The brotherhood, p.1
The Brotherhood, page 1
THE BROTHERHOOD
Alan Williams
Table of Contents
PREFACE
PART 1: WHEN BAD MEN COMBINE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
PART 2: FRAME-UP
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
PART 3: NIGHT RIDE
CHAPTER 1
PART 4: RETREAT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
PART 5: LUBIAN
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
ALSO BY ALAN WILLIAMS
PREFACE
It was in the small hours of the morning that Jack Paine, a truck driver from Reading, made his statement to the Berkshire police.
I was driving out of London on the M4 Motorway, just before the turning to White Waltham, doing about 45 m.p.h., when the car passed me. It was going at a terrific speed. I couldn’t even see what make it was, except that it was a big saloon. It had been raining and I got a lot of muck thrown up on my windscreen. By the time my view was clear again the car was about a quarter of a mile ahead. I saw the White Waltham flyover coming up in its headlamps and then the whole thing — the flyover, I mean — seemed to jerk over to the left, and the central pillar just exploded in a great flash and went out. Then the noise came. I could hear it even above my diesel. It was more like three noises, first a crack like a gun going off, then a sort of thud, then a terrible clanking, and that was all. I never saw his brake lights come on and there wasn’t any other traffic on the road. He just seemed to drive smack into the flyover.
Paine pulled up a few yards short of the accident, but stayed only long enough to see that the engine-block had been forced back through the boot. What was left looked like a ball of crumpled carbon-paper. In the silence the noise seemed to linger like smoke after an explosion. There was a faint ticking and dripping in the darkness, then a twang! as a crushed spring released itself through torn leather.
It was already growing light by the time the fire brigade, with the help of oxyacetylene equipment, was able to remove the wreckage — most of it on the back of a lorry, the rest under a blanket in an ambulance. It was more than hours later before any identification could be made.
PART 1: WHEN BAD MEN COMBINE
CHAPTER 1
The day had begun badly for Magnus Owen. When the taxi dropped him at 11.20 — twenty minutes late — outside the sombre building in High Holborn, his eyes still burned and his feet did not seem to be touching the pavement. An hour earlier, in his Battersea flat in Albert Bridge Road, it had taken two Vitamin C tablets, a tumbler of saline solution poured from a jar of Hungarian pickles, and a bath in pine-needle extract to steady him enough to shave — always a tricky operation on account of the long welted scar along the angle of his jaw. Then half a pint of fresh black coffee, and he was just about ready to face the taxi ride to work.
This had been more or less tolerable until an unsettling incident just below the Strand. His taxi had pulled up alongside a parked sports car, just as a long-legged girl in a white mini skirt was climbing ungracefully out of the bucket seat, her thighs aiming directly up at the dark predatory Welsh face pressed against the glass above her. The image had lingered in Magnus’ mind with cruel clarity for the rest of the way to the office.
It was a chill, wet morning, but as he got out of the taxi he pulled off what he called his ‘rapist’s mac’ — a sheath of crackly black plastic with shoulder straps and air-vents under the armpits, redolent of Pigalle pimps and Gestapo informers. Not a garment to be seen worn about the precincts of The Paper. His presentable coat, along with his car — a battered Citroën DS — had gone astray somewhere during the night. Wrapping the offensive thing inside a roll of morning newspapers, he started up the steps, swinging his left leg out in a noticeable limp.
The entrance hall was like an old-fashioned bank: a row of brass grilles fenced in the small ads and agony column clerks; while ahead, guarding the Gothic portico leading to the lift and mezzanine, sat the commissionaire between two engraved plaques. The first of these, tarnished to the point of illegibility, bore the inscription: The Written Word Is A Mighty Weapon Never To Be Used In Malice, Fear Or Favour, But Always To One End — The Truth. Sir William Finlay son. Founder. 1896. The other one, shining like gold, proclaimed simply: Virtue Industry Order. James Broom.
The commissionaire, a retired R.S.M. with a Kitchener moustache, called Bostock, managed to invest the words with a certain fatuous authority. Eyes front, bolt upright, he now watched Magnus Owen limp towards him across the marble floor. No one who entered or left The Paper’s offices managed to escape Bostock’s eye. The man had never been known to miss a day’s work, six days a week, except for two weeks’ annual holiday when his place was taken by another superannuated martinet who might have been his twin. Magnus had sometimes wondered if the man were real, if his organs functioned, if he ever slipped out for a pee. But not only was Bostock real; he was — in his limited field — powerful. There had been the celebrated occasion when a bright young Member of Parliament and T.V. personality, claiming an appointment with the editorial powers above, had been kept hanging about in the hall for ten minutes while Bostock made three separate phone calls before allowing him to go up. It had never been clear whether he had simply been doing his duty, or whether it was because the M.P. had been wearing a suede jacket over a maroon waistcoat.
Bostock gave Magnus a nod that missed nothing: dark tie, worsted suit, polished black shoes. Magnus passed muster. But the five steps to the lift were giving him trouble this morning. His leg ached more than usual and he was out of breath — a condition that reminded him that there were worse things in the world than a king-size hangover. Like having only one good lung and three steel pins in your knee.
He stared at a printed notice on the wall of the lift: ‘Anybody found shouting or spitting will be instantly dismissed.’
It had been there ever since Magnus had joined The Paper, four years ago; yet this morning the threat seemed oddly uncomfortable — almost personal. A warning that from now on he must tread more carefully — not only in his work, but also in his private life. There had been that man yesterday at the flat. A thin fellow in a mackintosh: said he was from the Gas Board and there had been complaints about a leak in the block. He hadn’t found one, though — not in Magnus’s flat, anyway — and he’d gone even before Magnus could finish shaving. But he’d been poking about in the kitchen, long enough to find the drink cupboard, the vodka in the fridge, see the double bed as he went out.
The lift stopped at the third floor, under the gilt letters: EDITORIAL. A carpeted corridor led round a block of cells with frosted glass doors where the leader writers worked — anonymous men who communicated with the proprietor and Editor-in-Chief, Sir James Broom, through a system of private telephones and sealed memoranda. At the end of the corridor was the Newsroom. There were walls of bookcases containing bound volumes of Hansard, The Times and The Paper, leather-topped desks bearing antique typewriters that looked like cash registers, and made much the same noise. At the back was the door leading to the News Editor’s office: a cosy little place with a gas fire, two armchairs and a rolltop desk surmounted by a pipe rack. It might have been a schoolmaster’s study, except for a hatch in the wall that opened on to the fury of the sub-editors’ room, full of glaring neon and clacking teleprinters.
The News Editor, Mr Hugh Rissell, was a lean saturnine figure who arrived every morning at ten o’clock, commuting from Esher, and would spend half an hour in front of the gas fire, studying the agency messages that were passed to him through the hatch in the wall, before ascending one floor to attend the Editorial Conference.
This morning he was still upstairs when Magnus Owen entered the Newsroom.
At that same moment, some six odd miles away, Thomas Pike was in the Press box of No. 2 Court at South-West Magistrates’ Court, Knightsbridge. The first name on the charge sheet that morning was Nesbitt. But at 10.30, when the court opened, the man had not been there to answer the charge. An hour later the magistrate had a quick conference with the Chief Clerk, then called to a blond young man in a sports jacket who was standing against the far wall with a buff file under his arm.
‘This is your case, Sergeant Skliros?’
The young man came to attention. ‘It is, your Worship.’
The magistrate spoke now to a solicitor sitting in the well of the court: ‘I don’t think we can spend any more time on this, Mr Jameson. If your client isn’t here by now, we had better postpone the hearing until tomorrow.’ As he spoke, a uniformed policeman appeared through a side door, went up to the blond detective sergeant and handed him a sheet of paper. The sergeant glanced at it, then took a couple of steps forward. The whole court was very quiet, watching him. He spoke in a flat neutral voice that belonged to no definable class or region: ‘Your Worship, I have just been informed that Mr Nesbitt received fatal injuries during the night in a motor accident near Slough.’
Thomas Pike was already on his feet, hurrying out of the Press box, past a row of dull-eyed traffic wardens, through the door into the entrance foyer, where there was a public telephone. The name of Nesbitt still meant nothing on its own, but the presence of a distinguished solicitor promised some importance.
At the end of the foyer he caught sight of the young detective sergeant, just leaving by the m
‘Sergeant Skliros? I’m Pike of South Star News Agency.’
Skliros stopped. He looked very clean next to Pike, his short blond hair shining silver under the glass ceiling. ‘Yes, Mr Pike?’
‘I believe you’re the officer dealing with this Nesbitt case?’
For a moment the young man smiled. It was no more than a creasing of the cheeks, for the eyes did not smile; they were a hard bright grey, too old for the rest of his face, and crinkled at the edges as though straining to look at something far away.
‘So you want to know about the late Mr Nesbitt, do you?’ He glanced up and down the foyer, and saw they were alone. ‘You’d better come over here, Mr Pike.’
The smile was still on his prim little mouth, as he took the buff file from under his arm and opened it.
Magnus Owen grunted to his colleagues, slumped into his chair and began to open his mail: a heap of P.R. handouts, an abusive letter typed in red calling him ‘a typically arrogant little crypto-fascist’, and yet another communication from his wife’s solicitors. This he screwed up and bowled inaccurately at a wastepaper basket, then leant forward, preparing to nurse the incipient headache.
It was six months now since she’d left him — a fast little rebel-deb who’d come running to him in search of further kicks. Because he was different and clever: History First from Cambridge, author of a minor political scandal and a best-selling book, now a famous journalist. She’d found him exciting; he had been wounded in battle and his body bore the scars to prove it. He was a new experience; but the novelty did not last. She soon found that marriage cramped her style, and her next experience had been more amenable: a successful fashion photographer with an exquisite profile and a Lotus Elan.
Magnus didn’t want her anymore; but he didn’t want the divorce either. The Welsh worm of Puritanism was at work, nurtured by that middle-class Chapel upbringing which he had rejected superficially, but would never be able to root out altogether. It had taught him guilt, but little compassion.
He picked up the heap of newspapers which he had not had the strength to read at breakfast, and carried them through to an oak-panelled door marked ‘Principals’ — The Paper’s euphemism for the lavatory. It was a solemn place, highly conducive to contemplation. The only graffiti ever to sully its walls had been the absent-minded jottings of a reporter trying to solve The Times crossword. Magnus sat down and began to read.
This morning The Paper was running a second leader entitled ‘A Scornful Abdication of Responsibility’, attacking the B.B.C. over a recent television play about a bank manager who was bathed every night by his mother.
Magnus groaned and closed his eyes; his headache was worse and the black tumours were churning. At such moments he wondered why he worked for The Paper. Secretly he despised it for its pious rectitude, its smug high-minded moralising and intellectual conformity. It was true that in the old days it had had a reputation for eccentricity. There had been one editor at the turn of the century who had grown his fingernail unusually long, slit it up the middle and used it as a quill. But those times were past. In the late fifties The Paper’s fortunes had begun to decline and rumours were abroad that the Finlayson Trust was threatening to dissolve itself and sell out. Finally, after a series of secret negotiations, The Paper passed into the hands of James Broom, a millionaire of obscure antecedents.
There was soon a new layout, which included a woman’s page, higher salaries to attract bright young men, and the introduction of by-lines. But otherwise The Paper remained its virtuous old self; the leader columns continued to rage against the decline of moral standards, while the political staff sat high on their Olympian fences, reluctant to commit themselves to any decisive line for fear of being thought partisan.
But perhaps the oddest feature of The Paper under its new regime lay in the character of its new proprietor and Editor-in-Chief. Throughout the whole controversy concerning the takeover, Broom — soon to become Sir James Broom — remained the sole personality in the whole drama never to enter the limelight, never to speak in public, never to be interviewed. Only one photograph of him ever seemed to be published, showing a shadowy middle-aged face that might have been any businessman’s passport photograph. Who’s Who awarded him with only a few lines, listing his address as Finlayson House, the offices of The Paper. He had no clubs, no recreations. He was said to be of Central European extraction, to have made a fortune first in South America, then in Australia, before moving on to the more influential heights of British public life.
But although the details of his career were spare to the point of mystery, his influence within the corridors of the establishment was considerable; and while some people still dismissed him as a social upstart who had bought The Paper merely as a ticket to the House of Lords, he was known to have the confidence of several prominent politicians of both parties, as well as access to the world of big business and the communications industry.
During the four years that Magnus had worked for The Paper he had only met Broom once. It had been a formal interview, lasting less than five minutes, and would have been quite unexceptional but for one curious incident which had stuck in his mind ever since. He had gone up to the Editor-in-Chief’s office on the fifth floor, to be told by a woman secretary to wait in an ante-room until Sir James Broom was ready to see him. The room had been empty except for a round-shouldered man on a stepladder dusting some books. He had asked Magnus what he wanted, and without saying anything had climbed down and disappeared through an inner door. A few minutes later the secretary came in and told Magnus that Sir James would now see him. He passed into a panelled room, lit by a single lamp on a long bare desk. Behind this sat the proprietor of The Paper. He was the same man Magnus had just seen next door dusting the books.
Sir James Broom asked him a number of routine questions, and hoped he was happy on The Paper. Magnus received almost no impression of him at all except that he appeared to have no eyebrows — just smudges of pale fur that gave his eyes a naked, startled expression.
Yet it was the wry impersonality of the man that made Magnus wary of him. He belonged to the remote world of power and the manipulation of power. It was a world that made Magnus, by comparison, feel almost a bohemian.
But while he had come to despise The Paper, he also needed it. It was not just for the money, or even the fame. It was something more personal, something of which he had grown aware only gradually over the years he had worked for the organisation. His job on The Paper had become a weapon in a private vendetta.
He was leaning forward now, his eyes still closed, his face almost touching his knees. The memory was as clear as it had been in those first blurred hours in the Nicosia military hospital. Splintering sunlight along Murder Mile. Ducking through the bead curtain into a bar which was out of bounds to all troops, after a sluggish patrol through the Walled City. All three of them National Servicemen — a boy called Bruce who had wanted to get back to camp but hadn’t dared spoil the fun, and a big Jew called Josh Stone who played the saxophone and could put back eight pints in a row — all drinking beer at the bar when there had been a flash and a roaring darkness, and Magnus had been crawling on his hands and knees, hearing Bruce screaming somewhere through the dust; then seeing Stone sitting against a pillar with his intestine swelling out under his shirt like a blue bubble; and he had drawn his revolver and emptied it into three Cypriots at a corner table — one of them, an old man, already wounded. He had killed all three, reloaded, killed the barman, then passed out. Both his companions died and the terrorist escaped.
He had lain in hospital for five months, before being discharged with one serviceable lung and a gammy leg.
Meanwhile, at home, there had been a public ballyhoo. The British Government was already shying off the Cyprus fiasco, and the Greek Press seized on the incident as an example of British atrocities against Cypriot civilians. Certain London papers lifted the story, and without naming names, warned of growing evidence that British troops were taking the law into their own hands on the island; while a group of M.P.s pressed successfully for a Court of Inquiry, and at least one, using his Parliamentary Privilege, cited the case of Second Lieutenant Magnus Owen.
