An Uncivilised Election Page 5

  “I didn’t realize it,” he said to Kate on that third night, “but this is going to be a second honeymoon.”

  “It takes two to make a honeymoon,” Kate said.

  Later, when she lay sleeping by his side in a huge, feather-filled double bed in a big room with a squeaky, shiny pine floor, he stared at the stars through an open window, and dozed, and dreamed, and did not realize that he was happy.

  Until that day Effie Wilcox had been very happy.

  She was twenty-three, but young for her age, and she had been married for two years. Her husband lay by her side, sleeping, making a faint noise with every breath; it could hardly be called a snore. He lay on his back, and Effie lay on her side, seeing his profile, his rather big nose, and the small, square window beyond it. They were lucky to have a bedroom as well as a living room, for flats and apartments were hard to get, and this tiny place was a palace to her. She and Fred had decorated it after they had married, had painted every piece of wood, had put on the wallpaper which they had chosen together – or rather, which she had chosen and Fred had approved.

  She worshipped him.

  And she was going to have a baby.

  Oh, God, why had that other, awful thing had to happen to her?

  The only man she had “known” was Fred. He had been the first ever to caress and to fondle her, the first to wake her to an understanding of sexual ecstasy, and from their early meetings she had felt no doubts about him, but had submitted with a willingness which would have baffled and frightened her with any other man. In fact she felt sure it could not have happened with anyone else. She had trusted him implicitly from the very beginning.

  She knew that he felt about her as she did about him; that there was no other woman, no other girl. She did not know whether there had been in the past, and did not even think about it. They were each other’s, and she was young and innocent enough to believe that the idyll could last forever. He had a good job as a mechanic at a large garage and was in the running for a foreman’s position. She would never cease to be fascinated by the way he handled gadgets; he could “fix” anything, and often laughed at her ineptness with tools. But as often he watched and admired her taste in decor and in clothes.

  There was only one blemish on their happiness, although she felt it wasn’t really a blemish, she felt ashamed for thinking of the word. Fred was so jealous it was unbelievable. He would go red and then slowly pale, as if to white heat, whenever a man took even the slightest notice of her. When they went dancing she had to be extremely careful to make sure that no partner held her too tightly. She didn’t really mind Fred’s possessiveness, in fact she was fiercely proud of it, but sometimes it was difficult, such as when after she had seen that doctor Fred had wanted to know everything.

  “Did he touch you?”

  “Well, hardly.”

  “Come on, I know what doctors do.”

  “Fred, he only just—well, he just examined me, that’s all.”

  “How old is this doctor?”

  “He’s about forty, I suppose.”

  “If he messed you about—”

  “Fred darling, I’ve got to go to a doctor, I’m going to have a baby. Don’t—don’t spoil it.”

  “Spoil it!” he had said, and pulled her to him and crushed her lips and pressed his lean hard body against hers. “It’s just that I don’t want any forty-year-old doctor even looking at you, let alone touching you. So change doctors, see. There’s a woman doctor at the clinic over at Darby Street, she’s the one for you. If you’d only told me what you thought before you went to see this chap!”

  At that time, standing in front of her, half a head taller, dark-haired, strong-looking, very thin, Fred had gripped her so tightly that he had hurt.

  “But I wanted to be sure, darling. Don’t you see?”

  “Of course I see and, okay, I’m a jealous fool – but it’s that clinic of women doctors from now on. Right?”

  “Right!”

  And it had been. A middle-aged gynaecologist had confirmed her hopes, and she had been so happy. Fred had too, behaving as if that silly interlude had never happened. She hadn’t given it a serious thought – until today.

  She had opened the door to a heavy knock, and found two big men outside. The flat was on the top floor of a four-story house in Sydenham, with a front door which opened straight into the living room. On the right was the bathroom and kitchen, which had just room for a small table, and where they ate except in the evenings, when they sat watching the television after the household chores were done, and ate from an oval coffee table. On the other side of the big room was this little bedroom.

  The two huge men had dwarfed Effie Wilcox. She hadn’t been scared, but she had been puzzled.

  One man was rather like Fred, but taller; the other reminded her of a man she had known at work. He had grey hair, looked rather tired, and had very big hands. He had a gentle voice, too.

  “Mrs. Wilcox?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am Chief Inspector Piper, of Scotland Yard, and this is Chief Inspector Dowsett,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Will you spare us a few minutes, please.”

  Then she had thought, Something’s happened to Fred, and she had felt her knees bending, her legs collapsing. Suddenly her head seemed to burst. The grey-haired man had stopped her from falling, lifted her, carried her into the room, and, a few minutes later, sat on the couch next to her, with a glass of water in his hands.

  “Better now?”

  “Yes, I—I’m all right. I thought—I thought it must be bad news about my husband.”

  “It’s just a routine call, Mrs. Wilcox.”

  “I—I don’t really understand.”

  “I believe you went to see a doctor about two weeks ago. On October 1st, to be precise.”

  “Well, yes, I did.”

  “What was the doctor’s name?”

  “Warburton, Dr. Warburton. I went—”

  “Had you ever seen him before?”

  “Well—no. No, I hadn’t. I’d expected to see Dr. Nash, you see, but Dr. Nash was away. I saw Dr. Warburton.”

  “Did he—ah—behave properly, Mrs. Wilcox?”

  She had stared, not comprehending. Only as the detective had asked more probing questions had she suspected the truth, and felt the breath of fear. All the time she had sat there, answering the man from Scotland Yard, and watched by the dark, saturnine Dowsett, she had been thinking of Fred and what he would say if he ever knew the truth – that it hadn’t been a doctor. Whenever she thought of it now she went white, both because of what Fred would think, how he would feel; and because a man had touched her. A man had laid his hands upon her breasts, a man had mocked the intimacy which was so precious and so right with Fred.

  She hadn’t told Fred. He had noticed that she wasn’t quite herself, and she had said she had a headache. He had fussed over her, made her change into her dressing gown, made the tea they always had as a nightcap. There had been a western followed by a thriller, and he had been absorbed in both. Afterward there had been a political program about the coming election. He was fiercely Labour in his views.

  So he hadn’t really noticed her nervousness.

  She hadn’t plucked up courage to tell him about the police as they got ready for bed, and once in bed he turned over and went to sleep.

  He had been asleep for hours. That noise was more like a snore now, but she did not worry about it at all, snoring didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except that beast of a man who had touched her.

  She could almost feel his hands.

  That same night Amanda Tenby slept, alone, in a well-furnished room in a well-furnished flat on the Chelsea Embankment, overlooking the Thames. There was no more picturesque position in London. She lived there by herself not because she could not afford servants – she was the wealthy daughter of a wealthy man and money meant very little to her – but because she preferred to do exactly what she liked in her own home, to have
whom she liked staying with her whenever she liked, by day or by night. She had one endearing trait, a great love of children, and another which also appealed, she was a good cook, had trained under a cordon bleu.

  From her infancy she had been used to having her own way. An indulgent mother, a succession of indifferent nurses, a father who was so busy making money to add to money which his father had made before him, had combined with her natural characteristics, a strong will and a determination which nothing could shake. Whatever she wanted she got. If she couldn’t get it easily she would fight in every way she knew. If she believed in a thing she would give everything she possessed to bring it about.

  It was the genetic aspects of the nuclear horror that had first affected her. The thought that mothers-to-be would be affected by radiation, the thought that a host of babies could be born idiots, imbeciles, beasts or cripples did something to her. At first, when she had realized the significance of it, she had tried to shut it out of her mind, but she had not been able to. She had flown to Japan, ostensibly for a holiday, actually to visit the scene of the World War II nuclear explosions, and she had seen some of the “children” of that awful era, she had visited the clinics and the hospitals and had studied pictures of a horror so hideous, of faces and human forms so grotesque and unbelievably misshapen, that the experience had burrowed deep into her being.

  From that moment she had dedicated herself to freeing the world from the nuclear shadow. Being Amanda Tenby, it had never seriously occurred to her that she could fail. She would need a great deal of help, but she could persuade some people and buy others. The committee was a means to an end, but for her it did not work quickly enough and was not drastic enough; it conformed too much.

  That night she lay awake staring out the window. The stars were very bright and the night was still. There was no lapping of water against the Embankment, and only now and again did she hear a car. In the distance, across the river, a pale glow shone above the Battersea Power Station, and a faint humming sound came from the station. She often wished that the power station was really a nuclear reactor establishment, which she could destroy. She had studied the theory of nuclear warfare and atomic reactors; she knew far more about them than most laymen.

  She believed that nuclear weapons must be outlawed.

  All the arguments against unilateral disarmament left her cold; her country need not possess the hideous weapon, it was a moral offence, an offence against humanity, an offence against children and the unborn.

  The politicians called it a deterrent, and certainly it was supposed to frighten other nations away from war. But it was above everything else a terror weapon, and such weapons were anathema to her. Yet as she had worked she had realized that the one way to make the campaign effective was to frighten the authorities, to plan some move which could embarrass and alarm them. Some of the bolder actions of the Battle Committee had stemmed from her agile mind; but, although she supported the committee with money and ideas, she knew that for really effective actions it had to be bypassed. Luckily there were a few who felt as keenly as she did, who would do anything within reason – or even beyond reason – to make the campaign a success.

  There was Daniel Ronn, probably the only man she ever deferred to, a brilliant organizer and a man with contacts in every sphere of public life – with members of Parliament, the friends and relations of public men, with fringe people in the royal household, with the great newspapers and magazines, with the television authorities, the book world, the film world, the theatre world; he was a man with a host of influential acquaintances, and he knew the strength and the weakness of all of them. He could say who could be bought and who could be persuaded, and who could be frightened into helping; and just as important, he knew whom it was a waste of time to approach.

  The one thing lacking in Daniel Ronn was ideas; he could work provided someone else did the creative thinking, he created nothing himself. Amanda was the thinker, and had never needed a brilliant idea as much as she did now. It must be something quite devastating, which would bring the nation to its senses, which would frighten the people into action.

  The general election offered an unrivalled opportunity if only she could think what.

  She felt as if she was in the position of Robert Catesby, and Daniel was Guy Fawkes.

  How simple life had been in the days of James I. A few kegs of gunpowder and a taper or two, and they had been able to scare the life out of the King and his courtiers, out of Parliament and its keepers. What would scare them now?

  A few kegs of gunpowder …

  Suddenly an idea came to her. It was like a knife slash in her mind. In the hush of that clear night her thin, boyish body went utterly still and her blood seemed to chill in her veins.

  Then she whispered hoarsely to the quiet, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it. It’s the obvious way, it’s the only way. I’ve got it!”

  She was so near ecstasy that tears squeezed themselves out between her eyelids.

  At half past four that morning Daniel Ronn heard a bell, as if a long way off, then suddenly close by. He started up out of sleep. It was pitch-dark. His flat was in a Mayfair mews, and there was no light by day, no sight of the sky by night. The bell seemed to blast through his head, and he groped for the instrument, struggling to sit up, hating the caller.

  He pulled off the receiver, and muttered: “Hallo.”

  “Daniel!”

  “Who the devil is that?”

  “Daniel, I’ve got it!”

  “Who—” Ronn began again, and then realized that it was Amanda. Amanda was not a person to shout at, even when she woke him in dead of night. Amanda was a wealthy young woman and he was an eligible young man. “Amanda,” he gasped, “what’s all this about?”

  “I’ve got it,” she said in a breathless-sounding voice.

  “You got—my God!” He was awake now, jolted into full wakefulness by understanding. “You mean you’ve got the big idea?”

  “Yes, I know I have. I know it.” She caught her breath. “I’m coming round to see you. I’ve got to talk about it, and we can’t talk on the telephone. You’ll be up, won’t you?”

  “Of course I’ll be up,” said Ronn. “My dear, I can come round to you, if you’d rather.”

  “No, I’d rather come to you,” Amanda insisted. “I want to walk. I’ve just got to walk.”

  He knew what that meant; that she wanted to commune with herself, to dream her dream, to soliloquize in the tortuous world of her mind.

  “I wonder what the hell she’s thought up,” he said aloud, and then his tone changed. “I’ve got half an hour, anyhow, if she’s going to walk.” He picked up the alarm clock, set it for five to five, and turned over and went to sleep again.

  At a quarter to five, Amanda left the Chelsea house and began her walk.

  A divisional policeman saw her, recognized her, and made a note for his report.

  5: Proud Deputy

  “It’s time you got up, George,” Kate said. “Your second honeymoon is over.”

  It was eight o’clock on the Monday morning after they had reached home. Bright sunlight sparked on frost on grey slates opposite, and on the window ledges. Kate stood with a tea tray in her hand, dressing gown on, hair drawn back from her forehead, straight as it could be. She had refused to pay Riviera prices for a shampoo and set, and had simply brushed and combed it herself after every bathe in a caressing sea. She was beautifully brown; in fact Gideon could not remember having seen her so sunburned. But she had not peeled, whereas his face had been painfully red for the first few days, and there was dead skin on his forehead and ears even now. Yet he had burned almost black, and the colour showed up sharply against the white pillow case.

  “So it’s over,” he said.

  “For this year, anyhow.”

  He said, “Bless you, Kate!” He sat up. “What I need is a couple of days to settle down before going to the office, but I daren’t suggest it. At least there wasn’t a pile of urgent message
s waiting here for me.” He took a cup of tea. “If I know Lemaitre, he’ll look up at me from my desk and ask me who I am.”

  Lemaitre sat with his jacket on, a dark-brown tie instead of a bow tie, a subdued dark-brown suit, his hair smarmed down, his hands and face looking very pale. He must have known that Gideon was on his way, for the Yard’s grapevine would have started to operate the moment Gideon had appeared at the gate, but he appeared to ignore the opening door. Piles of the familiar manila folders were on Gideon’s desk, more were on Lemaitre’s, which Gideon had never seen so tidy.

  Gideon closed the door quietly.

  Lemaitre looked up. “Good morning,” he said. “Can I help you?” Almost before the words were out he exploded, “Blimey, you’re burned to a cinder!”

  Gideon grinned; his teeth showed dazzlingly.

  “Handsome too,” Lemaitre scoffed, and got up and stretched out his hand. “Hallo, George. How’d it go?”

  “Couldn’t have been better.”

  “Kate okay?”

  “She’s as brown as I am.”

  “Jolly good,” said Lemaitre. “And you’ve lost weight. Oi! How’d you manage to lose weight in France, that’s what I want to know?”

  “One good meal a day,” replied Gideon, slapping his flat, hard stomach. “Nine pounds off, so I can start eating square meals again.” He moved toward his desk and Lemaitre moved away from it. “Someone been taking you in hand?”

  “Eh?”

  “The place looks as if you’ve had a spring clean.”