James Long - Sixth Column

The old man disappeared through a door and a teenager immediately came crashing, flat-footed in Doc Martens, down the stairs at the end of the hall. He was cadaverously thin and had a dragon tattooed on one cheek, peppered painfully by acne so that side of his face seemed made up of red and blue volcanoes. It hurt to look at it.

‘Oo the fuck are you?’ said the apparition.

‘Just a visitor.’

The youth switched his attention to the doorkeeper’s desk. He leaned over and pressed buttons. Nothing happened. Johnny became acutely aware that the old man had entrusted the security of the building to him. He watched closely but the teenager looked at the door in disappointment.

‘Din’t ’e leave yer the key then?’

‘No,’ said Johnny gratefully.

The boy looked him up and down. ‘Anyway, wotcher ’ere for?’

‘I’ve come to see Heather Weston.’

The boy’s demeanour changed in a flash. His face lost its surliness.

‘Eth,’ he said, ‘Are you Eth’s new bloke then?’

‘No, he’s not,’ said a voice from the doorway, and Heather appeared in the hall. ‘Hello, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Button it, Rodge, he’s a friend of mine.’

‘Rough luck, Johnny,’ said Rodge jauntily in a burlesque posh accent, ‘she’s all right is Eth. You ought to work on it.’

Johnny, who had felt a disconcerting burst of inner electric warmth at Heather’s appearance, felt oddly exposed by the boy’s words.

‘You fix your own love life, Rodge,’ said Heather, unruffled, ‘I’m quite old enough to look after mine. Anyway I notice you’re still short on incentive points this week and it’s after seven.’

Rodge was half way up the stairs before she finished the sentence.

‘I’d like to show you round,’ she said, ‘but I suppose we ought to get on.’ She used a key which was chained round her neck to light up the electronic lock console on the desk and the door locks buzzed.

‘Do they try and get out much?’ he asked as they went out to the car park.

‘Try? Not just try, they succeed. There’s a million ways. It’s not a prison. We’ve got some of the wiliest little beasts you could hope to meet in a month of Sundays.’ She said it with affection.

‘What do you do about it?’

‘We give them reasons to stay, try to save them from the prison system while we can. They’re all extremely difficult, no sense of community responsibility. We try to show them how to work together.’ She looked towards the two boys still deeply involved in the innards of the old Marina across the yard.

‘If they build up enough points by sticking to the rules, they get to do things like that. Working under supervision, then outside by themselves on trust. We’ve got scrambler bikes, hot rods, all sorts. If they get to the top of the tree they even get to race them.’

‘They seem to like you,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘They think I’m an outlaw too. It’s a bit difficult in some ways. Whenever I’m up in court, I get the hero treatment from them. I have to keep explaining why I do it, that it’s not in the same bracket as their sort of GBH. When the management nearly fired me I thought there was going to be a riot, then Sir Michael saved the day. I don’t know about this next one, though. I don’t think he can stop them this time.’

Sir Michael. The evening ahead faced Johnny like a mountain, the risk he had accepted as the price of seeing Heather again.

He opened the Mazda’s door for her, took her arm quite unnecessarily to guide her into the passenger seat just for the sake of the contact.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ he said as they drove off.

She looked at him, considering. ‘It’s good of you to come. It’s a long way to drive for dinner.’

‘I’m flattered that he invited me,’ said Johnny, and Heather said nothing in reply. ‘About this doctor…’ he said to fill the gap.

‘Save it for later, I’m sure Sir Michael would like to hear it too.’

‘Really? Oh, well, OK.’

It wasn’t far to the house and this time, in daylight, Johnny could get the measure of the place. The gateposts were weather beaten, softened by moss and lichen, and marked the entrance to a drive where the potholes would soon be in need of attention. There had once been a fine avenue of chestnuts but now the irregular gaps produced by gales and rot had degraded them into parallel lines of Morse code. Beyond the end of the trees the ground opened out into a sweeping curve, falling away to the River Wharfe below and the house nestled ahead under the shoulder of the hill, an outcrop of the old stone that spawned it.

The geography of the house had caused some problems that day. Sir Michael had been out for most of a frustrating day, called to what he regarded as a quite unnecessary meeting with the chairman of the Police Watch Committee in the morning. Then he was delayed on the way back from a long-scheduled speaking engagement at a Round Table lunch with a mysterious electrical problem somewhere inside his car which the AA took over an hour to sort out. Neither event had been a coincidence, though they had each been engineered quite separately. Sibley set up the first one, putting Lady Viola’s instructions into action and calling in favours from old contacts. Pacman Gerow, extending his web of phone taps from Johnny at the centre, was listening in as the Round Table rang to confirm arrangements. He passed the information on to Ray Mackeson who had a man do some subtle tampering.

In both cases, the object was the same: to gain some safe time for their installation specialists.

Each team therefore arrived at the house separately, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Ivor Sibley, worried enough about bringing Maggie into it, didn’t want any more of his staff seeing surveillance games played on one of their own number and had contracted this one out to a rival firm. They sent two men, who found that installing the first set of mikes was no more than half an hour’s work. Getting the radio links sorted out had been much more of a headache. There weren’t any public roads within a convenient distance where they could park a car or a van unobtrusively as a hiding place for the gear. They were up against it on time and they put together a serviceable lash-up, mikes with short range transmitters legging the radio link to the hay loft of a barn up the hill in line of sight of the house. There was a booster there and a switch, beefing up the signal and sending it across country to the nearest available phone line. No one had been in the hay loft for a long time and they decided they’d be very unlucky indeed if the metal boxes hidden in the hay were found. The boxes would be gone within twenty four hours, after all.

The barn was such an obvious way-point that, had they been in the same technical league, the Americans would certainly have picked it as well, with unpredictable consequences. They didn’t because they didn’t have to. The unit their man installed in Sir Michael’s roof space, hidden in dust behind a joist, took in the signals from all six of their mikes, recorded it in sequential ten second chunks, compressed each chunk to a thousandth of that length and squirted the result straight back to Ramsgill Stray. One micropulse every ten seconds, switching frequencies between pulses just in case. It was watertight technology. No one would know it was there, no one would accidentally tune into it and putting it in took no time.

Until the big surprise.

Louis, Ray Mackeson’s man, was by himself – which was just as well because he’d been completely silent while he was in the house. He was taking his time, knowing Sir Michael’s movements were being well monitored. He began in the study, choosing a picture in the prime spot for the acoustics and lifting it carefully off the hook. That was when he saw the best seat was already taken and a simple operation suddenly turned very wobbly. Sibley’s little device taped to the back of the picture was a low-tech bug, but it was a bug for all that, right where he had planned to put his own. He put the picture back very, very quietly so as not to give away to whoever else was listening that he’d stumbled on their secret then he went outside to call Ray Mackeson on the secure link.