Singleton's Law

by Reginald Hill

  “Come here,” he commanded.

  Slowly she rose. She was, he reckoned, in her late twenties, not pretty, but not plain either. Terror is quite becoming, he decided, if you have the bone structure to support it.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nancy Mays,” she said with difficulty as though she found it hard to remember.

  “Right, Nancy. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Be sure you answer them truthfully for if I discover you’ve been lying about anything at all, I shall kill you.”

  Even a mere quarter of a century earlier, the majority of Englishmen would have been unable to take such a threat completely seriously. At least not without guns being pointed, knives waved, the whole context of violence in evidence. But now incredulity was no longer the enemy of the threatener. Now anyone would believe anything of anyone.

  “You live here by yourself, Nancy?”

  “Yes.”

  That fitted with what he had seen in his quick look round.

  “Do you have a job, Nancy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Clever girl. What time do you start work?”

  “Ten.”

  He glanced at the old wooden wall-clock above the bathroom door. It was still only 5-30 a.m., he was surprised to note. Days seemed to have passed since he awoke and discovered Chaucer and the girl had gone.

  “Will you be missed if you don’t turn up?”

  She hesitated.

  “I mean, will any effort be made to contact you. Come on. You must know!”

  “They might… I mean, someone could ring, just to see…”

  “Yes.”

  That made sense. And if no one answered, would they come round to check for themselves? Hardly. But it was still a risk.

  He found himself yawning and pressed on.

  “Is there any reason why anybody should call here this morning. Delivery men? Cleaner? Anyone like that.”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain.”

  “Certain!”

  She sounded almost indignant.

  “All right,” he said. “Just hope no one rings that bell. Now listen. I’m going to be around here for a while. You go into the bathroom and shut the door behind you. No noise, mind. And don’t try to come out till I tell you. Any noise or any attempt to get out and that’ll be it. Understand?”

  She nodded.

  “In you go.”

  She obeyed. He removed the key from inside the door which he then closed and locked. Next he took a chair and hung it over the door handle, jamming its legs up against the wall. It was the best he could do, he decided. The bathroom itself had no window and even if she plucked up enough courage to rap on the one wall which was connected to a neighbouring flat, it was doubtful whether anyone would care to take.notice. Anyway, it was a risk he’d have to take.

  Of course, he found himself thinking, I really could kill her.

  With a sigh, he shook his head and went into the kitchen. Food first. There was a plentiful supply of tins and he ate his way through four of them almost indiscriminately. Then he returned to the lounge, checked the bathroom door, lay down on the comfortable old-fashioned settee, and went to sleep.

  The Dream came almost instantly. It had taken two and a half years of twice-weekly analysis to erase it from his subconscious. The consultant had modestly claimed complete success and charged the appropriate fee, but Whitey had never really doubted that the snake was merely scotched. Now as the old familiar images returned from their long exile, some still wakeful part of his mind greeted them if not with pleasure, at least with that fascinated revulsion which draws the sensitive child back again and again to the storybook which he knows will give him nightmares. It was not until the coach in front exploded in flames and the screams of those trapped inside were momentarily audible above the roar of the mob that this small standpoint of objectivisation crumbled and he was wholly fourteen once more and feeling a terror which acted as the yardstick for all other terrors he had felt since that day.

  He awoke with the usual violent surge like a dolphin breaking clear of the water. It was the image that usually came to his mind and he found it of little comfort to think that to him his waking life might be as relatively brief as those few moments free of the water were to the leaping sea-mammal.

  Despite his feeling that the Dream had occupied every second of the time since he lay down, two hours had passed. He was hungry again and returned to the kitchen, eating rather more selectively this time. A stiff drink of some kind would have gone down well also, but the liquor cupboard was either empty, well-concealed or non-existent, and he settled for a pot of coffee instead. A twinge of conscience, or perhaps just a need to establish that his conscience was still capable of twinging, made him pour a cup for the girl. He removed the chair from the door-knob and rapped on the woodwork, feeling rather ridiculous.

  “Like some coffee?” he called. There was no reply, which did not surprise him, and he unlocked the door.

  The jet of water that hit him from the shower attachment in the girl’s hands was not hot enough to blister but it burnt his beaten face like acid and sent him staggering backwards over a chair.

  She leapt over him and made for the hall. By the time he rose and followed, she was more than halfway through the complicated business of unlocking the door. He would still have had plenty of time to stop her if he had acted straightaway but at the sight of him she started screaming, her hands still busy at the door. Absurdly, he halted and started trying to reason with her. She turned the handle, the door began to open, now he jumped forward to throw his weight against it. But a greater weight at the other side thrust against him and he fell back.

  Standing in the door, crouched aggressively, was a man. In his hand was an automatic pointed straight at Whitey’s head.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “Not an inch. Audrey, are you OK?” “Yes,” said the girl, sobbing with relief. Then the strength seemed to leave her legs and she slid down the wall in a dead faint.

  “John Caldercote,” said Whitey suddenly.

  The man stiffened, then peered more closely at his bruised face.

  “Whitey?” he said uncertainly. “Whitey Singleton?”

  “That’s it,” said Whitey, pushing himself upright. “What did you call her?”

  He pointed at the recumbent girl.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” demanded Caldercote. “What are you doing here anyway? And don’t say you’ve forgotten your wife!”

  Nixon Lectures: Fifth Series

  Documentary Material

  2 (k) Extract from minutes of British Trade Union Congress. 1984. Mr. Fred Burdern (head of the Federation of Supporters Clubs) proposing motion of no confidence in the Government.

  Brothers, I put it to you plainly. This is more than just a motion of no-confidence we are debating. We’ve already put on record our determination not to recognize this law. But it seems to me to follow that if you don’t recognize the law, you don’t recognize the law-givers.

  Brothers, if we pass this motion, it means more than we just want the buggers out. It means that if the buggers don’t get out, then as far as we’re concerned, this country’s without a government and we’ll bloody well have to govern ourselves! (N.B. Motion passed nem. con.)

  Chapter 6

  John Caldercote had put on weight and the light brown worsted suit that he loaned to Whitey hung round him like a collapsed soufflé.

  His extra weight had not prevented him from moving with an urgency just short of panic when he realized the implications of what he’d found at Ramsey House.

  “Not your wife!” he’d kept on repeating. “Reff me! Not your wife!”

  The girl had recovered from her faint, realized her ‘rescuer’ had been won over to the opposition, and withdrew into a terrified silence.

  “She must be a plant. All these years. Oh Christ, what a lot that explains!”

  Caldercote had tied her up so brutally that Whitey had protested. />
  “She’s lucky,” retorted the angry man. “The Jays will be furious I didn’t kill her. Christ, and to think I went rushing round like the bearer of love-tidings to tell her you were back in town.”

  “You knew?”

  “Infiltration works both ways.”

  There had been no question in Caldercote’s mind but that he had to get out. They had driven furiously to his flat where he had parked the car for a few minutes while he went in to collect a few important papers and also some clothes for Whitey. Then a quick ’phone call. A risk, he admitted, but what the hell? It was possible they were being trailed already, and he needed instructions.

  “From who?” asked Whitey, bewildered.

  “You don’t know. Things have come a long way since we got you out, Whitey. In a way, that was almost the start.”

  “You were in on that?”

  “Of course. It was after that that the Jays began to appear. I’ve stayed on the surface, fooling everybody so I reckoned. But when Audrey or whatever her name is turned up, well, I sniffed around for a few months, then casually made contact.”

  “But for God’s sake, you’d never seen her before.”

  “Exactly. Nobody had. We read that his young wife had been brutally sacrificed by the traitor Singleton in his attempts to escape. We checked on the hospital. She was there. After a while, she became visitable and we sent someone in to take a look. It was the girl in the flat, no doubt. And she’s been patched up from gunshot wounds. I’ve seen the scars.”

  “Oh yes,” said Whitey neutrally.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. But five years is a long time, Whitey, and what’s it matter now anyway? When we were convinced she was with us, we tried to get her out to join you. But things went wrong. We lost half a dozen men. She must have set it up herself, the bitch! After that she said she didn’t want out, didn’t want anyone else killed on her behalf! And she made a special thing of asking that you shouldn’t be told about her. Your new life, your protests on the outside, these were too important to jeopardize. Christ, she had me crying nearly!”

  “And Audrey?”

  “Died in hospital, I suppose. And some bright reffer got the notion of playing a substitute.”

  They relapsed into silence. The car they were in was weaving a complicated web around North London. Its licence plate did not permit it to move outside certain clearly defined metropolitan limits, but at least they could make sure they were not being followed within that area. The towers of Wembley Stadium were visible from time to time and once they found themselves moving steadily down Olympic Way towards the huge structure itself. The dull red Athletic banners fluttered gently from every flagpole and on the steps leading up to the stadium the usual groups of strikers and supporters were standing. Whitey held his breath till the car turned away and left them behind.

  “Tell me,” said Whitey. “How long have you been running these, what do you call them, Jays?”

  Caldercote laughed.

  “You flatter me. I don’t run them. They run me. I was approached very discreetly, about four years ago. I’d thought I was a real counter-revolutionary after your escape. But I was beginning to realize there wasn’t any counter revolution. Just a few individuals making a lot of noise.”

  “And now?”

  “We still make a lot of noise, but not with our mouths. Our people aren’t the only ones who’ve been taken out.”

  “On Christ.” Whitey stared glumly out of the side window. They were passing down a street of mean terraced houses. No one was in sight. Only an occasional dog or rat moved behind the piles of uncollected rubbish.

  “I thought that violence and terror were what you were fighting against,” he observed neutrally.

  “What else? But it takes a diamond to cut a diamond. And the pen is only mightier than the sword till someone chops your nib off.”

  “Is that so? Well, at least I’m glad to see you haven’t forgotten how to hide the truth in metaphor.”

  John stabbed down angrily on the accelerator and the car surged forward through an amber light.

  “You can be smug, Whitey. You’ve been out of it for five years, playing at real journalism. It works if the system lets it work, that’s true. I’ve read some of your pieces that have been smuggled in. They’ve been good, very good. Only, never forget that if anybody’s caught reading them over here, they’ll be yussed away so fast they won’t have time to crap themselves through terror!”

  “Steady,” said Whitey. “Do they still have speed limits?”

  The car slowed down to a respectable pace once more.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “Hold it,” said Whitey. “You’re certain you’ve got some where safe to take me? It wouldn’t be anywhere Miss Nancy Mays knew about, would it?”

  “I doubt it,” said John. “It’s somewhere even I don’t know about.”

  They drove swiftly west now, changing cars three times as they reached licensing limits. Restriction had already begun to exist five years earlier, but they had developed considerably since Whitey’s departure. At each limit, they got out, moved quickly into the next car and drove on. The abandoned car was driven away behind them, but only once did Whitey catch a glimpse of the exchange driver, a nondescript youth wound round with an Athletic scarf and looking like a thousand other supporters.

  “We work on two levels,” explained John. “There are those of us who have a position in the overground. And there’s the true underground, those who either through choice or necessity work at it full time. The two levels are linked, of course, but we only know how to use the links. An undergrounder can never betray the identity of an overgrounder, nor an over-grounder betray the location of an underground hide-out.”

  “So Nancy couldn’t know where we’re going?”

  “Right. But she did know about me, which is why I’m going with you.”

  “Why the panic?”

  “When they find her, they’re not going to muck about. Before, they were happy to pick us off one by one, trying not to excite too much suspicion. Now there’ll be one great sweep. I’ve sent the word out, but it won’t reach everybody in time.”

  A thoughtful silence followed.

  “Because of me,” said Whitey finally.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” said John. “Nearly there.”

  There turned out to be Oxford. It seemed a rather too obvious place for a centre of subversion, thought Whitey uneasily. If he were in charge of the anti-guerrilla team, Oxford would be one of the first spots to be cleaned out. It was at the far edge of Athletic territory, close to the border of the Midlands area run by Wanderers. This proximity in itself was no great advantage to the Underground; if there was any single thing the Four Clubs who ruled most of England were agreed on, it was a common policy against subversives. Wanderers Supporters might be reluctant to hand Whitey back to the jurisdiction of Athletic, but only because they would like the pleasure of dealing with him themselves.

  For all that, Oxford and places like it did have something of the feel of frontier towns, a restlessness and wildness, which could cover a man’s passage very quickly. And in addition the presence of the University was still felt, though like all other institutions of higher education, it had been formally dissolved eight years earlier. The colleges remained as Supporters’ Clubs, but they still attracted mainly the young; and curiously the traditional medieval town and gown tensions, moribund for many centuries, had started back to life as the University died. The colleges regarded themselves as a kind of Athletic Red Guard. Their centre was All Souls (hence the local sobriquet of ‘assoles’, for the young Supporters); and rampaging bands of these assoles roamed the streets, ready to yuss anybody whose loyalty to the Club did not appear as absolute as their own.

  Thus in Oxford and places like it, the kind of social stasis which existed in most large centres of population was never achieved. And this in itself made it a place to look at with considerable suspici
on, from everybody’s point of view, thought Whitey uneasily.

  They drove uninterrupted across Magdalen Bridge and parked in the High opposite Queen’s. ‘Parked’ was perhaps too precise a word. John just stopped the car, got out and started walking briskly towards Carfax. Whitey had to trot to catch up with him.

  “What happens now?” he panted.

  “We’ll be contacted,” said John cheerily.

  They were, almost immediately. As they passed All Souls, a small group of Supporters, sitting on the pavement, rose, crossed the road and fell into step alongside them.

  “Where’s your colours, squire?” enquired one of them, thrusting his sallow, unshaven face very close to Whitey’s. John thrust him away with an open-handed push.

  “In the wash,” he said looking down at his hand in disgust. “You ought to try it some time.”

  “A joker!” said the stubbly Supporter in mock-awe. “A laugh-a-minute man, I say I say, entertainer of thousands. I’ve picked myself a reffing clown!”

  They were passing the end of the Turl. Whitey was beginning to feel very unhappy. To get involved with these boys could mean more than just a physical yussing. He had heard tales of people subjected to a twenty-four hour examination by a so-called disciplinary committee. The pressures so exerted could bring even a genuine Supporter to an admission of disloyalty. Whitey felt himself in no fit state either mentally or physically to withstand such an ordeal. But John showed no inclination to be conciliatory.

  “Keep it up son,” he mocked. “You might make the reserves some day if you grow up and one or two other miracles happen. Meanwhile, why don’t you run along like a nice little assole?”

  Whitey felt himself seized from behind, saw John grabbed likewise, screamed as his arms were forced up towards his shoulder blades and made no effort to resist as he was bundled across the road, up the Turl and through a door into Jesus College. Once inside there was no pause in his precipitous progress. He was rushed across a quadrangle, through another door, up a narrow flight of stairs on which he stumbled several times only to be wrenched upright with muscle-tearing force, and finally through yet another door which this time led into a room. His arms were released and the pain of their reverting to their normal position was almost as bad as the pain which preceded it. He sank on his knees and rocked gently to and fro, some ridiculous pride making him bite back the groans which were trying to force a way out.