Red Crystal (14 page)

‘But printed and produced here, or at least intended to be used here. The spelling’s definitely English rather than American, and the grammar and style is – well, perfect.’

‘It is, is it?’

Nick let the sarcasm diffuse into the air before saying, ‘I’m sure I could find the source given time—’

‘Well, let’s try the Irish Section first. And Box 500. They’ll probably know where it comes from straight away.’

Nick tried not to let his exasperation show. ‘But – shouldn’t we at least follow it up. I could ask around.’

Straughan nodded slowly. ‘All right. But …’ he paused thoughtfully. ‘Just be careful about your methods, I have the feeling that you’ve been getting perilously close to infiltration recently and we all know what that can lead to.’ Some months before a Branch man had passed himself off as a docker at a union meeting and got half-murdered. There’d been questions in high places. Everyone paid lip-service to the policy of non-infiltration, but if you wanted to get really good results you went your own way and shut up about it.

The DCS sat up in his chair. ‘You’ll get this circulated, will you? To the Irish and Anarchist Sections. And the original to Technical Support.’

‘Look, I’m lined up for the Neasden surveillance. Could you square it for me?’

‘Eh?’ Straughan made a disapproving face, then looked at the pamphlet again. ‘Well,
maybe
I’ll see if I can get someone else to fill in for the first few days – but no promises.’ He threw Nick a hard unforgiving stare. ‘But just keep me informed, will you? No waltzing off on your own with no one knowing where the hell you’ve got to. Okay?’

As Nick opened the flat door a flood of warm light and safe domestic sounds swept towards him. He was glad to be home. Then the clatter of china in the kitchen reminded him – it’d been his turn to shop and cook, and he had forgotten. But Anne would forgive him – from the cooking sounds she already had. He realized he was extremely hungry and went hopefully into the kitchen.

‘Hi,’ she said sharply without looking up.

He stared, surprised. She was packing plates into a box.

‘I’m leaving in case you’re wondering.’ She spoke harshly, her face taut and unyielding. Nick’s heart sank. He leant back against the doorframe.

The silence stretched out. Eventually she said sadly, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were capable of such a thing.’

Normally he’d do anything to avoid a row, especially on an empty stomach, but he parried, ‘What does that mean?’

‘All that gentle concern!’

‘Oh—?’

She stared at him resentfully. ‘Well, you’re a sham, aren’t you? A phoney!’

‘Anne, what on earth is this about?’

‘Your people came and spied on us!’

‘
Spied?
’

‘Came to our meeting and took notes.’

He asked incredulously, ‘Your
social
workers’ meeting?’

‘Our Women Against Vietnam meeting!’

‘I would have thought you’d be flattered.’ Immediately he wished he’d left the words unsaid.

‘My God!’ she gasped.

‘Anne, look – I knew nothing about it. Believe me.’

‘Have you got a file on us?
Have you
?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

She shook her head. ‘You leave me no choice.’

‘If you’re going it’s because you want to.’

‘Because I
have
to! I can’t live with a’ – she struggled to find the word – ‘with a rotten
informer
!’ She paused to find more ammunition. ‘Besides, you’re a chauvinist. It took a bit of time to come to the fore. But it’s there, isn’t it?
Who
ended up with all the chores, eh? Me! You’re a sham, Nick!’

He thought: Ouch! and wondered why women always had to apportion blame, had to analyse and dissect until the last spasm of pain had been extracted. He shrugged and said evenly, ‘Fine. Let’s just call it a day then.’

Before she could make a retort he walked into the living-room and sat down with a magazine. There was a silence and he could almost feel the strength of her anger. Finally there were sounds of heavy suitcases being dragged into the hall.

She put her head round the door and, without looking him in the eye, said a stiff ‘Goodbye then.’ A few moments later the front door slammed and she was gone.

Nick sat in silence, wondering what on earth had gone wrong. They’d lived together reasonably happily for – what was it? – eight months, and now suddenly she had gone. He’d never made a secret of the fact that he worked for Special Branch, and she’d known – or
guessed
– what it had involved. None the less it was unfortunate about the Vietnam meeting. He could have told her the truth – that many of the committee members were known communists – but she wouldn’t have believed him. People only believed what they wanted to.

It was a pity she’d gone. They’d had good times, bed had been wonderful and he still thought her exceptionally pretty. But since getting involved in peace movements and women’s rights her wonderful softness and vulnerability had given way to an increasingly strident and dogmatic harshness, and the magic had gone. As for the domestic front, he thought he’d behaved rather well there. Certainly he’d made an effort about cooking and going to the launderette – well, when he could. As for being a chauvinist, that was just unfair. He actually liked women which was more than a lot of men did. No, he couldn’t see that he’d been unreasonable.

His stomach rumbled and he remembered that he was hungry. In the kitchen there was a stack of washing-up in the sink, a pile of dirty laundry on the floor and almost nothing in the fridge. So much for meeting each other half-way. Eventually he settled for a stale Ryvita and a tin of sardines. He looked for some beer but remembered that they’d run out some days ago.

He went to put on a record. He decided against opera – in his present mood it would make him maudlin – and chose Desmond Dekker instead. He flopped back in a chair to the soothing sounds of ‘Oh-Oh-S-e-v-e-n …’

The problem with women like Anne, he finally decided, was that they were made to feel inadequate if they didn’t take up causes and follow them through to the bitter end. In the early sixties causes had been a mere fashion, now, in 1969, they were compulsory.

He thought immediately of the pamphlet. A cause taken to the limit. With relief he put Anne out of his mind and, finding the photocopy he’d brought home with him, began to study it. In the last year his library of political writings had grown considerably and, to simplify the impossible task of making sense of it all, he’d made detailed notes of all the various extremist philosophies and card-indexed them by doctrine, structure and actions.

Now he looked through the pamphlet for clues as to the writer’s origins and affiliations. The philosophy
might
fall into one of several general categories – Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, anarchist, nationalist. Then again it might just as easily
not
. Each category consisted of dozens of splinter groups, each preaching the true and only philosophy. Furthermore, the New Left were inclined to pinch ideas from all over the place, regardless of origin, and stick them together in whichever way suited them, so that you couldn’t categorize their ideas in the old way at all. They were an elusive bunch, constantly merging and splitting and reforming.

If
it was an organized group at all …

Then he looked at the jargon they had used. Most of it, as he’d thought, was borrowed from the urban guerrilla leader, Marighella. Then there was this sign-off, about pulverizing and polarizing and fabricating crystal splinters, whatever that may mean.

No: he couldn’t narrow the field at all.

Where would they have got the explosives info? Cuba? North Korea? The IRA? But the IRA weren’t in need of education on the making of bombs nor so philanthropic as to be printing pamphlets for the benefit of other people.

Suddenly he realized he was looking at the problem from entirely the wrong angle.

He should be looking at the
why
.

Why
would anyone want to produce such a document?

Only people dedicated to spreading the word.

It had to be a group with missionary zeal, prepared to spend the money on what was undoubtedly an expensive piece of printing, happy to hand it out to whoever might use it, and not at all fussy about which cause the information was put to.

Anarchists? Unlikely. As one might expect, they were usually very disorganized.

A subversive group with funds behind it, then.

He sighed. It was pointing to a Soviet-backed organization. And that was most definitely Box 500’s sphere of interest.

Perhaps Straughan had been right after all.

By midnight he was feeling thoroughly discouraged and decided to pack it in for the night.

Before going to bed he checked his diary. According to
Red Notes
, the periodic guide to revolutionary meetings published by the New Left, there was to be a major meeting of the Socialist Students’ League at the LSE next week. Nugent had mentioned a possible split. It might be worth going along, just to see if any of the usual faces were missing.

Another splinter group, another faction, another entry on the card index.

He switched off the living-room lights and stood in the hall, absorbing the quiet calmness of the little flat. In some ways it would be enjoyable to be on his own for a while. But not for too long. He’d got used to having someone else around. He’d enjoyed the domesticity and the companionship.

Yes. He would find someone else. Quite soon.

Six days later, on the dot of seven, Nick turned off the Aldwych into Houghton Street, a narrow lane overshadowed by the numerous grey buildings of the London School of Economics. He automatically assumed the preoccupied, tense look of a student, his eyes down, a frown on his forehead. He walked briskly up the steps of the main building and into the Old Theatre, pausing only to read the notice-board.

The audience was smaller than he’d expected for such an important meeting – there were no more than eighty. Perhaps the Socialist Students’ League was going out of fashion. He slid into a seat and pretended to read the latest issue of the
Red Mole
, a student publication of impeccable Marxist dogma. Only when the meeting finally started ten minutes late did he begin to study the group of young men and women on the platform: the Central Committee of the Socialist Students’ League.

He recognized three of them immediately – postgraduates who’d been in the league since it was founded in ’67. Their names came to him from the files which he’d examined earlier in the afternoon. Another two were familiar; he memorized their faces so that when he went back to the office he could identify them from photographs taken at marches and demonstrations.

There were a couple of others. They looked pretty young – probably new recruits. He studied their faces too so that he would know them again.

Who was missing?

The red-haired one called Reardon. He’d got two months for the Linden House Hotel affair. He’d always been an angry one, just the type to walk out in disgust at any lack of action.

And there was someone else missing, another who’d been heavily involved since ’67. An undergraduate with a sullen intense look. One of those who’d been booted out of France. What
was
his name?

The meeting was starting to warm up. There was some disagreement about joining yet another protest march to the American Embassy. Someone from the floor was arguing that the march would be a complete waste of time because they wouldn’t be allowed near Grosvenor Square. Too right, thought Nick: there’d be no repetition of that first large demo when a breakaway group had got within yards of the Embassy.

In patronizing terms one of the comrades on the platform started lecturing the floor about the importance of attracting media attention. The floor replied that the media was capitalist-controlled trivia and wasn’t worth attracting in the first place.

Nick wondered if he could slip away. The thought of sitting through another hour of this stuff bored him rigid.

But he decided against leaving – it would attract attention. Instead he tried to think of the name that went with that missing face … It was earthy, he remembered … Rural? No, agricultural. Mower, reaper, farmer … Suddenly he had it. Wheat.
Wheatfield
. First name Max.
Max Wheatfield
.

He sat through the meeting for another half an hour until a couple of nearby students got up to leave and he was able to slip out behind them. He went back to his office and found the files marked Wheatfield, M. and Reardon, P. In both he pencilled the comment: ‘Not present at 15th March meeting of SSL at the London School of Economics. Possibly forming splinter group?’

It was almost nine. Time to go home. Then with a sigh he remembered that he hadn’t filled in his daily diary for almost a week. He loathed the bureaucratic side of police work, but if anyone like Straughan chose to notice the incomplete diary, it could get him into trouble. He went back to his desk and half-heartedly began to write.

O
NCE AN OUTLYING
hamlet, the village had long since become a suburb of the ancient walled city of Chester. None the less it retained its identity in a comfortable, almost complacent way. The houses were well maintained, the gardens tidy, unemployment was low. The local industries – Morgan’s, the brewery, and Bradbury’s, a plant assembling electrical appliances – were busy. There were rumours that, even allowing for the traditional caution of the management and the gloomy economic outlook, both would soon be taking on more workers.