Cut to the Chase

by Ray Scott

  ‘Disappear; go under cover,’ McKay gave a grim smile as he read Wallace’s thoughts. ‘We’ll have to work something out.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I’ll do some investigating, particularly on that lease. The High Commission will be justified in asking questions and wanting to see the paperwork if one of their nationals is implicated, particularly with an international aspect involved.’

  ‘Well we’d better do something quick. If what you say is right it won’t be long before the police are knocking on your door.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that! I’ll do something about it, I’ll have to go out again. In the meantime you’ll have to stay here and keep low. Don’t answer the door and don’t even fart.’

  Wallace commented that in view of his recent rushed visits to the toilet that was the last thing he intended to do. McKay gave a wry smile, he seemed to appreciate that.

  ‘I don’t follow it.’ Wallace shook his head in perplexity.

  ‘Neither do I, but it’s right,’ snapped McKay.

  It was later the same afternoon and he had returned after giving some elaborate knocking at the door to confirm that it was him. If it hadn’t been so serious Wallace would have thought it was funny.

  ‘How did the police lock onto the fact that the apartment was in my name?’

  ‘Well they’re not bloody stupid and they had the help of the newspapers. Some enterprising journo chased up the lease on the apartment before they did, he must have had some idea of interviewing the owner. He locked onto the owners of the building, your name was thrown up and then they started looking for you, both the newspaper and the police.’

  ‘Where have they been looking?’

  ‘Your hotel for a start.’

  ‘Well answer me this. Wouldn’t they think it odd that I was staying at a hotel if I had my own apartment?’

  McKay pursed his lips and scratched his chin.

  ‘That is a consideration, I’m not sure whether they’ve thought of that yet, I’ll ask a few questions when I get back to the High Commission. In the meantime, the police have been around to your agent Saul Prosser. I also believe they’ve already been in touch with Christine Norton, your agent in Australia.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘So far ASIO doesn’t seem to have been linked, but that might come out.’

  ‘Good!’ Wallace snapped angrily, thinking viciously of Bramble.

  ‘Good my arse!’ McKay snorted angrily. ‘Any link there that is proven and your career is finished, Mr sodding Wallace! You’ll be branded for life as a government agent, as a circuit speaker that’ll be the kiss of death. So it’s for both our sakes that there must be no links.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘Christ! How can you be so bloody stupid?’

  Wallace was about to retort that he’d sing like a bird if arrested, at which point the significance of what McKay had said sank in. Wallace knew he was right. In America there was considerable scope for former Soviet intelligence agents to go on the speaker circuit. Some had been very successful now that the Soviet Union had collapsed while there were few, if any, hit squads after them. There was intense interest in the USA about life behind the former Iron Curtain and in the States people had flocked to hear those Russian circuit speakers delivering on the subject.

  However, Wallace wasn’t so sure about ex-CIA, MI5 or ASIO speakers, particularly if any one of them was involved in anything that looked or sounded shady, especially the murder of a foreign national. It is a curious feature about Western Democracies that when it came to security services they felt embarrassed and didn’t want to know; do-gooders and politically correct people appeared to believe that the use of such organisations by the West was underhand and “not cricket”. Anyone who was thought to be previously involved with these services could be treated as a pariah. On the other hand, if international opposition, whoever they were, used spies the politically correct brigade seemed to believe it quite reasonable.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Wallace uttered feelingly. ‘What the blazes do I do?’

  ‘Do?’ McKay poured himself a cup of coffee from the percolator; Wallace had made quite a passable brew just before McKay signalled his return with his elaborate knocking. McKay also added a dash of Scotch to it. Wallace reached for the bottle before he put it down and did the same, recalling the ravages McKay had inflicted upon his own Scotch supplies. McKay looked meaningly at the lower level in the bottle and sniffed.

  ‘We carry on with the original plan.’

  ‘Plan! What plan?’

  ‘You go to Birmingham and have a look for Murray Craddock.’

  ‘Oh great! That will prove any links with ASIO if nothing else does.’

  ‘Why should it? If you do the job properly nobody would be any the wiser,’ McKay said and added sarcastically. ‘If you do it properly, that is…from the way you’ve done things so far you’d probably blind him with the flash!’

  ‘Flash! What flash?’

  He ignored the question, clearly not impressed that Wallace had apparently failed to register his sarcasm. That it had struck home became obvious as Wallace developed his own brand.

  ‘How will I get up to Birmingham without being spotted? You’ll just beam me up will you…eh? Just like Star Trek! Beam me up, Scottie!’

  ‘No,’ McKay visibly controlled himself with an effort. ‘But there’s one way you could possibly get there without being spotted.’

  ‘Hitch hike?’

  He muttered angrily under his breath, and Wallace leapt in again reaching fresh heights of rhetoric.

  ‘Train? Motor up the M1? Maybe I could fly, indent ASIO for a couple of wings or a balloon!’ Wallace’s sarcasm was improving under stress and McKay clenched his fists furiously. Wallace backed away, realising his nose was in danger of being flattened.

  ‘Sail up.’

  ‘Right under the nose of the police, I suppose, they’re not bloody stup…! What? Sail up?’

  ‘Sail up,’ McKay repeated it slowly as though Wallace was an erring child. ‘You can go up in a canal barge.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! A canal barge? I’d be better off if I was employed by MI5 or the KGB. I’d be out of the country by helicopter if I worked for them, and all bloody ASIO can suggest is a frigging canal barge.’

  ‘If we were the KGB you’d have been shot and buried by now in a remote forest somewhere off the beaten track! That’s how they deal with people, even their own, who become a sodding embarrassment!’ McKay grated furiously and Wallace went cold. That point had not occurred to him as he went off into flights of wit and repartee.

  The pangs of hunger put an end, albeit temporarily, to the hostilities. McKay prepared a meal while Wallace remained silent. McKay did try to engage Wallace in conversation once or twice but the latter preferred to sulk. Wallace did unbend somewhat as they ate; he had to grudgingly admit that McKay was a dab hand as a chef, and said so.

  ‘Thanks!’ McKay said. ‘It’s nice…!’ he began and then he broke off. Wallace had the feeling that a sarcastic rejoinder had been loaded and ready to fire and that he’d suppressed it. McKay leant forward and refilled Wallace’s wine glass.

  ‘Getting you to the Birmingham area that way will kill two birds,’ McKay said slowly. ‘It gets you out of London. Secondly, if you continue with the Murray Craddock plan you ARE attached to us, albeit loosely, this means that the High Commission and the security services will be obliged to give you some protection and not throw you to the wolves.’

  ‘What help will they give?’

  ‘Not much, it’s a negative thing, but it will ensure that they won’t rush to give you away. If you were merely a suspected drug dealer and murderer they wouldn’t want to be involved, they’d shop you and be damned quick about it,’ McKay answered. ‘But doing this job for us will at least mean the Commissioner will have to ask our military attaché some questions before shopping you. It will also get you away from here; the police may be sniffing around here soon.’
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  ‘Hmm!’ Wallace said, for want of anything better. Then a thought struck him, something that had been in his mind since leaving Kalim’s, or as it now appeared to be, his own apartment. ‘By the way, where’s Albrighton?’

  ‘Albrighton? Why?’

  Wallace was not sure why he didn’t tell McKay what Kalim had said about a safe house. Wallace had the thought in his mind that he didn’t want McKay forbidding him to do anything about it, like looking for and going to the town.

  ‘I have a relative who lives there, that’s all.’

  ‘Not too sure, I’ll find out for you – I have a feeling there are a couple of places of that name. I know that one of them is near Wolverhampton somewhere,’ he had a sip of coffee. ‘With you out of the way on the canal system and the hunt down here in London the police may miss you altogether.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Can’t answer that, but hopefully long enough for us to find out what’s going on and how they selected you.’

  ‘I know that already.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Why and how they selected me, that fucking fiasco in Jakarta, bloody Bramble’s easy task. After that they knew who I was and that I was coming here. I talked to Kalim and told him too much and since he was involved with trying to grab that blasted package or message that I intercepted, he had a score to settle. If Ravindran’s assassination was a long term plan I was an ideal stooge or patsy.’

  McKay thought for a few minutes and then nodded.

  ‘You may be right, I agree it’s on the cards that Ravindran was on their hit list anyway, and finding an Australian patsy was ideal…they’ve never forgiven us for East Timor.’

  ‘Very likely, but Ravindran was a moderate wasn’t he?’

  ‘Maybe, but fundamentalists hate moderates, they want to take over the island he came from, and turn it into an Islamic paradise, sharia law and all that. Ravindran certainly would not have wanted that. But his death in London and apparently at the hands of an Australian will be used as an anti-Australian or anti-West argument, even though we wanted him alive and active. We don’t really know what Kalim’s motives are,’ McKay set down his coffee cup. ‘But right now we’ve got to work out a plan of campaign, starting from early tomorrow morning.’

  As a plan it was fairly simple, they emerged from the apartment block by the rear entrance. While Wallace waited in the recesses of the doorway McKay went and fetched his car and drove up to the back entrance. Wallace slunk out of the doorway, crept stealthily across the pavement looking furtively from side to side and tried to make a surreptitious entrance into the car, overdid it, pinched his fingers in the door and uttered a yell of pain.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ snarled the exasperated McKay as he crashed the gears and they roared off. ‘Did you have to make yourself so bloody conspicuous?’

  ‘Conspicuous!’ Wallace snapped defensively. ‘If you’d had your blasted car serviced properly the bloody door wouldn’t have…!’

  ‘I wasn’t referring to your screams of pain that were no doubt heard the other side of Tower Bridge,’ McKay responded acidly.

  ‘I was referring to your eccentric progress over the footpath. If you’d shouted your name and criminal activities over a loud hailer you couldn’t have attracted more attention.’

  ‘Oh get stuffed!’ Wallace shouted angrily.

  ‘No doubt I will be before the day is out if you persist in drawing attention to yourself…and don’t do THAT!’

  He waved cheerfully to the constable who was directing traffic; as they approached him Wallace had instinctively dived under the dashboard.

  ‘Diving for cover when you see a copper is the one thing that will arouse suspicion, you idiot! Just sit upright and smile…if they do have a mug shot of you it may not be one of you smiling…OK?’

  Wallace muttered angrily under his breath, ducking for cover had been a reflex reaction and he knew McKay was right, which made it worse.

  As they made their way westwards, Mc Kay explained what the plan was. Hitherto there had not been much time to discuss it as he had been out of the apartment making the arrangements. He had arrived back in a rush, ordered Wallace to throw some borrowed clothing into a suit case, from which McKay had carefully removed any traces of ownership or makers labels, and then told Wallace to wait at the rear entrance. In response to questions he had merely muttered something on the lines of: ‘…they’re closing in…’ which could have meant the police, the gutter dailies or Kalim and his thugs.

  ‘Look, I’m not really struck on this idea of a coal barge…!’

  ‘I don’t give a rats arse what you think!’ McKay snapped angrily. ‘It’s my job to get you out of here until the heat’s off, the High Commissioner doesn’t want one of his countrymen in custody on a charge of murdering an Indonesian political figure when there are delicate talks going on in Canberra about oil rights in the Timor Sea. And for your information, it is not a coal barge…it’s a poo barge!’

  They had travelled about a quarter of a mile before the implication sank in.

  ‘It’s a what?’

  ‘I wondered when you’d wake up…a poo barge is one that transports sewage.’

  ‘I’m not travelling on a sewage barge.’

  McKay collapsed into roars of laughter. Wallace entirely failed to see the joke. Finally McKay took pity on him and stated that he had only been joking. Wallace still failed to see the joke.

  ‘Look, what exactly have you arranged?’

  McKay took a grip on himself, and removed his left hand from the wheel and made a placatory gesture.

  ‘All right all right,’ McKay said. ‘Now listen…it’s a canal barge, and if you’ve ever been on a caravan holiday it’s similar to that,’ he paused at traffic lights and they both peered carefully around. McKay scanned the rear view mirror, what he saw, or didn’t see, appeared to satisfy him.

  ‘The canal system of England is one of those wasted assets, when you consider how it’s been abused and neglected it’s a miracle it has survived at all…here we go,’ McKay said as the lights changed to green. ‘Where was I? Yes…I won’t go too deeply into the history of it, but it’s a fascinating one, maybe you could deliver one of your speeches about it one day. It came into existence before the railways did, in the days when the roads were bloody awful and travelling on them in stage coaches was a misery and people had to contend with vehicles without adequate suspension, and also highwaymen.’

  He applied the brakes with a curse as another set of traffic lights loomed up.

  ‘Another point was that transport of goods was a problem, the roads were so bad that any merchandise was badly shaken up and if crockery or ceramics was being moved by road it could arrive in bits and if it was machinery it didn’t do it much good either. If there were any decent roads and they were carting heavy goods or machinery around it was still bloody hard going. So somebody had the bright idea of making waterways, much of the drive for a canal system came from Staffordshire where a lot of pottery was manufactured, and soon a network of them was formed and they eventually spread over most of the country.’

  He gave a grunt as the traffic lights changed and took off again.

  ‘Then the railways came along, they competed and were much faster, railways bought up the canals and they went to rack and ruin and some of them never recovered.’

  ‘So what’s the point of me using one then?’

  ‘Because back in the 1940s when the war was over people realised what an asset they were, not only from the pleasure aspect, but also water supply. They started forming organisations to restore them, they have re-opened many of them and much of the network has been restored. There is a thriving pleasure industry now, and there are many companies who hire out pleasure barges to sail the system. That’s what you are going to use…they are similar to caravans, except they go on the water.’

  He waited for Wallace to say something, but Wallace was still sulking. Nevertheless, even though he was still in a sullen mo
od he was also becoming interested in what McKay was telling him.

  ‘You can travel from London to Bristol; to Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool and as far north as York… I think you can even go beyond York to a place named Ripon, so it goes a long way. You can also get into North Wales, once you’ve got your boat you can go anywhere, I don’t think there are any restrictions by the hirers – so long as you don’t try and take it out to sea or some of the river estuaries. The boats themselves are limited to being seven feet wide.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Wallace asked, becoming more interested despite his bad mood.

  ‘It’s a question of water supply. The canals go up and down with the contours of the land, and to do that the engineers had to work on a locks system. Birmingham is fairly high up and you’ll find long banks of locks to get up there. The system was supplied, still is, by many old watercourses that were diverted a couple of hundred years ago to supply the system from the top. England has a heavy rainfall so there’s enough water but it made sense to limit the size of the locks to seven feet wide, despite the good rainfall the supply isn’t limitless.’

  ‘We’d never have a canal system in Australia then.’

  ‘Well we have but not on this scale. Anyway, as far as you’re concerned, they are seven feet wide. One point to watch is that your bow and stern are not caught in the lock wall when the water is rising when you’re going up a bank of locks.’

  ‘Who operates the locks?’

  ‘Lock-keepers, that is within the London area and maybe some other cities, I’m not sure about that, but in the main you’ll be operating them yourself because the system doesn’t generate enough income to pay lock-keepers wages. That’s how it’s been for years, but you’ll find many locks will always have a pub attached, it was one way of ensuring lock-keepers were able to earn a crust. Nowadays they are publicans pure and simple and have little to do with opening and closing lock gates. The pubs are good and with some of them it’s like going back in time over 200 years.’