The Partridge Kite by Michael Nicholson Read Free Book Online

she’d wanted. . . twenty dollars US in those days, or fifteen hundred piastres for a Special. He’d asked a friend what a Special was.
    ‘For fifteen hundred,’ he’d replied, ‘she’ll stop knitting!’
    No, Tom had long been convinced that his adrenalin pump worked only for the English woman. Tall, blonde, eyes blue, green or grey, and always honey-coloured like Kate. The menopaused spinsters in die Department thought she sat her evenings alone under a sunray lamp. But Kate did nothing just to look good. In summer when she returned from her holiday in Greece, her hair was almost bleached white by the Aegean sun. Seven times in seven summers he’d stood in Number Two Terminal, Heathrow, to meet the Olympic Airways flight from Athens. Every time he’d been certain he would miss her in the crowds massing around the exit doors. He had never missed her, however chaotic the holiday crowds. Her tallness, her blondeness, her tanned skin that flushed so dark the moment she saw him.
    She groaned softly, pressing her head hard against the window. The cold mist on the glass mingled with the sweat on her forehead. Tom could feel the rush in her thighs, could almost feel in himself the surge of pleasure run through her belly. In love she was often frantic, sometimes animal and
    noisy. But at the final moment of orgasm she had no time for endearments or obscenities. She was always silent in her moment . . . only the slightest moan … always gentle at the end.
    ‘Kate?’
    ‘Not yet, Tom,’ she answered. ‘Don’t talk, not yet.’
    They sat inside the steamy shell of the car for another hour. Little by little Kate came back from her private world of pleasure to the cold rainy world of Kellick and Fry, and the confidence trick she’d agreed to work on the man she loved. They talked together until it was time for her to go. Tom began to walk off, turned and came across the front of the car. Kate opened the side window and Tom handed her a parking ticket that had been stuck to the wiper blades.
    Some warden, plodding the weary rounds of London pavements, hadn’t seen or hadn’t cared about two lovers who’d gone well into red penalty time.
    The make-up men from the Department had done a very good job, just as Kellick had said they would. They were a team of specialist ‘props’ men who worked from what to passers-by was a small builder’s yard off the Uxbridge Road . . . the Shepherds Bush end. They were men who could ring the instant changes: turn a derelict shop into a busy bookstore for an anonymous, never-to-be-traced-again rendezvous point.
    They did all the printing for the Department. Visiting cards, letterheads and the like - business that could not be sent to the Government’s own printers in the usual way.
    They also looked after the production of much of the identification documents needed by the Department for its daily business of deceit. Documents like driving licences for men or groups of men not on the records of the Government’s Central Registration Authority in Swansea. They could supply pension books. National Insurance cards, cheque books, birth or marriage certificates, NUJ Press Cards, Union membership tickets, any number of stewards’ lapel badges to get into any number of private political meetings.
    They had perfected an ingenious passport that could carry one man out of a country and bring someone quite unlike him just as easily back. In short, men were invented or demoted to a name on a file, given life or had it taken away, by their issue of bits of paper with date stamps and watermarks.
    They’d had little work to do this evening. Merely to supply enough evidence that Fry was a bona fide Security Agent.
    Tom McCullin went to the hotel in Cadogan Square just as Kate had arranged for him to do. He took the lift to Suite 814. It was exactly eight o’clock . . . three hours since he’d left her, when he knocked.
    Fry opened the door. ‘Good evening, Mr McCullin. I am Hampton. You are