Hostage (14 page)

‘Nothing much,’ Mick replied. ‘More of a playground than a garden.’

‘Is he always on the same side of the square?’

‘Yes, he follows the two hotel sides, but he can always see the others across the garden.’

Mick was sure that he had not been trailed or noticed. Ordinary care would be enough if Mallant conforms to the rule of never using a shadow when there is no need. However, this tailing was far too risky. Mallant checked the lorry with Mick at Blackmoor Gate and would not forget a face.

If I were in his position – and the care given to my training suggests that I was being groomed as a possible adjutant or successor – I should want to keep an eye on the weapon, perhaps daily. That may be what Mallant is doing. I told Mick to take a front room in one of the many hotels and watch from there, using his imagination and not rejecting any theory, however wild. He said he could well run into someone who knew him, which might lead to awkward questions. The cheap hotels, conveniently close to St Pancras and King’s Cross, were for thrifty visitors from the North – foremen, engineers, salesmen, shop stewards.

‘Can I order Elise to do it?’ he asked.

‘What have you told her?’

‘Nothing. There’ll be no need to. After all I’m her cell leader and can tell her to watch out for the tiger man and report every movement she can see from her bedroom window.’

‘Suppose your whole cell is ordered out of London?’

‘Well, the order comes through me. She doesn’t have to tell anyone else where she has been and she should not.’

I agreed to that. It was a step in the right direction, for eventually I want Elise on my side.

‘I think you had better give her the impression that Magma is protecting Mallant, but don’t ever let her know his name. Tell her to keep her eyes open for inspection of drains or taking up the road, any rebuilding or conversion jobs, any delivery vans waiting and not delivering, any sort of pattern or anything out of the ordinary.’

I left it at that. The time for anxiety will be when Mallant leaves London.

The Roke’s Tining murder is in the evening papers. Not headlined. Just a mention without gory details. Police must have asked editors for extreme discretion. I hoped the body would remain concealed much longer. Now the committee will know that I am an active opponent and I must expect a determined effort to find and silence me.

I have trouble in sleeping, for it seems a waste of time. How soundly I slept in gaol when there was nothing else to do! Well, it’s better to record the curious yesterday than to toss and turn.

I took an early train to Stroud and walked the remaining ten miles along the high edge of the Cotswolds. These forced, invigorating marches are their own reward. Despair was impossible when striding over the windswept, short turf and looking down on the green valley of the Severn with the silver river itself shining at the bends where it flowed away from me, and the tower of Gloucester Cathedral so small in the distance yet dominating all the lush land between Cotswold and the cloudy ranges of Wales. I had the impression of two worlds, each with its own time – the fast clock of my physical body pressing towards its limited objective and the steady state of a distant reality spread out at my feet but only attainable through a peace consonant with its own timeless peace. No ecstasy, only satisfaction. What the hell is my future?

I reached Pen Hill about three in the afternoon. Gammel had an eye for wide country as well as his own herbaceous border. The rendezvous was well chosen. My small, unidentifiable figure could be seen for miles around and I, too, had a clear view except for woodland at the foot of the steep slope. Obviously that was where I must expect him to show himself.

He did. His appearance was unfamiliar. He was wearing a clerical collar and from the waist up was parson rather than landowner, Christian rather than anarchist. I hoped this transformation was for the benefit of the police, not to remind the criminal of the incorruptibility of the Church.

Signalling to me to follow, he took a path through the woods up the valley of the Churn and turned off into the open where I lost sight of him in a first fold of the hills. Closing up on where he ought to be I came on a low, ruined cottage, surrounded by bramble, nettle and fallen stone, and saw him at what remained of a window. The place seemed safe enough for a meeting, offering the temporary cover of interior walls and a deep inglenook in case anyone should pass and give the ruin a casual glance.

He took up a headmasterly position in front of the wide hearth and went straight to the point without any welcome.

‘Mr Johnson, when I invited you to call on me clandestinely I did not think it would cost a man’s life.’

‘In the position that I am, Sir Frederick, any activity of mine may cost a man’s life. I can only ask you to accept that.’

‘You killed him yourself?’

‘Yes. I do not know if your friend in the police has told you what they must have found on his body.’

‘He has not.’

‘They will have found a powerful air pistol, some darts and a small phial of poison either to kill or incapacitate.’

‘I had indeed hoped it was in self-defence. But, sir, the brutality of it!’

‘He was already dead when I cut downwards, Sir Frederick. The victims of nuclear fission die more slowly.’

‘Why did you mutilate him?’

‘Anger.’

‘Anger has no place in war.’

I should have expected that he would arrive at that parallel for himself, yet it surprised me.

‘I know it doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘But I’d say that most men who have won, say, the Victoria Cross were blazing angry at the time.’

‘It is generally given for saving the lives of others at the risk of one’s own.’

‘Which involves killing as well as being killed. What exactly were you thinking of when you suggested that an old man is more ready to give his life than a younger?’

‘It is true that I foresaw circumstances in which it might be my duty not to escape.’

I told him that I foresaw that too, and that meanwhile prevention was better than suicide. Then I drew out the knife and showed it to him.

‘Do you know why I carry that, Sir Frederick? Because I will not take life unless I am attacked. I know that my beliefs make that hard to accept. Yet you understood it and told me that I was in hell.’

‘I did, and now I tell you that Hell shall not prevail.’

I replied unfeelingly that it did its best most of the time.

‘And for the rest of the time what comforts you?’

‘My love of this world.’

‘Are you so sure it’s only this one?’

‘If you mean what I think you mean, Sir Frederick, I don’t admit any difference.’

‘And if
you
mean what I think you mean, dear Julian – here you will let me call you so – you’re perfectly right.’

He told me about the cottage, saying that in fact it did not belong to anyone. Years ago an old shepherd had died there. According to tradition, locally accepted, he had been given the place as a reward for a long life of service but there wasn’t a document to prove it. The probable owner, whose land adjoined Roke’s Tining, considered that the tiny patch of wasteland was not worth the legal expense of establishing his title to it and it had remained as ownerless as a cat gone wild.

‘I thought, no doubt romantically, that it could be of use to you,’ he said. ‘Meetings? Perhaps for meetings? I take it that you are not working quite alone?’

‘Very nearly. One recruit I can trust, and possibly another to come.’

‘And myself. Of little use I fear, though I can imagine an emergency when you were compromised and I was not. There is also the problem of communication. As you pointed out, we cannot avail ourselves of the club. There was no assistant porter in the box, but I am a pariah. My opinions are too well known. It is hard for many people to believe that I did not know what Shallope was up to. I shall never enter it again. But this cottage – at need you could safely remain here.’

The cottage could, as he said, be used for meetings with him or anyone else though uncomfortably close to Roke’s Tining, but as a hide-out I thought my boarding house a lot safer.

‘Sixty years ago!’ he chuckled. ‘Sixty years ago when I used to stay with my uncle, the baronet – ah, there are few secrets from little boys! Now you haven’t asked me where the shepherd got his water. You thought he walked down to the Churn with a bucket, didn’t you?’

I had not thought about water at all. It was one of the most essential points of guerrilla training but I did not envisage the cottage as Gil’s Stronghold.

He showed me an open hole in what had been the kitchen floor. Half a dozen steps led down to a little cellar in which was a stone trough fed by a trickle of spring water from a gutter among ferns.

‘No more small boys now! The cottage is known to be haunted. Funny to think I naughtily started the rumour myself and now it is accepted mythology. But we’ll cover up the cellar all the same.’

He drew the remains of a wooden door over the top of the opening.

‘Now I feel there is one need of yours more immediate than this,’ he said. ‘You’re wasting a lot of time in travel and you must badly want a car. It’s plain that you can’t go around with Herbert Johnson’s and you leave a scent behind you if you hire.’

He was right on all points. I dared not recover my own car and sell it, and I was reluctant to waste money on buying another when I might want every penny for some unforeseen complication.

He hauled a bundle of notes out of his breast pocket and insisted on my taking it.

‘You brought this with you for me?’ I asked.

‘A golden handshake, Julian, as I believe they call it. I could not hand you over to the police and so very reluctantly I had to assist your escape. I did not expect such very extenuating circumstances. You have a couple of hundred there. It should be enough, paying cash down, for a serviceable second-hand vehicle. Now I shall walk along the hill above this place daily or as frequently as I safely may. How are you to communicate with me if you need me?’

I suggested an arrangement of fallen stones which could be seen from a distance – two meaning today if possible; three meaning tomorrow.

‘And, by the way, Mallant?’ he asked.

‘Almost certainly, yes.’

So we parted on the warmest terms. I had to humour him over his cottage; in fact all future, urgent action is bound to be in London. But I may well consult him. His spirit, as priest or friend, absolves me.

I have bought a car with Gammel’s money in the name of Herbert Johnson since log book and driving licence must agree. I don’t much like it, but the main point is that my old car and its number were known to my cell, to Rex and to Clotilde and were – for all I know – on file with the Committee. Meetings with Mick are quicker and safer than in a public park.

Elise is established in a top floor bedroom at a private hotel called Hartwell Lodge. From her window she can see most of the movement in Argyll Square. She watches all day, devotedly carrying out Mick’s orders and asking no questions. Mallant maintains his routine.

Mick had a lot of explaining to do after the finding of Vladimir’s body had been reported. He was interrogated by Clotilde in her flat – she now seems to have a roving commission directly under the Action Committee – and by a man who by Mick’s description must have been Rex. They had no doubt that it was Gil who killed and buried their professional.

Mick thought they had been impressed by his description of the lights and patrols, for they agreed that he was right to clear out before dawn without trying to find the supporting car and that Vladimir had made a grave mistake in not ensuring that he knew its exact position. It appeared that the car should have dropped Vladimir in London and that he should then have reported to Clotilde. Her present flat was as discreet as could be – just a room, kitchen and bath over a garage in a small mews, where there were no other residents.

Helped a little by Mick, they decided that I had waited and waited through the night for a chance to get into Roke’s Tining and that Vladimir, too, had waited for me to give away my position. He had attacked when I had abandoned the attempt and was leaving the wood. Rex was careful to repeat to Mick that he wanted me alive to be certain what game I was playing. Mick thought it possible that he was emphasising that for the benefit of Clotilde as well. He could not of course ask questions and had to remind himself continually that he knew nothing about the A bomb and no more than he could have gathered from the press: that some anarchist in Gloucestershire had been manufacturing explosives.

Rex had no doubt that I was actively working against Magma. Clotilde was inclined to believe that I was suffering from nervous strain rather than a traitor. She said angrily that I was a typical professor who wanted facts before acting and was determined to have them. She was quite right about my character but not, I fear, about professors. She had a fascinating theory that battle-happiness – to which she had once referred – had completely overcome me and that I meant to shoot my way in and rescue Gammel. Rex said sceptically that if I was as crazy as that I might just as well have intended to assassinate him.

Clotilde’s theory, at first hearing inexplicable, at last gave me the true reason why the Committee believed I would try for Roke’s Tining and why I had to be stopped. It had nothing to do with Mallant. And it was definite proof that none of them suspected I had talked to both Sir Frederick and Shallope.

Look at it from their point of view! (1) I am an enemy. How far I am an active traitor is uncertain. (2) I take it for granted that Shallope and Gammel willingly manufactured the bomb. The police by this time must know that. (3) Therefore it is Gammel I want to get my hands on in the belief that he will trust me with all he knows or, if he doesn’t I shall be more ruthless than the police in making a dithering old man scream for mercy and talk.

Then Clotilde’s and Rex’s opposing opinions make sense. Rex knows damned well that I will stick at nothing to get every detail Gammel can tell me. Clotilde, over-influenced perhaps by affection for me, gives me the benefit of the doubt and suggests I was out for a single-handed rescue. It would not in fact have been impossible.