The Partridge Kite Read Online Free PDF Page A

fact or nonsense of CORDON; the threat or the farce.
    The paper seller on the corner of Parliament Square was shouting something Kellick couldn’t quite make out over the din of the passing traffic. But there was only one headline today and Kellick knew it now by heart. He crossed the square and passed the policemen at the gates of the House of Commons car park.
    The man with the umbrella followed ten yards behind.
    Kellick’s flat was as stereotyped as himself: austere, nothing ever out of place. If the cleaning woman cleared the chessboard for dusting, he would afterwards spend much time ensuring that each piece was back in its place, perfectly centred. Once, in one of his rare moments of carelessness, he’d put Black Queen on White Square and hadn’t realised until the next morning. It had depressed him.
    He made no apologies to himself for his fretfulness in matters concerning tidiness. It was why he insisted on wall- to-wall fitted carpets throughout his flat; no dust, no rugs to slide askew. It was why he preferred Venetian blinds to curtains, duvets to blankets and sheets. They were tidy, symmetrical, no fuss. The colour of his flat never changed, it was merely repainted the same colour every spring; cream and white to match the light-coloured natural bentwood chairs and dark brown upholstery. Being in Kellick’s flat was like being in the middle of a coffee cream.
    But the events of the past three days had upset his routine, so that he had ignored his daily chores. The sight this evening of the greasy washing-up water with last night’s dinner dishes jutting out of it like greasy shipwrecks had jarred him. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. But then, neither had Sanderson!
    By midnight he and Fry had sifted through the twenty- two references on the A.D. file. All but three were back in the thick brown folder. Those three were neatly in a line on the sofa, a photograph of each man stapled to the top right- hand comer of the reference sheet. The A.D. file contained the names, photographs, fingerprints, voice tapes, biographies and security ratings of men not on the permanent staff of the Special State Operations. They were men employed on a freelance basis to do particular jobs - jobs that might prove embarrassing to the Department and Government if things went wrong, as things occasionally did. Sometimes a man on an A.D. contract, caught by foreign police, would throw his cover, admit in the hope of leniency or exchange to be an agent working for British Intelligence, The British Government in turn would appear outraged by the claim, identify him as a convicted bank robber or whatever his past form was, and sit and watch foreign justice take its course. It was a Catch 22 that never failed.
    Among the twenty men Kellick and Fry had looked at, two had been convicted bank robbers - one of them convicted of armed robbery and recently completing a ten-year sentence; another was a pleasant-faced confidence trickster, another a stuntman; there was a mercenary, and a forger. But on the three faces staring up from the sofa there was a small red star stuck at the bottom of each photo. It meant they were clean: no police record, no embassy contacts, hopefully unknown abroad. It meant they were professionals, and costly!
    Tom McCullin was Kellick’s first choice but Fry suggested they checked out the other two as standbys. Kellick propped up McCullin’s file on the mantelpiece, the photo on the left, the biography in a neat column on the right-hand side. Tom’s photo was not a posed one. He looked startled. His mouth was open, his hair ruffled and a bow tie crooked. He looked, as Kellick said sourly, like a second-hand car salesman caught pouring sawdust into a sump. But there was no mistaking the eyes. Few men, sober, looking into those eyes would protest too loudly at Tom’s misdemeanours.
    Kellick read out aloud to Fry, his finger passing down the typed column.
    ‘Aged forty-one, birthday January 9th.