Over the growing crowd noises Lewis could be heard shouting, “We’ve got our rights under the law! We’re picketing this gate. Peaceful picketing.”
The Superintendent said, “Take that man.”
And then pandemonium broke loose.
Mr. Calder had every intention of keeping out of trouble. He started to back away. As he did so, someone tripped him from behind. He put his hands out to save himself and received a violent blow in the middle of the back. Until that moment he had assumed that the hustling was accidental. Now he knew better. Instead of trying to turn he let himself go, falling across the trampling legs. Two men tripped over him, and he pulled a third man’s legs from under him, squirmed onto his hands and knees, and crawled to temporary safety behind the human barricade he had created.
As he scrambled to his feet he could hear the police whistles shrilling for reinforcements. A crash proclaimed that the platform had gone down. Mr. Calder waited no longer. He ran toward the side road, where he had left his car.
When he got there, he saw there was going to be more trouble. A truck was now parked across the nose of his car, and two men were sitting in it, watching him.
He said, “Would you mind moving that truck? I want to get out.”
The men looked at each other, then climbed slowly out, one on each side of the cab. They were big men. One of them said, “What’s the hurry, mate? You running away or something?” The other laughed and said, “Looks as if someone’s been roughing him up already.”
“That’s right. And if he doesn’t mind his manners he may be in for more.”
Mr. Calder said, “I’m getting tired of this.” He opened the door of his car. Rasselas came out and looked at the men, lifting his lip a little as he did so. Mr. Calder indicated the man on the right, and the dog moved toward him, his yellow eyes alight. The man stepped back quickly. As he did so, Mr. Calder hit the second man.
It was not a friendly blow. It was a left-handed short-arm jab, aimed low enough to have got him disqualified in any prize fighting ring. As the man started to double up, Mr. Calder slashed him across the neck with the full swing of his right arm, hand held rigid. The man went down and stayed down. Mr. Calder then transferred his attention to the other man, who was standing quite still, his back against the truck, watching Rasselas.
“You can either move the truck,” said Mr. Calder, nursing his right hand which had suffered in the impact, “or have your windpipe opened up.”
“You would appear to have been in the wars,” observed Mr. Fortescue. “That’s a remarkably perfect example of a black eye that you have. How did you acquire it?”
Mr. Calder said, “I was trodden on. By a plainclothes policeman, actually.”
“I trust you weren’t attempting to assault him.”
“I wasn’t attempting to do anything except keep out of trouble. I was tripped from behind, hit as I went down, and trampled on.”
“Accidents will happen.”
“There was nothing accidental about it. I was on the edge of the crowd, minding my own business. But someone had spotted me. There were two more of the heavy brigade waiting for me by my car. Luckily I had Rasselas with me, and that evened things up.”
“I see. And what was your impression of the meeting?”
“Manufactured, for public consumption. A very skilled piece of stage management by people who knew their job backwards. A couple of hundred genuine strikers, at least twenty professional agitators, and an equal number of reporters, who’d been tipped off beforehand that something was going to happen and were ready with cameras and notebooks to record it for posterity.”
“It may not prove,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that having reporters there was really such a good idea. The police impounded all the photographs they’d taken. I have copies here. Is there anyone you recognize?”
Mr. Calder looked at the photographs. Some of them seemed to have been taken from a window overlooking the scene and showed the whole crowd. Others were closeups, taken by reporters in the melee itself. There was a fine shot of the platform going down and Punchy Lewis jumping clear.
“Is that Superintendent Vellacott on the ground?”
“It is indeed. He was very roughly handled and is now in the Infirmary. He’s still on the danger list.”
Mr. Calder had carried one of the photographs over to the window to examine it. He said, “There are one or two faces here I seem to recognize.”
“Indeed, yes. Govan, Patrick, Hall—”
“An All-Star cast. What are they doing with them?”
“They’re being held. The Chief Constable would like to charge them. He’s very upset about his Superintendent. I’ve tried to persuade him that it would be unwise. They’ll make a public show out of the trial. If they’re convicted they’re martyrs, and if they’re acquitted they’re heroes.”
Mr. Calder was still intent on the photographs. “That’s me,” he said. “You can just see my foot sticking out.” He picked up another one. “What beats me is, who puts the money up for a show like this? Twenty top-class agitators at twenty-five pounds apiece. And they wouldn’t get Punchy to come from South Wales for less than a hundred quid.”
“Part, at least, of their funds come from a liberal and philanthropic body known as The Peaceful People. You may have seen their manifestoes in the papers.”
“I have indeed. I thought they were a harmless and woolly-minded lot of intellectual pinks.”
“Behrens has attended six of their public meetings in the last two months. He found them excessively boring.”
“My meeting wasn’t boring!”
“Last night he thought he recognized Sir James Docherty in the audience. He followed him home to check up. It was Sir James.”
“Odd place to find our current shadow Foreign Secretary.”
“Sir James is an odd man,” said Mr. Fortescue.
He said the same thing to the Home Secretary that afternoon.
Mr. Fortescue had served six Home Secretaries, and the incumbent was the one he admired most — a thick Yorkshireman, sagging a little now, but still showing the muscle and guts that had brought him up from a boyhood in the pits to his present job.
He said, “If things go wrong for us at the next election, Fortescue, he’ll be one of your new bosses. I wish you luck with him. He was here this morning, complaining about some customs officer who had dared to open his bag when he was coming back from one of his trips to Paris. He asked me to discipline him. I refused, of course. Don’t let’s talk about Sir James. I want to hear about the riot.”
“Calder was in the crowd. He confirms what we’d suspected. It was a put-up job. Aimed at the American management of Amalgamated Motors.”
“Motive?”
“Anti-Americanism is the easiest platform for any rabble-rouser today.”
“The easiest and the most dangerous. An open split between ourselves and the Americans would benefit the Russians enormously. And the Chinese still more. Who were behind this show? Do we know?”
“It was paid for, if not actually run, by the Action Committee of The Peaceful People. The main body is respectable, aboveboard, and full of public figures. It holds meetings, writes to the papers, and collects funds, which it hands over to its Action Committee, without much idea, I would suspect, of how the funds are going to be used.”
“The tail wagging the dog, eh. They’d want more than casual money to finance the sort of national pressure they’re keeping up.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Fortescue. “I fancy they’re getting regular subsidies.”
“Where from?”
“I’d very much like to find out. But it’s not going to be easy. Some organizations are easy to penetrate. But not this particular committee. It’s too closely interrelated. The members all know each other personally. They’ve worked together for years. If we tried to slip anyone in, it would simply be asking for trouble. The sort of trouble Calder ran into at the meeting.”