Free The Partridge Kite by Michael Nicholson Page B

One carried a stack of folders from News-Information. The other carried two plastic cups of tea.
    Kellick carefully placed his, dead centre of the blotter, dropped in a saccharine and stirred with a chrome spoon he kept for himself hidden in a tin in his desk drawer.
    ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who is the present Chairman of the Heritage Trust? Who took Bremmer’s place?’
    ‘General Sir George Meredith,’ Fry answered.
    ‘Good Lord!’
    ‘Exactly!’ said Fry. ‘One-time adjutant to General Sir William Tendale who scalded himself to death, drunk on neat gin!’
    ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Kellick was bubbling. That’s the best bit of news yet. A starter AND our first piece of the jigsaw puzzle . . . General Meredith! Mrs Hayes,’ he spoke into the intercom, ‘send me in a currant bun, buttered both halves, the usual way.’
    He wiped the spoon clean from the box of tissues on the desk and closed the drawer. He pulled his chair close to the edge of his desk, sat very erect, sipped his tea and waited for his buttered bun. He smiled.
    Kellick, after seven most unpleasant days, was beginning to fell quite himself again.
    McCullin was on his way back to his flat, walking north up the Charing Cross Road from Leicester Square underground station. He’d gone there out of curiosity, morbid as well as professional, to pace out for himself the last moments of Reginald Scammill’s life. How easy it had been!
    After lunch he had telephoned a friend who was also an investment broker for Reed-Walker. The friend confirmed that Temax International Oil, like so many monopolistic American Corporations, had a thousand and one fingers in as many British pies. Its financial control of them all was absolute. Its real ownership of dozens of familiar British household brand names was not widely known, ownership of companies that produced everything from television sets to toiletries, children’s toys to telephones; it held majority shares in three British television networks; it owned garage and supermarket chains and four major drug and chemical companies. It also had direct access, by virtue of the money it had invested, and the men nominated on the Boards, to research projects of the British aeronautical and electronic industries. It had once bought and then closed down two car factories and five supporting component companies in the Midlands and Scotland.
    Many years ago Ethics had joined hands with Honour in a suicidal leap off the White Cliffs of Dover. How had his friend summed it up? ‘Capital has no conscience and no fatherland,’ quoting Buchan.
    The sun had gone and the sky was an even grey. A typically British phenomenon, rain to sun to the prospect of snow in less than twelve hours. The weather had turned around and a north-easterly was moving down the centre line of the Glaring Cross Road. Tom turned up the collar of his jacket and pressed the lapels flat against his chest. He was now less than thirty yards away from St Giles’ Circus, passing a string of porno shops. A flourishing market, evidence, he thought, of the growing number of impotents, nymphomaniacs and psychopaths who’d turned to rubber suits and leather when rhino horn and everything else had failed.
    McCullin felt a sudden tingle of shock, followed a fraction of a second later by a terrible scream . . . only yards away, a man’s scream. He instinctively jumped across the pavement so that his back was against the wall.
    The scream, guttural and shocking, was then joined by others, women’s high and piercing. People criss-crossed in panic in front of him and he saw just to his right a London Transport bus veering across the road.
    Then only the women were screaming and Tom saw, just behind the massive front wheels of the ten-tonner, a crushed head, blood spurting, still under pressure from the mass of red and white pulp. Then the man’s legs appeared, naked except for his short socks and shoes - brown shoes dragged within inches of the broken