The Partridge Kite (20 page)

‘It was talking to a local transmitter on the Lizard and at first Customs thought they’d hit on a smuggling ring. One wag thought the container might be full of French wine! But it became very quickly obvious to everyone listening that the tug and the land station were not bringing in wine or anything like it. No mention was made of it by name, but Military Intelligence, having read a transcript of the radio transmissions an horn: ago, are convinced it is something deadly. It could be, they say, something explosive like nitroglycerine or napalm. It might be a gas or a toxic or a bacterial dust.’

He paused but the hand in the circle of light did not move. The purply blue veins stood out from the white flesh but there was not the slightest evidence that lifeblood was flowing through them.

‘It ail sounds a little like a bad science fiction story, doesn’t it? Something out there in the English Channel, three miles from land, and we don’t have the knowledge or the nerve to find out what it is. It’s a bit like this CORDON itself. We know it amounts to something but we can’t risk disaster by just rushing in to find out what. And all because it just happened to snow!’

‘You’re certain there’s a connection. Prime Minister, between this container and CORDON?’

‘Yes, McCullin, quite certain.’

‘And how does this give us the breakthrough you spoke of?’

‘Are you convinced that the discovery of this container was an accident and in no way part of this CORDON plan you say exists?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Tom.

‘Kellick?’

‘Yes, Prime Minister.’

‘And what if we have now established, by taking co-ordinates of the transmitter on the Lizard and by actually pinpointing the actual room in the house where the radio was kept, the identity of the person making contact with the tug? And without their knowing it had been done? What then?’

‘Well, sir,’ Tom said, ‘the container is a breakthrough, I agree. But the name itself won’t give us the break. . . not as I see it, anyway. We’ll still have to go through the same routine of checks and wait for the telephone call to be made, like the other four.’

‘But that’s just the point, McCullin,’ the Prime Minister replied. This is a name they don’t want you to check out.

This name is not on your list! This is one we’re not supposed to know about!’

Kellick said he would take the chauffeur car, make a detour back to his flat and see them in his office in forty-five minutes. Tom noticed Kellick’s hands were trembling. He assumed it was fatigue or the anxiety of the Nimrod’s discovery and the new problems it introduced.

Tom and Fry left ahead of Kellick, so they did not see the dark blue Lancia Beta turn out of Richmond Terrace and follow Kellick’s grey Departmental Rover, crossing Parliament Square past the House of Lords and on to Millbank.

As the Rover slowed to take the Lambeth Bridge roundabout the Lancia accelerated ahead of it. Kellick sat hunched in the back seat so he didn’t see the other driver pull the collar of his heavy woollen overcoat high about his neck to keep out the draughts and protect his deformed left ear which pained him dreadfully in the cold weather.

He arrived at Kellick’s flat well ahead of the more cautious chauffeur and stopped the Lancia short of the unlit porch, twenty yards from the sprawling red brick apartment block. Within a minute he had climbed the fire escape in the rear yard to Kellick’s second-floor flat scattering powdered snow to the window sills below. He stood in the darkness of Kellick’s balcony that ran at an angle to the road, so that he could see his own car. Back to the wall, hands in black kid gloves resting lightly on his umbrella, the stock perfectly centred between his highly-polished black Oxford brogues, covered for this evening in rubber overshoes.

There was a moon but also fast-moving cloud, and he watched the untouched snow lit up by the moonlight in scattered patches for brief moments, catching sight of a dustbin, then a garage door, a cat crouched by a sheet of corrugated iron, a piece of dirty towelling wrapped around a leaking overflow pipe, hanging with icicles that made it like a glorious stalactite; it was all around him like a backyard Son et Lumière.

He pushed his head and shoulders against the wall as Kellick’s car drew up below. He watched Kellick move from it to the porch and saw the chauffeur touch his cap and move quickly back into the warmth again to wait and sleep.

Like all chauffeurs with long experience of waiting, he could sleep in an erect sitting position, hands on wheel, and flip wide awake with a ‘beg your pardon, sir!’ the instant a hand touched the rear passenger door handle.

Kellick’s balcony stretched the length of his flat, with French windows opening from both the living-room and the bedroom. The man stood hidden from the rooms by the partition wall that separated them. He turned his head right and saw Kellick enter the living-room and turn on the standard lamp by the bookshelves. He saw Kellick pull out an edition in red leather from the bottom shelf and take, from the inside cover, a wafer-thin strip of metal, like a feeler gauge used by mechanics to check spark plug gaps.

He watched as Kellick knelt on the floor by the door and raised a comer of the large beige Indian carpet that stretched from wall to wall. He saw Kellick push the metal strip in between the floorboards and pull it gently along the crack three inches, maybe four. A short length of floorboard then clicked up on a hinge and Kellick took from the cavity beneath two tape cassettes, some rolls of 35mm film and a computer tape. He packed them carefully into his briefcase, closed the floor-safe, relaid the carpet, careful to smooth out the smallest ridges, replaced the magnetic key into the book and eased it back into its place in the shelf.

He picked up his white telephone, dialled, paused and spoke.

The man on the balcony edged closer to the French windows and he could feel the draught of warm air fan his face as he quietly prised open the wooden frames with his penknife.

‘Kellick here. Fry. . . I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Alert Warner and all three liaison units and have them there soonest. And have Duty Night call in as many of the morning computer shift as he can muster. . . I’ll settle any overtime problems later. . .’

There was no goodbye. Fry took the abruptness as typical.

But this time the fault was not Kellick’s. He had no warning. Perhaps just the slightest sound behind him as a shoe brushed the pile of the carpet. The six-inch-long stainless steel needle at the tip of the umbrella pierced the back of his neck, severing the spinal cord and his trachea.

He fell forward, eyes open, with no expression of surprise on his face, and hit the bookcase with his forehead. Just for a second his head and feet wedged his body perfectly straight at an angle of 45 degrees to the wall, which reminded his assassin, patiently watching, of some ridiculous trick men play at party time!

Kellick’s body collapsed to the floor and a very small trickle of blood eased itself from the puncture in his nape and ran down the side of his neck into the folds of his shirt- collar. It congealed long before it reached the Kashmir.

The man picked up the briefcase of secrets, crooked the umbrella over his right arm and went out the way he came in.

As the French windows closed, by one of the tricks of the body’s nervous system Kellick’s left lower arm jerked twice across the carpet.

It looked, for that one instant, as if he was waving his assassin goodbye.

Monday, 20 December

Nothing in the flat had been touched. But as Fry was the only one except the cleaning woman who was known to have been in it, there wasn’t a great deal of comparative evidence. The only thing the charwoman noticed wrong was the bookshelves in slight disarray.

‘Mr Kellick,’ she told the inspector, ‘would never have left them like that!’

All agreed. It was a professional who had stood on the balcony waiting his time. But only Tom, Fry and Warner of Photos knew his name, his face, and where he worked. They did not, though, expect to find him there this Monday morning. And of course he was not. And never would be again.

‘He had something. The way he went off so quickly to his flat, the telephone call, getting everybody up to his office at five in the morning.’

It was ten o’clock. Two cups of coffee had just arrived on Mrs Hayes’s tray.

Fry stood by Kellick’s empty desk almost to attention, hands clasped in front of him, head slightly bowed. As if Kellick was lying on top of it.

‘He had something for some time now,’ Tom answered. ‘Didn’t you see the change. . . the way
he
changed? The constant hassle every time we hit on something. Always wanting to slow down, go back, recheck. Didn’t you notice him last night? The way he was when he met us? When he left us?’

‘I noticed he had on a dirty shirt,’ Fry answered.

Fry was obviously very upset by Kellick’s death, which surprised Tom. Fry, he accepted, was a very sensitive man but surely sensitive men, especially sensitive men, are relieved when their tormentors at last go away.

‘Fry,’ he said, ‘don’t mourn. We don’t have to wear black. Be realistic. Kellick found out something last night. Something happened between the time we left him in this office and when we met him again at Number Ten. Maybe it had to do with the container, maybe something else. Perhaps he had decided to tell us something he’d been hanging on to for his own reasons. Either way CORDON found out and decided he shouldn’t.

‘Two things that happened last night were not in CORDON’S plan. We can be certain of that at least. We’ve known all along the only way we would get ahead of them was to break the control they have over events. I’ve a feeling we’re about to do exactly that.

‘Fry you are going to ring Transport Ops right now and authorise a private Cessna flight from Heathrow. We’ll have tea in Cornwall.’

Monkey puzzle trees lined the drive to the house. It was a long drive shaped like an extended ‘S’ with worn gravelled tracks divided by a centre strip of grass; in summer it had the quality of a cultivated lawn but now it was lightly covered in snow, brushed level by car engine sumps that occasionally swept over it.

The house was quite secluded, enclosed in a copse of tall and magnificent beeches, two hundred and fifty years old, with trunks the look and feel of elephant skin. The house was built of stone, brought all the way from Portland by hard labour and much money, at a time when the masons who cut and shaped it earned two shillings a day and a midday meal of cider and a baked dough turnover filled with onion and potato. It had been designed in 1742 by a young man from Truro, poor but with aspirations. He’d once spent a weekend in Blandford Forum, a five-day ride away in Dorset, and sketched the best creations of the two men who designed and masterminded the new Georgian town, a pair with the unlikely name of the Bastard Brothers. The young man then returned with the sketched copies to Cornwall and claimed them to be his own inspired originals. His clients, merchants and landowners, paid him well, and when he died forty years later his own estates were enormous. His profits were carefully distributed to his large family, enabling them eventually to ease their way into the aristocracy and become part of the ruling class of an expanding world empire.

The woman in the drawing-room on the first floor looked out of the tall distinctive window towards the front lawns. It did not concern her that an ancestor had built Trewythian House. Like all of her class she was slightly embarrassed at the origin of her wealth.

She had heard the distant rattle of a cattle grid, the one that separated her estate from the public highway. She always had three warnings of visitors from the three cattle grids in the drive. The first distant rattle usually meant one of her many tenant farmers was working the fields in the land that stretched to the cliffs on the lower and eastern side of the Lizard Peninsula that looked towards Falmouth Bay.

The second rattle would certainly be one of the army of Water Board Engineers who regularly visited the relay pumping station in the dip below the loose boxes.

The third and most imminent rattle meant that within seconds a car would leave the camouflage of trees and enter the broad sweep of yellow gravelled drive that circled the lawns, rosebushes and fountains in front of Trewythian.

Lady Joanna Forster was surprised to hear the third grid rattle this evening. She had not been expecting visitors. And as the only visitors she ever received were those invited she would not be home today.

She watched the car, a nondescript light blue Cortina, crunch the semi-circle way to the front of the house. As she did not believe in peering, she had suspended from the ceiling on each side of her tall window mirrors, which, by the angle they had been set, reflected perfectly movements below. She had had similar devices suspended from her bedroom ceiling for quite a different purpose.

So she could see, sitting in her armchair by the ornate firescreen, sipping her afternoon tea, two men leave the car and climb the steps on the porch. She heard the doorbell ring, heard her butler, Dawkins, go through the well-rehearsed ‘not at home’ routine, and was about to turn her mind to other things when she heard one word mentioned and mentioned so loudly that she was sure it had been shouted deliberately to attract her. The word would have meant nothing to Dawkins. Normally it would have meant nothing to her. But that one word spoken in such a way today in her house alarmed her. And it did more. It was to make her do something she would bitterly regret. Something that would have appalled her ancestral builder because it was to cost her her birthright, and her nine hundred acres.

It was done from impulse, something quite foreign to her nature. Two and a half centuries of protection had given her inbred immunity from the baser reactions. But the instant she heard that one word she panicked. Which was exactly why Tom McCullin, waiting with Fry in the hall below, facing Dawkins and the portraits of ten generations of Forsters scattered across the walls, shouted the word. . . CONTAINER.

Lady Joanna was thirty-six years old, famous for her good looks, radio and television appearances, her novels and her husband. In that order. Before she married, her face, covered in the world’s most expensive cosmetics, and her body, covered usually with furs of the world’s most endangered species, appeared in the world’s glossiest fashion magazines. At great profit to herself.