The Enemy Within (inspector carlyle)

by James Craig

  The Enemy Within

  ( Inspector Carlyle )

  James Craig

  James Craig

  The Enemy Within

  The enemy within is just as dangerous to our liberty. . It is a battle that we must win.

  Margaret Thatcher

  They were skilled and courageous men who had built the prosperity of Britain. They were treated like criminals. .

  Tony Benn

  ONE

  Clowne, South Yorkshire, June 1984

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘That would be lovely, thank you.’

  It was nice to have company, whatever the circumstances. Beatrice Slater poured a cup of Earl Grey into one of her best bone china tea cups and handed it to the young man perched nervously on the edge of her sofa.

  ‘Would you like some milk and sugar?’

  ‘Black is fine, thank you.’ Martin Palmer patted his already expansive waistline and smiled sadly. ‘My mother has had me on a strict diet for almost a month.’ He made a face. ‘I’m supposed to cut out the dairy products wherever possible and have lots of green vegetables.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She thinks I need to lose almost four stone.’

  ‘Gosh, that’s a lot, isn’t it?’

  Palmer stared morosely into his tea. ‘What she doesn’t understand is that I’m big-boned, just like my Dad.’

  ‘It’s an ambitious target,’ Beatrice agreed. ‘How are you doing, so far?’

  Martin grinned sheepishly. ‘Depending on which scales I use, I’ve either lost one pound or gained two.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I know,’ the boy groaned. ‘That’s why the diet is supposed to run until Christmas.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ the old lady said, with feeling. ‘What a shame.’

  ‘Yes,’ the young man looked down at his belly sorrowfully, as if unable to understand quite how it had come to be there, ‘it’s terrible.’

  ‘Christmas. .’ Beatrice mused, conscious of the sunlight streaming into the conservatory. Today was just about the first nice day of the year, so far. Summer remained little more than a hopeful smudge on the horizon. ‘That’s rather a long way off, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite a way, yes,’ Martin agreed, eyeing the plate of Mr Kipling French Fancies that his host had unthinkingly placed on the table between them.

  ‘I’m sure that one won’t hurt, dear,’ Beatrice said, following his gaze. ‘After all, they are rather small.’

  A glimmer of hope appeared in the boy’s eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s still plenty of time.’

  Martin looked at her blankly.

  ‘For the diet, I mean.’ Pouring a cup of tea for herself, Beatrice added a dash of milk, stirring the mixture with a teaspoon.

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, you’re quite right.’ Placing his cup carefully on the coffee table, the young fellow reached over and grabbed a cake. ‘The pink ones are my favourite,’ he explained, ‘along with the chocolate ones.’

  ‘Have one of each,’ Beatrice smiled, taking a sip of her tea. ‘What your mum doesn’t know won’t hurt her.’

  ‘I’m not so fond of the yellow ones,’ he reflected, as the entire cake disappeared into his maw, ‘but I’ll eat them if that’s all that’s left.’

  Finishing his tea, Martin placed his cup and saucer carefully back on the tray and sat back on the sofa, wondering about the wisdom of eating that fourth French Fancy. Ah well, he thought, it’s too late to worry about that now. What was it that Shakespeare said? What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief. It was something like that, anyway. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he should have kept on with his English studies. He could have become a teacher, or maybe found a nice job in publishing. That would have been ideal: long lunches and home before five. Something more suited to his temperament than his current line of employ.

  Looking round the room, he had to admit that the old girl had a very nice place. Her redbrick Victorian villa was at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, in a small village half an hour from the motorway. After travelling up from London, he’d had some trouble finding the place, having to ask directions twice. On both occasions, the people he spoke to knew exactly who Beatrice Slater was; the old girl was clearly something of a local celebrity, which was rather disconcerting, given what he had to do.

  The house itself was too big for her on her own but the atmosphere was both comfortable and relaxed. It reminded Martin of home. Or at least, home when he was a kid. These days, things were different. He knew that his parents were keen to see the back of him, particularly now that he had a job, but Martin didn’t see the point of leaving the spacious family home in Finchley for the kind of flea-ridden bedsit he would be able to afford on his paltry salary as an entry-level intelligence analyst.

  Not wanting to think about imminent homelessness, he reached over and sniffed the bouquet of white roses that had been placed in a vase next to the sofa. ‘Aah!’ He turned to Beatrice and smiled. ‘They’re lovely.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the old lady beamed, ‘you’re very kind.’

  ‘Not at all; I like flowers. These are very nice indeed.’

  ‘I grow them myself.’ She gestured towards the garden which stretched from the back of the house for maybe a hundred yards before giving on to farmers’ fields. ‘I’ve been a member of the Amateur Rose Breeders’ Association for more than fifty years now.’ Martin nodded. Beatrice guessed he must be in his early twenties, but sitting on her sofa, with his tie at half-mast and crumbs around his mouth, he looked about twelve.

  A boy sent to do a man’s job.

  ‘My mum likes her garden, too, although ours is a lot smaller than yours.’

  ‘Yorkshire is famous for its roses,’ Beatrice explained. ‘The white rose of York dates back to the first Duke of York in the fourteenth century.’

  ‘Yes,’ Martin nodded. History wasn’t his strong point and he was already feeling hungry again. There was one French fancy left on the plate, a yellow one. Not ideal, but better than nothing. He couldn’t grab it, could he?

  Beatrice pointed to the vase. ‘Those ones are called Margaret Thatcher.’

  The boy frowned. ‘After the prime minister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His eyes narrowed as his brain tried to compute this latest piece of information. ‘But I thought you hated her?’

  Beatrice placed her cup on the table and gave the young man a steely glare. ‘“Hate” is a very strong word, Mr Palmer,’ she said primly, ‘particularly when you get to my age.’ She was conscious that she was slipping into schoolteacher mode, going back to the days when she tried to instil some interest in mathematics amongst the flotsam and jetsam passing through the third year in King Ecgbert’s school in Sheffield. It wasn’t necessarily her most friendly demeanour, but at least this lesson would be short. ‘I don’t hate Mrs Thatcher. Apart from anything else, I have never met the lady. But I don’t particularly like some of the things that she says and I don’t like some of the things that she does.’

  ‘Ye-es. .’ Settling in for a long lecture, her guest kept his eyes firmly on the last cake on the plate.

  ‘I look at all the conflict and violence taking place right now and I wonder just why it is taking place.’

  ‘Well-’

  ‘And I wonder if we had more intelligent, thoughtful political leaders we might not be able to avoid it. All this shameful nonsense about the miners being “the enemy within”, it is crass and unhelpful, the language of a woman spoiling for a fight.’ On a roll now, conscious of her elevated heart rate, she glared at young master Palmer, ‘and using useful lackeys like you to do her bidding.’

  ‘But-’


  ‘I am sure you will disagree with me. Indeed, you are paid to do so. But the strikers are just normal people with families to support. They are the exactly the same as you and me.’

  Speak for yourself, grandma, Palmer mused.

  ‘It seems incredible to me that such a basic truth can threaten the thought police so much.’

  Palmer blushed. ‘I’m hardly the thought police, Mrs Slater.’

  ‘So why are you here then?’ she shot back. ‘What have I done that demands this visit to try and shut me up?’

  Palmer shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘No one is trying to shut you up.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Slater said gently. The boy clearly wasn’t up to much in the debating stakes. ‘As long as I stay within the law, I am allowed to express my opinions. Is that not right?’

  Tearing his eyes from Mr Kipling’s bounty, the young man looked up at his host, nodding furiously. ‘Of course,’ he stammered.

  A sly smile drifted across her face. ‘You believe in free speech, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, why, precisely, have your masters in the security services sent you up here to try and threaten me?’

  TWO

  A loud extended fart came from the prostrate body in the nearby bed. Police constable John Carlyle — badge number V253 — turned away, hoping that the smell would not reach him.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘Huh?’ Irritated by yet another interruption, Carlyle looked up from his copy of the New Musical Express and scowled. He had just come off a fourteen-hour shift, standing around on a patch of waste ground just up the road in South Yorkshire, doing fuck all other than eyeballing a bunch of striking miners. All he wanted to do now was read his newspaper, get some food and have a kip.

  Ignoring his colleague’s tetchiness, PC Dominic Silver offered him a small, brown plastic cup containing a nasty-looking dark liquid that was as close to coffee as you could get at RAF Syerston, their current home.

  ‘George Orwell,’ he mused, ‘spot on.’

  ‘Mm.’ Taking a sip of the coffee, Carlyle winced before trying to return to the article about Aztec Camera.

  ‘Here we are,’ Dom persisted, ‘it’s 1984 and us poor sods are doing the dirty work of The Party and its totalitarian ideology.’

  ‘Mm.’ Carlyle eyed his mate suspiciously. Even after a double shift, Dom was giving off the kind of nervous energy that suggested that he’d been doing too much amphetamine sulphate again. That or the coffee was proving more stimulating than he first thought. He took another sip and concluded that it was more likely that Dom was still speeding his tits off.

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  You’d better bloody believe it, Carlyle thought. Letting his gaze drift past the cheery speed freak, he surveyed the massive aeroplane hangar that was providing their temporary accommodation. More than three hundred police officers billeted in a space the size of Earls Court Arena. Bussed up from London to do picket-line duty, the officers had been living cheek by jowl for only a few days but already it felt like an eternity.

  The place smelt of damp and body odour. From somewhere nearby came the sound of Bob Geldof spewing out ‘Rat Trap’ from an outsized tape deck. Surveying the scene, Carlyle tried to remember why he had signed up to join the police force in the first place, but his mind was a blank. It was barely a year since he’d joined the Metropolitan Police but, already, it felt like a lifetime ago.

  ‘And to think,’ Dom said airily, ‘that it was written way back in 1949.’

  Trust me, Carlyle thought ruefully, to get stuck with the only fucking plod in this whole damn place who knows the difference between George Orwell and George Best. Apart from me, of course. Smiling, he closed the NME, folded it in half and tossed it on the camp bed. The thoughts of Roddy Frame would just have to wait. ‘It’s not exactly what we signed up for, is it?’

  ‘Nah.’ Dom pulled up a folding chair and sat down next to the bed. ‘That’s the thing though, once you sign on the dotted line they can do what the fuck they like with you.’

  Carlyle took a further tentative sip of his coffee. ‘I signed up to join the police, though, not the bloody army. They didn’t mention anything about this at Hendon, did they?’

  ‘Pff.’ Dom made a face. ‘What do you expect? Training’s always a pile of wank. Anyway, it was never the case that we were going to walk out of there and — bam! — ’ he waved his arms in the air, spilling coffee over the concrete floor, ‘we’re in an episode of The Sweeney.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But still. .’

  Their conversation was petering out when Carlyle caught sight of Charlie Ross motoring towards them like he had a rocket up his arse. Ross, a veteran sergeant, had direct charge of the thirty or so officers — including Carlyle and Silver — that had been brought up from West London earlier in the week. An aggressive Scot old enough to be Carlyle’s father, Charlie was delighted to have found himself parachuted into the middle of a full-scale scrap at this late stage of his career. As well as guaranteed aggro, the strike meant enough overtime to pay for his next two-week holiday in Lanzarote many times over.

  Carlyle tried to avoid making eye contact with the hyperactive Jock midget, but it was too late. ‘Oh shit. .’ he mumbled.

  ‘Huh?’ Dom looked round. But it was too late; the predatory sergeant was already upon them.

  ‘You two,’ Ross snarled, toying with his Village People-style biker moustache, ‘come with me.’

  ‘But sarge,’ Dom protested, ‘we’ve only just got back.’

  ‘And we haven’t had anything to eat yet,’ Carlyle whined.

  Ross’s eyes narrowed. ‘Shut up and do as you’re told. Grab what you can from the canteen and meet me outside in ten minutes.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Carlyle asked, getting to his feet with the utmost reluctance.

  ‘Just fucking move,’ Ross growled, already looking round the room for other volunteers for his little project. ‘Anyone seen Miller?’

  Urgh. Carlyle and Dom exchanged a knowing glance. What ever fun Charlie Ross had in store for the two of them, the involvement of Trevor Miller would only make it worse. Maybe five years older than Carlyle and Dom, Miller was a mouthy, annoying git from Peckham, a fat slob with the IQ of a dead amoeba. As far as anyone could tell, Trevor’s abilities were strictly limited to eating, farting and wanking, not necessarily in that order. It was clear to anyone who ever met him that Miller was the kind of guy who would never rise above constable, however long he spent on The Job.

  ‘I saw him heading for the bogs a while ago,’ Don grinned, ‘with a copy of Razzle under his arm.’

  Now it was the sergeant’s turn to look uncomfortable. ‘Jesus H Christ on a bike,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Trevor likes his porn.’

  ‘The boy’s an animal.’

  ‘Yes, sarge,’ Dom grinned.

  Ross glared at him, shaking his head.

  ‘After all, it’s the only sex he’s ever going to get. . unless he manages to catch a sheep.’

  Ross held up a hand. ‘Enough!’ For a moment, he contemplated his options. There was some more moustache scratching and then the sergeant came to a decision. ‘All right, you two will do.’ Not wishing to engage in any further conversation on the matter, he began moving towards the exit. ‘I see you in ten minutes. And make sure you wrap up warm. You’ll be out for the rest of the night.’

  Fuck. Carlyle shot Dom another helpless look. Just why had he chosen this fucking job?

  THREE

  Sitting in the front passenger seat, Charlie Ross tapped the dashboard of the Triumph Toledo with the fingers of his right hand. ‘This will do us fine.’

  The driver slowed down but didn’t stop. ‘Are you sure, sir?’ he asked in a thick provincial accent Carlyle didn’t recognize. Looking through the windscreen, he gestured towards the wasteland to their left. ‘There’s fuck all around here.’

  Well spotted, Carlyle thought glumly. Sittin
g in the back, next to Dom, he tried to ignore the rumbling of his stomach. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine he was back home in Fulham. It didn’t work, not even for a second.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Ross said firmly, ‘just let us out here.’

  ‘Okay.’ The driver brought the vehicle to a gentle halt. ‘There you go.’

  The rubble-strewn waste ground was about the size of a dozen football pitches. It was an area that the three policemen had come to know well over the last few days. They stood there for hour after hour, as part of the thin blue line tasked with keeping the flying pickets at bay and ensuring that the hulking colliery about 400 yards from the main road remained open and operational. So far, the police had been successful. Coal was still being dug from the ground by those miners who were refusing to strike, albeit at a fraction of the usual rate.

  Less than four hours ago, maybe four hundred men had been milling about here, waiting for a fight that, this time, never materialized. Now, however, the last shift of the day had hurried home and the day’s protests had ended. The mine glowered in the twilight, its machinery silent, shut down for the night.

  Charlie Ross pushed open the passenger door. ‘Let’s go,’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘Out you get.’ Sliding out of his seat, he slammed the door and began walking away from the vehicle at a brisk pace.

  With the greatest reluctance, constables Silver and Carlyle pushed out of their seats after him. Barely had they closed the doors than the driver had conducted a brisk three-point turn and set off, heading for the safety of the RAF base. Watching the Triumph’s red tail lights disappearing into the distance, Carlyle looked around warily.

  ‘Bandit country,’ Dom sniffed.

  ‘Yeah,’ Carlyle nodded, ‘no sense in hanging about.’ Both of them knew well enough that any straggling officers caught by a band of roving strikers could expect, at the very least, a good kicking. In the last week alone, three officers had suffered minor assaults and one had been hospitalized with a broken leg.