A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  George cuffed him. "Come back to me when you've some answers."

  * * *

  Major Swart resented having any more of his time taken up with the Carew affair. The file was hardly worth the effort of couriering it from Pretoria on the overnight 747 of South African Airways. Carew was a home desk problem, and following up stray ends was unrewarding work for a major of security police. The woman had seen him off. He'd have thought she'd have spilled her heart out given the chance to save a man from the rope. A week earlier he thought he had placed her in the game. All by leg work and tracking back in the files of Somerset House. Before her divorce Mrs Hilda Perry had been Mrs Hilda Curwen. She had been married to a James Curwen. James Curwen was his man, until he had driven down to the Hampshire village which was listed as the woman's address at the time of her marriage. He'd had a photograph from Pretoria, taken in the gaol but especially so as not to look like a police shot. He had found three men who remembered James Curwen in a pub by the cress beds. A retired postman, the man who kept the village grocery store, and the vicar. He had said he was the London representative of a South African based legal firm. He had said he was trying to trace this James Curwen because there was money left to him. He showed them all the photograph, and he had seen each one of them shake his head and heard each one of them say the photograph was not that of James Curwen. Wrong face, wrong physique.

  So, he hadn't linked Hilda Perry to James Carew, and it didn't have a high priority from Pretoria, and there was a limit on his time.

  A higher priority was the man who had come in from Lusaka.

  If there was a matter that could make Major Swart emotionally ill, it was that the United Kingdom, on top of all its cant about the suppression of terrorism, could allow African National Congress murderers free rein to visit their chummies in the London office.

  He thought he might get to see the bastard from Lusaka that evening, not certain, but a good chance.

  * • *

  In the late afternoon Jack came into the office.

  Janice was making up her face over the typewriter, her mirror propped against the ribbon. She waved to indicate the paper she had left on his desk, too busy to speak.

  Nicholas Villiers had gone home, so had Lucille.

  He recognised most of the names and numbers that he was to call back. The people with the chimney in Streatham, a good one for George and he'd get his photo in the local rag. The brewery who were pulling down the Bunch of Grapes in Addington, a ball and chain job. The clearance of a small council house development at Earlsfield where the precast concrete units were disintegrating and it was cheaper for the local authority to demolish than to repair . . .Duggie Arkwright and a number were half way down the list, and again at the bottom of the list.

  It was Duggie's girl who picked up the phone, Anthea.

  She sounded high. She dropped the telephone, and he heard Duggie Arkwright curse her. Jack introduced himself.

  "You meant what you said?"

  "Yes, I want to . . ."

  "Open phone, priggy."

  Jack swallowed hard. And this was London. He felt juvenile, naked.

  "Same place as we had a drink, same time - we'll go on."

  Jack wanted to ask who they would meet, where they would be going, but the line was dead.

  He rang his mother. He wouldn't be in for supper. He'd be back late. The habit was catching, no explanations.

  Next he called Sandham's number at the Foreign Office.

  He wanted to hear about Sandham's meeting, what the new information was.

  He was told Mr Sandham had gone home.

  There was no reply at the home number.

  "I'm dying for a drink," Janice told him. "They're open now."

  lack said, "It's the nice thing about pubs these days, that a girl can go in and have a drink on her own."

  He settled back to his list, the people with the spare chimney and the brewery and the local authority. The chimney people had gone home, so had the local authority, but he had a good talk with the brewery.

  • • •

  The Prime Minister was obsessive about "banana skins", and over the years the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service had had more than their share of disasters.

  It had been only too often the Prime Minister's misfortune to get to the despatch box in a gloating House of Commons and wriggle in the mess. With this Director General the Prime Minister felt secure. The confidence was reciprocated with an all-consuming loyalty.

  The Director General was "clean" in the matter of James Carew. He had been transferred from a diplomatic career the previous year. He had come in after Carew's arrest and trial.

  The file on Carew revealed ample evidence of an approach to intelligence gathering that was provenly dangerous.

  The man's career was a joke, a pathetic confidence trick.

  Colonel Fordham should have been put up against a wall and shot for what he had done for Carew. At the very least Carew should have been wound in the morning after Fordham's retirement. The file was horrifying reading.

  Colonel Fordham had transferred from the regular army to the Service. He had recruited his batman for leg work, a man without higher education. In due course a small operation had been run into Albania. Albania was the most irrelevant corner of mountains on the European continent.

  Colonel Fordham had sent this devoted but second-rate individual into Albania on a mission based on rotten information. The Soviet Union scowling at Yugoslavia might do a Hungary or a Czechoslovakia, and then N.A.T.O. might deploy troops and armour in North West Greece, and if N.A.T.O. were up on the Greek Albanian border then they just might need to know what was on the far side of this most closed and guarded frontier. Colonel Fordham had sent this man into Albania for a bit of map reading and reconnaissance, and to see which bridges would carry 55-ton tanks.

  As if he had never heard of satellite photography.

  In the file were the minutes of the meeting where the mission was agreed. It wouldn't have happened in the Director General's day. There was a brief paper on the aims of the mission. There was a telex, decoded, from the mission's forward headquarters in Corfu reporting that radio contact had been lost. And the poor bugger sat in prison there for ten years.

  No record of a minute to Downing Street. Alec Douglas Home, Wilson, Heath, none of them ever heard a whisper of it. And of course the Albanians had never known who they had, right to the end, because Curwen had never confessed anything in ten years. It had ended shabbily with the payment of £100,000 from the service contingency fund, into a Venezuelan bank account.

  Colonel Basil had brought his man home, and about bloody time.

  The Director General came to four sheets of lined paper that might have been extracted from the centre of a school exercise book. The writing was close, joined up, in ball point. At the top, in capitals and underlined, was SPAC

  LABOUR CAMP 303. In the ruled margin, written with a different pen but in the same handwriting, he read "Col Fordham, I thought this might be important to you in case anyone else of our team ends up in the place, Respectfully, Jeez".

  It was a factual account of life in the Spac labour camp.

  It was compiled without a trace of self pity. It described the work of the camp - the mining of pyrites from which copper is taken - eight hours a day and six days a week, and a seventh day if the week's target had not been reached. He read of 10 foot high barbed-wire fences and guards with searchlights and attack dogs. Unheated concrete barrack blocks where more than three hundred inmates would sleep on straw mattresses on three tier bunks. Of a diet that hardly ever included protein, fresh vegetables or fruit. Of the beatings and the punishment cells. Of finger nails ripped off with plumbing pliers. He read of strikes, riots, reprisal executions.

  And every day of the ten years this poor bastard had nurtured the assumption that the Secret Intelligence Service was working for his release. It was a disgrace. He tidied the faded sheets of paper.

 
Anon, the legman had been brought home, privately feted as a hero.

  But he'd lost his wife, lost his son, lost the best ten years of his life, so the agent had been given a warm berth in South Africa. Controlled from London, working for Colonel Fordham.

  The telephone rang.

  He thought the man who had done ten years of his life in Spac was indeed second rate. He thought also that the man must have a near limitless well of courage.

  He picked up the telephone. He said to send them in.

  He put the Curwen/Carew file to the side of his desk.

  • * *

  Perhaps Duggie believed him. Extraordinary that priggy Curwen should have sought him out to set up a meeting with the African National Congress, not just any old Joe there but the military wing, and should have said he worked in the explosives racket. Explosives weren't a joke. Explosives and detonators and time delay fuses were serious business.

  They left the pub. Then went in Jack's car, north up the Essex Road. It was dark and raining.

  "You scared?"

  "No," Jack said. "Not now."

  "Perhaps you should be."

  ''This isn't South Africa yet."

  "It's a war. We're fighting to destroy them and they're fighting to survive. Point is, we're winning, but that doesn't mean they'll stop fighting. What's at stake is whether South Africa is governed by the representatives of nearly thirty million people, or whether it's run by nearly five million who happen by accident of birth and breeding to have a different different pigmentation of skin . . . Jack, if you're getting into South African resistance politics, if you're into explosives then, my opinion, you ought to be a bit scared''

  Jack said curtly, "I've my own reasons for getting involved, they're good enough for me."

  "Learn first that you don't talk on open phones. Learn fast that they can get a hell of a lot rougher than phone taps.

  There's bombs in London and Paris and Zimbabwe and Botswana and Swazi and Maputo. Big bombs down to letter bombs. They've got infiltrators. They pay burglurs to turn over resistance offices right here in safe old London."

  "Got it." Even as his father had. He had known what was for real. , , .

  "These people you're going to meet don t piss about, not the sort of man you're going to meet. Fighting repression in South Africa is their whole lives."

  "They'll trust me."

  Duggie noticed the assurance. He gave me instructions.

  Right turn, then a left, then straight on over the lights, another right.

  They walked across the poorly-lit playground of a junior school.

  There were posters up on the playground fences to adver-tise the meeting. Big d e a l . . . It wasn't the Albert Hall, nor the Royal Festival Hall. It was a junior school in Stoke Newington. ,

  There was music beating out through the open doors of the gymnasium. Through the door Jack could see the lines of chairs They stopped at the door. Duggie turned, hand out, and Jack gave him two pound coins. It bought them admission and a photocopied sheet detailing the evening's programme.

  "I'll start you off, then you're on your own."

  Jack looked around him. There were posters and flags fastened to the wall bars. There were pictures of Mandela and Tambo. There were the slogans of the Anti-Apartheid campaign. There were a hundred people. He thought he must stand out, a fly in a tea cup. There were eyes watching him. The uniform was jeans and sweaters and shawls and long skirts.

  "You said it," Duggie chuckled. "You said you knew what you were getting into. Now you find out."

  * * *

  The apple of Major Swart's attention was Jacob Thiroko.

  The Black lounged at the back of the hall away from the low stage and out of sight of the door. He leaned against the gymnasium's vaulting horse. His eyes drooped, as if he was still exhausted from the long flight out of Lusaka.

  Of course he would be cold after the Central African heat.

  Around him were a clutch of his European-based comrades.

  Swart wore patched denim trousers. He had not shaved that day, his cheeks were rough below the tinted glasses.

  His hair was brushed up. Before coming he had rubbed his hands in the earth of his office pot plants, getting the stains into his palm and under his fingernails. He sat in the last-but-one row, unremarkable and unobserved.

  There was a young man at the doorway, in a suit, staring round him. He saw the man who was with him. He recognised him. Douglas William Arkwright, 27 years old, unemployed, unpaid worker at Anti-Apartheid, verbose and useless. He saw Arkwright speak in the young man's ear and then lead him the length of the hall to stand respectfully on the fringe of the group surrounding Thiroko.

  Swart was interested. He couldn't hear what was said, but he saw the young man in the suit shake hands with Jacob Thiroko.

  * * •

  It was for Jack to start. There was casual amusement in Thiroko's expression. Jack saw a handsome man, soft chocolate skinned, mahogany eyed. He couldn't tell the age, anything between middle thirties and late forties.

  He was Jack Curwen and he lived in Churchill Close, and he paid into a private medical scheme, and he voted to maintain the status quo. He was Jack Curwen standing in a run down school, shaking hands with a member of a revolutionary movement committed to the overthrow of a government half the world away. Preposterous enough to make him laugh, but his father had three weeks to live.

  "I was brought here to meet someone from the African National Congress."

  "There are many of us here, Comrade." A soft, swaying voice.

  "I wanted to meet someone from the military wing of the A.N.C."

  "Then you should be in South Africa where they are fighting the freedom war."

  "I was told that if I came here I would meet someone from the Umkonto we Sizwe wing of the A.N.C."

  "There is no war in London. The war is in our homeland."

  Jack moved close to Thiroko.

  "My name is Jack Curwen. I am an expert in explosives.

  I have to meet, and urgently, someone from the military wing."

  "Perhaps in a month such a person . . . "

  "I don't have until next month. I've two days at most to meet someone from the military wing."

  "What sort of person?" Thiroko's face was a mask.

  "Someone who can make decisions and see them through."

  "I doubt I am that person. There is no one from the military wing at a meeting such as this."

  "I have to talk to you."

  "You said that you wanted the military . . . "

  Jack cut in. "I told you I don't have time to be pissed about. I can tell you how you are different from these creeps round you. Different face, different eyes, different hands."

  "How different?"

  "Different because they are a soldier's."

  "Perhaps you are mistaken."

  From behind Jack there was a burst of applause. He turned to see the stage filling.

  "In this room you are the only man who is a soldier."

  "Who are you, Mr Jack Curwen?"

  "My father is going to hang in South Africa in three weeks. My father is an activist of the A.N.C."

  The mask fell. Astonishment flooded Thiroko's face.

  "Jeez Carew is my father."

  * * *

  The applause grew. The audience stamped their feet as they stood and clapped the principal speakers of the evening as they climbed onto the stage. Major Swart could no longer look behind him. He had seen the young man and Thiroko deep in talk. He had to stand with the rest and beat his palms together. He heard the chairwoman of the meeting coo her gratitude that their meeting was honoured by the presence of a distinguished guest from the A.N.C. headquarters whose name for security reasons could not be given out. He saw Thiroko going forward. The bastard didn't look a fit man. When the audience settled down, Swart looked behind him.

  There was no sign of the young stranger.

  His eyes darted to the door. He saw the back of Douglas Arkwrig
ht's duffel coat disappearing.

  * * *

  He sat with his mother in the living room. Sam was upstairs, in bed before Jack had returned. He held cupped in his two hands the mug of coffee she had made for him. His hands were rock still.

  "My mind's made up. I'm going to South Africa."

  "To see your Dad?"

  "Yes."

  "I've told you, Sam'll help you with the airfare."

  "Not his business, it's mine."

  "What does he mean to you?"

  "As much as if I'd known him all my life."

  His mother held a square of lace, dabbed it into her eyes.

  "Will you have the strength when you go to see him, when you have to say goodbye to him?"

  "It's not just to see him, Mum. I'm going there to bring my father home."

  7

  Janice and Lucille stared at the open office door.

  Jack was on the phone. He had spun his chair round so that he could rummage into his filing cabinet as he talked.

  He didn't see Duggie Arkwright. He was a disaster, wearing his oldest patched jeans and a scarlet t-shirt under a skimpy denim top. He saw Jack, and whistled. Jack spun, saw who it was, and with a brisk apology finished his phone call.

  Jack stood and muttered something to the girls about being out for most of the day. He took his coat. He felt their questions on his back and ignored them.

  They went out of the office and into the mild morning air.

  When Jack looked back from the pavement at the office window he saw that Nicholas Villiers and the girls had their noses pressed to the panes.

  "You said you were going to ring," Jack said.

  "The kiddie was crying in the night. I got up, I was holding the kiddie near the window and I saw this guy on the far side of the road, covering our place. The kiddie had a bad night. I was up again a couple of hours later, he was still there. I didn't go back to bed, I just stayed in a chair. Each time I went to the window he was there."

  "Have you ever been under surveillance before?"