Hayter left the room at a dismissive nod from Reed. The American commander glared at the English chief inspector. ‘You got a problem Friday. You across it?’
Reed’s mouth went dry. He disliked the Commander intensely and hated every second of the humiliation he had been put through.
‘What problem would that be?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘How can I be sure unless you tell me what you’re talking about, Commander?’
‘You tell me first, Chief Inspector. Do you know of any potential problem affecting us, here, this Friday? Is that plain enough?’
The policeman squirmed. ‘No,’ he said curtly.
The Commander had extracted his pound of flesh. He reached into his top drawer, pulled out a large sheaf of papers clipped together and passed it over.
‘Mass trespass. Midday. The biggest yet. Goddam peace groups from all over the north coming through our wire.’
The words felt like drips of freezing water down the policeman’s back. He leafed through the papers.
‘These are phone intercepts? I need to read them.’
‘I didn’t say what they were. Read them here and read them fast. Outside this room you don’t know they exist. Get on it, Chief Inspector. See if just maybe, just for once, you can stop them walking right through my base.’
It took Reed ten minutes to go through the papers under the Commander’s sardonic gaze, ten minutes in which he kept wondering how domestic phone intercepts had sidetracked him so embarrassingly without coming down the usual pipeline from Cheltenham.
Bob and Dolly did a lot of business that Friday morning. Margo, Heather and the other peace women had given them plenty of warning and they turned up in the lay-by bright and early, laden down with supplies. Four times the usual stock of bacon, sausages, beefburgers and rolls, a hundred of Dolly’s juicy cottage pies and two hundred portions of the thick crusted apple pie that always went well when there was a special occasion at the Stray. They were raking in the money from the moment they raised the caravan shutters. The police were rotated through their refreshment breaks and being civilian coppers, not the MOD, they were excluded from going into the base unless it became operationally necessary. The local Harrogate and Otley lads knew Dolly’s reputation for good food and weren’t slow to spread the word, so the queue at the caravan’s open flap stretched away into the distance all morning.
Bob and Dolly usually saw quite a lot of the modplods, as they patrolled the base perimeter and stopped off for a mug of tea and a chat. Today though, there was no sign of them. They were all inside the base, called in whether they were on shift or not, feverishly checking the wire, eyes glued to the monitor console in the Operations Room for any sign of trouble. Bob and Dolly’s customers today were regulars called in from as far away as Northallerton and York, deserting their usual duties to line the lanes all round the outside of the base, riot shields and helmets piled up in the backs of the vans. They didn’t take it too seriously. Previous demonstrations around the base had usually been good-tempered affairs, with most of the spleen coming from their MOD opposite numbers, who seemed to take it all very personally. The civilian bobbies didn’t think much of their MOD colleagues and weren’t slow in saying so. ‘They just don’t know the law’ was the usual verdict; ‘arrogant sods too. They’re going to go too far one day, kick someone’s head in, I shouldn’t wonder.’
By midday the visiting police were, to a man, pissed off.
‘Bloody mass trespass? Like bloody hell,’ said a dour sergeant. ‘I’ll have a burger, please, love.’
‘Sorry. You’re a bit too late for that. Do you a nice sausage in a roll with a bit of extra bacon on it?’ She was sorry there were no more burgers. It was her private joke, when they asked for ketchup, to paint a CND badge on to the burger with the spout of the plastic ketchup squeezer before putting the bun on top. She did it in full view and they never noticed.
‘All right, then, and a mug of coffee and maybe a bit of that apple pie with it.’
‘So there’s nothing happening? Do you want custard?’
‘Got a bit of cream? I’ll say there’s nothing bloody happening. Bloody fools in there don’t know what the bloody hell they’re talking about. It’s going to cost someone a flaming fortune in overtime, this lot.’
His radio crackled. ‘Sarge. Ops Room have been on. They say they can see two people coming your way on the monitor, down the sideroad. Can you check them out?’
He looked round. Two old women, one with a stick, walked slowly up the lane from the south and stopped by the main road. A small bus ground into view over the hill, slowed to a halt and picked them up.
The sergeant balanced his plates in one hand and keyed the transmit switch. ‘Yeah. Tell the Ops Room it’s Che Guevara and Chairman Mao and I’m pretty sure they’ve got the Red Army in their shopping bags.’
A dribble of cream slid off the apple pie and down the sleeve of his uniform. ‘Bugger!’ he said with feeling.
Inside Ramsgill Stray, Chief Inspector Reed was starting to feel quite pleased with himself. He was in the Operations Room with the Commander standing beside him and the Commander was showing signs of tension as the clock ticked on. The Commander’s pal, the old spook with the cropped hair, was standing there impassively. Noon was only seconds away, and the cameras covering the roads around the base told their story all too clearly. By now, on a peace group day of action, there should have been a mass of activity, cars, minibuses, even coaches disgorging hundreds of protesters unwrapping their banners and getting ready for a bit of sitting down or fence rattling. Usually it was a colourful scene. Instead the screens were dominated by white and blue police vans lined up along the verges as far as the camera could see, bored policemen strolling up and down or sitting inside reading their newspapers.
As the hands of the clock hit noon, he turned to the Commander. He’d chosen the words carefully, rehearsed them for maximum impact.
‘What would you like me to do with all these people?’ he said mildly.
Before the Commander could answer all six of the phones on the desk chose the same moment to start ringing. They jumped, looked quickly at the monitors. Nothing. The Chief Inspector picked up the nearest phone. ‘Reed here.’
It was an unfamiliar man’s voice and it sounded surprised for a moment. ‘Ah! Chief Inspector Reed. How nice to have the chance to talk to you. My name’s Maurice Cannon and I’m just ringing to ask you to consider whether as an upholder of British law you really should be helping to preserve a foreign operation on our soil which is probably illegal and certainly interfering with the…’
He put the phone down, looked around and saw others in the room who’d also picked up phones and were now staring, hypnotized by what was being said to them. He picked the receiver up again. But the man at the other end hadn’t stopped. His voice went relentlessly on. ‘…things they couldn’t do in America. If we had a proper constitution in this country you would probably be facing charges of…’ He put it back down and looked at the Commander.
‘There’s your mass trespass,’ he said, ‘mass trespass by telephone. I don’t think your people could have done quite enough work on their transcripts, do you?’