The Partridge Kite (27 page)

Despite his insistence on secrecy, someone in Production at SSO had booked the sleeper in his own name.

So if CORDON was in Scotland, it would know by now he was on his way. And they would be waiting. For sure!

Thursday, 23 December

The skiers overwhelmed him by their numbers and their noise, by their colours and equipment and by their single- mindedness. They darted into queues, their skis crashed on to backs of mini buses and toppled from roofracks: tall thin young men with plump kapoked young girls lumbered past in heavy boots which deformed their expensive ski suits. Dozens at a time marched to the ski lifts in perfect step two abreast, skis and sticks sloped at the shoulder, looking like a squad of futuristic soldiers uniquely styled to fight a hidden enemy somewhere high up in the snow mountains.

Tom had never before felt so totally out of place, standing there in his overcoat and suedes, a tatty scarf wound about his neck. They all looked so completely involved with each other and with the mechanics of the chair lifts and tows. With the process of going up. And the glorious coming down.

He felt he was surrounded by foreigners, not knowing one word of their language. They laughed, and shouted around, above and through him. He felt naked, anonymous.

Except that was the one thing he knew he wasn’t.

Any doubts he had had about Fry’s theory, that CORDON was somewhere here in the Cairngorms, disappeared the moment he stepped off the sleeper that morning. During the night he had woken up many times, shaken in his first-class bunk by the bogies noisily manipulating a hundred thousand crossings. Every time he had cursed himself for a wild goose chase into the Scottish wastelands.

But the moment he left the cosy warmth of his compartment for the early morning frosty Highland air, he knew he had been expected. Somewhere on that station someone was watching.

He had spent more than twenty years of his life chasing and being chased, and he had more than his eyes and ears now to alert him. He sensed it. Other eyes were watching him and other ears were waiting to hear what those eyes had seen.

He had come to the Cairngorms in search of CORDON but already it had found him. So it would now be merely a matter of waiting for it to make a decision. That they should or should not meet.

The season’s heavy snowfall had attracted many more skiers than normal, people coming on spec, bringing forward their holiday plans, to make certain of getting perfect piste conditions. The hotels at Aviemore were full. He was very thankful that he’d been booked in elsewhere. He couldn’t remember seeing anything more ugly than the thoughtless chunk of concrete, a monument in ready-mix to a long line of mindless, inspirationless British architects, that was referred to locally as the Aviemore Sports Complex.

Paying a taxi-driver twelve pounds for the journey, he was taken to Kingussie, seven miles farther south along the A9. Each side of the winding road that ran along the Spey Valley, the mountains stretched out like giant white molehills, the slope of one rolling imperceptibly into the next and then the next until the range disappeared into the low grey snow clouds.

He checked into the small hotel, or what was really a Highland Development Board subsidised guesthouse, and signed in with his own name. There seemed no point in doing otherwise. The girl receptionist welcomed him in his own name, confirmed a single room and bath booked in his own name and with the key gave him an overnight telegram addressed to the same Tom McCullin. The anonymous saboteur at SSO informed him that Fry’s operation had been a success. Tom had not expected it, in fact he had purposely instructed those few who knew of his trip that there should be no communication from London. If he wanted anything he would contact them via any working callbox. The news of Fry was welcome but the unsigned telegram hadn’t been sent for Tom’s peace of mind. It had been sent to confirm his arrival to those locally who might need to know.

The porter carrying Tom’s light holdall didn’t seem put out by the absence of skis and boots from his luggage. He was a tall stooping man in a threadbare dark grey worsted suit flecked with dandruff front and back. Like a schoolboy’s, his cuffs were shiny from their constant use as a handkerchief to wipe a long dribbling nose. He wore a waistcoat of a lighter grey, as old as the suit, and with only two top buttons, so that his stomach and shirt flowed out from underneath. The skin on his face was sallow and pitted, so dark in the bad light of the reception hall that it looked like an extension of his worsted flannel. His ears and his eyes were also long and drooping so that all in all he reminded Tom of a shabby bloodhound on hind legs.

‘You’re not here to ski then?’ the man asked as he unlocked the bedroom door.

‘No!’

‘Then you’re wise. D’you know that until twenty-five years ago we had none of it. I was born here, so was my father and his, but none of us skied. No need. We walked when we had to. It only came because someone wanted to make money out of it.’

‘You must get a little of it yourself,’ Tom said as he tipped the man fifty pence.

‘Not as much as we’d like,’ he answered, taking the coin without a thank you. He left the room abruptly, leaving the door open.

One of the least attractive Scots, but with that characteristic they all shared. Unaccountably flushed with pain at other people’s pleasure.

He knelt and pushed three ten-penny pieces into the coin meter by the electric fire. Then he began his standard unpacking routine, something he did quite automatically now on a trip. Pyjama trousers folded under the pillow, tooth’ brush and toothpaste, razor and shaving cream in perfect line along the rim of the bath. A Bible from a drawer in the bedside table, placed there by the Gideons, became a press for his crumpled tie. A bottle of Scotch, as inevitable as the Gideons’ gift, was placed securely in the middle of the dressing table. The Browning was wrapped in lavatory paper and put into the plastic toilet bag and hung behind the bathroom door. His bits and pieces all arranged, he relaxed.

Carefully he poured whisky from the full bottle into a quarter-pint pewter hip flask, sat on the bed facing the fire and began drinking it. His toes tingled, his face glowed and he felt immensely confident. And elated at feeling it because there was no reason to be confident. A sense of witness, of being watched, overwhelmed him. He got up, pulled apart the thin flower-patterned curtains, and looked out over the front drive. The taxi-driver had promised snow within the hour and he had been exactly on time. In the thirty minutes Tom had been settling in, the new fall had covered the circle of tyre prints the taxi had made. Beyond the drive and the lawn that went down to the A9, Tom could see occasional yellow headlamps of cars and lorries driving through the snowfall, travelling north to Inverness or south to Pitlochry and Perth.

The massive sprawl of the giant white molehills was gradually disappearing as the clouds swept over them. Bleak was not the word to describe them. He could not think of one that did adequately, but they strangely reminded him of sand. Snow dunes in a snow desert, desolate, destructive and hostile, where the cold could break a man’s bones, split open his skin and freeze his blood to ice before it had a chance to run. CORDON was hidden somewhere out there. Fry had been right. And if he was to find CORDON he would do it by just sitting comfortably here, waiting to be found himself. There was no going out in that snow into those mountains to die of frostbite.

But what of his backup? CORDON had tried to kill him yesterday and might probably try again. But what kind of protection could he demand of the Department or Military Intelligence? What alert could he send them? That he was certain CORDON was here because he sensed it? That its headquarters was somewhere hidden within a hundred square mile radius, protected by mountains of snow and an arctic climate? That he was sitting drinking whisky by a two-bar electric fire waiting for CORDON to call? So please send help.

No! He had known he was on his own from the beginning. If he had any protection at all it was simply that both SSO and MI knew he was here and if anything happened to him they would know CORDON had found him and know its headquarters was in the area. But if it didn’t want to break its cover it could just as simply leave him sitting in his hotel room destroying his liver with whisky and bankrupting himself at the coin meter. The possibility depressed him. One way of dealing with an enemy is to ignore it. So CORDON could ignore him. But all that he and Fry and Kellick had been doing these past thirteen days was part of CORDON’S plan, and killing him had not been part of it. He was sure of that. So something had gone wrong and the plan had had to be quickly modified. Was it because CORDON had decided he had found out too much? Or was about to? Was it that CORDON realised he was about to discover something? Their base, maybe?

He turned back to the fire. His overcoat had been thrown across a chair, and from one pocket he pulled out two Ordnance Survey maps, sheets 37 and 38, one inch to one mile, Grantown-on-Spey, east to the coast at Aberdeen. He opened both and spread them out on the bed. From the other pocket he took three coloured brochures, ones he’d picked up from Aviemore, showing ski runs, car parks and ski lifts. He flattened out the creases and put them on top of the Ordnance sheets.

The names of the ski runs were as foreign to him as the skiers had been that morning. Ptarmigan, Coire Na Ciste, Fiacall, Coire Cas, and high up over the Cairngorm peak at 4,084 feet was Ciste Mearaedh. The ski runs were shown by colour, black for the experts, red difficult, yellow easy. He saw that both the black runs were on the same right-hand side of the diagrams, south-east on the Ordnance sheets. One of the tow lifts on Coire Cas coloured black stopped just below the summit itself.

He looked more closely at the one-inch sheets. The other side of the peak was barren unpopulated country, a continuing range of mountains, Ben Macdui, Cairn a Mhain, Sgor Mor, split occasionally by small rivers and bums which fell between the rock and heather to become finally the River Dee just above Braemar Castle.

He saw that the Cairngorms rose between three major roads on their northern, western and eastern sides. But there was nothing south for more than thirty miles until the A9 curved back again just above the Forest of Atholl near Pitlochry. Nothing.

A narrow metalled road took skiers off the A9 at Aviemore, up through Queens Forest past Glenmore to the car parks and ski lifts. Once on the peak, skiers turned about face and came back down. Tom compared the ski runs again with the one-inch map. If a skier went down the other side, if he went right over the top on the Ciste Mearaedh side south-east, there was nowhere his skis could take him . . . unless he veered left, to the east, towards Braemar itself. Where did Elsa Pilkington’s skis take her, once she’d left that ski tow at the top?

He picked up the brochures and left his room. The receptionist, a girl of about twenty-six, smiled comfortably at him. She was heavily built but tall and well-proportioned, with auburn hair turning fair. She had a wide flat face, well tanned. And green eyes. As he came to her she took a deep breath and pulled her white sweater down tight, emphasising the largeness of her breasts. She kept smiling and Tom tried his best back.

‘Do you ski?’ he asked.

‘Weil, I wouldn’t be here for any other reason, believe me!’ She said it pleasantly enough.

He opened the ski brochures on the counter in front of her. She crossed her arms just below her breasts and then lifted them in a single movement so that they suddenly seemed to inflate even larger. He guessed them at 46”, possibly 48”, and their shape and their whiteness under the sweater reminded him of the rounded snow mountains just outside the front door.

She watched his eyes and read his thoughts. She knew he had no desire for her, at least not yet. Men seldom did so early in the day. But later, after lunch hopefully, she would enjoy having him. He would be strong and last long enough for her to be satisfied. Sadly so few seemed to be able to.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘just assuming I went to the top of this run’ - he pointed to the black run of the Coire Cas - ‘is it possible to ski south? Go right over the top?’

‘You mean to Maraedh?’

He looked again at the brochure. Her breasts had put a shadow over it so he had to peer at the names.

‘That’s right, Maraedh. . . beyond the top station.’

‘Are you a good skier?’

‘No, I can’t ski a yard.’

‘Well, aren’t you being a little bit silly? You wouldn’t get a yard from the lifts, let alone over the top.’

‘I did ask you to assume. Won’t you assume a little?’ His eyes twinkled, and changed colour until they were the same green as hers. He looked at the bridge of her nose, a small nose for such a large face, made of hard shiny brown skin, the product of many winter seasons and much sun and wind.

She felt a familiar flush in her belly and the muscles in the insides of her thighs tightened involuntarily.

‘Well, Mr McCullin . . .’

Tom.. .’

‘… Let’s assume you’re Franz Klammer, hot on the next Olympic Downhill, and you get to the top of the Headwall and bomb over it for supper in Braemar Castle. Well, believe me, you wouldn’t have supper!’

‘Why not?’

‘You wouldn’t have the appetite.’

‘I might be very hungry.’

‘You’d be too dead to be hungry.’

‘You mean it’s never been done?’

‘I mean that those who’ve tried it have never lived to boast about it. And people have died trying it. You see, you would have to know the route in summer to be able to do it in snow. Otherwise you’d break your neck or a leg on a boulder you didn’t know was there or disappear into a snow drift hiding a gorge. You might just run out of slope and not have warmth or the energy to climb back to height again. More than likely you’d hit a white-out.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It happens in a snowstorm when the cloud and mountains merge. You can’t tell the snow coming down from the snow that’s already there, it’s just solid white and you’re blind. And lost. And if you don’t know your way well enough by instinct you just freeze up from toes to tits.’