98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Malindi,’ echoed Dad. I knew for certain Dad had never in his life heard of Malindi. But the way he said it at once suggested an endless succession of world-famous power-boat races whose course he followed annually as one who knows.

  Simmonds knew perfectly well he hadn’t heard of Malindi but went on, ‘I gather your machine is something quite special?’

  Dad’s back arched smugly as he adopted a fireside stance. ‘It’s not really a power boat. I design things a bit, you know ...’ Dad suddenly remembered that I knew he did nothing of the sort. What he did was tell Hale that he wanted something that would do this, and a little of that, and none of the other, and Hale rang up his friends, who all gave advice, and arrived at some sort of craft with an evil great engine at the back which through sheer, brute force could not avoid pushing the craft forward in vulgar impersonation of a boat.

  Afterwards I said to Simmonds: ‘You were lying about Malindi. You once went there for a dirty weekend and didn’t move once from the chalet.’

  ‘Still you got the boat. And I did move. We went swimming and nearly got eaten by crocodiles.’

  ‘In the sea?’

  ‘Sea-water crocodiles. — They are thought to have been invented by Enoch Powell.’

  NINE

  In the afternoon Simmonds took the boat along the coast, ready to show up at our agreed meeting point. This was a lagoon called Tyrant’s Bay — about three miles west of Bishops Bight. From inland you reached the bay via an old coach road that was reasonably out of range of Stergen’s house.

  We had made a rough plan. After dark we would go to a fix five miles out to sea, taking bearings off three lighthouses — two of them either side of Cardiff on the Welsh coast and the third on the Somerset coast north of Bristol. This would position us about where the harbourmaster had obtained radar readings. There had been two sitings on a Saturday so it seemed reasonable to expect action this night.

  From then on the programme was flexible. We might see a sub and we might not. We might learn what they were doing or we might not.

  There might even be a chance for me to board. If this happened, Simmonds was to beach the boat and get back fast to the aeroplane. We borrowed a Land-Rover for this purpose and I was using it during the afternoon for a detailed recce. On arrival at my father’s ‘estate’, Simmonds would take off and do a zigzag search of the sea area, with a view to either looking out for the sub if she surfaced or some sign of other traffic, such as a landing craft. We put out some lamps in the improvised landing field and took care to set the line so that the gap between the beech trees was well established. My father watched these preparations with lugubrious disapproval; only as he’d decided to be racially integrated (he was too pompous to go back on an attitude once he’d started out with it) he couldn’t very well complain. Simmonds, to him, was a new sort of black god. Just how long it would be before Dad grew tired of his new-found liberalism remained to be seen. It was useful in the meanwhile.

  We had until early on Monday morning to get through all this and return to London in time for the Little Man. That was assuming my ruse with the tape recorder worked. Louise was a capable woman and there was no cause to doubt her ability to bluff. Still, as she herself had pointed out, if Tim Fine came instead, and insisted on waiting until I’d finished in the bathroom, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  I drove cross-country to the Bight. In sunshine it was idyllic and I wondered how I had managed to feel so despondent about the landscape that other morning, when I’d first driven down overnight.

  It was the beginning of harvest time. On the lane leading from the main road I got caught in a traffic jam of tractors. There wasn’t room to pass in the bulky Land-Rover so we proceeded in slow procession. They thought I was a farmer too, so we all hailed each other and smiled and commented on the excellent weather for reaping. Ripe corn swished in a light breeze and you could see waves travelling along great fields stuffed with marvellous golden oats, as gusts sang through the power lines slung on kingsize pylons standing with their legs apart in the meadows. The nearer we crawled towards the nuclear power station the denser they became.

  I took a side lane and broke away from the convoy. Now I was heading towards a military airfield belonging to the Americans and I judged this to be directly above the maze of tunnels drilled underneath.

  This airfield had been one of the features marked on my father’s updated map and attracted my interest for its obvious tactical implications. It would be interesting now to see what was what.

  I parked the Land-Rover in a copse thick with sycamores which, apparently dissatisfied with being the same as less enterprising relatives, contrived to grow trunks which came out sideways from the ones that went straight up.

  Through the trees I could see the airfield. Nothing moved there. A parked Electra indicated, though, that the runway could accommodate fairly heavy machines. The plane had got the sun and me in a perfect angle, and a dazzling blaze of sunlight made it look as if a sheet of magnesium alloy had ignited there. Half-blinded, I couldn’t see very much else. But on towers at the perimeter were a series of radar dishes that were much too elaborate and large to perform the normal function of air traffic control. They puzzled me because of the steep angle at which they were elevated. Clearly their turrets could rotate through the full circle and track all sectors of the visible sky.

  That was when I noticed the band of children coming along the lane. They seemed to fit the setting well enough. Wild flowers were in profusion all along the hedges; skyblue-pink tinted the Bristol Channel and the painting before me was an impeccable canvas for anyone’s wall.

  Why, then, were the children so sullen, so silent, so grim? They hadn’t seen me and no one else was around. What was it?

  Their leader was a boy of no more than eight or nine years old. He had the clearcut good looks of the healthily reared. Nobody had stuffed him full of potatoes and his feet were for footballs. The features of-the face were exemplary for a kid of his age — and yet, for all the zip in face and body he was consumed with a brand of hate.

  Astonished and somehow cowed by such malevolence I watched what happened next. All the children, some of them girls but all of them militant, were equipped with tools which, in the country, are destructive weapons against nature herself. The leader had a pair of garden shears ... others had pen knives, scissors and various bits of murderous ironmongery not normally taken out for a country ramble.

  Abruptly the children stopped, listening. They’d sensed something around them ... no, below them, surely? And I felt it too; a deep rumbling sound, just as I’d heard at Elstree ... rhythmic machinery pounding.

  I watched their leader. He stood stock still, his eyes turned towards the big radar scanners, then at the rest of the group. He nodded, conveying some message which had evidently passed between them many times before.

  They all moved on, but slowly, a few yards. Here, a brilliant splash of rosebay recklessly showed magenta out of the dark green dock-and-nettle of the hedge, like girls in bikinis mingling with nuns.

  At a curt signal from the boy, the children snapped their tongs at the flowerheads and executed them all in one rapid-fire clatter of metal blades. And running from the scene of destruction, where broken plants lay like bleeding bodies in the path, the children careered off shouting filthy abuse. What in God’s name had they heard in the nursery that had led to this?

  The rumbling had ceased; but a flash of brilliant light from the aircraft caught my eye. I saw what it was. The radar dishes had rotated, catching the sun and beaming it straight at me.

  The blinding flash hit the nerve that I’d put there to conceal my memory, and cracked the weld. Whatever had poisoned the minds of those children, I could have antidoted six years before. Now, the masks of my nightmare came back to accuse with total recall — signed, sealed and damning.

  *

  It was a few days after my interview with Jemma Schwartz, and I was puzzled and irresolute as I clacked a
long those hollow corridors at Elstree when most of the others looked secretive and triumphant. I was still trying to find out what substance lay in Jemma’s sudden impulse to stop the whole merger and found it even more difficult than I’d thought. Lord Dineham wouldn’t grant me an interview and I thought this odd. I didn’t know enough about the man to think it not only odd, but conclusive.

  I think the only man who knew even less than me at this time was the wretched Stavely. Though greedy, he didn’t then know what to be greedy about. I was searching the building for Philip Thorne — my one last chance to find something out — and on this mission wound up in the men’s room on the fifth floor. It was now four p.m. on the Friday: the big meeting was scheduled for Monday. I hadn’t much time with only the weekend interceding. Moreover there was no chance of further discussion with Jemma, though in fact she had made it clear she wouldn’t be forthcoming. Now both she and Vince Halliard were on a collision course in St Trop — and God only knew what might result from the final impact when it came.

  Stavely — who could not have known the extent of my ignorance — looked around from a urinal and raised hopeful eyebrows in search of a clue. He knew there was a great big bandwagon to jump on and from his expression I gauged that I was required to direct him to the correct departure gate. Every half-statement he made was really a half-question.

  Nozzling Brylcreem out of the dispenser and slapping the stuff on his scalp with an audible squelch he stated/asked: ‘So this thing is going to go through?’

  I crossed to the Stand Up and felt Stavely trying to assess the inner knowledge I didn’t have by watching my back through the mirror.

  ‘It looks like it,’ I peed.

  Stavely crossed to a basin and washed his hands ostentatiously. I personally wasn’t too interested in his level of hygiene but evidently he felt it important to establish it. ‘And you think,’ he asked, ‘that I should transfer to Group Three? — when it comes into being?’

  ‘That depends on whether you’re asked,’ I said.

  He contrived a smile. ‘I suppose my security rating will decide that.’

  Another disguised question. I zipped up and tried to gauge what was really on his mind. ‘I’m not the Gestapo, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘What I’m asking is why that damn little Commie Thorne is going over to Group Three when evidently I’m to be stuck in this building. The Americans must know he’s dangerous.’

  I controlled myself carefully. ‘Are you suggesting I should tell them that?’ — The one thing I did know was that Stavely himself was to be the liaison between the two Groups. If he were that prejudiced his appointment as such was hardly ideal.

  I decided to warn him to this effect. Thereafter he never forgave me for being in a position to do so. But like a fool I didn’t see how dangerous it would be to give him a motive for future malice. ‘I shouldn’t prejudge your own chances and I certainly wouldn’t make judgements about people who could be your colleagues. In my estimation your future depends on keeping your balance.’

  I received a veiled, ugly look. ‘I’ll make a note of it. And are you still saying you’re not the Gestapo?’

  I simply couldn’t make the man see that my function was not to report back every petty thing that was said — but I suppose he could only guess at my own conduct by what he would have done. ‘You worry too much,’ I told him.

  A fraction of a second after Stavely had gone out a cleaner man, I heard a WC being flushed. It was Thorne and he must have heard everything. Typically, he made no comment; and when he washed his hands it was because he would have done so anyway. ‘Can I have a word with you in my office?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly.’

  Thorne was always meticulous and correct in everything he did. He was not typical of the breed ... or perhaps it would be better to say he was not what people imagine all scientists are like. If I said that Thorne never had a hair out of place it would make him sound like Stavely. The point is the effect was achieved by different means and for a different reason. Thorne was an obsessive perfectionist; a highly controlled disciplinarian in his work and the very opposite in manner to the other man. He never used an unnecessary word, never indulged gossip, never showed emotion.

  Nor did he go out of his way to be friendly. His air of objectivity was something I personally found rather off-putting because he so readily put you out of court if you tried to extend any personal warmth. Yet he didn’t mean it that way. He simply felt it wasn’t up to him to make allowances for others and would probably have thought it presumptuous to do so.

  I did not possess the crystal ball Stavely thought I’d got and of course at this time Thorne hadn’t met Louise. But if I had, I would certainly have realized that a relationship between them could never work. Philip Thorne was a brilliant young physicist of the wide-eyed school and his communism was of the brand generated in the snug surroundings of prim university life. Slim-waisted and crispy aesthetic, he could only have got bitched up by a girl of Louise’s temperament. Like Jack, he should have been her brother.

  When he spoke the tone was highly controlled and disciplined and economical with words. Consulting a neat wristwatch on a neat wrist he said: ‘Unfortunately I don’t have much time. How can I help?’

  ‘This is in confidence.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The background,’ I said, ‘of the proposed merger contains some very ugly elements. I was wondering if in fact they’re so ugly that they’ll affect the whole policy of the Group by contamination.’

  He smiled thinly. ‘Business methods aren’t my cup of tea but do they really filter through to pure research? ... It seems to me they’re quite separate things.’

  ‘Not always.’

  He cocked his head on one side. ‘Do you propose to try to stop this merger, then?’

  ‘I doubt if I can, anyway.’

  ‘If you did, you’d be taking on a very big responsibility. There are medical issues involved.’

  ‘Not only medical.’

  ‘As far as I am concerned, they are.’

  ‘I know. But Lord Dineham won’t declare himself on that score.’

  ‘I have absolute trust in Lord Dineham.’ — for a communist I thought he was inordinately snobbish. He went on: ‘Have you conveyed your views to him?’

  ‘I can’t get to him.’ I added: ‘I was hoping you would.’

  But he wasn’t going to dirty his hands with mere business. ‘I’d have to agree with you — which I’m afraid I don’t. Stergen is the only man in the Western world who can put my ideas into practice. The work done in Prague is the template for future transplant technology. We mustn’t waste it.’

  ‘Why not leave it to the Russians to develop?’

  ‘Because the healthy competitive elements must be upheld. They provide the incentive for energetic development. My friends in Czechoslovakia are agreed on this. They see this utterly non-political; just as I see it as utterly non-business.’

  ‘But you know perfectly well that the American interest in your work is hardly altruistic.’

  ‘Of course. Equally, Moscow has to consider the military advantages to them. In either case, this will supply essential funds. Where else would we get them?’

  ‘You mean that as long as the balance of power is maintained, the military implications don’t matter?’

  Once again, the little smile. ‘That’s what you mean. To me it’s irrelevant. But you do have my personal guarantee that my influence will be entirely in the direction of the humanities. I’ve no interest either in war or business.’

  It was no use. He glanced again at his watch and excused himself.

  Later that night the murderous snowball got under way in earnest. I’d gone to bed exhausted and beaten; Lord Dineham had seen me finally but only for five minutes. Of course I’d had absolutely nothing to go on when it came to the point except what Jemma had said. Dineham, a hunched, coiled-up ball of a man whose legs were too short, angrily dismissed my
anxieties as ridiculous. He was neither the first nor the last to bawl me out for going off half-cocked ‘Yes,’ he said, sitting immobile and contemptuous, ‘I’m glad that — as you put it — you came direct to me. Now here it is direct to you: get on with your own job and have the grace to let me do mine. You’ve saved me a lot over petty pilfering but as ombudsman you sound like the fifth-form sneak. Never enter this room again without the facts.’

  So someone had already worked him over. And if Vince Halliard, junior member of the opposing board, was really in Dineham’s pay to the extent the Schwartz woman had suggested then he might have warned Dineham by then. Jemma had been in St Tropez several days. During this period she could have made her point, in which case Vince wouldn’t hesitate in making his. Jemma, though she thought she could ‘blackmail Vince from here to New Year’s Eve’, was not noted for playing her cards right.

  The crunch came at 3 a.m. The phone rang in my flat and I knew it meant trouble. I’d been waiting for it. I’d even stayed sober — despite the humiliating deck Dineham had dealt me before he squatly bulged into his Rolls-Royce for the weekend.

  ‘Nigel? — This is Vince.’

  Oh, yes?! — ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘St Trop. There’s trouble. I need you down here fast.’

  I paused. It seemed unwise to seem too keen though this was just what I was waiting for. ‘You know damn well I can’t leave now,’ I said, fumbling frantically for the cigarettes.

  ‘Listen, old boy, I mean it!’ He sounded very scared. Too scared. Whatever I’d been waiting for it hadn’t implied quite this. He said: ‘I’ve checked with Air France and there’s a flight out of London at five. You could just make it.’

  ‘I’m needed here, Vince. There’s a slight matter of a merger and the Monday meeting is important.’

  The caddish rasp of a juvenile not getting his own way: ‘I got you your job and I’m telling you to get here.’

  ‘Thanks for the job but now I’ve got it I’ll do what I think is right.’ God, don’t go too far. The man’s in a panic. What does it mean? — ‘Can’t you tell me about it on the phone?’