listening aghast, aware that identical cassettes of the seemingly never-ending indictment had already been distributed to the world's news media. There could be no covering up this time.

'The lackeys in pinstripe suits from the Public Control Department should have dragged me off by now. If this had been a British platform, they would have done. So I'll finish with an apology.' Charles Wainwright swayed forward over the lectern and scanned the audience with emotion. 'I've been thirty-five years in the trade union movement. I've been proud of every year except the last seven. The crisis of '83, when my country tore up its constitution and the Magna Carta. When we went bankrupt and welshed on every debt we'd run up. When the world's moneylenders turned their backs on us - and rightly. When we became outlaws of civilization, cringing in an island cave. For those seven years, I'm sorry. Goodbye, brothers.'

He looked over the hall with quiet bitterness. 'Rule Britannia.'

The video-cassette cut off and the image disappeared from the screen. A leaden pause filled the Controller's office. Mellor gave him a hard stare.

'At best, insane. At worst, treasonable,' was the only comment Skardon could think of.

'He made one good point,' the politician retorted. 'Your surveillance boys could have collared him, said he was drunk, or something. Why didn't they?'

The PCD chief viewed him, loftily. 'Because they would probably have been lynched by free-world delegates and the scandal would have been exacerbated.'

'Like this bloody department will be if you don't sweep up the Wainwright mess a bit quick.' Mellor had caught the look and was offended.

But, although Herbert Skardon had a day-to-day apprehension of his political boss, he was not without the traditional civil servant's innate sense of superiority. He knew where the real power lay.

'May I remind you, Home Secretary, that this department was responsible only for drawing up and vetting a short-list of delegates for the New York congress,' he pointed out, with deceptive blandness. '
You
made the final decision.'

Dan Mellor's pugnacious jaw thrust forward and his face went an ugly colour. 'That's right. But you can get more than one neck on a chopping-block, Skardon. Remember it.'

'I remember only, Minister, that you are elected and I am appointed. Senior Civil Servants have always had a notoriously longer lifespan than their masters.'

'And a lot of that lifespan can be made very miserable,' the Home Secretary roared back. 'So listen. I want Wainwright in my office the minute his Concorde's wheels stop rolling. If not before.'

'If he's on it.' Delly Lomas, who had watched the exchange with roguish satisfaction, voiced what they were all thinking.

Kyle took several deep breaths of relief as he and Mark Gelbert left Mayfield House to walk through the grounds. The journalist's customary low-key style had been crushed by watching the unconscious patient twitching in the operating room. He had wondered who the man was and why he was there, and had known, with terrible certainty, that those questions no longer mattered. When the patient awoke from the anaesthetic, he would be someone else; his original and essential self destroyed and replaced by another, more acceptable and docile character. Kyle had understood that he was seeing the annihilation of an individual, and there was nothing he could do, or say, or write about it.

The fresh air touched his skin like a shower. The inmates moved calmly through the garden. It was all so genteel, so
nice
, a hell in Eden.

A group of workmen passed, carrying television sets and expensive furniture towards a single-storey chalet wing.

'What's happening over there?' he asked, glad of the diversion.

'Renovation of the new recuperative wing,' replied the doctor. 'It's still classified, I'm afraid.'

'Something had to be,' Kyle commented.

The attendant from the operating room came hurrying across the lawn and handed Gelbert a folded slip.

'Red, urgent for you, Doctor.'

'Thank you, Halloran.' Gelbert read the message quickly and started to move back to the house. 'See that Mr Kyle gets away, will you?' His eyes were distant, betraying the fact that he had already almost forgotten the journalist's existence.

'Yes, sir,' Halloran responded, smartly, then turned to the newsman. 'Could I see your authority to visit, Mr Kyle?'

The other raised his eyebrows. 'Your boss has already seen it and I'm not about to brandish identity at every jumped-up male nurse in sight.'

Halloran's features remained impassive as he produced a warrant card. 'I'm also a PCD officer.'

'That makes sense,' the journalist retorted. 'The KGB set up. Every institution with its Party watchdog.' He sighed and extracted the signed pass from his wallet, studying his examiner, closely.

A man in early middle age, with thick, muscled and practised hands and an open, bucolic face, in which only a low blink rate and a tight mouth betrayed innate sadism. All at once, his name triggered off a memory.

'Oh yes, Halloran. Made your name in Manchester on the moonlighting squad, when it became illegal for anybody to have two jobs,' the journalist exclaimed. 'You used to specialise in painters and decorators, waiting until they were twenty feet up and then kicking the ladder away.'

The PCD inspector handed back the pass and said, woodenly, 'Just doing a job, sir. The same as you.'

'Not the same as me, chum,' Kyle spat. 'I like to sleep at night, which can't be easy after a hard day breaking legs.'

But he was wasting his energy. Halloran was quite unmoved and stolidly escorted him to his car, then stood watching as he drove down the drive between the flower beds, serene with colour, and out of the great gates.

The journey back to Fleet Street gave him time to marshal his feelings, so that only the familiar, dull residue of rage was left as he walked into the newsroom, scowling and rubbing his temples.

'What's the matter with you? Dandruff?' Tiny Greaves contemplated him, quizzically.

'No. Just wondering what electrodes feel like,' Kyle replied.

'Was Mayfield any good? Or Gelbert?'

'Clean as a whistle, kosher as a barmitzvah, ethical as the Sermon on the Mount,' the columnist returned, in disgust. 'Trying to put the knife in there would be like tattooing a jellyfish: It's a laudable conversion clinic for criminal psychopaths.'

'We'll keep trying. It's got to be a three-card trick when Skardon's lot hand out facilities. But it can wait,' the big news editor dismissed the morning's failure without signs of disappointment and reached eagerly for his video-recorder. 'Look.'

Charles Wainwright appeared soundlessly on the office television screen. Kyle moved to adjust the machine, but was stopped by the other, who explained that the sound was poor, and produced a transcript of the speech.

The columnist began to scan it quickly and hissed through his teeth, while the news editor continued talking.