1990 (7 page)

'The media lot did well by us.' He lit a large cigar and relaxed in his chair, obviously thinking of the rosy compliments to come from above.

'They went in too close on Nolan,' observed Tasker. 'You could see the cuts and bruises.'

'I thought they were convincingly explained,' Skardon snapped.

'Otherwise full marks to Jack Nichols and his chaps.' Tasker discerned that this was no moment for criticism.

'Jack Nichols looked like a camp warder,' Delly's acid tones cut across the party. 'The image was bad.'

'He's done a great job...' Skardon tapped the red telephone on his desk. '...And I expect the Home Secretary through shortly to compliment us... him... the Department. Today was a coup. It was a lesson to unpatriotic elements.'

Delly stifled a yawn.

'- You're tired, Delly?'

'It was all so clumsy and it looked brutal,' she sounded bored.

'It had to be,' Skardon said.

'But did it have to be seen to be?'

The grey telephone rang. Skardon seized it, then thrust it at her, irritably, 'For you.'

Kyle's voice sounded in her ear. 'I'm not breaking up a champagne celebration?'

'No. Carry on,' she said, absently noticing how Skardon always began to clean his nails viciously with his paper knife when stung.

'It's just that a lot of people are asking how that bloke - what's he called? Nolan - how he came to look like the victim of a mugging?' Kyle asked.

She wrinkled her nose, but responded silkily, 'May I call you back?'

'Yes, darling. Don't leave it too late, though. We have earlier deadlines than the nationalised rag. Union punishment for independence.'

As she hung up, she surveyed her two male colleagues with some smugness. 'We're going to have to issue some kind of statement to explain how that man came out looking so bloody and bruised.'

'That shouldn't be difficult,' Skardon raised his eyebrows to Tasker. 'Should it?'

The red phone sounded and Skardon grabbed it before its first buzz had stopped. 'Skardon here... Yes, I'll hold...' He glanced with unconcealed excitement at his two Deputies 'It's him. The Home Secretary.'

'Then I should tell him that Kyle's on to his plan to substitute extra meat, petrol and luxuries for the King's Birthday Honours,' said Delly.

Skardon's jowls sagged and his mouth went tight.

Dave Brett scorched across the tarmac of the heliport, screeching to a stop inches from two Emigration Officers. The younger jumped aside, annoyed, but the elder merely looked round with a grin.

Brett bounced from behind the wheel to slap the captain's back. He looked fit and prosperous in deep winter tan and Vicuna coat. No-one would have guessed that, less than twenty-four hours before, he had almost found himself on an official two-year misery trip.

The reflection of a TV Outside Broadcasting van had first appeared in his mirror as he was driving through Shepherd's Bush. It had remained quite close through Knightsbridge and St. James' Park, then disappeared somewhere between the run along the Embankment and the stop-go through the City. It was only when he noticed it again as they neared Stepney that he began to wonder what was happening to bring it to the East End.

Within yards of the docks, his skin went taut - the instincts of a street kid. As he drew near the entrance gates, he slowed down and cruised straight past them, checking in the mirror. The TV van approached, an Emigration Officer stepped out, waved it down and directed it to park out of sight in a side road. Brett had driven away, fast.

Later, he watched the rest on the TV news hour in the Leisure Centre. There, but for Scotland Road and Borstal....

Now he wisecracked with the helicopter captain and co-pilot, as a middle-aged loader ticked off a pile of light alloy containers against a list and the E.Os. chalked against the stencilled destinations in North France - Lille... Caen... Bayeux... Calais...

The first official was an old familiar. The other was obviously newly trained and hot for theatrical results. He paused over a large crate with perforations.

'Chemicals. They need ventilation,' Brett remarked, without even blinking.

'I know this stuff,' the senior man declared, marking the crate with a large red cross. 'It's O.K.'

The second officer gave it a last, lingering look before moving on. Brett winked at the older one and followed them away from the helicopter as the cargo hold slammed shut and the propeller began to spin.

'Trade seems to be looking up, Brett,' the first Emigration Officer chuckled, scanning him and the car, appreciatively.

'About bloody time...Did you hear Oxfam are raising funds in India for us?' Brett joked.

It was hard to curb his elation as the machine took off in the background. He'd done it again! Despite the bastards! This one would really get them jumping!

Sweeping luxuriously away, at last, he could imagine Scholes apprehensively climbing out of the crate and stretching his limbs. Before long, the helicopter would land in Northern France and Scholes would jump out and run across that woodland clearing to meet the waiting French man. There would be no waves, no goodbyes. That was the ritual.

Skardon received the news in his morning bath, to which he always retired with the national and international newspapers which arrived daily at 7 a.m. by special delivery.

He let out an exasperated wail and dropped the offending
New York Times
in the water. The 'phone rang before he had time to reach his towel. Dripping and shivering, he cringed as the Home Secretary bellowed down his ear. Seconds later, he was making sure that his two deputies did not sit down to a tranquil breakfast.

All the way to headquarters in the back of the official car, he pretended to concentrate on official documents from the official, wafer-thin briefcase, which carried the Royal cipher embossed in gold.

The mixture of temper and funk jarring his brain was becoming all too familiar. Forgetting the air of dignity and poise he usually favoured, he snarled twice at the driver during traffic bottlenecks. The man gave him a look which, in Skardon's present paranoiac state, might almost have been interpreted as contempt. He was grateful for the subservient nods from the two duty policemen at the entrance to the PCD block.

The lift was full of other civil servants. Not a word passed between them, although each knew perfectly who the others were.

'Seven,' Skardon said, his voice impact producing a light against the figure seven on the dial. Floor buttons were no longer necessary.

Within minutes, he was ensconced at the head of the conference table in his office, the security of deferential deputies and the Chief Emigration Officer around him.

'They're getting out! They're getting out regularly, steadily, in greater numbers! It's like a scheduled service!' he spat at them. 'The gutter press will be calling it the Great Exodus before long! And it has to stop. The Home Secretary's had a bellyfull.' He slapped the still damp copy of the
New York Times
on the table. 'Look at it! The American press is full of it.' Hitting the photograph with the back of his hand. 'You'd think he was the greatest scientist since Einstein the way they're playing him up. And he was only a third-rate nuclear engineer.'

'So why should we worry?' asked Delly Lomas, with feigned innocence.

'He signed Form P17,' Skardon growled. 'And he makes us look like incompetents.'

She remained deliberately pragmatic. 'So we tighten up our port controls.'

'I doubt if Scholes got out through one of my ports, sea or air,' Jack Nichols blustered. 'It would take a mouse to get out through the net we've got now.'

'We seem to have a lot of mouse-sized runaways,' the Controller barked at him.

Delly remarked, conversationally, 'When I was a girl they were all trying to get
into
this country.'

'Africans and Pakistanis!' Tasker retorted, with all the scorn of a West Indian who has married a white girl and moved a long way from Brixton. The other three stared at him, but he was quite oblivious.

Delly rattled on, 'And now even some of their kids are trying to get out. It's come to something when Jack, here, and his emigration officers are being made a target for the Race Relations Board.'

The Controller looked weary. 'All that matters is that we seal these bolt holes. Otherwise the Home Secretary's going to have my guts for garters.'

It was a recognisably accurate forecast. He waved a dismissive hand and the three trouped out leaving him gazing gloomily at the heap of newspapers on the table.

Perhaps they had all moved too far from the grass roots, Delly Lomas thought to herself. They were personally out of touch : inspectors and surveillance machines apart, their only direct contact with activity at ground level was through idiots like Nichols.

Although she enjoyed goading the Controller, she was also ambitious and conscious that trouble for him could affect all. A shift in power was not in her interest unless she was the one promoted.

Returning to her office, she asked the male secretary to check through recent records. One of the files he selected was in her briefcase as she boarded a train for the Midlands the following morning.

The court was intimate, informal and without any apparent panoply of authority. No bewigged lawyers, no dock, no witness box. Even the chairman was not robed, because he was not part of the judiciary, but a senior civil servant in the Ombudsman's department.

Alan Vickers, the appellant, sat in a chair in the body of the court and the hearing had started when Delly arrived and took a chair beside the State counsel.

The Chairman was speaking. 'So what it comes down to, Doctor Vickers, is an appeal on compassionate grounds?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What you are asking this court to accept is that, because your child is subject to this alleged chest condition...'

'She has bronchial asthma!' Vickers interrupted, trenchantly.

'Do please control yourself, Doctor Vickers. We are trying to be fair.' The Chairman was elderly and would have preferred the sanctuary of wig and gown to protect him from young upstarts like this. 'One expert witness has told us that your child's condition is not serious and can be treated just as well here as anywhere else.'

Alan Vickers sat rigid, trying impossibly to appear objective. 'The expert witness is a medical officer in the Public Control Department,' he pointed out. 'He has a vested interest. My child would be better off in California.'

'And so would you. You'd be at least five times better off in salary,' the chairman stressed, obviously finding the other's demeanour personally offensive.

Vickers glanced at his counsel, who rustled some papers, but said nothing.

He turned back to the chairman, desperately, 'I thought this was an Ombudsman's Court. I thought it was to protect personal freedom.'

'Within the law, Doctor Vickers,' came the pompous reply. 'Don't forget that this country saw you through your education as a doctor. And you signed an agreement to work for at least ten years here after qualifying.'

'But Mary wasn't even born when I signed that!' he blurted out.

Delly Lomas had heard it all before. The trouble with grass roots work was that it was all so monotonously repetitive. She idly scanned the room. A small section of the court was reserved for the public, a few chosen from the social security list. There were also twelve places for the media. All were filled and, among them, she was cheered to see Kyle.

He caught her eye and returned her wink. At least that could mean an amusing lunch.

The chairman had gone into a ceremonial whispered huddle with the man and woman on either side of him. All three were mature and tamed by years in the civil service. Their verdict was a foregone conclusion.

'We have immense sympathy with you, Doctor Vickers. We believe, however, that your child's ill-health does not constitute grounds for the issue of an exit visa to you. We are prepared to grant your child a visa, so that she may be treated in a more congenial climate...'

'And break up my family?' the doctor shouted.

'We remind you that you signed form P17 and we must reject your appeal....This court will resume at two-thirty.'

Kyle saw Alan Vickers' face crumple momentarily, before the man wheeled round and left the room. People began to scrape back their chairs and move out, and Delly Lomas found her way to his side.

She looked glossy and alive against the drab background. He had intended to follow Vickers, but now he stopped.

'What brings you here? Seeing the balls and chains are properly put on?' he teased her.

'Come off it, Kyle. You don't like it any more than we do when anti-social people try to dodge paying their debt to this country.'

'He did have a bit of a case,' Kyle responded, easily.

'An excuse, no more. You're surely not going to splash this all over page one tomorrow?'

'Inside page,' he reassured her, without rancour. 'Twelve lines. That's all they're worth these days.'

'If that.'

'And I don't want your heavy mob after me.'

'Don't. You'll have me in tears,' she mocked. 'Nobody orders you what to print.'

'No, they just bend our fingers back as we try to type.'

She laughed, showing strong, even teeth. Everything about her was somehow seductively challenging. Her small-breasted, long body, her clever, sophisticated face. Dangerous, he thought to himself.

'Anyway, you're on our side most of the time,' she was saying.

'Till you get above yourselves,' he commented.

They had moved out of the court and, almost guiltily, he saw Alan Vickers standing in the corridor with his wife and small daughter. The family looked tired and beaten. The two men regarded each other, betraying nothing except a mysterious interest, which did not escape Delly Lomas.

'Don't tell me you swallowed his yarn?'

Kyle shrugged. 'None of us did. We're all so conditioned now.' He steered her towards the door. 'I hear you're going to need more of these Ombudsman's Courts.' It was a deceptively casual remark.

'What?'