The Partridge Kite Read Online Free PDF Page B

approach, above the table, so much a day, expenses plus, the usual way. And for cover we could make it a foreign-based agency.’
    Kellick thought for a while. ‘We’d have to be very careful with our introduction.’
    ‘Yes, but we could be recommended to him via an old contact - one that is still with us.’
    ‘Of course!’ said Kellick. ‘Someone who has or has had proper access to the file but not anyone who had the authority to offer a contract direct.’ Kellick was warming to the idea. ‘What if we could find someone who had reason to help McCullin but who is duty bound to us first. . . no suspect loyalties?’
    ‘How about Mrs Cathcart?’
    ‘Exactly! Mrs Kate Cathcart, nee Bowes. Exactly right for us!’
    ‘Are they still involved with each other?’
    ‘No idea.’
    ‘If they are, we could have complications. McCullin might be frightened off. She could refuse to help.’
    ‘She can’t refuse. Fry, you know damn well she can’t. And why should McCullin scurry off? She’ll have nothing to do with the offer. She’ll just be the in-between girl, trying to help an old lover. They don’t have to meet if they don’t want to. All we need is her name and status to make her recommendation authentic. And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t take to the agency offer - our make-up men will take care of that! What is essential is that he accepts the first approach. We must concentrate our cunning on that. Fry!’
    Fry moved to get his reversible blue-grey raincoat hanging on the back of the door, trying to ignore the puddle of rain that had gathered beneath it, gradually seeping into the pile of the cream Indian carpet. Kellick had seen it though, and quickly walked into the kitchen for a cloth with his usual fussiness.
    ‘Fry,’ he said, as he went down on one knee to wipe up the water, ‘have Cathcart in my office eleven Monday morning. Tomorrow would be better, of course, but Sundays are for emergencies only.’ It was one of his many standard glib phrases.
    Both men looked at each other for the first time properly that evening. . . for emergencies only . . . they’d almost forgotten what it was all about; why they were there.
    Kellick continued quickly, ‘You can begin groundwork tomorrow. Find out where McCullin is, what he’s been doing since he came back from Prague: check his bank balance, and find out what he’s been drinking recently: how much of it, too! Let me have it all before eleven on Monday in your handwriting. I shall want to be briefed before I see Cathcart.’
    Fry opened the door, stuffing the A.D. file into his Samsonite briefcase.
    ‘And remember,’ Kellick said, ‘only four of us know anything about CORDON and Sanderson. It must stay that way until McCullin either stands it up or knocks it down. I’ll set up the cover story for Cathcart by the time I see you.’
    Fry drove away along Prince of Wales Drive a few minutes past midnight. The man under the umbrella standing in the doorway at the next block of flats thirty yards along watched the red tail lights of Fry’s Range Rover swing left towards Chelsea Bridge, and disappear. He waited. Ten minutes later the lights of Kellick’s flat went out. Then the man too walked away towards the bridge and Chelsea to find a taxi. It was still raining.
    Monday, 13 December
    Tom McCullin was not a tidy man. Not unhygienic, hut scruffy. He would blame it as a reaction, in approaching middle age, to the regimentation of his youth: that and seven years of tidy Service life. His body was sagging, he’d say, but his mind would see him through!
    He’d never married. And had he stayed in one place long enough he might well have fallen into the bachelor routine of tidiness in all things, slavishly obeying the first rule of survival for those living alone: never come home to the breakfast grouts and dishes. He knew the rule well enough but had never had the energy to keep to it. He knew the sight of cold breakfast leftovers, the greying sheets