'They'd kill you if they found you were bent.'
'That's not what they'll find.'
'You didn't tell me what work you were in.'
Jack cracked a thin smile. His mind was made. He was on his road.
'I'm to do with explosives.'
Duggie pulled an old envelope out of his pocket. On it Jack wrote his home number and his office number.
In the pub they had three pints each, paid for by Jack, and they talked about college days and laughed too much.
They laughed too loud because Jack had said he worked with explosives and Duggie had heard him.
6
'I see the world's looking up on you.'
Nicholas Villiers noted the change in Jack.
'Sorry about the snap. I was a bit under the weather. The problem's sorted out.'
'Glad to hear it.'
Janice and Lucille heard the satisfaction in Villiers' voice.
The girls liked Jack for his apology.
Jack told Villiers that he was going straight out to do his elms, that he'd be back in after lunch. He asked Lucille to mind his telephone. He said that a Mr Arkwright might phone him, and to be sure to get the message exactly.
He drove down to Dorking, then came off the main road and took a winding tree-lined route to Ockley. He reached a remote farm, far up a lane, with post and rail fencing for the hunters. Hell of a backwoods place for thirty miles from London. The owner had looked as though he'd had a death in the family when he'd first had Jack down, when the elms were toppled on their sides, felled but waiting to be cut up and carted away. Taking out the stumps was small business to Jack, but he'd had to work for the contract because the owner seemed hesitant to uproot his final memories of the elm avenue.
For once George had beaten Jack to the site. Just the two of them. The JCBs and the lorries would come in the owner's own time. Jack had asked that the horses be kept well clear and there was no sign of them. Some beef bullocks watched them. They'd take plenty to be frightened.
George had already dug neat holes at the side of each of the stumps.
By his small unmarked van was the wooden crate that held the nitroglycerine, ammonium nitrate based dynamite, and also the metal box in which he carried his no. 6 detonators, and also a drum of Cordtex and a drum of safety fuse.
'Are you going to sit on your arse, or are you going to help?'
'I'd like to help, Mr Hawkins.'
They worked together. Jack at George's shoulder as the old blaster stowed the 4 oz cartridges of explosive down under the arches of the roots. Jack didn't speak, didn't interrupt. He watched as George slid the aluminium tubed detonators into the cartridges. He saw him crimp the Cordtex to the open ends of the detonators. He was learning. He was watching a master at work.
'Set 'em off all together,' George muttered. 'Cordtex and safety fuse are cheaper than my time.'
Jack had many times witnessed the routine. He had seen the laying of the explosive, the insertion of the detonators, the crimping in of the Cordtex, the linking of the Cordtex to the safety fuse, the unwinding of the safety fuse back to the van and the charger box.
'You're bloody quiet this morning, Jack boy.'
Jack didn't answer, just watched. A long job with thirty-two stumps to be taken out.
If Sandham was nervous then he was good at hiding it.
A secretary had come up to the South Africa desk to collect him.
Furneaux had been in the open plan area, he had seen Sandham summoned, and known who the secretary worked for, and wondered what in hell's name was going on. Sandham, Grade 2, having an audience without it going through the Assistant Secretary running his desk.
Sandham came into the hush of the outer office, where the girls' fingers whispered over the electric typewriters. He thought a funeral parlour might have been more cheerful.
The Permanent Under Secretary was waiting in front of the closed inner door, ill at ease. Sandham understood. When a Grade 2 man requests a personal meeting with the Foreign Secretary on a matter concerning national security then the fat cats would be wetting themselves, one and all. There had been some exquisite moments in Jimmy Sandham's life. He reckoned this would knock spots off les affaires Bangkok, Teheran and Amman.
The P.U.S. opened the inner door, waved Sandham inside.
It was the first time that he had been inside the Foreign Secretary's office. He was too far down the ladder to take part in the South Africa policy meetings, where strategy was hammered over. He thought the Foreign Secretary's wife must have had a hand in the decor. It was seven years since his own wife had left him, shouting from the pile of suitcases at the front door that she couldn't endure one more day with a man so pompous and self-opinionated. And nor had she.
But he still recognised a woman's hand. The Foreign Secretary, tepid and small, wouldn't have had the wit to choose the colours and the fabrics and the gentle hidden lighting.
The Foreign Secretary had his nose into a paper-covered desk.
There was a second man in the room. He sat in a low chair with his back to the door, the bald crown of his head just visible over the chair's back.
The P.U.S. announced Sandham. He pointed to a plain, upright chair and Sandham went to it, and sat. Sandham wondered if they had any inkling of what was about to drop into their laps.
The Foreign Secretary raised his head. He had pale skin and owl spectacles.
'Ah, Sandham. Thank you for coming. You wanted to alert us to a matter of national security, I think. I have asked the Director General to sit in. You know P.U.S., of course, who will make any notes that may be r e q u i r e d… The floor is yours.'
The Foreign Secretary had his elbows on his papers, his chin in his hands. The P.U.S. lounged back on a short settee, a pad on his knee. The Director General gazed with frank hostility into Sandham's face because he had read the wretch's file. J. Sandham, Grade 2 man, given the moment could be mischievous or impertinent, but he needed a deep breath. He had expected that the P.U.S. would sit in with the Foreign Secretary. He had not expected that the Director General would have been summoned across the Thames from his Century tower. The Director General as the man in place in the Secret Intelligence Service had responsibility for Jack's father. The Director General was the employer of Jeez Carew, alias James Curwen. A hell of a deep breath before launching into his accusation.
'Thank you for seeing me, sir. I t h o u g h t there was a matter that you should be aware of. It is a question of life and death and that is why I have requested this personal meeting with you… '
The P.U.S.'s propelling pencil was poised.
'In South Africa, in about three weeks time, a man called James Curwen, but who goes under the name of James Carew in that country, is going to hang… '
Sandham saw the muscles tighten under the pug dog chin of the Director General.
'I'll call him Carew because that's the only name that the South Africans have for him. Carew was convicted of driving the getaway car used by African National Congress guerrillas in their escape from the Supreme Court bombing in Johannesburg fourteen months ago. At the time that Carew drove the vehicle he was a full-time operative of the Secret Intelligence Service… '
He saw the eyebrows of the P.U.S. flicker upwards, he saw him begin to write.
