A SONG IN THE MORNING (10 page)

He doesn't sound to me like a man about to splash through a sea change. That's one pointer, there's another. A few days ago their Justice Minister made a speech that effectively shut out all prospect of clemency. They want to show they're strong. They want blood."

"What would happen if I went out to see him?"

"You wouldn't get a contact visit. You wouldn't be able to touch him, hold his hand. You'd have a glass plate between you. You'd speak down a voice tube. My opinion, it would be pretty distressing for you and for him."

What would they talk about? Jack shuddered. The man would be a stranger. God, and small comfort he'd be to his father.

"What's your interest in his case, Mr Sandham?"

Sandham shrugged. "Something stinks."

"Meaning what?"

"I'll tell you when I've found out."

"When my father's dead and buried?"

"I can't say."

"What stinks?"

"Sorry, Mr Curwen . . . but you'll hear from me when I know, I promise you that."

"I don't know where to go except to you," Jack said simply. "That's the hell of it, and time's running out."

• * •

Janice looked at him curiously, then gave him the message that his mother had rung. He telephoned her. He cradled the telephone on his shoulder, his elbows were on his desk top, his hands in front of his mouth. Janice noted his attempt at privacy.

He heard about the visitor and the questions. He told her that he had been to the Foreign Office, that there wasn't any good news. He rang off abruptly. He was sagging over his desk.

"Why don't you go home?"

He looked up. He saw young Villiers staring down at him.

"Why should I go home?"

"Because you look knackered."

"I'm fine."

"You're not, and you should go home."

Jack was shouting. "If I say I'm fine, then I'm bloody fine. And I don't want any one bloody tip-toeing round me."

"Just concerned, old boy."

"Well, don't be fucking concerned."

Janice and Lucille studied their typewriters. Villiers flushed, flexed his fingers. His father had told him everything that he needed to know about Jack Curwen, that he had been two years and one term at university and left on a disciplinary matter, that a drop-out added up to a cheap work horse for D & C Ltd, that Jack Curwen was lucky to have his job however dedicated and able he might be.

"Nice to know that nothing's wrong," he said evenly.

• * *

As a young man, in Teheran, at a time when British factories were on overtime and weekend shifts to turn out Chieftain tanks for the Shah's army, Sandham had briefed a visiting journalist on the help with direct interrogation methods that British Intelligence were giving to Savak. In Amman he had filed a formal report to the ambassador stating that the representatives of British construction companies were buying their contract to build a hydro plant with back handers; two of the representatives were at that time putting up at the ambassador's residence.

He couldn't be fired, but he could be disliked, and he could watch his promotion prospects going down the plug hole.

It was eight years since the industrious Jimmy Sandham had last been posted abroad. He never complained, never sought explanations as younger men leap-frogged him. But the word was out. If there was a bad smell in a section then keep Sandham's nose at arm's length.

The Carew case was a thoroughly nasty smell to Jimmy Sandham, and the error of Peter Furneaux, assistant secretary, had been to let him within a mile of it.

The friend Sandham had telephoned had been his best man at the English church in Bangkok. The friend thought the day spiced with pleasure because the ambassador had been the guest of honour eleven days after receiving the query from the crown auditors concerning his wife's frequent and private use of the Rolls. Jimmy Sandham's bride had been his friend's secretary.

That had been a long time ago, but they had stayed as close as two men can who meet each other for a couple of meals a year and exchange cards at Christmas. The friend worked from a nondescript tower block on the south side of the Thames, home base of the Secret Intelligence Service.

The friend loved Sandham for his pig-headed obstinacy, and made certain they were never seen together.

They sat on a bench in Battersea Park, shielded by a towering shrub from the nearest path. The fun fair hadn't opened for the summer season, the kids were at school, it was too short of pickings for the tramps, too draughty for the lovers.

"Furneaux's a total arsehole," the friend said.

"I get this garbage from Furneaux about 'deep water', and we have a file with Carew's real name on it. Furneaux didn't put the file back into records, it's locked in his own safe."

"To keep your prying eyes off it."

"What would I have seen?"

"Enough to whet your appetite."

Sandham grinned. "What about your file?"

"Enough for you to choke on."

Sandham stared into his friend's face. "Is James Carew one of ours?"

"Fighting talk, Jimmy. You should know, there's a D-notice."

"What else?"

"I reckon there'd be Official Secrets Act, Section I. Closed court. Ten years minimum, could be fifteen . . . You want cream on your raspberries? There's a fair bit of bad blood in the Service over Carew. Desk men say it's entirely his own fault, leg men say that once a man's on the team then it's marriage vows, for ever. Trouble is that the Service has changed since Carew started out. Desk men count, leg men are dinosaurs. Evaluation and interpretation is the name of the game, and you need an Oxbridge degree for that. Running around on the ground's out of fashion."

"And the desk men'll let him hang?"

"He had a fairy godmother, but that's over. They got him out the last time, second time's one too many. The leg men say that Carew wasn't asked to do what he did."

"So you bastards are going to write him off."

"Come off it, Jimmy . . . Are we going to go to Pretoria and tell them that a staffer, a wallah on the pension scheme, is driving the scoot car from a daylight bombing. He was there to infiltrate, provide the raw intelligence for assessments. He wasn't there to lead the bloody charge down the Johannesburg High Street. I tell you what we think happened. We think he had infiltrated the A.N.C., just inserted himself under the skin. We think the A.N.C.

learned to trust him and one day, bad luck for Carew, they trusted him enough to do a little job for them. We think the poor creep probably didn't know what he was into."

Sandham said bitterly, "I thought it was holy writ that you lot looked after your own."

The friend laughed out loud. "That's gone with the ark."

"What sort of chap is Carew?"

"Brilliant. You want to know what he said when he was lifted. 'Let's have a bit of dignity, boys.' That's what he said to the four guys with him, and they'd just knocked half Jo'burg over. He'll keep his secret. Our secret." The friend looked at Sandham keenly. "You won't forget the ten years minimum and the D-notice, Jimmy?"

"It's the nastiest story I've ever heard."

"It's
real politik."

" The politicians have backed this, leaving him to hang?"

"Who needs to tell them about the big bad world?"

"When he left his wife . . ."

"We got him back, without ten years of his life, four (ones, two fingernails, and he never told them anything.

Hut he had the old godmother working for him then. Right now, he's no-one rooting for him."

"Why not?"

"March of time, Jimmy, comes to us all. The godmother got retired, a bit before Jeez was lifted. There was Lennie Abrams, he's posted to Djakarta for expenses trouble. There was Adrian Mountjoy, fairy, he's in an open prison in the Midlands, groped a vice-squadder in a gay club, once too often. There was Henry Willcox, took an early out and skipped with one of the library girls. Jeez's problem is that no one's shouting in his corner."

Sandham shook his head, as if the smell was suffocating him.

"Where was he, the first time, those ten years?"

"Try a happy little holiday home called Spac. A stint of Albanian hospitality."

"It's disgraceful."

"Keep in touch, Jimmy."

"For what?"

"So's I know whether I'm going to have to traipse down to Parkhurst for the next ten years of visit days."

A West Indian woman pushed a pram past him and gave him a long sneering look, like she'd spied out a flasher or an addict. His friend was gone, vanished into the trees and shrubs. For more than a quarter of an hour Sandham sat bowed on the bench. Finally he stood, and tried to pull the creases out of his raincoat. On his way back to the Foreign Office he found a telephone kiosk, rang Jack, and fixed to meet him the following day.

He was a man heavy with anxiety.

• • *

Jack knew from Sandham's voice that he was to be told something that was worse than he had been told before.

They met in a pub south of Westminster Bridge. Sandham found them a corner where neither could be seen from the door, where he could not be seen from the bar.

Jack told Sandham that a South African had been to see his mother. Sandham said that the man would be either from security police or intelligence. He'd check it. Sandham said that they had to have been working on tracing Hilda Perry ever since Jeez's letter had given them her previous address.

Sandham said there was a civil war being fought in South Africa . . .

" . . . And they'll play dirty if they have to."

"How dirty?"

"Four Blacks from Port Elizabeth, big guys in the opposition United Democratic Front, get a telephone call from what calls itself the British Embassy asking for a meeting.

They set off, and they disappear on the road. When they're found they've been burned and hacked to death. We never made the call. That was last year. I'll give you another one.

Victoria Mxenge, a Black lawyer representing some of the accused in the treason trial. She was coming home after dark to her township outside Durban. Shot dead on her doorstep.

No arrests."

"This isn't bloody South Africa," Jack said.

"They have a keen idea of national security. They're a serious
volk
, and they couldn't be caring too much about international frontiers."

"These people in South Africa, the government murdered them?"

"I didn't say that. I said they were opponents of government, and they're dead. There
might
be a difference. Do you know what a D-notice is?"

Jack shrugged. "It's when the government tells the newspapers they shouldn't print something."

"Do you know about the Official Secrets Act, Section I?"

"The charge that's brought against foreign spies and our traitors."

"What I'm going to tell you is covered by a D-notice and the Official Secrets Act, Section I . "

"We're going in up to our necks, aren't we?"

Sandham told Jack what he knew.

He knew that James 'Jeez' Carew was on the payroll of the Secret Intelligence Service, had been for a quarter of a century. He knew that Jeez had been in South Africa for the last dozen years with the job of infiltrating the military wing of the African National Congress. He speculated that Jeez had overstepped his brief and become involved in a guerrilla attack. He knew that Her Majesty's Government were not prepared to go to Pretoria and cough up that a White under sentence of death was in fact a legman in deep cover for S.I.S. and therefore should be spared the rope.

A gasp from Jack. "I can't believe it."

"You're on the horizon of a tough, rough old world."

"They always get their people back, that's what you always read." "

"It might have been true once, but isn't true any more, and your father wasn't acting under orders and that's government's let out. There's more to it. Technically South Africa is a major trading partner. We've billions invested there.

We may have as many as a quarter of a million jobs dependent on South African purchasing power and South African mineral resources. Government's dislike of apartheid comes a poor second to economics. I'm just telling you what I know."

Jack flared. "I'm going to blow this off the roof tops."

"Don't even try it. The papers won't print it and telly won't broadcast it. That's the D-notice. You'd be charged under the Official Secrets Act, and when you get to court it'll be long after your father's been executed. And then it'll be
in camera,
the court'll be cleared, the doors locked, the Press out."

"So who's lifting a finger for him?"

Sandham picked up their glasses, went to the bar. Jack sat slumped on the upholstered seat. He was drained. He could not absorb that this was happening to Hilda Perry and Jack Curwen. Worse than a nightmare. Sandham put two large Scotches on the table and sat down.

Jack asked, "If I blew it would you go to prison with me?"

"Worse than that. Breach of official trust."

"You've taken a chance on me."

"It was the only decent course to take."

Jack gripped Sandham's hand, held it tight. His face was screwed into lines, as if he agonised over the question.

"Is Jeez Carew worth crying over?"

"You know the answer."

"You have to tell me."

Gently Sandham released Jack's hand. "You're his son, you don't have a choice. And from what I've discovered I'd say that your father is a man you should be very, very proud of."

Sandham said he had set up a meeting at the Foreign Office for the following morning that was to discuss Jeez.

He didn't elaborate. He left Jack, grim and drawn.

* * *

Waves of outrage lapped over him, outrage against the forces that had intruded into his life, his mother's life. His tongue twisted round obscenities, sometimes silent in the spring evening wind, sometimes out loud. Terrorism, prisons, and the sentence that a man should hang by the neck until he was dead had never before owned a corner of Jack Curwen's mind. Many targets for his hatred. He hated White South Africa. He hated the security policemen who had arrested Jeez. He hated their prisons and their gallows.