Blackmail North

by Philip McCutchan

  Unlikely …

  Shard looked up at the Assistant Chief Constable, who had been studying him curiously. He said, “I’m beginning to see a pattern I should have seen earlier, sir. Maybe the reason I didn’t was that … no, I’ll put it this way: maybe the only reason I see it now is because there’s damn-all else to see!”

  The ACC lifted an eyebrow. “Care to elaborate?”

  “It’s not all that deep. It’s just that too many things have been Yorkshire orientated. I’ll be doing some thinking.” He changed the subject. “Question of a night’s lodgings, sir. There’s not much I can do, I dare say, but I’d like to be handy. Is there somewhere I’ll be able to doss down here at HQ?”

  “I’ll fix that,” the ACC said.

  *

  “I want you,” the Head of Department said to Hedge later that evening, “to go north. To Scotland.”

  Hedge gaped. “To Scotland? Er … may one ask why? I’m not a field man, you know.” His cheeks wobbled and he looked distressed: Scotland he found unfriendly, he was essentially a Londoner, as such agreeing with everything Dr Johnson had said and written about Scotland’s barbarism in the eighteenth century. “I have my responsibilities here, Head.”

  “They’ve moved, shifted to Scotland. I want you on the spot, to act for me as my co-ordinator of security across the border. We no longer dictate from Whitehall, you know. There’s a need for co-operation rather than orders issued. You’ll liaise with Sir Andrew MacKendrick, who I think you know.”

  “Yes, Head. Yes, indeed.” Hedge dabbed at his cheeks with an expensive linen handkerchief. Sir Andrew MacKendrick was one of the abrasive Scots, a shrewd and outspoken man who controlled security under the aegis of the Scottish Office in London but who had his personal headquarters in Edinburgh and was ostensibly and coverwise a part of the Management Group Support Staff in St James’s Centre. Hedge’s heart sagged further. “When do you wish me to go?”

  The Head of Department shrugged. “No unseemly haste — that is, not by air. I don’t want to appear to rush things with MacKendrick — he’s touchy. Go by train, tonight, a sleeper from King’s Cross, fake a confidential secretary, not your own, I’ll need someone here who’s au fait with the situation in your absence.”

  “Very well, Head. And Shard?”

  “He’s still the field man in charge. Anything come in from him, by the way?”

  “Not since he reported from Dundee.”

  The Head of Department nodded briskly. “I see. Establish contact with him when you reach Edinburgh.”

  Ten

  HEDGE HAD HAD a disastrous night.

  He had caught an Inter-City train out of King’s Cross, and had dined with the confidential secretary allocated to him for his sojourn in barbarous Caledonia. She was a good-looking girl, with quite a wicked glint in her eye but obviously had no interest in Hedge, who sensed the rebuff that would come if he should say anything out of line. And the dinner was atrocious, most unusually so for Inter-City: Hedge suspected discord in the kitchen, something stirred up, no doubt, by the accursed unions. There was an attitude of take-it-or-leave-it indifference which he found most trying but against which he could make no headway: outside the Foreign Office, like a ship’s captain ashore, his area of command was gone. This put him badly on edge, and he grumped his way through the meal, thankful only that at least the expense was reclaimable. A complaint, for what it might be worth, would go to British Rail from the majesty of St James’s Centre immediately upon his arrival; he might, he reflected, even send for the station-master, a title that had a better and more authoritative ring than station manager, at Waverley; breakfast, thank God, would be taken in the august purlieus of the North British Hotel. Dinner over, Hedge said goodnight to his unresponsive secretary and retired to his sleeper. This was some way before York; in darkness the Inter-City stopped at Darlington and just before it flashed through Durham station and over the viaduct spanning the River Wear the man with the knife appeared and woke Hedge terrifyingly from slumber, having first knelt down so as to get an arm right around Hedge’s mouth, an arm that held him in a cruelly tight grip.

  “No noise,” the intruder said into Hedge’s ear, softly and in a Scottish accent. “Get up and get dressed. Fast and quiet.” The arm was removed, and in the beam of a pencil torch the knife came to within an inch of Hedge’s face: it was very nasty, thin, obviously razor edged, and it would make no sound at all if it should slide into flesh.

  “Oh, my God,” Hedge said in a high squeak.

  “I said, no sound. Get up, get dressed. That’s all. Unless you want to die. Come on, now.” The knife came closer, dipped down and nicked at the base of Hedge’s throat. It was no more than a pinprick, but it drew blood, and it was more than enough. Hedge got dressed and packed his grip, took up his brief-case, and left the sleeper with the knife in his back but not visible. Outside the sleeper, in the corridor, another man waited silently. Two minutes later, by which time Hedge had been handily placed by the door with the Scotsman’s free hand reaching through the open window to rest on the handle, the Inter-City express pulled gently into Newcastle and Hedge was disembarked.

  *

  The word reached Shard in Dundee after some delay due to an exhaustive search of the Inter-City from London once the secretary had managed to obtain a hearing from authority. The word came not from Edinburgh police or Sir Andrew MacKendrick but from the Head of Department in London.

  “I’d like to know,” the Head of Department said, “how in hell Hedge’s movements became known, Shard. And who’s involved.”

  “At present, I can’t offer any helpful comment, sir. I’ll be working on it. If Hedge has been hijacked, the hijackers could turn out to be our dead friend Jamie’s bunch, restocking the larder.”

  “What?”

  “You remember Jamie’s body was aboard the aircraft that came down in Yorkshire. That could mean Fiona Mackintosh has changed hands, sir. If that’s the case, the Scottish bunch will be in need of another bargaining counter. Just a theory. They could have been watching Hedge’s movements —”

  “Not in time to organise a hijack. I want you to find Hedge.” There was a crash in Shard’s ear. He put down the handset, frowning. Where to begin on this one? If dead Jamie’s mob were involved, it was still no help: they were only too conspicuous by their absence from the scene. Shard went into conference with the Assistant Chief Constable and Harry Kenwood. Various routines were put into operation and the alert was put out, nationwide from Dundee. Later, after a hurried lunch, other news reached Shard: a PC on the beat in Leeds had observed three Middle Eastern men getting into a Mercedes with a white woman who showed signs of having been doped up with tranquilisers. Coloured skins, and white women in their company, were not especially remarkable in Leeds; but the woman had seemed unwilling to get into the car and the PC was a bright boy who had done his homework and he had recognised Fiona Mackintosh from the circulated description. Or anyway was ninety per cent sure he had done so. He had reported in and after that things had not gone so well. The Mercedes, being tailed to see where it might lead, had been lost. It had, quite simply, vanished, and no-one knew where except that when contact had been lost it had been apparently heading north through Leeds, which might mean nothing at all. The house in a slum terrace outside which the four persons had been seen by the PC had yielded no clues: it was deserted.

  Shard said, “Leeds again. Uthman had a Leeds connexion.”

  “Does that help?”

  “I don’t know. But if that PC’s right, we can take it as certain now that Fiona Mackintosh has had a change of captors, though why they’re shifting her around beats me. It seems risky from their point of view.”

  “So what’s the next step?” the ACC asked.

  Shard said. “I’ll get down there.”

  “What about Hedge?”

  “I’ll be as useful to him down in Yorkshire as up here. He won’t be in immediate danger, that’s for sure — he wouldn’t have been kid
napped only to be killed right away.” Shard believed that sooner or later a contact was going to come and Hedge’s potential to the villains would be revealed; and in the meantime there was a strong possibility that Hedge’s path and his own would cross, maybe converge upon Fiona Mackintosh at the same time.

  *

  Shard rubbed at eyes that stung and burned from the effects of the smoke that hung like a pall over the whole of Dundee. There had been more indications of the presence of the poison gas, the trichlorophenol: the hospitals had confirmed its effects in the sickness-and-sunburn casualties, though the public health authority had cleared the water supply and it had not been necessary to order a cut-off. Shard listened, as a police car drove him with Harry Kenwood to the airport, to reports coming in over the radio. Considerable activity on the part of the army was taking place in the area following upon the disaster, the troops and vehicles backing the overstretched police and still carrying weapons. Other troop disposals were being made all over Britain to provide the maximum possible protection for other chemical plants, power stations and atomic reactors that might be at risk from what was being referred to officially as ‘sabotage’, at least on the BBC news flashes that also came in. Shard stared from the window as the car moved out fast; despite disaster, people still went about their business. On dried-up grass fronting a big block of council flats children played, one or two of the boys knocking golf balls about around a notice reading PLAYING OF GOLF FORBIDDEN. A small girl sat and screamed for an absent mother, a bigger one gave her a vicious slap across the face and she stopped, as though well accustomed to the action. Distantly, the fire smouldered around the utter ruination of the chemical works, themselves nothing but a blackened collection of shattered buildings around a deep, deep hole from which flames spiralled still. The smoke seemed even to cover the Fay, the seaward reach of the firth invisible. It was going to take Dundee many, many months of licking its wounds towards recovery: soon the funerals would start to empty the overcrowded mortuaries and families would begin to pick up their lives’ fragments, and think about rebuilding. As if in sympathy with a sorrowing city, the day’s beyond-the-smoke brightness began to fade as heavy black cloud loomed and spread. Rain at last-rain to wash things clean and start new life budding? That was a hopeful thought, but currently the clouds brought only gloom and a heavy sense of foreboding: where would the next attack come, and when?

  *

  From Newcastle Hedge had been driven fast through the early hours along an unknown route; unknown to him, that was, because he was driven in a dormobile with the driver compartmented off and all curtains drawn tight, with an armed man present to make dead sure he didn’t peep out. All questions remained unanswered: the armed man was exceptionally surly even for a Scot, which he obviously was when he did speak; his name appeared to be Angus and the dour overtones fitted well. Hedge quaked, sitting on a miniature settee built sideways, almost pitching on his face as the vehicle took right-hand turns. His brief-case had been gone through, but fortunately there was nothing vital in it other than to himself: interdepartmental memoranda for reading in the train, a bottle of pills, some observations on security matters from Defence Ministry, things of that sort. Angus, who had done the going through, had appeared angry at his lack of success and had rammed the contents of the brief-case back in again haphazardly, an untidy mess that he hadn’t bothered even to close properly, but Hedge was too upset to care though normally untidiness appalled him, especially where paper was concerned. He also felt alarmingly sick: sideways sitting in a fast, swaying vehicle was no joke. After a while his stomach overcame his control and he vomitted, a dreadful gush of sub-standard British Rail dinner.

  Angus said, “Dirty bastard.”

  Hedge gushed again, and brought out a handkerchief with trembling fingers. He mopped at face and jacket until the handkerchief was no more use, then he sought the help of his brief-case. An expense-claim form was brought into play as makeshift blotting-paper and then Hedge was sick again. He groaned and groaned, almost weeping in his terrible predicament …

  He had absolutely no idea where he was going; for a while there had been the odd bright light beyond the curtains, there had been stops and starts, at traffic lights probably, and all those sick-making turns. All that would have been in Newcastle; after a time the progress had been swifter, the lights had gone, and it became a case of bends rather than turns mostly: the open road, but which? A1, A68 — north into Scotland? Or south, or west? Time passed, miles were left behind. Hedge sweated; the night was warm and the dormobile was stuffy and smelly. His sick feeling didn’t leave him although he had no gush left. He mopped his brow, which was streaming.

  “I would like to lie down,” he said suddenly.

  “Aye?”

  “I’m not well, you know.”

  “Lie down, then.”

  “Where?”

  “On the floor.”

  “But it’s all … oh, dear.” Vomit or not, Hedge lifted his rump from the settee, felt giddy, lurched as the dormobile took a left-hand bend, a tight one, and more or less collapsed on the floor. Recumbent, he felt a little better, but the position, when he lifted his head, gave him a crick in the neck and he complained about this, petulantly.

  “Don’t lift your bloody head, then.”

  “I was suggesting a cushion …”

  “Ah, shut up,” Angus said. Hedge subsided, sniffing and feeling desperately sorry for himself. A matter of minutes later, however, he felt that providence, in propelling him to seek recumbency, had turned a special eye upon him: headlights that had been behind them for some miles veered to the right and sped up the off-side of the dormobile in a fast overtake. When amidships, the overtaker reduced speed to hold himself alongside and a sudden burst of fire from what sounded like a sub-machine-gun riddled Angus’s head with bullets and his body slid bloodily off the seat to the floor. Then came another burst, this time at the driver, and to Hedge the end of the world seemed to be at hand: everything spun and something heavy landed on him in the split second before he was hurled through the air to the roof. Bounce, bounce and then the peace of utter stillness and total darkness until — and he knew not how long after — both were shattered by footsteps and torch beams, the latter shining through smashed bodywork directly onto Hedge.

  Hedge opened his eyes, gasped with the pain of the light, and shut them again. Tentatively, he moved arms and legs so far as was possible: they appeared to work — he’d been remarkably lucky, must indeed be loved by God. There was a lot of blood, some of it his, for his face was badly cut, but most of it from the man Angus he thought, the cushioning effect of whose body had contributed, most probably, to his own salvation. Hedge felt extremely sick again and had a most terrible headache and was shivering violently.

  “Help me,” he said imploring in a weak, pathetic voice, opening his eyes again. “Get me out.”

  He couldn’t see the faces behind the torch beams and he was in a state of some confusion: it was possible — indeed likely — that they were police, a patrol that had come upon the wreckage. One of the men asked, “Who are you?”

  “Hedge,” Hedge quavered. “Of the Foreign Office. Get me out for God’s sake.”

  There was a gasp from beyond the light as the Foreign Office was mentioned and an excited outburst of some alien tongue, then the two men came forward and felt around Hedge’s body and the mangled vehicle, and the vomit. Blood dripped; it was horrible. Hedge felt a drawing kind of sensation as the men pulled at him; helping them as best he could, he thrust out behind with one leg, and contacted something soft that squelched gently. Hedge fainted, knowing no more as he was drawn from the wreck like a grub being extracted from a chrysalis.

  Eleven

  ENGLAND’S NORTHERN COUNTIES seemed to be approaching confirmation as the most likely area for close search: once again Shard thought of the aircraft in Robin Hood’s Bay, its believed take-off point in North Yorkshire; of Uthman’s earlier Leeds connexion, of the finding of the fake cop
car in Harrogate, and now of Fiona Mackintosh’s sighting in Leeds; and Hedge, hooked off somewhere south of Edinburgh and north of York. Shard checked into police HQ in Leeds feeling the rise of some kind of hope: at least there seemed to be a convergence and that was something.

  In Leeds news awaited him: the nick at Selkirk in southern Scotland had come up with a report of the wreckage of a dormobile in a deep ditch beside a B road running off the A7 above Hawick. There were three bodies in it, two in front, one in the domestic part, all unidentified as yet; the vehicle was registered in the name of one Angus Dewar and among the debris was something highly relevant to current events: a Foreign Office form, nothing secret about it, a form, not yet filled in, concerned with the claiming of travelling expenses and covered with blood and vomit. Shard’s mind went to the obvious: Angus Dewar could be one of the boyos from Glen Etive, the one who had piloted the helicopter that had picked him off the purlieus of the M1; and the expense claim form could spell Hedge — could. It was perhaps too easy, but not often did one find FO forms floating about in wrecked dormobiles more or less between Scotland and the railway line from London. Descriptionwise, none of the bodies sounded in the least like Hedge, but one could just about fit Angus of Glen Etive.

  Shard lifted an eyebrow at Harry Kenwood. “Maybe it’s a lead. If that claim form was Hedge’s, and Hedge doesn’t seem to be among the dead, then it could be a double kidnap. First Angus, then someone else. Someone who ran the dormobile off the road.”

  “Uthman?”

  “Could be. On the other hand, of course, Hedge could have been in an accident and was dead lucky.”