A SONG IN THE MORNING (16 page)

Jack saw a fast grimace of pain on Thiroko's face, momentary, then wiped away. "Perhaps we won't ever meet again, but I'll tell Jeez that you're a good man."

* • *

Jack was lucky to have caught Dickie Villiers in the afternoon, a miracle that he wasn't hacking his way down the fairways. Villiers was at his desk. A quizzical look upwards from his boss. Nicholas would have briefed him, that in a bit over a week Jack was a changed man. Out of the office without explanation, effing and blinding in front of the girls, hangovers, an extraordinary creature coming in to collect him. Villiers had been steeling himself to call the lad in.

"I gather there are some problems, Jack." Villiers fondled his polka dot bow tie, chaffing at the awkwardness.

He thought Jack Curwen was one of the best, one worth keeping.

"I have to go away, Mr Villiers," Jack said.

"You're not leaving us . . .?" The blurted question. "I'm sure we could find more money."

"No, it's for three weeks only. I'm going tomorrow."

"That's damned short notice." Dickie Villiers leaned forward, his avuncular manner. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"

"I've a problem, I've three weeks to beat it."

"It's often better to talk something through."

"I am afraid I can't do that."

"Where are you going?"

"Sorry . . ."

Villiers' patience was failing. "That's just impertinence."

"I hope my job stays open to me, Mr Villiers, and I hope to be back in three weeks."

"Are you involved in anything criminal?"

Jack smiled at him, shook his head.

"Let's not beat around, you're very fortunate to have this job." Villiers recovered quickly. "There're enough graduates looking for work, not to count those who never made it through. We gave you a real break. I made it my business to find out why you were sent down from university, and I've never held it against you. This is no way to be repaying my kindness."

"I've worked hard for you, Mr Villiers, but I'm not begging any favours. I'm going to be away because I've no choice. If you've given my job to someone else when I get back, I'll just have to find another one. Goodbye, Mr Villicrs."

And before the older man could answer him, he was gone.

Jack went to his desk and picked up the contracts pending file and took it to Nicholas Villiers' desk, dumped it. He put on his coat. He waved a kiss to Janice and winked at Lucille.

He went out of the door. He walked out of the building.

He had turned his back on the world he knew.

* * *

lack heard it on the car radio. He was driving across Leatherhead towards Churchill Close. He had just bought his ticket, open return, to Johannesburg, for the following evening.

" . . . The soldier who has not yet been named was a member of a foot patrol in the strongly Republican Creggan district of Londonderry.

"A junior diplomat has been found dead below the summit of Carnedd Llewelyn in the Snowdonia range. It is believed that he fell more than 400 feet onto a ledge where his body was found by a mountain rescue team. He has been named as James Sandham. Mr Sandham, aged 52, was on a walking holiday in North Wales. It is thought that he lost his way last night and fell to his death while trying in darkness to make his way down from the 3,400 foot summit of the mountain which is described by local experts as treacherous for the inexperienced.

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer said this morning at a news conference before leaving for . . ."

Numbly he switched off the radio.

He was living in Britain. He was living in the oldest democracy and he was frightened. He was living where the government's agencies existed through the will of the people.

Crap . . . Jimmy Sandham didn't look like a man who would have climbed two flights of stairs if there was a lift. He had taken Jack into his confidence, into the area of the Official Secrets Act, Section I, and into the area of the D-notice.

Jimmy Sandham hadn't died on a walking holiday, for Christ's sake, he had died because he thought he'd found something rotten at the core of his country's government and had had the guts to say so.

In deep, controlled anger, Jack drove home.

• • •

Since Peter Furneaux had made the announcement of Sandham's death to the staff of South Africa desk, that office had been a sombre, lack-lustre place. The staff had packed up, gone home, on the stroke of half-past four, turning their backs on the empty table beside the radiator and the window.

Only Peter Furneaux stayed. He knew Sandham could be a cursed nuisance. He had seen him called to a meeting by the secretary of the P.U.S.; he had no idea what the meeting was about and he hadn't seen him again. He had received a memorandum from personnel informing him that the Grade 2 officer was going on immediate and indefinite leave.

Sandham hated physical exercise, despised joggers, sneered at the lunchtime keep fit fanatics. With a straight face, with a stolid voice, he had told his colleagues that Jimmy Sandham had died in an accident while walking in Snowdonia.

Furneaux remembered the meeting when he and Sandham had faced the son of a man who was to hang in South Africa.

He knew a little of the history of James 'Jeez' Carew, enough to realise the sensitivity surrounding the man. He deliberated and he decided. He would make no mention to his superiors of the meeting with Jack Curwen. He would not report it.

He had not put a minute of the encounter on the file and he wouldn't do so now. To have reported the meeting would have been to involve himself, to have put a spotlight on . . .

Well, the odds were that the meeting with the P.U.S. had nothing to do with Carew. Furneaux's decision ensured that the operatives of the Secret Intelligence Service, the men of Century, had no line on James Curwen's son during the twenty-five hours that remained before the departure of his flight to South Africa.

* • *

He had come by the back route into 10 Downing Street.

The Director General always came through the Cabinet Officer entrance in Whitehall, and the underground tunnel to the Prime Minister's office. The P.U.S. had taken the same route.

The Prime Minister said, "Director General, you were appointed to suppress the type of clandestine nonsense you are now telling me about."

The P.U.S. said, "In fairness to the Director General, Prime Minister, Carew was sent to South Africa long before his time."

The Prime Minister said, "I want to know exactly what was Carew's brief."

The P.U.S. nodded to the Director General. For him to answer.

"Carew was sent to South Africa with the job of fastening himself to protest and terrorist organisations operating in t hat country. The job was created by a Colonel Basil Fordham for whom Carew had previously worked. It was the assumption of the Service that in the years ahead it would be important to know the planning and capabilities of the revolutionary factions." The Director General paused, relit his pipe. He had the Prime Minister's attention. He fancied the P.U.S. thought him a windbag. "Some statistics, Prime Minister. South Africa is our twelfth biggest export market.

We are the principal exporter into South Africa. We have the largest capital investment there. We have the most to lose if the place goes down in anarchy. We have 70,000 jobs directly linked to South Africa, another 180,000 indirectly dependent in that they are supplied by raw materials mined in South Africa. Should the present regime collapse, then we have to be sufficiently well-informed to ensure that any administration born out of revolution would be friendly to our interests."

"All of that seems to fall within the scope of conventional diplomatic observation."

The Director General puffed his disagreement.

"With respect, Prime Minister. In recent years South Africa has attempted to shield itself from guerrilla incursions by agreements with Mozambique, Angola, Botswana and Zimbabwe. This has led to the formation of cells, cadres, of A.N.C. activists inside the country. They act autonomously.

General orders are given from outside, specific actions are usually initiated from inside. Conventional diplomacy can monitor outside, Lusaka headquarters of the A.N.C.

Carew's brief was to infiltrate and report on the men inside . . . "

"To report . . ." the P.U.S. mouthed softly.

"Not to take part." The Prime Minister was hunched forward.

"Indeed not." The Director General stabbed his pipe stem for emphasis.

"Without being instructed to do so he engaged in terrorism?"

"So far as we know, Prime Minister, Carew's role was strictly on the periphery."

"An act of quite shocking violence?"

"I don't think we can assume that Carew, who was only the driver of a getaway vehicle, knew of the intended violence."

"But in which a courthouse was bombed and a policeman was killed?"

"Correct, Prime Minister."

The Prime Minister leaned back. "Then, periphery or no, he deserves the gallows."

"What if he talks?" the P.U.S. asked mildly.

"He won't." A rasp in the Director General's voice.

"Should he make a confession from the death cell then our position will be that this was a freelancer who supplied occasional and trivial information . . ." The Prime Minister shrugged. "A private individual, whose terrorist actions we totally and unreservedly condemn . . . I have to be back in the House."

They were in the corridor outside. It was an afterthought from the Prime Minister.

''This fellow, what sort of man is he?"

"A very brave man and intensely loyal to our country . . ."

The Director General saw the Prime Minister turn towards him, puzzled.

" . . . who will die the victim of one horrendous mistake."

A spark of annoyance, and then the Prime Minister no longer listened. The meeting had run a little late. The black car was waiting for the drive to the House of Commons.

The Director General and the P.U.S. were left in the corridor, abandoned, because the circus was on the move.

"Why didn't you say that during the meeting?" the P.U.S.

asked.

"No point, Carew's beyond our reach."

The P.U.S. touched the Director General's arm. There was a rare uncertainty in his eyes.

"That fellow we met, Sandham?"

"Happens to people who climb without the proper equipment. A very silly man."

* * *

Sam Perry stood by the window. He looked out over his tended garden. His wife sat in her usual chair, where she would have done her sewing or her knitting, where she would have watched television.

Jack paced. He couldn't have been still. He owed it to his mother, to talk to her. Couldn't have avoided the talk.

She stared all the time at the airline ticket that was on the arm of her chair. She said that she had thought it was just stupid talk when he had told her he was going to South Africa to bring his father home. She said that she had thought that he was just being emotional.

Sam hadn't spoken. Jack couldn't remember a time when Sam Perry had had nothing to say.

"You can't bring him home, can you?"

No reason to tell his mother about the man who was a military commander of the Umkonto we Sizwe wing of the African National Congress, nor about the man who was expert in his knowledge of shaped and hollow charges, nor about the man who had fallen to his death down a mountain in Snowdonia.

"It's just silliness, tell me it is."

And no reason to tell her about the man who lived in a cramped bedsit in North London, who had a tail on him, and who had to play the "on-off" game on the underground to throw the tail.

"I'll see him."

"You'll give Jeez my love?"

Sam strode to the dark wood cabinet. He poured Hilda's sherry into a whisky tumbler. He poured Jack a beer.

"It'll be all right, Mum, I promise you that," Jack said.

He doubted she believed him. She had no reason to. She liked to say that her Jack was a bad liar. She muttered about Sam's and Jack's dinner. They watched her go towards the kitchen, nursing her drink.

"Is there a chance?"

"I've no choice but to try," Jack said.

"It'll break your mother's heart if anything happens to you."

"I can't leave him there for them to hang."

The proxy father gazed at him. In many ways he regarded Jack as his own achievement. He thought his influence had given the young man his work ethic, his straightness, and his honesty. He thought he had the right to be proud of the way his step-son had grown. But the quiet authority and the bloody-minded determination, they weren't Sam's. Since he had met Hilda, when she was a bitter, introverted young woman, he had thought of Jeez Curwen as a right bastard.

The authority and the determination weren't Sam's and they weren't Hilda's. They could only be Jeez Curwen's hand down to his son. The man could not be a right bastard, not if this was his boy. He understood that he and Hilda could douse the boy with affection, love, he understood that Jack must go to find his true father. He was ashamed, because he felt envy.

"Come home safe," Sam said hoarsely.

• * *

They'd picked up the scum when he left the flat to go for his drink.

Piet used the pay telephone in the lounge bar, Erik stayed in the public bar to watch. They wouldn't be thrown again.

The business in the underground still smarted with Erik, and the yelling he'd had from the major. No chances taken when the scum had gone to the pub, Erik walking behind the scum and Piet on the far side of the road in case the subject spotted the tail and dived into the traffic for a quick jump on a bus.

The scum had been two hours in the pub, sitting on his own, nursing his drinks to make them last. Near to closing time when Piet had gone to the telephone. The warrant officer did as their major told them. Independent action was not their right.

Erik watched Duggie Arkwright. Scum was a good word for the subject. What did the scum know of South Africa?

What did he know of the melting pot of the ethnic minorities that made up the Republic's population? Scum, Arkwright, would think of all non-Whites as being the same. The scum wouldn't consider that there were Asian Muslims and Asian Hindus, and Coloureds, and then the groupings of Africans