by Anthony Grey
The Chinese nodded briskly and signalled towards the door. ‘All the better for him. X-ray is quiet now. It’s got to be done— as a precaution.’
The men advancing down the ward pushing the trolley kept their heads bent to hide their features. They pulled the screens quietly aside and aligned the trolley with the bed. They had begun to lift the unconscious form of Yang onto the stretcher before the guard spoke again. ‘If you’re going down to X-ray, I’d better come too, doctor.’
The Chinese was already starting away down the ward. ‘Of course, of course, you must come,’ he said quietly over his shoulder. At the end of the ward he opened the doors and waited as his two assistants approached, pushing Yang on the trolley. He held them open long enough for the guard to pass through, then followed him into the corridor.
The Special Branch man stopped in his tracks when he saw the empty chair where the uniformed policeman should have been sitting. He turned suddenly, an expression of alarm spreading across his face. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’
Fei lifted a warning hand and opened his mouth as though to explain. In that moment the door of the ward sister’s room opened and the other Chinese leapt at the guard’s back, his arms raised high above his head. He chopped viciously downwards with both hands and the double blow delivered at the base of the neck collapsed the detective to the floor without a sound. Between them they dragged him into the ante-room and dumped him beside the unconscious policeman. Without hurrying they locked the door behind them and ‘walked calmly to the lift. The other two men had already moved Yang inside on the trolley and they all descended to the third floor.
The lookout left by the emergency exit had removed all the bulbs from the lights in the rear section of the corridor and under cover of the darkness all five men unwound long canvas straps from their waists and bound the unconscious form of Yang tightly to the stretcher.
As Fei pushed open the exit door the engine of the ambulance in the parking bay on the other side of the mews coughed and started up. It was the sudden roar of the engine in the silent, locked mews that first alerted the Russians watching from the television repair vans on the other side of the Street. They saw two Chinese run ahead down the fire-escape and leap nimbly outwards to straddle the high wall. They watched them lean backwards and guide the stretcher onto the top of the wall, preparing to slide it down to the driver waiting by the now open back doors of the ambulance.
Razduhev, in the front of the first van, gabbled rapidly into his walkie talkie as he watched the five Chinese slithering down the wall. When he’d finished he ordered the driver to start his engine in preparation for giving chase. Within seconds the stretcher had been run smoothly into the rear of the ambulance. The five men jumped in behind it and the ambulance driver flung himself behind the wheel, leaving the rear doors open.
The puzzlement of the Russians at this turned to astonishment when the ambulance, instead of crashing out through the barrier onto the street, shot away backwards up the darkened mews. The Chinese driver leaned out of his seat, peering behind him as he reversed the cumbersome vehicle at speed between the rows of parked cars on either side of the cobbled lane. The horses behind the yellow double doors of the riding stable whinnied in fright at the sudden noise as the ambulance shot past, its engine roaring in reverse, and it was halfway along the length of the mews before the back doors of the Russian repair vans opened to disgorge four men. They flung themselves across the road, leaping the metal barrier one after the other, and dashed headlong after the retreating ambulance.
The Chinese driver kept his foot on the accelerator until it slammed hard against the wall at the top of the mews, buckling the open rear doors and throwing the men inside to the floor in a tangled heap.
Only the stretcher bearing the unconscious Yang remained in its place, held by three canvas straps that had been attached to the trolley. Within moments the men were on their feet. They freed the stretcher and slid it quickly through the doorway in the wall to the waiting American in the back of the laundry truck. He laid aside his shotgun and clamped the stretcher quickly into place on the trolley. Then he climbed back through the hinged panel into the driving seat. The engine had been idling from the moment the ambulance started up at the other end of the mews and by the time the last of the five men had scrambled through the wall and onto the narrow side benches, he had the truck moving slowly forward across the yard.
Because the driver of the ambulance had been peering backwards up the mews throughout his frantic drive, he didn’t see the pursuing Russians until after he’d switched off the engine and lifted his head to look out through the front windscreen. The urgent clatter of their feet on the cobblestones, and the aggressive crouch of their bodies as they ran, left him in no doubt about their intent.
Drawing a knife from a sheath inside his shirt he threw himself out of the open door. The four Russians, with Razduhev at their head, were at that moment still twenty yards short of the ambulance. Above the racing engine of the laundry truck on the other side of the wall he heard the frantic voices of his comrades, calling to him in Chinese. He lunged desperately towards the back of the ambulance. But the twisted metal of the crumpled rear doors had been ground deep into the brickwork. All access to the gap in the wall, except from inside the back of the ambulance, had been cut off.
From the close rush of feet behind him he knew the four men were almost upon him and without turning his head he leapt for the top of the creeper-covered wall. But even while his fingers were still scrabbling for a hold among the vines he felt hands close around his ankles. He lashed out wildly with both feet and managed to free himself as they dragged him back to the ground. He fell on all fours, trapped and at bay, his back to the wall, his teeth bared, the knife clutched before him in his right hand. The Russians hesitated in an uncertain semi-circle, then on a grunted order from Razduhev began advancing slowly as one man towards him.
‘Ch’u pa! Ch’u pa!’ The trapped man screamed the two Chinese words repeatedly over his shoulder as the Russians closed in. He didn’t stop until he heard the slatted back door of the laundry truck slam shut on the other side of the wall. A roar of rapid acceleration followed, then the truck’s racing engine began to fade rapidly as it shot across Old Barrack Yard and out into Knightsbridge.
The Chinese grinned triumphantly round at the Russians confronting him. But his expression changed immediately to one of alarm as one, on a barked order from Razduhev, took a sudden flying leap at the top of the wall in an attempt to catch at least an identifying glimpse of the departing vehicle. The Chinese twisted sideways and flung himself at the climbing Russian in a suicidal attack, plunging his knife again and again into his unprotected lower back.
The stabbed man flung back his head and his guttural scream of agony echoed round the mews. The reflex of pain tightened his grip among the gnarled tendrils of the vines and he was still hanging on the wall when one of his companions drew out a silenced pistol and, stepping close, shot the Chinese four times in the chest from point blank range.
The knife clattered to the cobbles and the Chinese twisted round, staring wildly at the man who had shot him. Then his eyes misted over and he sank slowly into a foetal crouch at the foot of the white wall, coughing blood onto the cobbles.
The stabbed man’s wailing ceased suddenly and for a moment the silence was broken only by the sound of the laundry truck’s engine fading into the night. Then lights began to come on in the upper windows of some of the mews houses. One of the Russians cursed softly and moved to lift the stabbed man down from the wall. Razduhev spoke a fast volley of words into his walkie-talkie handset, then, a moment later, carrying the injured man between them, they all turned their backs on the dying Chinese and rushed away into the shadows, anxious now only to regain the safety of their closed vehicles.
On Sloane Street, the innocuous-looking laundry truck was heading south towards the Thames at a steady, respectable speed that would attract no attention. Within five minutes it wou
ld cross the river over Chelsea Bridge, and long before the police alert was put into force it was swallowed up with its human cargo inside one of the anonymous, grime-covered industrial warehouses beside the river at Nine Elms.
PEKING, Friday—Chairman Mao Tse-tung has broken ten months of official silence on the fate of the former Defence Minister Lin Piao by telling two foreign statesmen who have visited him in recent weeks that Marshall Lin was killed in an air crash while fleeing the country in the wake of an attempted coup.
Toronto Globe and Mail, 29 July 1972
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Harvey Ketterman, wearing a black tie of mourning with his sober Ivy League suit, was standing at an upstairs window of a house in North Audley Street at ten o’clock when a plain white van with ‘Ambulance’ painted in red on its sides drew up at the kerb. Another undertaker would have recognised the windowless vehicle immediately for what it was—a collecting van for the newly-dead, disguised to save the feelings of those inmates of hospitals and old people’s homes still fighting the battle to stay out of it.
When Ketterman saw Arthur Cooper climb from behind the wheel, he started quickly down the stairs to the front door. Cooper, who was dressed in the same shiny black suit he’d been wearing the night before, waited obediently while an empty taxi drew up behind the van. When the negro driver in the tartan cap who’d been his shadow for the past twelve hours alighted, he unlocked the rear doors of the van and together they lifted out a maroon fibre-glass collecting coffin. Fastened with two snap clips clamped to the lid, it looked like the carrying case for some grotesque musical instrument. They hoisted it quickly to their shoulders and hurried across the pavement to the front door of the house which Ketterman was by this time holding open.
In an upstairs bedroom he watched them lift out the pale shrunken body of an man with bushy grey hair. ‘First one in this morning, Sir,’ said Cooper cheerfully. ‘Died during the night. Cardiac arrest.’ As they positioned the body on the bed, the young American, his shoulder-length hair now cropped short, entered carrying a flash camera in one hand and a new, garishly- coloured American shirt still sealed in its Cellophane packet in the other.
Ketterman pointed to the shirt and nodded to Cooper. ‘Put that on the corpse and prop him up as naturally as you can in that chair by the bed. Hold his head from behind. We can lose your hands.’ He handed the little undertaker a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket. ‘And put those on him too, it will help the retouchers with his eyes.’
Ketterman walked over and stared out of the window into the sun-drenched street while the photographs were being taken. When the flashes ceased he turned round and took a worn American passport from his pocket. He held it out towards the fair-haired man. ‘Fix the retouched photograph in there. And be back in half an hour.’
When he’d gone Ketterman took a new pair of pyjamas from a chest of drawers and Cooper and the negro between them manhandled the dead man between the sheets. Ketterman watched uneasily as Cooper dressed the body in the pyjamas as if it was a stuffed doll, then pushed it down under the bedclothes.
‘Wait here please, Cooper.’ Ketterman motioned to the negro driver and they went out of the room and down the stairs leaving the undertaker alone with the body. He sat down obediently by the bed, staring at nothing and listening to the hum of the traffic in the hot street outside. Twenty minutes later be heard the front door open and the voice of the young man who’d taken the photographs floated up the stairs as he talked quietly with Ketterman. At exactly half past ten the doorbell rang and moments later Ketterman led a corpulent, arrogant-looking man dressed in striped trousers and black jacket into the bedroom.
He scarcely glanced at the passport of Marshall Symonds which Ketterman handed him. The undertaker, looking over the doctor’s shoulder, saw that the retouched photograph of the bushy-haired corpse lying dead in the bed had already been inserted open-eyed and bespectacled in the travel document.
Keeping his eyes averted from both Cooper and Ketterman the doctor put his bag down by the bedside table and clipped a stethoscope behind his neck. Then he shot his cuffs with great deliberation before searching irritably wider the sheets for the dead man’s wrist. He gazed blankly at the ceiling with his mouth clamped shut, breathing noisily through his nose as he went through the motions of searching for signs of a pulse. Then he dropped the arm carelessly back onto the bed and unbuttoned the corpse’s pyjama jacket. When he’d taken several careful soundings he returned wordlessly to the table where his bag was standing and took out a pad of death certificates. Details had already been entered in the top one and Ketterman saw the doctor switch his gold-plated ball-point pen into his left hand before completing the final flourish of a signature. He replaced the stethoscope in the bag with elaborate care then slipped the certificate between the pages of the passport and handed it to Ketterman.
‘You’ve been most helpful.’ Ketterman smiled fixedly, but the doctor was already on his way towards the door, the stiffness of his posture making it clear he had not the slightest interest in the American’s remarks. Ketterman followed him out and in the hall below the doctor stopped and turned a severe gaze on him.
‘Within the hour I shall report to the police the discovery of a break-in overnight at my surgery.’ He nodded to the passport in Ketterman’s hand. ‘If attention is ever attracted to that death certificate for any reason whatsoever, I shall remember that the pad from which it was extracted was among articles missing in the burglary and denounce the signature which is sloped left-handed as a deliberate forgery.’ He stood waiting in a pointed silence until Ketterman took a bulky envelope from inside his jacket, then accepted it without a word of thanks He didn’t speak or even look at Ketterman again. When he’d put the envelope in his medical bag he walked stiffly down the steps to the pavement and hurried away in the direction of Oxford Street without looking back.
Five minutes later Ketterman opened the door to welcome a harassed-looking middle-aged American, who arrived from the direction of Grosvenor Square. He shook him briefly by the hand and took him straight up to the bedroom.
‘Hello, Sir!’ Cooper smiled eagerly at the newcomer and stood up. His manner had become enthusiastically professional again. ‘Done a lot o’ jobs together for the embassy, haven’t we?’
The newcomer nodded distractedly and peered anxiously towards the bed.
‘Mr. Cooper is going to get Mr. Marshall Symonds embalmed super-fast and shipped to Washington tonight on Pan Am,’ said Ketterman lightly. He handed the passport and the death certificate to the consular officer. ‘Go with him now to Canon Hall to register the death and he’ll be back in your office within the hour with the Coroner’s export certificate and all the other documents for you to sign and seal.’
The diplomat took a slow breath and looked down at the dead man’s face, comparing it with the picture in the passport. Then he closed the passport and glanced uneasily from Cooper back to Ketterman. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here Mr. Ketterman. I hope you know what you’re doing, that’s all.’
Ketterman ignored him and opened the door. The negro driver reappeared and together he and Cooper lifted the body into the fibreglass case which had been hidden under the bed. The fair- haired man was already behind the wheel of the mock ambulance when they came out through the front door, and as soon as the coffin was loaded he drove away. The negro led Cooper and the consular officer to his taxi to drive to Caxton Hall and Ketterman ran back upstairs for the last time to check the bedroom.
He picked up the now discarded new shirt and its wrappings, retrieved two fallen packing pins from the carpet, dropped all the bits and pieces into his briefcase, then, after a final glance round the room, ran back downstairs. He locked the front door, and dropped the bunch of keys into a stout envelope that was addressed to an estate agent and already contained a cheque for a week’s rent. Be posted it in a pillar box twenty yards along the street before flagging down a bona fide taxi. Two minutes later he was heading past the gold an
d concrete frontage of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square on his way once more to St. George’s Hospital.
MOSCOW, Saturday—The plane carrying Lin Piao, his family and comrades, was heading back towards China when it crashed in Mongolia last September, killing all on board, according to a new’ theory here. At the last minute, the theory says, someone on the plane decided to return to China and changed his mind about seeking refuge in Mongolia or the Soviet Union.
The Observer, 6 August 1972
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At eye level outside the open third-floor windows of St. George’s Hospital the four black horses of war on the Wellington Arch seemed, to beat frantically at the burning sky with their raised hooves. To Richard Scholefield, as he lay with his bandaged head propped against a broad wedge of pillows, they looked as though they were fighting vainly to stir the scorched, stagnant air around them into a cooling breeze. He dabbed at his own damp forehead with a paper tissue and turned his gaze slowly away from the windows as he heard footsteps approaching his bed.
He saw Harvey Ketterman’s sweating face set in an enquiring expression of earnest concern. The bruise on his cheek was multi-coloured and edged now with a rim of jaundiced yellow. Instead of shaking hands he squeezed Scholefield’s limp forearm considerately in a gentle gesture of greeting.
‘How are y’feeling today Dick?’
‘Concussed—in a word.’ Scholefield raised his eyebrows ruefully as a substitute for a smile. ‘I like your black eye. It reaches down to your chin.’
Ketterman grinned and peered anxiously into his face. ‘No bones broken though, huh? You’re all of a piece, right?’
Scholefield nodded.
‘Thanks be to God and the solid British craftsmanship of that pro-war oaken dais at the Institute!’ Ketterman and Scholefield both turned at the sound of the voice of the bald, bespectacled Cabinet Office diplomat who’d sat in the front row at the meeting the previous night. He marched pompously to the bedside and patted Scholefield on the shoulder, causing him to wince momentarily. He swung a visitor’s chair away from the wall and lowered himself heavily into it, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. He wore striped grey trousers and a black jacket but despite his efforts to sustain his usual airy manner, his face was pinched and pale from the after-.effects of shock. He continued breathing heavily even after he’d sat down.
