Sitting in the lounge a short time later with his colleagues Dick discretely nursed his bruised jaw. As relationships with your boss went, he wasn’t doing so well. So far in their brief relationship Taylor had kneed Dick in the groin and punched him in the face, but if Taylor harboured a deep-seated feeling of seething resentment towards Dick then this was currently well-concealed. He was as civil and as friendly as usual. Likewise, if Alice had been distressed about what had taken place earlier on the library table then she certainly didn’t show it.
The three of them, Edward and Susan were discussing the extraordinary news of the capture and likely execution of Benjamin Faraday. Taylor vehemently denied that Benjamin had been a member of the Resistance and that his arrest was as much of a surprise to him as it had been to Dick. By the strengths of his protests and those of his colleagues Dick was starting to believe that Taylor might actually be telling the truth. Taylor, meanwhile, was angry with himself that Benjamin’s anti-Party sentiment had not come to his attention earlier – and for not recruiting him. He wondered how many other people like Benjamin had slipped through the net; valuable additional members the Resistance so dearly needed. This was being discussed when, in an extraordinary coincidence, Grace rushed into the room with a copy of the London Evening Telegraph in her hand and an excited look on her face.
‘I think we might have found a potential new member!’, she said eagerly. ‘Look!’
Grace pointed energetically at the open paper. Dick joined Taylor, Alice, Susan and Edward in staring at the page.
‘New Indian tiger for London Zoological Gardens?’ Dick asked, pondering a) why they would recruit a tiger and b) how they would train it to such a degree that it would be useful to the Resistance, let alone cure it of its innate man-eating instincts.
‘No!’, Grace, exclaimed, pointing excitedly to the page again.
Dick tried to follow her finger but this was difficult as she was waving it about so frantically.
‘New Sewerage System for Manchester?’ If Dick had doubts about recruiting a tiger then enlisting the help of a sewage system made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Dick thought the whole notion was fraught with impracticalities, starting with the fact that they would need an unfeasibly large volume of perfume to hide its stench. Dick’s colleagues however, didn’t share his confusion.
‘Well spotted Grace’, Taylor said. ‘This is definitely worth investigating further’.
‘What an odd story!’ added Alice, which made Dick even more determined to find out what all the fuss was about.
‘What is it?’, asked Dick, the frustration evident in his voice.
‘This!’. Susan picked up the paper and thrust it in Dick’s face. She read out the headline of a very small story sandwiched between ‘New bandstand for Kensington Gardens’ and something equally un-newsworthy about a new iron ore smelting process.
‘Man Arrested For Molestation of Statue’.
Dick took the paper and scanned the story. According to the article a man had been arrested for being intoxicated and trying to have sexual relations with a statue of Queen Victoria in Regents Park.
‘So?’. Dick handed the paper back to Susan. Apart from a very slight comedic value in the story and a weak pun about ‘statutory rape’, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
‘So? So!’ said Taylor. ‘This is a great opportunity! Someone displaying anti-Party sentiments’.
‘What, being drunk?’, Dick asked.
‘No, being sexually repressed. Trying to have sex with a statue!’, Susan explained.
Dick still thought they were placing too much importance on the story. ‘The man was drunk and drunk people do lots of odd things’, he said. They’re sick in doorways, they start fights and they marry people they shouldn’t in Las Vegas. Just because he was humping a statue doesn’t mean anything!’
Taylor smiled. ‘But it does, Dick. You see the monthly injections are designed to suppress sexual desires, whether conscious or subconscious. The dosage is such that this sort of behaviour should not take place. How it even got reported is another matter. You can be certain that the story will be pulled from a later edition’.
‘What it means’, Susan explained, ‘Is that the man who did this had latent desires that even the injections can’t quash. All the alcohol did was temporarily allow these dormant feelings to rise to the surface’.
‘Think of it as a catalyst’, added Alice.
It was Edward’s turn to support this assumption. ‘We’ve seen it before Dick, the same sort of behaviour. Trust us. This man is a good candidate to join the Resistance’.
Dick looked at the four of them, all smug and self-satisfied in their suppositions. To him the man was clearly pissed. Nothing more and nothing less. If he’d been caught molesting a statue of Scarlett Johansson then there might be something in what they were saying, but it could only be intoxication, pure and simple, to make someone fake sex with a statue of the ugliest queen ever (and that includes Queen Dorete of Denmark, the wife of Eric VII, who had warts and a small moustache). It was one thing he thought, to use Victoria’s image for private arousal, but trying to have sex with her statue in public was definitely not the action of a sober man. As far as this newspaper article went, Dick felt his colleagues were reading far too much into it.
‘I’ve done some research and you know the most amazing thing about this story?’ said Grace.
‘This ordinary story about a drunk man?’
Grace ignored Dick’s sarcasm and dropped her bombshell. ‘He is a low-ranking member of the Party!’.
Taylor’s pipe dropped from his mouth. If Edward, Alice and Susan had been smoking pipes, then theirs too would also have fallen out in the exact same way. But they weren’t, so they just looked shocked instead.
Grace continued. ‘Out of interest I crossed referenced his name with our intelligence records and sure enough, found a match. He’s called David Parnell. He’s an assistant to the assistant under-secretary to the deputy joint executive in charge of canal digging!’
Dick was suffering from SUS, Severe Underwhelment Syndrome, a condition and a term he’d just invented but which seemed more than appropriate for this moment.
Taylor displayed an almost orgasmic level of excitement. ‘Don’t you see?’, he asked, ‘This is a man who has displayed anti-Party behaviour and who is actually a member of the Party. Recruiting him will be such a coup!’.
‘Sure, if you want to find out all the dirt on canal digging!’, Dick added with an equal degree of cynicism and unhelpfulness, and a smug feeling about his word-play.
‘It doesn’t matter’, Taylor continued. ‘However minor his role, he’s a member of the Party and would be able to give us names, positions, news, rumours… anything like that is priceless’.
Edward concurred. ‘That sort of information, even if it’s seemingly inconsequential, helps complete our picture of the Party’.
‘Whatever’. Dick shrugged, still not convinced.
Taylor, Edward, Susan and Grace left the room in a high state of excitement to double check the records, leaving Alice and Dick alone.
‘You look jealous’, Alice said.
Dick frowned. ‘Me? Why?’
‘This new man, David Parnell. If we manage to recruit him he could provide invaluable information. Are you worried we might discover he’s actually more useful to the Resistance than you?’
Alice, apart from having full, firm breasts and the most squeezable ass Dick had seen in a long, long time had obviously been programmed with the kind of logic circuits to give her a woman’s intuition. He laughed out loud, the sort of false laugh that usually means you’re covering up for some sort of insecurity.
‘Me? Jealous? Come on!’ said Dick as convincingly as he could.
‘Why not?’ pressed Alice. ‘You told me before that you were jealous of Taylor and I. If envy is a weakness then it’s not so unbelievable that you’d be jealous about someone who might usurp your place and your role in the Resistance, is it?’
Dick laughed out loud again. More of a ‘guffaw’ this time, and just as unconvincing. Deep down Dick knew she could have a point. And even deeper down he knew she was right.
‘That’s crazy’, he said. ‘I think the whole idea of this guy making some anti-Party demonstration is ridiculous however in the unlikely event he is what you all claim, then that’s great. I’d welcome him with open arms — in a brotherly way of course, not as some precursor to any form of man-love that might lead to naked wrestling, touching willies or sodomy’. Alice was now staring at him. Dick shrugged and continued. ‘Sure I’d welcome him here. Any enemy of the Party is a friend of mine’.
‘As you say, Mr. Longg. As you say’. With that, an unconvinced Alice left the room, leaving Dick alone with his thoughts and a teeny weeny bit of jealously.
‘Anyway’, Dick said under his breath in an effort to comfort himself, ‘I bet he’s got a really small penis’.
Sure enough, that news story had disappeared from the later edition of the paper, giving credence to Taylor’s assumptions. Further painstaking research conducted the next day by Humphrey established that David Parnell had been arrested and taken to West End Central police station for questioning. Taylor thought that while there was a very small chance that the Party would make David Parnell ‘disappear’, it was far more likely that he’d be fined, demoted – and given an extra dose of chemical suppressants. Because the Resistance now knew where he worked, it was an easy enough task for one of the members to follow him home one night and note his address.
Everything moved very quickly after that. The same source in the Resistance who supplied Dick’s entire fake back-story manage to access David Parnell’s permanent record. This contained details of a series of minor incidents going back over several years that, when viewed in isolation, were just that; minor incidents: vandalism, drunken behaviour and public disorder. Nothing that demonstrated any real degree of dissent, but which definitely did hint at someone dissatisfied with the status quo. Under Taylor’s direction David Parnell was placed under detailed surveillance. Further investigations failed to throw up any questions or issues about his legitimacy or sincerity, and verified Taylor’s original assumption that he was a good potential resistance member. That being the case, plans were made to contact him.
At the next meeting Taylor updated everyone on the process to recruit Parnell.
‘Don’t you think you’re moving a little too fast?’, Dick enquired. ‘I thought you said that the recruiting procedure for new members took months. You said you had to be overwhelmingly confident that the prospect was entirely safe to introduce’.
‘You’re right’, Taylor admitted, ‘But we’re extremely concerned about this secret weapon that the Party are developing. Each day that passes is a day they’re closer to using it’.
‘But we’re not sure about the weapon. It’s still just a rumour isn’t it?’, Dick enquired.
‘It is, but a very strong rumour, and one from several different sources. That makes it a rumour we can’t afford to ignore’.
‘Just because you haven’t uncovered any definite proof about it Mr. Longg, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’. Humphrey added. There were murmurs of agreement within the room. Dick recoiled from the pointed criticism.
‘Have faith. Taylor has weighed up the situation and he knows what he’s doing. There are sufficient precautions in place to safeguard our identities and location’. This was Alice’s turn to add support to her lover and she did it with a look that said, ‘You were wrong about Mr. Parnell and you’re still jealous of him’. It was also a look that said, ‘And when he gets here I’m going to have really good sex with him’ — but then Dick thought that maybe he was reading a little too much into her look.
When it was Dick’s turn to report on developments he told his resistance colleagues that Jack had so far located and dispatched eleven of the rogue harlots. In his job at the Ministry he continued to seed all variety of rumours about the murders including fake confessional letters from the killer in which he signs his name Jack. All these reports were being lapped up by the public which still demonstrated an unquenchable desire for all things associated with the killings. In addition to these news stories papers were devising their own crowd-pleasing features like ‘The Ripper Diet’, ‘Are YOU a Prostitute?’ personality tests and even ‘Jack the Ripper Bingo’. Dick even planted a few reports that said that Jack had killed prostitutes and their clients in the same bloody brutal attacks (the men, stories claimed, had been found with their severed penises in their own mouths). Discouraging women from becoming prostitutes was the key objective, but putting men off visiting them was equally important.
The Party didn’t mind the fact that conflicting stories confused the police and ultimately wasted their time. The intention of these reports was to make sure everyone got the message that prostitution, as the Party had always claimed, was a ‘great social evil’. Of that, after Dick’s sustained media campaign, there was absolutely no doubt.
Although Dick was kept busy, his days at the Ministry had become rather routine. The Ripper business would continue until all the robot prostitutes had been killed, and then maybe a little longer. (At his most cynical and manipulative, Dick was toying with the idea of a moral ending to Jack’s reign of terror; having him killed off in a fight to the death by a god-fearing, Party-supporting, non-masturbating, happily-married man — that sort of thing). Each day he monitored transcripts of the television news, studied press cuttings, planned and implemented future activity and briefed Vera on his activity. Just when he felt he’d been forgotten and wouldn’t receive any more recognition for the excellent work he was doing, he got the call. As calls went this one was very, very welcome, and in fact featured in Dick’s Top Three Calls Of All Time.
The first was the time he learned he was being inducted into the Pornography Hall of Fame, having his penis imprinted for perpetuity in cement outside a seedy cinema off Hollywood Boulevard. The second of the top three calls was the time he was told he would be appearing on the cover of Newsweek as ‘The Man With The Golden Cock’ (this was a feature on his immense wealth and not an incident involving a pet rooster and a can of spray paint). This latest Top Call came when Dick was in the middle of charting week-on-week newspaper coverage.
‘Mr. Brunel’, a serious voice intoned over the phone, ‘This is Jonathan Claygate from Party headquarters. Your presence is requested tomorrow afternoon at 1600 hours’.
Dick’s default response was to feel guilty and panic. He looked up and saw Vera sitting on her platform, head raised up from a massive pile of papers, smiling at him. She winked and Dick knew that this was the call he’d been waiting for. He was going to Party HQ to be congratulated in person. Maybe he’d be given a promotion. Now his skills had been recognised, the sky was the limit. A sub-section under-manager? No, he was better than that. A department deputy head? What about ‘Head Assistant to the Deputy Leader?’ Or ‘Deputy Head Assistant to the Leader?’ He liked the sound of that. In fact, he thought he’d be happy with any position with ‘Leader’ in the title. Well not a title involving the words ‘Syphy Leader’ or ‘Pooh Pants Leader’, obviously.
‘Mr. Brunel? Mr. Brunel? Hello…’ Dick was shaken back to reality by the impatient voice still emanating from the receiver.
‘Hello Mr. Claygate. Sorry about that. I’ll be delighted to be there tomorrow’.
‘Good. Be ready in your reception at fifteen forty where a ministerial hovercar will pick you up. Goodbye’.
With that, Mr. Claygate was gone. Dick put the phone down, still in a state of shock. He looked up at Vera who smiled and winked at him once more. Dick smiled back. He wasn’t certain which high-ranking Party official he was going to meet but just to be summoned to Party headquarters was enough at this moment. Dick couldn’t wait to tell Taylor about this invitation. This was his chance to infiltrate the Party hierarchy, discover their plans and fulfil his mission. He didn’t give a shit about this young upstart David ‘I simulated sex with a statue of Queen Victoria’ Parnell. He might join the Resistance and impress them with his stupid party connections via his even stupider canal building-related career but what he wouldn’t be doing was travelling in a chauffeur driven car to Party HQ. Dick just knew Alice would be suitably impressed.