Head of State, page 22
He freewheeled the last few hundred yards towards the post office and general store, where he was going to post an urgent letter to his bank. But then his sunny, escapist mood was rudely interrupted by the sight of a large, grim bear of a man. Wearing an old leather jacket, frayed jeans and heavy motorcycle boots, he was standing in the shadow of the store, but making no real attempt to hide himself.
‘Aleksander? What are you doing here? Are you on your way to the house? But Mr Haydn isn’t here.’
Aleksander edged out of the shadows and gestured towards his motorbike. ‘I am here from London now. I have been following people for Mr Haydn. They are not good people. They behave like dogs. One of them may be dead. I hope. I am trying to find the other. I almost had her, but then I lost her in these ridiculous narrow English lanes. The girl. Jemima.’
‘Jennifer?’
‘Yes. Jennifer.’
Ajit wanted nothing to do with this monstrous creature, this sweaty Caliban. Olivia Kite would know how to deal with him, and anyway, Danskin House was probably where Jennifer was headed. If Alois was there too, and would be embarrassed by the uninvited arrival of his creature, that was too bad. Let him take responsibility for once.
So Ajit gave him directions to Danskin House. Aleksander grunted his thanks and clambered back onto the machine.
Jen Blows It
With a crunch of gravel and a squeak of protest from its ageing suspension Ned Parminter’s Bristol came to a halt in front of the pillared entrance hall of Danskin House. Jen scrabbled through her handbag, pulled out McBryde’s envelope and reread the typewritten account of his meeting with Alois Haydn. It was short on detail, gory or otherwise, but it was specific about the timing and the identity of the plotters. To her surprise, a folded piece of paper that she hadn’t noticed before fell out of the envelope.
‘Addendum’ was written in pencil, heavily underlined, at the top. ‘Jen,’ she read, ‘there’s a bit of a twist, though I can’t properly stand it up …’ So, she thought, just more speculation. Stuffing it in the back pocket of her jeans she promised herself that she would read it carefully later. But first she had to find Olivia. She headed straight for the dining room.
Her boss’s greeting was not as warm as Jen might have hoped. Olivia stood up without a welcoming smile, and turned to the few workers who hadn’t yet left for the evening. ‘It’s an Americanism, I know, but would you mind giving us the room?’ Jen stood ramrod straight in front of her, hands behind her back, a schoolgirl before the headmistress. Olivia fingered her riding crop.
‘So you’ve turned up at last. I was wondering how long you’d linger in London. We’ve been managing rather well in your absence, dear. I find I have a few questions for you.’
Jen held her ground. ‘You’ll want to hear what I have to say. I haven’t been wasting my time, as you’ll see. So the first question goes to me. Who are we fighting here, really?’
Olivia trotted out the words Jennifer had expected, and had heard scores of times before, but always in private.
‘Number three, apathy – the British people’s fundamental lack of seriousness. Number two, the big-business and banking cowards who would happily sell our democracy for a little more influence over the regulatory gnomes in Brussels and Strasbourg. But number one, as you well know, is the prime minister himself, that slippery, honey-voiced old hypocrite. The people love him …’ But Olivia seemed distracted, almost bored.
Jen stepped nearer, staring fiercely into her eyes. ‘What would you say if I told you that our number-one enemy is no longer with us? That the prime minister died four days ago in his office. It’s true. They’ve hidden his body and managed to keep the whole thing secret. Quite an achievement. That disgusting Alois Haydn’s involved. He confessed it all to Lucien McBryde, who’s since been killed. It might seem nuts, Olivia, but I think they’re after me too.’
Having carefully removed the firing pin and thrown the grenade with a girl cricketer’s forearm lob, Jennifer took a full step back, waiting for the blast. A shout? Laughter? Amazement? Incredulity? But Olivia merely smiled tightly.
‘So, Jennifer, your ex-boyfriend came through for you in the end, just before he committed suicide. It may surprise you, but out here in the sticks we’ve known about the prime minister’s death for ages. So don’t you dare come here and start throwing around stupid accusations about one of the most important allies we’ve got – who, I’ll have you know, also happens to be a good personal friend of mine. “Disgusting”? I’ll tell you what’s disgusting: trailing around London smearing good people, wittering on about murder and delaying, for many hours, telling the woman who employs you a vital piece of information.’
Jen flushed and opened her mouth to speak, but Olivia cut in. ‘Don’t protest your innocence. Don’t you dare. A little bird has told me everything.’ And then she raised her voice and called, ‘Oh, little bii-ird!’
The pale oak door behind her swung open, and through it came dark-eyed Alois Haydn. Jen gaped. Beelzebub himself. The killer alongside her queen. She could not have been more surprised had Olivia revealed that a pet Siberian tiger was living in the kitchen.
Behind her, the door leading to the entrance hall creaked open and Aleksander entered the room. He began to raise his gun, but when Haydn gave a slight shake of his head Aleksander shrugged, reversed his grip and brought the butt down hard on Jen’s head. She dropped to her knees, hovered there for a moment as if praying, before sliding gently to the carpet.
If even a tenth of the things Alois had told her about Jennifer Lewis were true, Olivia reflected, the girl deserved a very sore head indeed, and probably a lot more than that. Olivia felt almost hurt.
‘And so. In this way. Is poetry justice,’ said Aleksander as he bent down and picked Jen up under the elbows. Alois took her feet and the two of them lugged her up the stairs to a bedroom, where they laid her on a bed. Aleksander produced a thick roll of tape from the pocket of his leather jacket, covered Jen’s mouth with a strip of it, then bound her feet and hands tightly. He glanced around the room. The window was too high to jump from, and there was an old-fashioned lock on the door. After Haydn had gone through Jen’s handbag and removed her mobile phone the two of them left the room. She was safe enough for the moment, a problem that could wait.
Some time later Jen came to with a raging headache. She may not have felt it, but she had been remarkably lucky. Had Alois or Aleksander taken the trouble to rifle her pockets and found the crumpled note she hadn’t bothered to read, they would have killed her there and then.
Speaking Plainly
Overlooking the circular lake in the grounds of Danskin House was a small white replica of the Temple of Artemis, with Doric sandstone columns and a roof of wooden tiles. Its present function was to house a collection of lawnmowers. Lounging on the seat of the largest of them, his motorbike propped against the back wall, Aleksander, who had just told Haydn about Jen felling Ned Parminter, was being briefed by his employer.
‘That girl knows more than enough to ruin me, and that means to ruin you too,’ said Haydn.
Aleksander yawned. He did not want to appear overly enthusiastic. Money was involved. Wait and listen.
‘If everything turns out as it should, I will become – comfortable. I’ve been generous to you, haven’t I Aleksander? So let me make this clear. If that girl blabs to Olivia and screws things up for me, she screws things up for you as well.’
‘And so you wish me to do what?’ As he spoke Aleksander took his mobile phone from his jeans pocket, held it towards Haydn and pressed a button on it.
‘What are you doing?’ said Alois.
‘This I think is a dangerous business. I am making a recording. We are men, we trust each other. But just so you do not drop me in the toilet, Mr Haydn, this is my insurance. Do you object?’
Alois did object, but he also knew that he would not be able to do this on his own.
‘No, of course not. And you’re quite right, this is all very unfortunate. You want me to be specific. You want leverage. I’ll give it to you. Unfortunately, the girl must be finished off. There. I wish there was an alternative, but there isn’t.’
Aleksander showed no sign of surprise, but merely grunted and scratched himself. He felt a sneeze coming. Alois continued in a low monotone he hoped the phone would not be able to pick up.
‘Come back here tomorrow morning, around eleven. It’s the day before the referendum, so the place will be in a frenzy and no one will notice you. Take her in the car she arrived in, drive it over towards my place, then head out into the marshes and do it there. There’s plenty of shooting out there at this time of year. No one will take any notice. The tide will do the rest.’
Alois lit a Turkish cigarette and walked slowly out of the temple, past the remains of a grotto and into the rose garden. Olivia Kite, watching him from an upstairs window, thought he looked like an immaculately dressed young boy.
Aleksander urinated against a Doric column before rolling his motorbike down a cinder path, behind some cedars, away from the house.
In a locked bedroom Jen tasted blood in her mouth and squirmed vainly on the bed.
Olivia was still seething about Jen’s treachery, as relayed to her by Alois. She’d like to thrash the living daylights out of her. But Alois was right; Jen had become a dangerous distraction, and the important thing was to keep her quiet. She would deal with Miss Lewis later, after the press conference was safely over.
Olivia took four sleeping pills downstairs to the kitchen, ground them into a powder and sprinkled it into a bowl of hot soup. She then went back upstairs, untied Jen, affecting to be horrified by the tape over her mouth, which she gently removed, and kissed her. Jen, woozy and scared, accepted her heartfelt apologies about the thugs who’d somehow wormed their way into Danskin, and gratefully swallowed the soup.
Olivia picked up her riding crop and left the room. She was beginning to feel rather curious about seeing that horrid little Alois Haydn without his clothes.
12
Wednesday, 20 September
Referendum Day Minus One
Phoebus Awakes: A Pageant
In the early hours of the following morning Rocks Point seemed not only a financial folly but a bleak joke. Rutted tracks led across dark-grey marshland to a small hillock on which a few scattered remnants of the old Victorian house were still standing. Once a place where Arthur Ransome had sought sanctuary with Trotsky’s secretary, churning out ‘nature note’ columns for the Guardian, it was now reduced to a couple of walls of good red brick no more than a few feet high, and a tangled pile of ironwork.
An entire chimney, once constructed of fretted and artistic brickwork, lay on its side. Weather vanes in beaten metal poked through the nettles and the dead, grey remnants of the exotic plants which had once been lovingly reared in the Victorian greenhouse. Hundreds of smashed panes of glass reflected the moonlight, like broken ice on a still pond.
The monstrous growth of reinforced concrete and glass which now overshadowed the remains of the earlier house appeared to be a haphazard arrangement of geometrical shapes stolen from a child’s mathematical primer; it was neither better nor worse than many other self-indulgent modern follies constructed by the new rich along the English coastline. North into East Anglia you could find green-glass palazzos, flying saucers, cast-iron spiders and rickety fantasies on timber legs. At the weekends hedge-fund managers, advertising men and Russians on the run would arrive by helicopter for a little shooting and swanking. Dorset was as bad, and Devon was on the turn.
Alois Haydn’s Swiss architect had had reservations about his design being planted on the very edge of the shifting Essex coastline, where it had the general effect of a bijou nuclear power station – the addition of the mandatory helipad leading some of the bloggers to describe it as looking like a James Bond villain’s lair. But wildfowlers and birdwatchers alike could agree on this: Rocks Point was a blight. Inside the house giant windows, designed to flood Alois Haydn, Ajit Gupta and their weekend guests with radiant light, merely added to the sense of desolation.
There were no Rocks here, just ooze and scum and a huge raw sky. There was no Point either, just a radius of salty mud vanishing to the north and south into yellowish seawater. To the west lay the wreckage of the Victorian house, and to the east, whenever the rain lifted, the grey sea, regularly punctuated by ferries and container ships on their way to or from Harwich. Haydn had had to remortgage the property, and had been too busy in London to furnish it to his taste, or even to finish the building work. Which was at least one saving grace.
Just a single room downstairs had been sufficiently completed to accommodate the shooters. Apart from that, only the concrete spiral staircase leading to the first-floor bedrooms had been painted. It was bright white, and was hung with lithographs of various tortures and executions, originally drawn by Goya but garishly redecorated by the Chapman brothers. Apart from the stairs and the shooting room the interior walls were bare concrete, still garlanded with electrical cables squirming out of ragged holes. There was some furniture downstairs, but it was mostly covered in polythene and dust. Upstairs, pacing from one of the almost empty bedrooms into Alois Haydn’s ‘library’ (which contained no books) was a shrouded and moaning figure.
In silk pyjama bottoms, with a duvet wrapped around his head to keep out the chill, Ajit Gupta felt he must have woken up into a nightmare. This horrible house on this horrible piece of coastline seemed even more horrible since he had discovered yesterday, while picking through his partner’s emails from the bank, that it was bankrupting the two of them. They must have been mad.
A seaside mansion, a piece of old England which had its dignity and history, had been smashed to pieces for this cold shed. What had they been thinking? And since, according to the most moderate estimate, this brand-new house required another two or three million spent on it just to make it weatherproof, let alone comfortable, Ajit was beginning to feel that nothing here in England was going to get any better for him.
Sleepless, he wandered to the back of the house and gazed down on the broken old brick walls. Still shivering with the cold, he realised he was thirsty. He had spent the evening waiting for Alois, drinking too much wine and wondering whether to confront him over their money troubles. What manner of man had he ended up with?
Ajit padded downstairs, the lithographs gurning at him, and into the temporary kitchen. This was dominated by a huge, brushed-steel fridge-freezer, standing in a corner of the room like an upright coffin. He reached in for a carton of orange juice. When he turned around he gave a start and dropped it with shock. A naked Alois Haydn was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, staring at him.
‘Ooops. Sorry. I came in late from Olivia Kite’s place. I didn’t want to wake you.’
Haydn stood and walked over to the window. In the moonlight Ajit could see livid red lines down his back.
The iron-grey nothingness that had hidden the sea and the ferries and the container ships was becoming tinged with the first whorls of pink. As Haydn spoke, little flecks of gold and tangerine began to decorate the hairs on his muscular legs and surprisingly powerful arms. He turned back to Ajit.
‘When you look at me, what do you see?’ He paused, and raised both arms in the air like a sporting hero.
I see a faun, thought Ajit. A baby god with a chest of brass, hair of beaten copper, and ankles and feet of clay.
But what he said was: ‘I see a man who takes me for a whore, and a stupid whore at that. All these shady financial dealings, Alois. All the silences. Your sordid little mysteries. That terrible Pole. And now those marks on your back. What do you actually do all day? I know what I do. I sit on my arse and I write sentences. And when all the sentences are joined up I take them to my publisher and eventually I have a book. And even if not so many people read my books, enough of them do for me to make an honest living. And you? You live high on the hog, but what do you actually do? I’m sick to the teeth of all this flitting about in the shadows thinking you’re so clever. Christ, I’ve even degraded myself by going through your accounts. So I know this folly is breaking us. I won’t say it hasn’t been fun, but I want out.’
Haydn stretched himself in the sun. Getting rid of Ajit would suit him quite well, but it would be a big risk. He knew too much, and these writers were always in search of material.
‘Going to put me in a book are you, honey?’
‘I’m not a blackmailer. But somebody should put you in a book one of these days. It would be a shame not to …’
Haydn felt he detected a threat. He began to pace back and forth, as if delivering a soliloquy on an empty stage.
‘You write your sentences, Ajit. I take risks. We both use our brains as best we can. But yes, of course we’re at a turning point. After this I can never go back to Westminster or Whitehall. All those contacts, those parties we gave, those favours still unredeemed, those little packets of golden information … all gone, all useless now.’
As the sun started to rise he became only a silhouette against the window. Ajit felt he was looking at a marionette, not the man he had once loved. Haydn talked on.
‘I am an ambitious man. Yes, in this unambitious country I dare to say it. Here the politicians don’t matter any more. Not the secretaries of state, not the ministers, not the lords. The British think they’re democrats. But they’re only shoppers. They don’t vote very much, and they don’t think very much either. Here the only people who count are the very rich, the people who can buy football teams and private jets and flash penthouses on the Thames. If you want power you have to become as rich as the robber Russians, the tyrannical Arabs, the Shanghai property developers and the Indian industrialists.
