Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (10 page)

“For goodness sake,” said Mrs. Trumpington, “turn that thing off.”

“We call ourselves,” said Lord Axminster, “the Peaceful People, and we are gathered here tonight to testify by our presence, our belief in the Tightness, the cumulative force and the inevitable ultimate success of the cause we all have at heart, the cause of world peace. It
must
prevail.

“There will be setbacks. No cause worthy of the name has ever succeeded without encountering, and overcoming, the opposition of bigotry, self-interest and indifference. These are dragons to be slain and we will slay them, not grudging the mortification, and the wounds, the toil and the discomfort . . .”

The chair on which Mr. Behrens was seated had, he concluded, been designed by a sadist. Its seat was not only hard, but knobbly in all the wrong places. It was tilted at an angle which threw you forward, but so short that it gave no real support to the thighs.

“. . . but I will detain you no longer with blasts from my feeble trumpet. The object of our gathering is an exchange of ideas. A cross-fertilisation of mind with mind. After we have heard the report of our International Secretary, Reverend Bligh, of the Unitarian Church of Minnesota, and have considered the financial statement produced by our hard-working treasurer, Mr. Ferris, we will be pleased to deal with the many questions which must, I feel sure, be agitating your minds.”

Reverend Bligh plunged straight into business. “Support for our movement,” he said, “continues to be global. In the period since we last met together, messages of encouragement, and donations, have been received from Algeria, Anatolia, the Andaman Islands, Bahrain, Bangkok, Barbados, Botswana . . .”

The raised edge of the seat dug into the femoral artery, cutting off the blood supply and causing agonising pins and needles.

“. . .Venezuela, West Germany, Yucatan and Zanzibar. In the light of such universal support we should be wrong to consider ourselves as lonely fighters. We must feel ourselves to be, as it were, the advance guard of a great invisible army with banners, marching as to war.” Feeling, perhaps, that this was an unhappy metaphor, he added, “A war for peace,” and sat down; whereupon Mr. Ferris, armed with a bundle of documents, reeled off a quantity of figures.

The young man in horn-rimmed spectacles on Mr. Behrens’ left woke up and started to make notes. Pins and needles were succeeded by complete paralysis of the lower leg.

Question time kicked off with an enquiry from a lady who had a nephew in Tanzania; touched on devaluation (dealt with by Mr. Ferris), the church’s role (a sitter for Reverend Bligh), and the iniquities of the Government (blocked by Lord Axminster, whose peerage was political). It did not take them long to reach Vietnam.

A tall man, with insecure false teeth, managed to ask, “Would the platform expound to us its proposals with regard to the unhappy conflict at present decimating the peaceful people of Vietnam?”

“Certainly,” said Lord Axminster. “Our proposal is that the fighting should cease at once.”

“On a more concrete plane,” said the young man with horn-rimmed spectacles, “how is it proposed that this solution with which we all, of course, agree, should actually be attained?”

“It will be attained automatically, and immediately, when the United States withdraws its armed forces from the country.”

When the applause had subsided, Mr. Behrens rose to his feet and said, “Would it be proposed that the South Vietnamese forces should also withdraw from the country?”

“Certainly not,” said Lord Axminster. “The Vietnamese of the South would lay down their arms and embrace their brothers from the North in fraternal friendship.”

Renewed applause.

When the meeting finished, Mr. Behrens got out as fast as the state of his legs would allow.

He had spotted a familiar-shaped head of grey hair in the front row. When its owner emerged into the foyer, Mr. Behrens had his back turned and was examining one of the campaign posters. He allowed the grey-headed, red-faced figure to get ahead of him, and followed. A taxi cruised past. The man ignored it, and strode on. Evidently he had a car parked somewhere. Mr. Behrens secured the taxi. He said to the driver, “If I was leaving here by car for the West End which way would I have to go?”

The driver meditated. He said, “You’re bound to go over the railway bridge. Carnelpit. All one way, see.”

“Excellent,” said Mr. Behrens. “Get to the railway bridge and draw up.”

“Want me to follow someone?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Police?”

“Special Constable.”

“You look a bit old for a policeman.”

“They’re so short of men these days,” said Mr. Behrens sadly. “They have to call up anyone they can get hold of.”

It was an interesting chase. The grey-haired man was a bad- tempered driver, and took a lot of chances with traffic lights and other motorists, but the taxi-driver stuck to him with the ease of an expert angler playing a fresh fish. They finished up, fifty yards apart, outside a house in Eaton Terrace. Mr. Behrens noted the number, and signalled the taxi-driver to keep going. Once they were round the corner, he re-directed him to the Dons-in-London Club. He had a long report to write.

Two hundred miles to the north, in the industrial outskirts of a Midland town, a different sort of meeting was taking place. A couple of hundred men, mostly in overalls or old working clothes, were crowded into the small open space in front of the main gates of the Amalgamated Motor Traction Company’s factory. Since it was the lunch hour, many of them were eating sandwiches out of small despatch cases, but all were listening to the speaker.

“Punchy” Lewis had a jerky, but forceful delivery. He had learned the value of short simple sentences, and his timing was expert. Lord Axminster could have learned a lot from him.

“And who gains from this lovely arrangement? Who actually gains from it? I’ll tell you one thing.
We
don’t. And if
we
don’t, who does? You don’t need to be a genius at mathematics to work that out. Who gains?”

“They
do,” shouted the crowd.

Mr. Lewis smiled down on his listeners. “You heard what they call it! They call it a new deal. That’s not what I call it. I call it a crook deal. A deal with a stacked pack. And shall I tell you who’s champion at stacking cards?” Pause for effect. “The bloody Yanks!”

There was a roar from the crowd.

Mr. Calder, who was standing inconspicuously at the back, found it difficult to tell whether the applause was a tribute to the speaker’s timing, or whether there was genuine warmth in it.

“That’s what I said. The bloody Yanks.” Lewis turned his head towards the building behind him, and shouted, “And I hope you heard
that
in the boardroom.” Swinging round on the meeting, and lowering his voice to a conversational level, he added, “What we’ve had plenty of since these Yanks took over is trouble. A big hand-out of trouble. Now they want us to crawl in and lick their boots and say, Thank you for a lovely new deal. If you want to do that, I don’t.”

Mr. Calder became aware of movement behind him. The workers who wanted to get back because the lunch-break was over were forming up in some sort of order at the rear of the crowd, which blocked the way. Lewis saw them, too.

“I notice some of our mates,” he said, “hanging round the back there, waiting to crawl in. That’s why we’re holding our meeting right here. Because if they want to crawl in, they’ll have to crawl past us and we can see them do it.”

There were police there too, Mr. Calder noticed, in plain clothes as well as in uniform. Leading them was a superintendent, with the beefy red face and light blue eyes of a fighter. He pushed his way through the crowd and made for Lewis.

He said, “Stand back. Clear the way there. If these men want to get in, you’ve got no right to stop them.”

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 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 like a scrum-half checking a forward rush. 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 this human barricade.

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 scuttled off towards the side road, where he had left his car.

When he got there, he saw that there was going to be more trouble. A van had been parked across the nose of his car and two men were sitting in it, watching him.

He said, “Would you mind moving that van? I want to get out.”

The men looked at each other, then climbed slowly out, one 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 towards 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 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 van, watching Rasselas.

“You can either move the van,” said Mr. Calder, nursing his right hand, which had suffered in the impact, “or have your wind-pipe 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 plain-clothes 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 recognise?”

Mr. Calder looked at them. Some of them seemed to have been taken from a window overlooking the scene, and showed the whole crowd. Others were close-ups, taken by photographers 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 in the Infirmary now. 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 recognise.”

“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 sore 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. 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 manifestos in the press.”

“I have indeed. I thought they were a harmless and woolly- minded lot of intellectual pinks.”

“Behrens has attended six of the public meetings in the last two months. He found them excessively boring.”

“My
meeting wasn’t boring!”

“Last night he thought he recognised Sir James Docherty in the audience. He followed him home, to check up. It was him.”

“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 present 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.

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’d dared to open his bag when he was coming back from one of his trips to Paris. Asked me to discipline him. I refused, of course. Don’t let’s talk about Sir James. I want to hear about the riot.”