“Nor do we confine our happy state to England alone. In every corner of the world where our own have settled, our Dominions are also advancing in peace and liberty and the most perfect external security. Yes, look at the Empire—that groups of states, all independent in their own local concerns, but all united for the defence of their common interests and the defence of a common civilisation, united not in an alliance, for alliances can be made and unmade, but in a permanent and organic union.
“Look at our common future as it might have seemed in the March of 1939. Look at our future as it so reasonably seems twenty years later—a future of longer and richer lives, of weather control and space flight, of electrical devices almost unimaginable just ten years ago, but soon to be in every home. Look at this contrast, and let us all be grateful for the Providence that has enabled England alone—England and all her dependencies—so successfully to negotiate the rapids of the past half century.”
I drew another breath, and was about to launch into an encomium on the gold standard and the removal of the food taxes, when I felt a sharp kick from the man sitting next to me.
“You are from the Labour Headquarters?” he hissed, an anxious look on his face.
“Er, yes,” I said. I looked about the room. Now I thought about it, everyone was looking rather common—and there was an omnipresent smell of unwashed clothes and stale tobacco. Even otherwise, this was Peckham—and I surely ought to have noticed the trade union banner on the wall behind me, and the framed picture of Dennis Healey. Silly me, I told myself. Of course, this had to be the Labour Party! I had come into the room with other concerns in my head. But I should perhaps have asked which party I was supposed to be representing. Still, no one had actually started a slow hand clap. The heckler aside, no one was even looking very put out. But I put myself into a change of mental gears that Krellburger himself might have thought sudden and went on:
“But, if all this must be appreciated, Brothers, are we to think it enough?” There was a gratifying shout of “No, never!” from the heckler. I flashed a brilliant smile in his direction, and wondered what might presently be on Labour-thinking minds. “Oh, there is the Health Insurance Act that relieves the poorest among us from fear of sickness. There is the Higher Education Act that awards bursaries to the young and able poor to study at university. But no one should be deceived that this is the limit to what a country as wealthy as ours has become may afford. Where are the co-operative associations that the Tories promised at the last election? Have they supplemented the work of the private friendly societies and of state subsidy? I tell you, Brothers, they were allowed to fall stillborn from the womb of Parliament.” I slapped the table for emphasis, and thought its trestles would give way under the sudden shock. I stared defiantly about. “Where is the strict enforcement of the Imperial Immigration Act? Is it not notorious that whole streets of our cities have been allowed to fill with persons of alien and inferior race?”
I now got my first cheer of the entire speech. There was a long burst of applause, and several men got up to wave their cloth caps in the air. I was thinking to explain the laws of supply and demand as they operated in labour markets, when I suddenly noticed that the audience had increased by three. Large men, still wearing their hats and overcoats, they stood at the back of the hall beside the only known exit. I slumped forward and leaned on both hands.
“Is there a telephone here?” I asked from the corner of my mouth. The chairman of the meeting shook his head and asked if I could explain Labour’s policy on colonial birth control. If I’d known what it was, I’d now have been hard put to string more than a dozen words together. I thought desperately. “I need to use the toilet again,” I said. The chairman looked alarmed. I swallowed and looked once more at the back of the hall. The three men had now multiplied to six, and they were edging forward. Right at the back, framed in the doorway, I got a quick flash of a familiar, moustached face—its usual melancholy look replaced by a glare of blazing and malevolent triumph.
“But Brothers,” I shouted. I banged very hard on the table, not caring now if it did collapse. That got everyone’s attention. “Brothers, let it never be said that the Labour Party was at all exclusive in its welcome to speakers. You’ve heard me put the socialist case for our national future. If you want to hear the other side, be aware that our Foreign Secretary—Harold Macmillan himself—is standing just outside this room, and is waiting to answer all your questions in person.”
There was a sound of disbelieving laughter. Then someone at the back forced his way through the door and jumped back in, nodding and waving his arms. There was a deafening scrape of chairs and a cheerful shout of “Big Mac! Big Mac!” as sixty people got to their feet and formed a chaotic, jostling mob at the exit. I could see one of the big men trying to struggle forward. For the moment, the others had simply vanished into the crowd.
Even before the chairman could get in his obvious question, I had my hat and coat and was off the stage and rushing for one of the side doors. I threw myself into the little cubicle and shot the bolt. The window was painted shut. But I stepped onto the seat and smashed it open with both fists protected by my hat. It was only a couple of feet square, and my shoulders would only go out diagonally. But it’s astonishing what acrobatics a man can achieve when he’s in a blind terror. It couldn’t have been thirty seconds between jumping down from the stage and my rolling about on an overgrown gravelled path outside the hall. There was a high wall in front of me, and a rusted wire mesh gate a few yards along on my left that might well have been locked. I crept right along the path to the main street. No one had yet bubbled out of the hall. Perhaps the door was being kept shut while Macmillan’s men fought their way through the crowd in search of me. The methane car was still parked outside. The only other parked vehicle, I realised with a shock, was the one in which Krellburger and I had made our escape from Birch Grove. I dodged back behind the high wall and looked carefully out at the car. It was dark now, and many of the street lights were broken or hadn’t yet come on. But the reading light was on in the front of the big car. Was that Krellburger sat in the driving seat? I stared hard. It was. No point asking what he was doing here. It was either make an ineffectual dash either way along a street where I couldn’t recall any openings or turnings off, or resign myself to a delayed meeting with the great Nathaniel Branden.
Hesitantly, I approached the car. The street was otherwise still empty, I pulled at the handle on the passenger’s side. The door opened and I got in.
“I won’t ask what you’re doing here, old boy,” I said, trying to sound cheerful through my fit of the shakes. “But you are, beyond all doubt, a sight for sore eyes.”
No answer.
I looked at Krellburger. Now I was beside him, I could see that he was slumped forward against the wheel. I reached slowly out and patted his arm. Like a thing disturbed from some unstable equilibrium, he fell heavily towards me. As his hat fell off onto my lap, I saw his blank, staring eyes, and the exposed, darkened flesh of his throat.
I heard a noise from the seat directly behind me.
“It helps with these old cars, Dr Markham, if you have the keys ready.”
Michael Foot sniggered and tossed the keys onto the top of the dashboard. Then he clamped his bony, murdering hands about the dead boy’s throat and pulled him back into a sitting position.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
So far as I could tell without my watch, it was about midnight. Following a short though scary helicopter flight, we were back at Birch Grove—now in one of the deeper cellars. A man held me by each of my arms. I stood handcuffed. About eight feet from me stood a ceramic vat of some dark liquid.