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Benson arriva à l'adresse de Lambeth avec une équipe télé complète peu avant 10 h 30 le 11 Février. It was a three-storied terraced house - dingy and claustrophobically gaunt - with rubbish moldering in the narrow patch of front garden. Most of its windows, like those of its neighbors, had been boarded up to one on the first floor appeared to be screened with a dirty sheet. The garden gate had been ripped away and there were broken roof-tiles on the path leading to the front door.
Benson hurried up the steps, followed by the technicians, and rapped on the door. No reply. He tried again, harder. Still no response. The house appeared to be deserted. He shouted and started pummeling with both fists. Then there was a girl's voice from inside: Qui est-ce ?
Mon nom est Benson. Colin Benson.
De l'autre côté de la porte shabby, dans l'obscurité de l'entrée, Wendy était effrayée. Elle ne savait toujours pas qui ils étaient exactement ou ce qu'ils voulaient mais savait qu'ils pouvaient arriver à n'importe quel moment. Et qu'ils feraient probablement du mal à Harry. She bit her bottom lip, regretting now that she'd betrayed her presence. Qui ? demanda-t-elle.
Benson shook his head in frustration. Il n'y avait pas de numéro sur la maison. He stepped back along the path to double-check the numbers on either side, returned to the door. C'est 88, c'est çà ?
Qui êtes-vous vous avez dit ? L'accent américain de Wendy, maintenant plus évident, était la confirmation que Benson attendait.
Colin Benson, répéta-t-il. Je suis là avec une unité de télévision.
Wendy, comme elle nous l'a dit depuis, était toujours suspicieuse. Toujours pleine de peur. Et, à la manière dont les choses allaient ce matin, elle ne pensait pas très clairement. Peut-êêacute;tait-ce une astuce. Harry avait dit qu'ils utilisaient toutes sortes de ruses. Comment puis-je être sêre de çà ? Il y avait un tremblement dans sa voix. Vous êtes avec quêacute;mission ?
Science Report... un homme nommé Harry nous a demandé de venir.
Un court silence. Puis le son de gros bolts being drawn back. La porte était ouverte de juste quelques centimètres.
Wendy, les hair unkept et les yeux ouverts par l'angoisse, regarda Benson puis la caméro et l'équipement du son. Elle semblait avoir des difficultés à prendre une décision. Donc vous êtes vraiment lê, dit-elle.
Benson décida que tout ceci devenait ridicule. Peut-on entrer et le voir ? dit-il. Il nous a invités. Wendy shrugged with indifference. Si vous le voulez vraiment. Elle ouvrit la porte en grand. Mais vous n'obtiendrez pas grand chose de lui, dit-elle. Pas ce matin.
Ils la suivirent à travers l'entrée mildewed and up a flight of naked stairs. Ancient paper decorated with roses was peeling away from the walls and the whole place smelled of dirt and of damp. Wendy stopped, suddenly remembering, at the landing and she shouted down to the sound man who was the last in: Bolt the door after you... we've got to keep it bolted. And she waited, watching, while he did so.
You know, this really is a waste of time, she said quietly to Benson... Maybe it would be better, after all, if you just turned around right now and left.
He asked me to be here - so I'm here.
She shrugged again. As you like.
There were three doors leading off the landing. She opened the one at the front of the house. And there, in the room with the sheet-covered window, Benson saw Harry Carmell.
He didn't recognize Carmell, not at first, for what he saw was a haggard and vacant-eyed creature. It was shivering convulsively and its teeth were chattering and it was clutching a matted blanket to its naked shoulders - and it seemed impossible that this could be the man he'd met, only the day before, in the market.
But it was Carmell. It really was. He was hunched defensively, with his knees up to his chest, on an old sofa - the only bit of furniture in the room - and he was blinking rapidly as if trying to see more clearly.
Benson stepped forward tentatively. "Harry?"
Carmell pressed himself back harder against the sofa. He'd stopped blinking now and was staring with mistrust and bewilderment. "Who are you?" Even his voice was different. Like that of an old, old man.
"You remember me...Colin Benson."
Wendy tried to help. "It's all right, Harry...he's with the telly..."
Suddenly, horrifyingly, Carmell gave a howl of despairing terror. "It's them!" he yelled. "They've bloody tricked you and now they've found me..."
"What's he talking about?" demanded Benson. "What is the matter with him?"
Wendy ignored him and hurried across to kneel by the sofa and cradle Carmell. "Now, Harry..."she said soothingly. "It's quite all right...and there's nothing to be frightened of." She glanced up at Benson, jerked her head towards the door. Vous devriez partir.
Il a pris des acides ou quelque chose ?
Mais vous allez vous en allez, oui ?
Mais peut-être que nous devrions trouver un docteur...
That was when Carmell, in an unexpected burst of mysterical violence, flung Wendy aside and came hurtling off the sofa. "So come on then, you bastards!" he yelled. "Come and kill me!" He waved his arms wildly and the blanket slipped to the bare boards. Now they could see that he was wearing no clothes apart from his socks.
Suddenly he was very still - half-crouched like an ape just a few feet in front of Benson. His fingers, rigid as metal rods, were spread wide and his hands were raised to the level of his hips. Now there was defiance smouldering in his eyes. "But Harry Carmell don't die that easy." His voice - contrasting disconcertingly with his grotesque appearance - now sounded normal. Just as Benson had heard it in the market. "Harry Carmell's a fighter...and he'll bloody take you too." As he spoke, he took one pace backwards to steady his balance and then, with an horrendous battle-scream, he sprang at Benson. Benson ducked, tried to dodge, but Carmell's nails raked down his face - narrowly missing his eyes - to make deep and symmetric furrows in the flesh of both cheeks.
The film technicians, wedged behind Benson in the doorway, were unable to help and Benson, now as terrified as Carmell had been, was lashing out wildly in an attempt to beat off the attack.One of his blows crunched sickeningly in Carmell's nose and suddenly the fight was over.
Blood spouted from Carmell's nose. He moaned, clutched his face with both hands and collapsed in surrender to the floor. He lay there with his face pressed hard against the dirty boards. And suddenly his puny naked body was racked with great juddering sobs.
Benson moved backwards, unsteadily, to the landing where the cameraman grabbed his arm to support him. "I'm sorry," he said to Wendy. "I didn't expect..."
"I told you to go." She was now again kneeling by Carmell, gently wiping his face with a handkerchief. "Now for God's sake just leave us!"
They reported to Clements as soon as they got back to the studios and it was Clements who decided to notify the police. "We can't possibly leave him there like that", he said. "Sounds to me as if he needs hospital treatment."
There was, however, no sign of Carmell of Wendy by the time the police got to the house. Wendy had gone out almost immediately after the TV team had left. We know that because she has told us. She had gone out to buy antiseptic and a bandage from a nearby shop. When she returned, there was no Harry. There are reasons to suspect that he became a hot-job victim but we have been unable to find any proof. So we can merely record that Harry Carmell has never been seen since.
There were three of them - Clements, Benson and Dickson - clustered around on of the little editing machines in the Film Department. They were watching, yet again, the uncut film shot in the market "That's the spot!" said Clements. "Go back on that!"
The technician sitting in front of them touched the rewind key and there were high-pitched Donald Duck noises from the sound-track as the film raced in reverse.
A flip on another key and the pictures stopped whirling in a backwards blur. Now there was silence and on the midget screen there was a frozen show of Benson and Carmell.
Right, love, shift it.
The tiny black-and-white figures immediately became animated, walking away from the postbox in the background, and their voices could be heard. Benson was talking about Ballantine :
BENSON: But surely that was an accident...I remember reading in the papers that there was some sort of freak skid...
CARMELL: Crap! There was no way for that to be an accident...it was that the call an Expediency and I know why it happened...and I've got to get it on record before they get to me...
"Okay...kill it there," said Clements. The technician stopped the film, switched off the machine. "Well?" asked Clements. "What do you reckon?"
Dickson shook his head doubtfully. "Acid-head," he said. Obviously he'd read about Ballantine in the papers and he was living out some fantasy...
"I'm inclined to agree," said Clements. "I'm not sure we should waste any more time on him. Colin?"
The marks on Bensons cheeks were now scarring over. He rubbed them thoughtfully. "Remember what he said about vanishing scientists. So maybe you're right...maybe he is an acid-head...but it's a hell of a coincidence, isn't it...the way his fantasies spilled over into our work. Did Ballantine go to America like Harry said?"
"Yes, he did visit NASA but that was also in the papers," said Dickson. "I checked the cutts."
Benson looked at him sharply. "There! Aren't you missing the obvious? You know because you checked the cutts.What're you saying? That this acid-head also checked the cutts? Or was it that he really knew?"
Clements stood up, glancing at his watch. "So what do you want to do, Colin?"
"Maybe talk to Lady Ballantine?"
"You can't go troubling her, man. It's the funeral today.'
"So I'll be discreet," said Benson. "And I'll wait till tomorrow." Friday, February 12, 1977. Lady Ballantine was composed and hospitable when Benson arrived by appointment at 3:30 p.m. She told him virtually what she later told us on July 27. And he was particularly interested in the large envelope which Ballantine had insisted on her posting. Did she know what it contained?
"I just can't imagine," she said. "I know it was a package that he took out of his desk but I have no idea what was in the package."
Did he give any explanation for having it posted to London - although he was driving to London that same evening?
That's what puzzled me most of all, dit Lady Ballantine. Particularly when I discovered later it was addressed to the man he was planning to meet.
I'm sorry, dit Benson. I don't follow...
The envelope...it was addressed to a journalist called John Hendry. He and William - they'd been friends for years. Well...late, very late, on Friday I got a call from Mr. Hendry. He was still in his office waiting for William and, well, you know the rest...
Have you spoken to Hendry since? Asked him about the package ?
He rang again on Saturday... with his condolences... but I was far too upset to think about packages or anything like that...
Four hours later Benson was in Hendry's office in Fleet Street.
"A premonition - that's the word he used," said Hendry"Events were starting to move fast and he had a premonition - that's exactly what he said. Extra-ordinary, isn't it...when you think what happened."
"The package," persisted Benson. "What was in the package?"
Hendry got up from his desk, crossed to a table by the window, took a spool of tape from a drawer. "Just this," he said. "No message, no nothing."
"But what's on it?"
"That's the oddest part of all. Not a damned thing as far as we can make out."
"You've played it right through?"
"Sure...we tried everything but there's nothing there. You know what I think? I think he sent the wrong one by mistake."
"That hardly sounds likely, does it," said Benson. "A man like Ballantine - surely he'd be meticulously careful."
Hendry went back to his desk, threw the tape on the desk, lit a cigar. "Normally, yes...but, as I told you, he wasn't himself on Friday. His voice on the telephone - I hardly recognized it. He was all strung-up and excited and I hate to say this because he was a friend of mine - but he was talking the most incredible rubbish. Maybe he'd been over-working or something - who knows - but I got the impression that he'd really flipped. And you know something? That could explain the accident. If his driving was half as wild as his words...well, it's hardly surprising, is it?"
Benson picked up the tape. "Could I borrow this?"
Hendry drew deeply on his cigar, making the end glow fiercely. "Don't want to be personal," he said. "But those marks on your face...how did you get them?"
Benson fingered his cheeks, grinned ruefully. "It's all right, they're not tribal marking," he said jokingly. "I had to interview rather a rough character. I don't think he liked my questions."
Hendry returned the grin. He'd been a reporter in Fleet Street during the "heavy-mob" days - before the place had got so sedately respectable - and his nose was slightly lopsided. "It happens," he said laconically. "Why do you want the tape?"
"We've got some pretty sophisticated equipment at the studios. Maybe we can trace something on it."
"No harm in you trying," said Hendry. "But I'll want it back afterwards and if you find anything interesting I'll expect to be told right away."
There was nothing on the tape. Or, at least, there seemed to be nothing.
It was played in its virgin state, you may recall, in that television documentary. And, as Simon Butler pointed out then, it apparently held only "the ceaseless noise of space - not much different from countless other tapes in the archives of radio astronomy."
At that stage in the program Butler told viewers: What it meant...what the vital information was that Sir William Ballantine had deciphered out of this apparently random cacophony...was something we would have to wait much longer to find out."
They discovered later that the waiting time would have been far shorter if Harry Carmell had not been drugged out of his mind on that February morning in Lambeth. For Carmell, of course, had he de-coder - the one he'd stolen from NASA.
But they were steadily making progress. While Benson was in that derelict house, being attacked by the crazed Carmell, Butler was trying to fix an appointment with an old man at Cambridge - an old man who would eventually steer them closer to the astonishing truth about Alternative 3.
Dr. Carl Gerstein's housekeeper was possessively protective over him. She'd been bullying him for years over his pipe-smoking. It was a filthy and disgusting habit, in her opinion, and it was certainly bad for him with his weak chest.
There's been a told-you-so tone in her voice when he developed a severe bout of bronchitis at the end of January, 1977. All she'd said about that pipe, she felt, was now vindicated. Maybe this time he'd listen and throw the dirty thing away. But Gerstein, of course, had no intention of throwing away his pipe. It was part of him.
She had her way, however, about visitors. There were to be none, absolutely none, until he was completely fit. He needed absolute rest - that's what the doctor had said - and she was going to make sure he got it. She refused to even allow him downstairs to speak on the telephone. "It's draughty in that hall and if you need to speak on the phone you can do it through me," she said. "You're staying up here in the warm."
That was why, on February 11, Butler found himself having to deal with her. She'd seen Butler often on television and she had a soft spot for him. But it wasn't soft enough for her to relax the rules.
"Not this month," she said. "Out of the question."
"How about next month?" asked Butler. "Isn't he expected to be better by then?"
We should mention here that Butler was later horrified when we showed him the relevant part of Trojan's transcript - dealing with Gerstein - of the Policy Committee meeting held on March 3, 1977:
A EIGHT: Pas de nouvelles... he's been laid up with bronchitis housekeeper, il ne voit personne depuis des semaines...
R EIGHT: Donc la situation, alors, n'a pas changé... Je recommande que nous maintaignons une observation du vieil homme...
Butler would have acted very differently if he had known that Gerstein was under surveillance. But he did not know and he persisted: "It really is very important...I wouldn't dream of troubling him if it were not..."
She relented, said she would go upstairs and check with the doctor. Soon she was back on the line. "I can only make a provisional arrangement, Mr. Butler," she said. "It'll have to depend on how he's feeling."
"What date do you suggest?"
"It's not me suggesting - it's Dr. Gerstein. He says he's quite looking forward to meeting you again." She was determined to keep things in proper perspective. "March the fourth, about two o'clock - would that be suitable?"
Butler checked his desk diary. Tuesday, March 4, was completely clear. "Thank you," he said. "Unless I hear to the contrary, I'll be there then."
The investigation, although they still did not realize it, was soon to take an astonishing turn.
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