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126 pages

English

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Jeremy Brook claims to have invented a revolutionary means of enabling electric cars to travel without on-board batteries. Although his claim seems far-fetched, a few experts have suggested a very remote possibility that his invention could work. It has therefore attracted the attention of the criminal arm of the conglomerate PANCC, whose intentions towards Jeremy alternate between kidnap and assassination. The task of preventing either event, while the invention is being tested, falls to an obscure organisation, outwardly the most fuddy-duddy of government departments, but behind this faade, a specialist arm of the security services. Among the places to which this work takes them are: the tiger enclosure of a safari park; an island off the coast of Scotland; an Oxford college; and a yacht on the Indian Ocean, where they encounter characters hardly less daunting than the denizens of the safari park.

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Thriller

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	29 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781848768888
Langue	English

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Extrait

A LOW-PITCHED HUM
A LOW-PITCHED HUM
CHRISTOPHER BEVIS WHITE
Copyright © 2010 Christopher Bevis White
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1848768 888
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All the characters in this book are purely fictional, and have no relationship to any person living or dead.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
FOR MARION
Contents
Presage
I The Department that Time Forgot
II Nice Little Pussy Cat
III Nasty Big Pussy Cat
IV I’ll Take the Low Road
V Operatics
VI Groves of Academe
VII Paradise Lost
VIII Per Ardua
IX Own Steam
X Back to Blighty
Postscript
Presage
The aspect of the gigantic stone wild boar, reflected old Mr Johnson, was so monstrous, so threatening – had such a thesaurus of frightfulness – as to give it a certain perverse attraction.
He was sitting in the ornament section of his local garden centre where his wife had dumped him while she went off in energetic pursuit of plants. He faced pots and troughs and sundials and gnomes and little naked ladies and quite embarrassingly large naked ladies and bird-tables and tubs and urns in such variety that it seemed impossible that anyone could ever make a choice. But as he idly watched the meanderings of the couples in the May sunshine his eye kept wandering back to the wild boar, and he noticed that he was not the only person to fall for its charms. Every ten minutes or so it was revisited by a curious pair – a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties wearing a highly disreputable blue pullover, accompanied by his elderly mother. Mr Johnson could just hear: “…but mummy you miss the point, the whole point is that it is so vulgar… had a success and I’m surely entitled to celebrate...” And his mother’s voice, sharper and sharper: “I said no Jeremy, I wouldn’t dream of letting a thing like that into my garden… ridiculous beyond words… let’s have no more of this.”
As Mr Johnson watched he became aware that a group of three other people seemed to be taking a particular interest in this couple. He had seen the trio several times earlier – if “trio” was the right word, since one of them seemed anxious to appear dissociated from the others. He was a very tall, dapper-looking man with elaborately-coiffed fair hair and a curiously sharp-featured face, conspicuous among the weekend throng in a well-cut grey suit. The other two were more appropriately dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, but – manifestly club bouncer types with a metropolitan pallor – they also were conspicuous as they slow-marched self-consciously side by side. The three had already made several circuits of the garden ornaments, the dapper one in front keeping just out of sight of the mother and son, while at the same time making angry surreptitious little backward waves of his hand warning the bouncers to keep their distance: gestures which (guessed Mr Johnson) they were simply too stupid to understand. Villainy, he reflected – and he had no doubt that some form of villainy was involved here – often has its risible side.
Suddenly he noticed that the man in the pullover and his mother and the two bouncers had all come together in front of the boar. Dapper stood nearby with his back to them, leaning forward on an urn and partly hidden by the charms of a Venus de Milo. There was a commotion, and the mother dragged her son away, at the same time giving a vigorous push to one of the bouncers. No doubt a most unequal encounter, but the man seemed to trip over the legs of his colleague and went staggering towards the Venus. There was an angry screech, and the dapper one could be seen whirling round as he tried to see a hypodermic syringe sticking into the back of his thigh, just below the seat of his trousers. “You bloody fools, ” he shrieked, “You bloody bloody fools.” And Mr Johnson felt the smile freeze on his face at the degree of venom in the words.
Abruptly the man collapsed. The bouncers heaved him upright and dragged him through a gap in the hedge forming the perimeter of the garden centre. Mr Johnson heard a car being driven quickly away. Pullover and his mother had long since disappeared. The wild boar remained impassive.
Although any number of people must have heard the fracas, Mr Johnson thought that he was the only one who had actually seen what had happened. Well, he said to himself, well, I shall write to the local inspector of police to report this. Mr Johnson loved the business of making statements, of writing formal letters: “Sir, I have witnessed an incident which I do not fully understand and which may be of little significance, but which I have nevertheless thought it my duty to report to you…..On Sunday 26 th May between 3pm and 3.30pm I was sitting in the Halesford Garden Centre…” … Yes, he would compose it that evening. It might get to Scotland Yard, he day-dreamed importantly, it might even go to MI5.
In fact Mr Johnson’s letter, after rapidly going through Scotland Yard and MI5, arrived at a much less conspicuous organisation.
I
The Department that Time Forgot
Somewhere in the network of roads to the east of Baker Street is a government department like no other. In the middle of one of the lines of shops there is a small entrance you would certainly miss if you were not specially looking for it, with a battered and partly-obscured brass plate, HM Govt. Office of Minor Archives and Arbitrations. If your business takes you inside you will find yourself transported back a century. Deferential and friendly doormen, heavy mahogany panelling, an alcove containing a number of high stool-desks (which, you will be gravely informed, have now ceased to be used), and, pervading everything, the dusty, musty smell of antiquity. In a cavernous room on the ground floor you will see shelves and shelves and shelves, reaching to a lofty ceiling, stretching to the far distance, of heavy books and brittle documents going back to the nineteenth, eighteenth, and even seventeenth centuries. You may reflect that it would be possible to spend a happy lifetime of research here, and still barely scratch the surface of the information available. If your business takes you to see one of the officials on the first or second floors – nervously travelling up in the arthritic lift – you will find similar themes repeated. The room you visit will be grand and high-ceilinged and dark and dusty, with heavy velvet curtains and a huge mahogany desk surrounded by yards of shelves of ancient books. If your official is of sufficient seniority, there will be a length of dusty twisted wire leading to one of those new-fangled electric bells, by which can be summoned a messenger bearing a tray containing a silver-plated teapot and a dish of freshly-toasted and liberally-buttered crumpets.
If, after transacting your business and then making polite conversation over the aforesaid crumpets, you attempt some general enquiry about the Office’s functions or about the meaning of “Minor Archives”, you will receive a labyrinthine explanation that will leave your mind askew for some days. And as you make your puzzled way out into the corridor you may in winter months come across the finishing touch, namely a messenger carrying a coal scuttle. The fact that, uniquely in the modern civil service, the Chief Officer and his Assistant Officers still have coal fires is (as the staff chuckle to each other) the second-best-kept secret of the Office. To which the invariable reply is: “What d’you mean, the second best? It’s the best, ha ha.”
The centrepiece of the Office is the Court Room, a large oak-panelled room on the second floor with heavy ancient tables in the same wood, and photographs of past Chief Officers looking benevolently from the walls. The name derives from the arbitrations that sometimes take place in that room, and it is also the room where the most important meetings are held.
In keeping with the Victorian ambience, the staff of the Office have up to a few years previously used only surnames, both in the third person and in the vocative. The cause of the abandonment of this practice has been the recent accretion to the staff of (as the older members archly say) “persons of the female persuasion”. First names are now the norm – albeit with some degree of queasiness – except for the Officers, who are still referred to by their surnames, with the addition of “Mr” when addressed directly or otherwise when they are present. The arrival of persons of the female persuasion has also played havoc with another time-honoured custom whereby a member of staff rises whenever an Officer comes into his room and remains standing until desired to resume his seat. An uneasy compromise has been reached by which this still applies to male staff but not to staff of the fairer sex.
One phenomenon the visitor may particularly notice, in contrast to the modern government department, is the absence of security. The open-faced doormen are innocent of any kind of electronic equipment, while combination locks, codes, swipe cards and so on have clearly not yet been invented. Unless, that is, the visitor by chance gets to the third floor. There he will