Red Crystal (2 page)

The sound of protesting astonished voices swelled out from the dining-room. The next moment the rest of the group were running forward, whooping and yelling. Gabriele caught the exhilaration. She pulled her hat further down over her face and, letting out a great shriek, ran for the window.

Inside, Gabriele almost fell over a huddle of people bent over something on the floor. She side-stepped them neatly and made for the top table, passing behind a long line of angry, startled, bemused faces. A man rose up in front of her, shouted ‘Outrageous!’ and put out his arm. Fending him off, Gabriele dived past, rounded the corner of the room and, placing herself behind the ambassador, held up her placard and began to shout: ‘
US out! Hands off Vietnam!
’

There was uproar. She saw Reardon on top of a long table, stepping none too carefully across the china. Stephie was running round the far side of the room, waving her placard like a maniac. The others were parading up and down, shouting their slogans above the din. Some held chairs in front of them, herding startled guests into a corner. But most of the guests sat stunned, waiting in impeccable British style for somebody to do something.

The surprise was total. Gabriele almost laughed at the guests’ incredulous outrage.

The noise rose to a crescendo. A table was turned over; there was the crash of breaking china and cries of alarm as the diners shot to their feet and examined their clothes, dripping with wine and hot greasy food.

Gabriele danced along behind the top table, enjoying the sight of the appalled faces. A shout rose above the din. Reardon, his hair flaming red under the lights, stood on a table, a wine bottle held high in his hand, and slowly, solemnly tipped the bottle until the red wine spilled in a long stream on to the table and splashed up at the diners, who hastily withdrew, wiping at their clothes with their napkins.

‘
The blood of the Vietnamese!
’ Reardon screamed. ‘
Murdered by the US aggressors!
’

Gabriele cheered loudly. She saw Stephie force her way past Reardon and approach the top table. Stephie raised her placard in front of the ambassador who was getting to his feet in an attempt to leave. Seeing her, the ambassador turned his back. With a yell of anger, Stephie raised the placard and, reaching across the table, brought it down on the ambassador’s head.

Gabriele saw the ambassador clap a hand to his head, then a sudden movement to the right caught her eye. Uniforms had appeared: three of the policemen from the front door. They went for Reardon, pulling him down from the table head first. Another grabbed Stephie, but she swung at him and clipped him smartly in the eye. He fell back, his hand to his face, and Stephie sprinted away.

Gabriele hesitated: should she fight or run? Through the pandemonium she saw Stephie and Max moving across the back of the room towards the windows.

Time to retreat then. Gabriele turned to run, but stopped dead. A group of guests were standing in the aisle, blocking her way. They looked angry and obstructive, and she had the unpleasant feeling they would try to prevent her from passing. She felt a moment’s fear, a clutching claustrophobia.

She fought it and, calming herself, gritted her teeth and rushed them.

All but one, an obese round-faced man, fell back. The man made an attempt to grab her, but she struck out, shooting an elbow sharply into the obscenely large stomach. She heard him gasp.

Now the way was clear and she raced to the end of the long table, rounded the corner and made for the open window. The huddle of people she had stepped over were still intent on whatever lay on the floor. She paused and glanced down. It was an elderly man, his eyes closed, his head cradled in a woman’s lap. Gabriele had a vivid image of the woman’s lap, bright red, a vast pool of wetness that was obscenely bright against the pallor of her dress.

She hesitated, but then people were bumping past her and Max was dragging her away, yelling, ‘Come
on
!’ Dropping her placard, she ran for the garden gate.

She arrived panting at the van to find the others clambering in. As the engine fired with a roar, Stephie reached out to pull her up into the front seat. The van shot off and swerved round a corner, the open passenger door swinging wildly on its hinges. Gabriele clung to Stephie, shaking slightly, not yet brave enough to reach out for the door and pull it closed, thinking only of the pale man with the closed eyes and the white dress covered in blood.

But then Stephie laughed, a wild hoot of triumph, and Gabriele realized that she was right to be exhilarated: the demonstration had achieved everything they had hoped for, and more. It was the end of passivity, the beginning of a new movement.
She
–
they
– were part of it.

But what really astonished Gabriele was that it had been so easy.

They rounded a corner, the door of the van swung shut. She was safe. Catching the mood, she hugged Stephie and began to laugh.

Nick Ryder frowned in concentration and read the passage again. ‘Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process … Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.’

Ryder wondered if he was really understanding all this correctly. Did Marcuse mean that the underprivileged could be revolutionary without
knowing
it? Seemed highly unlikely. Or did he mean that their opposition justified
other
people being revolutionary
for
them?

He put the book down and yawned. He was too tired to read this sort of stuff tonight. It was difficult enough at the best of times. Although he was finally beginning to understand some of it. He opened his eyes and looked at the line of books on the mantelpiece. Marx, Engels, Fanon, Guérin … In two months he’d accumulated quite a library.

He marked his page and slid the copy of
One-dimensional Man
back among the other books.

Nine o’clock. It was the first time he’d been home before ten that week. It was a pity that nice girl Anne hadn’t been free. She was a social worker and about the only one he’d ever met who didn’t burst with good intentions or look like the back of a bus. In fact Anne was rather attractive. She’d said she had a meeting that night. He hoped that she wasn’t feeding him a line.

He thought: What a suspicious mind you have. But then it went with being a policeman.

A nice hot bath was what he needed. He put on a record –
Traviata
, with Moffo and Tucker, and stood for a moment, letting the soft notes work their magic. Italian opera never failed to move him. His love of music had been the most amazing discovery of his life.

He never let on to the lads, though: they’d find it very curious.

He went into the bathroom and ran the hot water. The gas geyser hissed and roared and finally spat out a minute trickle of steaming water. From bitter experience he’d learnt that the hot water cooled off considerably during the twenty or so minutes the bath took to fill, so he added no cold.

The steam rose in wet curtains. It reminded him of the freezing bathroom at the back of the house in Barrow and his mam yelling at him to get the hell in before the water got cold. He hadn’t been home in months, and probably wouldn’t get round to it until summer. It was a bit of a chore now anyway. After four years the north seemed a lifetime away.

He went to the kitchen, which was so small you could reach everything while standing in one place, and poured himself a beer. He returned to the bathroom. It wasn’t far. The flat consisted of a hall, bedsitting-room, kitchen and bathroom. For some time he’d been meaning to find himself something better. But, being in Lambeth, just across the river from Westminster, it was handy for the office. It was also very cheap.

Though the bath was only half full he was impatient and, undressing quickly, got in. Shivering, he lay back and felt the hot water creep slowly up his body. In another five minutes, when the water covered his legs, it was going to be very pleasant indeed.

The phone rang.

Ryder breathed, ‘I don’t believe this.’

For a moment he lay still, considering whether to answer it. If it was the office they could go to hell. On the other hand, it might just be Anne …

He got out, grabbed a towel and padded wetly across the bedsitting-room to the phone.

A cheery, horribly familiar voice echoed down the earpiece. ‘Hello, sport. Didn’t disturb anything interesting, I trust?’

‘Sod you, Conway. What is it?’

‘Oxford. That Vietnam demo. A real fracas. Rampaged round the dining-room waving placards. About thirty or forty of them.’

Ryder sighed. ‘The Oxford lads were warned, for Christsake.
Several
times …’

‘I don’t doubt it, mate, but the fact remains that it was a right cock-up. The
ambassador
got hit on the head. And there was an injury caused by a brick. Geezer’s all right, but it could have been nasty. There’s mutterings about bringing serious charges. Trouble is, they’re short of customers—’

‘Didn’t they nab
any
of them?’

‘Two, I think.’

‘God, how many lads did they have on the job then?’

‘They’re not saying, but can’t have been many, can it?’

Ryder was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose they want some names tonight.’

‘You got it.’

Wearily, Ryder went back to the bathroom and got dressed again. He should have known. This had happened before. It was the fault of the structure. There was no national police force, just a large number of county and borough forces, each, Ryder sometimes thought, more stubbornly independent than the next. You could give them all the information you liked, but you couldn’t force them to act on it.

Names, they wanted, did they? Well, they were asking a lot. All the same, he was already turning some ideas over in his mind.

In 1968, as much as now, the work of Special Branch was deliberately unpublicized – not to say shrouded in secrecy – and the police liked to keep it that way.

It was generally believed that the three hundred or so officers of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch were merely the legmen for the Security Service – known to the public as MI5 – and indeed one of their main responsibilities was the arrest and charging of spies and subversives previously identified by the Security Service. But in fact Special Branch’s brief went further, treading an uneasy line between pure police work and intelligence-gathering. Officially, the Branch had to keep an eye on undesirables – mainly foreign- entering and leaving the country, to help guard government ministers and foreign VIPs, and to investigate foreigners applying for naturalization. But they were also expected to keep abreast of developments among the ‘lunatic fringe’ – the anarchists and the far-left and far-right extremists: those who were ‘likely to threaten the country’s security or to cause a breakdown of law and order’. Whereas MI5 dealt with foreign-linked plots and security leaks – counter-intelligence – the Special Branch kept tabs on home-grown troublemakers.

Or tried to.

Ryder had transferred from Lancashire CID to Special Branch twelve months before and his speciality was Trotskyists.

He took a number 10 bus across the river and arrived at Scotland Yard shortly before ten. Special Branch was located on the seventh floor of the brand-new metal and glass tower block off Victoria Street that was the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police.

Ryder found Conway sitting in front of a heap of files.

‘Oh
there
you are,’ Conway said. ‘The boss phoned. He wanted to know if this shemozzle was our fault.’

‘You told him?’

‘Yeah. He was somewhat relieved.’

Ryder took off his jacket. ‘Any more news?’

‘They’ve caught a few more. No names yet. But apparently they were local Oxford troublemakers.’

‘What about the two they nabbed?’

Conway handed him a file. ‘Haven’t got anything on one, name of Lampton, but there’s a bit on the other, name of Reardon, Paul.’

Ryder took the file and remembered having seen it quite recently. Unlike other branches of the Criminal Investigation Department, Special Branch kept large numbers of files on people who had no form. In fact almost all the people the Branch were interested in had never been near a court of law, let alone a prison.

The file on Reardon was very thin. One four-line report on a slip of paper. It was no wonder Ryder had recognized it – he’d written it himself.

It read: Reardon, Paul. Date of birth: 17th April 1946. Student at LSE, 1964–67. Failed to sit finals. Feb 1968: Member of SSL Central Committee. Address: unknown as at February 1968.

Since Reardon had no passport, there were no further birth details or photographs, which Ryder would normally have obtained from the passport office.

Conway stared over Ryder’s shoulder. ‘There could have been less, I suppose.’

‘Well, it’s a damn sight more than there was before—’ He almost said ‘before I sorted it out’ but didn’t. Conway was well aware of the situation. Until recently there’d been quite a gap in the Branch’s intelligence on the far left. Marxists, anarchists, and the Communist Party of Great Britain were covered by the relevant Branch sections, but the Trotskyist Section had got into a bit of a mess. The problem was that the Trots were increasingly difficult to keep track of. Some were still pro-Moscow, others vehemently anti-Moscow. The groups were continually splintering and merging, and almost impossible to categorize.

This Paul Reardon was on the committee of the SSL – the Socialist Students’ League, a militant Trotskyist group, but violently anti-Moscow. It had been formed by a group of students at the London School of Economics – known in the Branch as the London School of Comics – an institution famous for its left-wing views. In the past LSE students had been revolutionary in an intellectual non-violent kind of way. But the Socialist Students’ League was distinctly aggressive. That was why Ryder had opened a file on them.

Ryder examined the main file now and looked at the list of people suspected of membership of the SSL. It was impossible to be sure who the members were because the league was typically disorganized, charging no subscription and keeping no lists.