The Partridge Kite by Michael Nicholson

head.
    The bus jerked to a stop. The driver jumped from his cab and ran round the front of his bus to the near side. He stopped abruptly as he came to the wheel and retched violently. He could not stop the heaving of his chest; clutching his stomach through his heavy black uniform with one hand, he guided himself, like a blind man, back to the front of his bus and clung to the radiator.
    Tom was a spectator. He lowered himself, sliding his back down the wall, and crouched. He watched as the driver was helped from the radiator by men who forced themselves to look away from the gore. They sat him down within a couple of feet of Tom and covered him with overcoats. His face and chest were now covered in vomit. He made no effort to wipe it away.
    There was commotion all around. Tom was looking only at the driver now but he could hear the din, the shouts and horns from motorists further down the street, impatient at the sudden jam, unknowing of the sudden horror.
    ‘It was murder! I saw him pushed. . . I saw it in front of me. . .’ It was the bus driver.
    ‘It was an accident,’ Tom said, partly to comfort the man, hoping to make him say more.
    ‘It was murder,’ he mumbled through the mess in his mouth. ‘He was on the pavement, he wasn’t going to cross. He was dragged down . . . I saw him pulled down with a stick. . .’
    ‘Did you see who did it?’ Tom asked as gently as he could.
    But the bus driver would never remember. Shock erases. He would, over the next days, repeat his short story a dozen times to the police. And they would record in precise English the horror of one man’s recurring nightmare. Shock would take away the man’s sleep, creating again and again in the sweat of his pillow the football of gore that became a face and then a football again until his wife reached across him to the bedside table for the Valium.
    And anyway, even as Tom had asked his question, the man with the umbrella - the umbrella that had dragged its victim by the neck to his death - was already in a taxi going south, to his favourite wine bar under the railway arches of London Bridge Station. There was always good cheese and draught sherry there.
    Kellick had finished his buttered bun and was rearranging the various files News-Information had given him. Fry was preparing the list of British Heritage Trust Committee members for the computers. The Department’s programmers had already been alerted for a punctual eight o’clock start on the following morning’s shift.
    The telephone rang at Kellick’s right elbow. Without looking he picked up the receiver and listened. For half a minute he said nothing.
    Then he spoke, slowly lowering the receiver as he did, so that Fry could not be sure the caller heard all Kellick was saying.
    ‘No, nothing for the time being. . . I’ll call you when I’ve decided.’ Kellick spoke in a monotone and it alerted Fry, who stopped what he was doing.
    ‘That was the Duty Day Officer. The man he had tailing McCullin has just died in a road accident - the Charing Cross Road. Bus ran over him. Driver insists he saw the man pushed.’
    The two men caught each other’s gaze. Fry felt a twinge of embarrassment but it went quickly as he sensed Kellick’s sudden fear.
    ‘It must mean,’ Fry said, ‘that they really are on to us.’
    ‘It means,’ Kellick replied, still looking directly into Fry’s eyes and in the same strained monotone, ‘it means that they want us to know it, too.’
    Rules Restaurant would almost certainly have been demolished if there had been enough money to do it. Not only Rules, a pleasant, expensive place, but almost the entire Covent Garden and the streets surrounding it.
    The demolition men at County Hall had wanted to clear the area - acres of it - for redevelopment. So when the Vegetable Market moved out to Nine Elms on the other side of the Thames, the planners moved in. They in turn were followed by the Conservationists.
    There was much protest.
    But it was money,