bunks. Of a diet that hardly ever included protein, fresh vegetables or fruit. Of the beatings and the punishment cells. Of finger nails ripped off with plumbing pliers. He read of strikes, riots, reprisal executions.
And every day of the ten years this poor bastard had nurtured the assumption that the Secret Intelligence Service was working for his release. It was a disgrace. He tidied the faded sheets of paper.
Anon, the legman had been brought home, privately feted as a hero.
But he'd lost his wife, lost his son, lost the best ten years of his life, so the agent had been given a warm berth in South Africa. Controlled from London, working for Colonel Fordham.
The telephone rang.
He thought the man who had done ten years of his life in Spac was indeed second rate. He thought also that the man must have a near limitless well of courage.
He picked up the telephone. He said to send them in.
He put the Curwen/Carew file to the side of his desk.
•**
Perhaps Duggie believed him. Extraordinary that priggy Curwen should have sought him out to set up a meeting with the African National Congress, not just any old Joe there but the military wing, and should have said he worked in the explosives racket. Explosives weren't a joke. Explosives and detonators and time delay fuses were serious business.
They left the pub. Then went in Jack's car, north up the Essex Road. It was dark and raining.
'You scared?'
'No,' Jack said. 'Not now.'
'Perhaps you should be.'
''This isn't South Africa yet.'
'It's a war. We're fighting to destroy them and they're fighting to survive. Point is, we're winning, but that doesn't mean they'll stop fighting. What's at stake is whether South Africa is governed by the representatives of nearly thirty million people, or whether it's run by nearly five million who happen by accident of birth and breeding to have a different different pigmentation of skin… Jack, if you're getting into South African resistance politics, if you're into explosives then, my opinion, you ought to be a bit scared''
Jack said curtly, 'I've my own reasons for getting involved, they're good enough for me.'
'Learn first that you don't talk on open phones. Learn fast that they can get a hell of a lot rougher than phone taps.
There's bombs in London and Paris and Zimbabwe and Botswana and Swazi and Maputo. Big bombs down to letter bombs. They've got infiltrators. They pay burglurs to turn over resistance offices right here in safe old London.'
'Got it.' Even as his father had. He had known what was for real. ,,.
'These people you're going to meet don t piss about, not the sort of man you're going to meet. Fighting repression in South Africa is their whole lives.'
'They'll trust me.'
Duggie noticed the assurance. He gave me instructions.
Right turn, then a left, then straight on over the lights, another right.
They walked across the poorly-lit playground of a junior school.
There were posters up on the playground fences to adver-tise the meeting. Big d e a l… It wasn't the Albert Hall, nor the Royal Festival Hall. It was a junior school in Stoke Newington.,
There was music beating out through the open doors of the gymnasium. Through the door Jack could see the lines of chairs They stopped at the door. Duggie turned, hand out, and Jack gave him two pound coins. It bought them admission and a photocopied sheet detailing the evening's programme.
'I'll start you off, then you're on your own.'
Jack looked around him. There were posters and flags fastened to the wall bars. There were pictures of Mandela and Tambo. There were the slogans of the Anti-Apartheid campaign. There were a hundred people. He thought he must stand out, a fly in a tea cup. There were eyes watching him. The uniform was jeans and sweaters and shawls and long skirts.
'You said it,' Duggie chuckled. 'You said you knew what you were getting into. Now you find out.'
The apple of Major Swart's attention was Jacob Thiroko.
The Black lounged at the back of the hall away from the low stage and out of sight of the door. He leaned against the gymnasium's vaulting horse. His eyes drooped, as if he was still exhausted from the long flight out of Lusaka.
Of course he would be cold after the Central African heat.
Around him were a clutch of his European-based comrades.
Swart wore patched denim trousers. He had not shaved that day, his cheeks were rough below the tinted glasses.
His hair was brushed up. Before coming he had rubbed his hands in the earth of his office pot plants, getting the stains into his palm and under his fingernails. He sat in the last-but-one row, unremarkable and unobserved.
There was a young man at the doorway, in a suit, staring round him. He saw the man who was with him. He recognised him. Douglas William Arkwright, 27 years old, unemployed, unpaid worker at Anti-Apartheid, verbose and useless. He saw Arkwright speak in the young man's ear and then lead him the length of the hall to stand respectfully on the fringe of the group surrounding Thiroko.
Swart was interested. He couldn't hear what was said, but he saw the young man in the suit shake hands with Jacob Thiroko.
** •
It was for Jack to start. There was casual amusement in Thiroko's expression. Jack saw a handsome man, soft chocolate skinned, mahogany eyed. He couldn't tell the age, anything between middle thirties and late forties.
He was Jack Curwen and he lived in Churchill Close, and he paid into a private medical scheme, and he voted to maintain the status quo. He was Jack Curwen standing in a run down school, shaking hands with a member of a revolutionary movement committed to the overthrow of a government half the world away. Preposterous enough to make him laugh, but his father had three weeks to live.
'I was brought here to meet someone from the African National Congress.'
'There are many of us here, Comrade.' A soft, swaying voice.
'I wanted to meet someone from the military wing of the A.N.C.'
'Then you should be in South Africa where they are fighting the freedom war.'
'I was told that if I came here I would meet someone from the Umkonto we Sizwe wing of the A.N.C.'
'There is no war in London. The war is in our homeland.'
Jack moved close to Thiroko.
'My name is Jack Curwen. I am an expert in explosives.
I have to meet, and urgently, someone from the military wing.'
'Perhaps in a month such a person… '
'I don't have until next month. I've two days at most to meet someone from the military wing.'
'What sort of person?' Thiroko's face was a mask.
'Someone who can make decisions and see them through.'
'I doubt I am that person. There is no one from the military wing at a meeting such as this.'
'I have to talk to you.'
'You said that you wanted the military… '
