Killer Elite

43

The meeting was held in the Wandsworth home of Bob Mantell. There was a full house despite the short notice.

Colonel Macpherson arrived early. He was expecting big trouble, and had seen it coming from the moment Spike had called with the news. He was angry with Spike, yet without admitting it openly, sympathetic to the thought processes that had led Spike into acting as he had, without authority.

There was nothing that could be done now about Mac except to add his name to the list of those the Feather Men had failed to protect. At least Spike had tried: Macpherson knew the committee would have refused any request Spike might have made for an authorized Mac-watch. Nevertheless, Spike had unintentionally caused what Macpherson recognized to be conditions ripe for a showdown.

Spike had assured Macpherson that there was no longer any traceable evidence that the Welshman was dead, by whatever cause, but even so Macpherson had instructed him to send a full report on the accident to their in-house solicitor and to be ready for police inquiries at any time. Hallett and Wally were told to make no comment but to contact the solicitor at once if they received a visit from the police.

Tommy Macpherson sighed. If only the founder had been well enough to attend the meeting and make his presence felt there might yet be a sensible outcome. As it was, Bletchley would undoubtedly blow a gasket and do something foolish.

The committee members were unusually silent as they awaited the start of the proceedings. Jane completed her vacuum-flask routine to a roll call of “thank yous,” and Bletchley, whose personal hygiene and mannerisms had deteriorated so much that the committee members no longer doubted that he was seriously ill, received his in an unbreakable mug. Unsubstantiated hints that he had some sexually transmitted disease were circulating, but when August Graves had openly asked him what was wrong following a particularly alarming attack of leg jerking and impaired speech, he had merely responded, “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”

Graves had approached Macpherson and most of the others individually and suggested that Bletchley be asked to resign. The majority view was that he should remain in the chair for as long as he wished. After all, his presence at meetings, although embarrassing owing to his impediments, did not in practice curtail their routine activities. So Bletchley had remained nominally at the helm alongside Macpherson. His hostility toward what he chose to see as “increasingly irregular behavior by certain elements of our movement” had grown to paranoiac proportions.

“Colonel Macpherson”-Bletchley salivated as he spoke-“has called us together due to exceptional happenings.” He nodded curtly at Macpherson, who thanked him and without undue preamble broke the unwelcome news. He gave a resume of the Dhofar-connection killings and explained why Spike had seen fit to act over the Mac affair without committee approval.

Spike stared impassively at his lap under the hostile stares of the members. When Macpherson related the events leading to the death of Davies, there were shocked murmurs from the gray men and Panny, a strangulated grunt from Bletchley, and an angry snarl from Mantell. Jane, the don, and August Graves remained outwardly impassive.

“I must stress,” said Macpherson, “that our people did not murder Davies. Indeed they did no physical damage whatsoever to his person. They did not in any way precipitate his death but they were there and they did witness the event without reporting it to the police. They further compounded the problem by disposing of the body.” He paused and then spoke slowly and clearly. “This may come to nothing. The police may never even learn of the event. Perhaps no motorist contacted them or did so without having taken the number of the Bedford van. Nonetheless, if our driver is traced and, via him, Spike and the committee, then all of us will have questions to answer.”

He looked at all those present in turn. “I must also stress that the authorities may, through this incident, learn of our existence, and if they do, you will all, theoretically, be implicated as conspirators in events leading to a death; possibly presented as manslaughter. In order to prepare for the worst, I called you all together without delay to discuss and execute a suitable course of action.” He sat down.

For a moment there was stunned silence, then Bletchley stood up, his mouth gaping like a goldfish. Almost immediately his balance gave and he sat down again. His words came hissing out in a rush.

“Ruined. All these years. Ruined.” He glared at Spike. “How dare you act without my authority? Do you realize you have irreparably damaged the very soul of our movement? And what of our personal reputations? Our integrity? If this gets out we will be drummed out of our clubs, our directorships, the City… my God, it does not bear thinking about.”

He looked around wildly, his gaze settling with intensity on Mantell and Jane. “There is but one course of action and we must take it firmly and at once. All the records, Jane, every file and every document, must be destroyed right away. Burned. At once. And we must disband as of now. It must be as though we never existed, should the police come searching.”

He reached for his coffee and gulped at it greedily, spilling some down his shirt and over the table. For a while he could not talk and his head jerked sideways in a series of violent spasms. The condition slowly eased, although his shoulders continued to shake and beads of sweat trickled down his forehead. Nobody spoke.

Again a burst of indignation and anger. “How dare you, Allen, follow your own private war, which this has undoubtedly become, and without reference to the committee? You have caused untold harm. If this escalates, even our founder’s name will be besmirched. Everything I, many of us, have built up over so many years, all torn down by your stupidity. There is but one course now and that is damage control. The committee must disappear from being and, I tell you now, I will personally consider what I shall do to protect my own reputation.”

Drained, Bletchley slumped like a dying spider. Jane watched him with obvious concern but did nothing. Mantell filled the gap. “I can only agree with our chairman’s decision. Extremely sad though it makes me, any course other than disbandment would be to court extreme unpleasantness for each and every one of us. I suggest a show of hands.” There was a general nodding of heads and the matter was put to an open vote.

Only Graves and Tommy abstained; the rest voted in favor of disbandment. Mantell telephoned the founder and relayed his vote, which, to the unspoken surprise of most people present, was in favor of Bletchley’s motion: immediate closure and destruction of all records. Existing business was to be curtailed as neatly and speedily as possible by Mantell working alongside Spike.

The Feather Men, it appeared, ceased to exist as of Monday, December 14, 1987.

The following morning Macpherson took a further step since, with no further action from the Feather Men, he feared the possibility of an unchecked continuation of the Dhofar-connection killings. During his 1983-84 tenancy of the office of High Sheriff of Greater London, he had made many police friends. Now he telephoned the most senior of them to ask for an immediate off-the-record meeting.

Later that day he told his friend that certain people with whom he had served in the past had uncovered the fact of, but not the motive behind, a series of murders of ex-Forces personnel. The most recent incident involved Mac in Hereford, and there was reason to believe a man thought to have been killed two days previously in a road accident on the A49 was one of the killers. He knew no more and could say no more, but could the four cases be reexamined?

The police officer called Macpherson back three days later. There was no mention of any death on the A49. “We have looked at the files on the deaths that occurred in the United Kingdom and we cannot see any grounds for reopening them unless some new motive and/or evidence is produced.”

Macpherson had expected this response, but felt he owed his action to those who had tried to protect the killers’ targets. He received a worried call from Jane the following week and as a result met up with her and Spike at the London office of the founder. Jane, torn between her loyalty to the movement as a whole and her personal devotion to Bletchley, owned up to an action she much regretted. At Bletchley’s insistence and in the state of shock that followed disbandment, she had taken Bletchley a single clutch of files before undertaking the soul-destroying business of burning all the records that she had lovingly prepared, collated and filed for so many years.

Only when she had delivered the files had Bletchley made clear his reason for wanting them. He had made up his mind to write a book and reveal how his movement had been derailed by Macpherson and others, how even the founder himself had been hoodwinked into condoning the following of dangerous, unethical paths, how a magnificent and pure concept had been dragged into a mire of vigilantism, and how he, Bletchley, disassociated himself from the unfortunate results. He had appeared terrified lest his zealously nurtured reputation be blemished by a police investigation and the resultant publicity owing to the Davies fiasco or, should that not materialize, some similar future indiscretion.

Jane had attempted to dissuade Bletchley from such a course but the man was delirious. He had refused to give Jane back the files.

“Which files?” Macpherson asked her.

“The Dhofar-connection deaths, 1977-87,” she replied.

“Do you think he really intends to go to have them published?” Spike asked.

“If he was able to think clearly about the results of such a book,” Macpherson replied, “no I don’t. But the man is, in my opinion, no longer compos mentis. I am not worried for myself but we must not allow the founder’s good name or yours to be falsely tarnished by the warped and inaccurate version of events that Bletchley’s deranged blatherings are likely to be. His revelations, in the hands of the wrong MP, caring nothing for the truth, could be immensely damaging and serve to blemish the founder’s enormous achievements for this country.”

“So what do we do?” asked Spike.

“I will privately approach the top libel lawyer, Peter Carter-Ruck, for advice. Maybe such a book could be stopped on some libel basis. I will let you know but there is something else that may make it impossible for Bletchley ever to write this or any book.” He passed Spike a single typed sheet of A4.

“Before you read that, let me tell you something of Bletchley’s background. He was adopted when his parents were killed in a train crash in the 1920s. After Sandhurst he joined a rifle regiment in 1938 and saw action against the Italians in the western desert in the early forties. He was one of only a few officers with desert experience to be promoted to the Army Staff in Cairo and he did an excellent job, which greatly helped turn the tables on Rommel. At the end of the war he faced rank reduction from lieutenant-colonel to captain, so he left to become an accountant.”

“A far cry from his current City preeminence,” Spike commented.

“Quite so,” Macpherson agreed. “But his timing was good and he ‘left the profession’ at a time of postwar expansion to become finance director of an independent company. He never looked back and retired at fifty-five in 1972 to a plethora of nonexecutive directorships and top charity appointments. Until his illness developed, everybody admired him. He was the perfect chairman: respectable, pedantic and safe, undeniably clever and rich in influential friends.”

“What is his health problem?” Spike asked. “Does anybody know?”

Macpherson nodded at the paper he had given Spike. “Read it,” he said. “If I am right-and all the symptoms seem to fit-then Bletchley was first affected, in character only, in the early seventies. The physical signs first became marked only last year. That precis was prepared for me by a friend in Edinburgh.”

Spike read the text aloud: “In 1872 the American, George Huntington, first defined a disease, which is now named after him, as Hereditary Chorea (chorea means to dance). Huntington wrote, ‘The disease is confined to few families and has been transmitted to them as an heirloom from generations way back in the dim past. It is spoken of by those in whose veins the seeds of the disease are known to exist with a kind of horror. The disease is now understood a great deal better and certain drugs can delay its dread progress although it is still classified as incurable. One in every 20,000 people worldwide is affected.

“ ‘Twenty or even forty years may separate the first tiny mood changes that signal the onset, from the chronic mental and physical afflictions that lead to death, usually by asphyxiation whilst eating.

“ ‘The disease may strike at any time and, when the onset is first experienced only after fifty years of age, the victim can continue with intellectually demanding work for many years, providing the subject is familiar.

“ ‘If either or both parents have the disease, then one or more of their children will sooner or later suffer from it. However, since they may remain apparently healthy until they are middle-aged or older, they are likely to marry and infect further generations.

“ ‘Once the disease decides to show itself, the deterioration, though often imperceptible day by day, is inexorable. The victim may suffer no physical problems for some years but his or her character will undergo insidious change. Friends and family will be upset and hurt. Divorce may follow. Inevitably, sooner or later, certain muscles will spasm and this will gradually spread through the body until each and every voluntary muscle is shaken puppet-like.’ ”

“Luckily,” Macpherson commented, “Bletchley never married.”

“Poor devil,” said Spike. “I would not wish such horrors on any man.”

“He may yet write a book,” Macpherson said. “He may retain at least partial clarity for years to come.”