No need to look far for an explanation of the fascists’ actions, this was part of their basic creed… but the Negroes? The men in those semi-uniforms didn’t look like ordinary immigrants, somehow; they had a dedicated, fanatical look about them. Shaw was convinced they were not representative of the decent, normally law-abiding Negroes who lived quietly and reasonably with their families, willing and anxious to be assimilated into English life without giving offence to anybody if only they were given a fair chance. Nor were the fighting Whites representative of the huge mass of citizens who believed in give and take and according that fair chance to the newcomer — both sides were being inflamed into riot by their respective, quasi-military lunatic fringes.
When Shaw looked back he saw the columns of water in the distance as the fire brigades came in with their hoses, then heard the shouts of anger which turned to panic as the mob got on the move from the first of the tear-gas bombs. Tear-gas — in Piccadilly.
Shaw reached the Mercedes. Prunella said, “Glad to see you in one piece.” She was looking a little shaken now. Thoughtfully he drove along Pall Mall and turned left past St James’s into the Mall. He went on by Buckingham Palace and headed towards Victoria to come up into Knightsbridge by way of Sloane Street. Once into Knightsbridge he met the earlier refugees from Piccadilly — White and Black and Brown, still bloody, still fighting on the run. Someone, somewhere, was making a mockery of liberty in Britain.
Why? What was behind it?
Shaw’s little place off Kensington High Street was the Turtle Dove — English name, but French food. Along with a bottle of Nuits St George they had esperges fraiches au beurre, followed by ris de veau des gourmets with celeri au jus and salade Panachées; then ananas delice au Kirsche and a bottle of Château d’Yquem. Prunella was good company and the meal had its due — and frankly calculated — effect. She said she would be delighted to have a nightcap in his flat and that she herself lived alone in a room with kitchen and bath off Sloane Street and no one was waiting up for her.
The nightcap drunk a little later on, Shaw looked lazily through his empty glass at the shaded light. “Funny thing,” he observed. “I’d guess my chief was wrong for once in his life.”
“About what?”
“He said you didn’t… er, stay out at night.”
“Did he now?” Her eyes roved his body. “In that case, I’d certainly say your chief wasn’t always right!”
He wasn’t; Prunella did. When dawn lightened the curtains of his bedroom, Shaw was feeling fine and ready for anything; his self-confidence was back with a bang. The cure had worked — all of it.
Chapter Four
After an early breakfast Prunella departed for the Ministry and Shaw read his papers.
He read them with considerable interest. All except The Times had last night’s Piccadilly riot splashed across their front pages; and The Times had a first leader on it. Nearly two hundred people had been taken to hospital, including seven policemen and a fireman, and a Negro had died from injuries received. And it hadn’t been only London. Cardiff had had it again; Tiger Bay had been a miniature battlefield. Much the same was reported from Liverpool, Manchester, Immingham, Glasgow. A minor outbreak had occurred in Southampton, where a bunch of Goanese, perfectly inoffensive crew members from a P & O liner, had been attacked by a group of long-haired Whites with flick-knives; the attackers had been stewards off another ship. The Times leader-writer was concerned about the way the riots were flaring up simultaneously, like outbreaks of bush fires hundreds of miles apart. The papers also carried Late News flashes of more trouble in the States: Harlem, Pittsburgh, Chicago — and, as ever, the Southern states. All on the same night as Britain’s troubles. It was as if a co-ordinating hand were at work.
Shaw glanced at his watch and then went across to his desk and unlocked a drawer from which he took a neat 9-mm. Browning automatic. He checked the slide and slid the gun into his shoulder-holster.
It was a filthy morning when Shaw reached the King George V dock. The wharves lay blank and ugly and depressing beneath a soaking, penetrating drizzle. Shaw had left the Mercedes parked some way back from the entrance. He walked in, showing a dock pass that had been delivered to him by hand just after breakfast. To the P.L.A. policeman he said, “I’m looking for Mr Hargreave. He said he’d be here.”
“Yes, sir,” the policeman said briskly. “He left word he expected you. He’ll be in the dockmaster’s office.” The officer gave him directions and he walked ahead, into the sodden desolation and the dripping cargo sheds and the weeds growing between the rusty railway lines. Rows of wagons stood, some empty, others tarpaulin-covered and bearing Britain’s vital exports; lines of lorries, forlorn, neglected, stood waiting also, waiting for the dockers to hoist their consignments into the freighters’ holds for transport across the world. A great white-painted P & O. liner was alongside the quay, her decks deserted and as forlorn as the dock itself. Shaw made out her name through the skies’ melancholy drip: Cathay. The age-old name for China… odd if her holds even now contained the dead and presumably preserved body of some British citizen bound for China… but then Cathay wouldn’t be touching any port on the Chinese mainland, and probably the Dead Line’s operators would prefer air freight anyway.
Nevertheless bodies could be shipped out in otherwise innocent cargoes and those responsible might find it handy to have a man planted in a loading dock — a man like Siggings, alias Seldon.
It was a gruesome thought.
Shaw stared out from the dockmaster’s office windows, at the ships, the cranes, the dreary cargo sheds. The drizzle had stopped now but the air was dank and unpleasant and heavy with still unshed rain. Shaw had talked to Hargreave while waiting for the dockmaster, a Captain Cassidy, to return from his routine rounds; Cassidy, Hargreave said, knew Seldon as a quiet, efficient man who gave no trouble and seemed to want only to efface himself — facts which didn’t surprise Shaw in the least.
Ten minutes later Cassidy came back to the office and told Hargreave that Seldon was working a vessel called the Kurdistan.
“She’s at Number Three shed,” the red-faced, sailorly-looking dockmaster added. “If you’re ready, gentlemen, we’ll go along right away.”
They left the office and walked along the wet, greasy dockside, past the great ships and the busy cranes, past the vast sheds where the cargoes awaited the slings. As they went along by the doors, slid open on their greased rails, Shaw looked in at stacked bags, heavy crates of machine parts bound for Australia and India, agricultural machinery, manufactured goods of all descriptions… the sheds seemed crammed to capacity. They went on, keeping out of the way of groups of dockers, standing clear of fork-lift trucks and travelling cranes, stepping over ropes and wires. Soon, away ahead, they saw the Kurdistan, taking aboard what looked like a pretty solid cargo.
“Cased machine parts,” Cassidy said briefly in answer to Shaw’s question. “For Calcutta. She’ll sail tomorrow, if we can finish loading in time.” He took Shaw’s arm as they came nearer. “That’s Seldon — up there… see him?” He pointed upwards at the cab of a tall travelling crane moving in their direction, coming back towards the Kurdistan’s Number One hold. The jib, high in the air, was swinging in for the ship, carrying a couple of the big crates in a steel-mesh net. As the jib steadied over the hold, the wire ran down and the crates disappeared from view. Shaw watched the crane-driver. He saw thin shoulders, the back of a dark head, a thin arm resting on the open window of the cab. He couldn’t yet see the face.