Head of State, page 23
‘So, Ajit, I am going to short the United Kingdom. It will make me as rich as those kinds of people. And to achieve that I will do anything, absolutely anything, that needs to be done. The world is divided between those who dream – or write – and men of action. So, Ajit Gupta, do you still want out?’
The sun was now fully up. Haydn placed one small foot in front of the other, raised his palms upright as if for applause, and bowed. Ajit found himself hypnotised by those little hands. They were so small and brown, so tapered. They looked more like the hands of a mole than a human being.
But he was having visions of his own. Haydn now appeared to him like one of Blake’s engraved monsters, with speckled wings and leprous skin. He shuddered, and thought that as soon as he could he had to get away from here and back to London.
‘Yes, Alois. I’m afraid I do.’
‘Then I will give you some advice, as a parting gift. It should make you a few million pounds, which will make you financially secure for the rest of your life.’ Haydn then went on to explain to Ajit exactly how to buy options on shorting British Airways, British Aerospace and a couple of the major banks. He gambled that Ajit would be unable to resist the temptation of such easy money, and that if Sir Solomon Dundas and Charmian Locke were right, he would certainly be caught, and would be safely locked away in one of His Majesty’s prisons for several years. After that, no one would listen to anything a convicted fraudster said.
By now both of them were desperately hungry. There was a small camping stove in the kitchen, and the unsuspecting Ajit made bacon and eggs. They washed the frugal meal down with tumblers of Armagnac. Afterwards, Haydn, still naked and looking suddenly young and vulnerable, flopped back in his chair. Ajit ran a hand across his chest, tugged a nipple, and began to kiss him. An hour later they were lying sated, fast asleep, intertwined – and many miles apart.
Death in the Morning?
By 11 o’clock Danskin House was buzzing with activity in preparation for Olivia Kite’s final press conference before the referendum. As Haydn had speculated, no one paid any attention to Aleksander. He marched boldly up the drive, opened the door of the Bristol with the key he had removed from Jen’s handbag, and concealed his gun and some of the spare cartridges under the driver’s seat. He then went into the house and, taking the stairs two at a time, up to the room where he had left Jen the previous evening. Thanks to Olivia’s hot soup she was still fast asleep and snoring. He woke her gently. She recoiled in shock and loathing when she opened her eyes to see him standing over her.
‘Shush, girl,’ he said, and managed a smile. ‘Mrs Kite says you are to go back with me to London. Things are getting too difficult here.’
Jennifer tried to protest, but Aleksander gently placed a large hand over her mouth. ‘No, not yet, girl. I will speak to your questions in the car. You must dress. I wait outside, it’s OK in this way. You must come down quietly with me and make no noise. Mrs Kite is angry for us both.’
It was only when the Bristol, which Aleksander drove very badly, turned off the main road to the village and began to bump and grind its way along a deeply rutted track into the marshes that Jen’s mind began to turn over. The sky was colourless. A shimmering haze meant that it was hard to make out anything much beyond the clumps of sedge, the odd gatepost stump and the pools of brackish water in the road. The ghostly figures of stunted trees flickered in the near distance. Jen didn’t like this at all.
Alois Haydn had been right. The isle was full of noises. Frequent pops and cracks betrayed the fact that the wildfowlers were out, and finding targets in the soupy brightness. When he was sure there was nobody within sight, Aleksander turned off the road and very gently asked Jen to get out for a moment. Feeling like an automaton, swallowing her fears, she dully unfastened her seatbelt, opened the door and stood by the side of the car. Her legs were shaking. Moving without haste or comment, Aleksander reached under his seat and pulled out the gun.
‘Now you will walk, not run, to that ditch there. Do not worry, the water is quite shallow. You will kneel down please. This will be very quick.’
Jen, sobbing and gasping, found herself completely unable to speak. Crouching down in the ditch, she felt the cold water rising above her knees. She heard a metallic click. It must have been very loud, she thought, to penetrate the roar of the blood pounding in her head. She wondered about Ned Parminter.
Aleksander was standing behind her, his legs planted widely apart and his arms outstretched. The stubby barrels of the shotgun were no more than an inch or two from Jen’s uncombed hair. This, he thought, was what he was good at. This was what he liked.
Turbulence
But far out above the North Sea a small area of low pressure had created a bubble of turbulence over the water. Waves ruffled the surface. The gust took a steward by surprise as he made his way to the bar of a passing ferry. And as this lightest of breezes reached the sopping, sucking edges of the marshland, the haze suddenly lifted.
Trevor Kampusch had been a London taxi driver all his adult life. There was nowhere, from Barnet to Croydon, that he didn’t know like the back of his mottled, liver-spotted hand. He hated it out here in the sticks, fifty miles from the nearest falafel. He’d done his best for the old lady and her gentleman admirer in the back, and tried to find the bloody house they wanted, but he couldn’t for the life of him.
His passengers had been quiet to begin with. He’d thought the old lady was asleep. But actually Myfanwy was thinking hard about her ancient errors, the unprepossessing little baby boy she’d sold for the price of a fortnight’s holiday in Rome. Tiny pinpricks of conscience reminded her of being a young girl herself. Well, maybe she could still put things right. This would be a day for truth-telling.
Eventually the opportunity for a bit of gossip with Briskett had proved irresistible, and she had embraced the opportunity of retelling her life story to her eager listener. Briskett was suitably impressed to find that so many of the men and women he had written about in the course of his professional career had been friends or lovers of hers. They had talked of cabinet ministers and dashing former military officers, of self-serving memoirs and of diaries and collections of letters still to be published. They had talked about Jennifer and Ned Parminter too. It was proving a delightful adventure. Neither felt any sense of danger as they drew nearer to Danskin House.
But the taxi driver was now well and truly bloody lost. His AA road atlas lay on the seat beside him. These tangled lanes were almost enough to drive you to a bloody satnav. As the cabbie swore and tried to execute a seven-point turn without sinking into the malevolent-looking puddles on either side of the narrow track, Lord Briskett started, wound down the window and shouted, ‘Ned?’
For there was no mistaking his protégé’s beloved Bristol, badly parked, spattered with mud and leaning at an awkward angle.
Aleksander heard the shout, paused and turned around.
It was then that Lord Briskett noticed the girl huddled in the ditch and clearly in distress. He jumped out of the taxi and ran towards Aleksander, who straightened up and swivelled his gun in the direction of the elegantly dressed academic.
‘Hey there! What do you think you’re doing?’ cried Briskett in his best, most commanding Oxford tones. They could have been his last words, but they were not. For his leather-soled brogues, perfect for city pavements, slipped on the mud and he was flung headlong to the ground just as the Pole fired, missing him by inches. The shot pinged against the taxi.
Immediately afterwards there was another loud report. Aleksander staggered backwards, looked down and was surprised to see a neat round hole in his left shoulder from which blood was not trickling but pumping. All sensation left his arm, the gun tumbled to his feet and he collapsed to the ground.
By the taxi, looking rather cavalier in a large blue felt fedora purchased at Liberty in 1960, Myfanwy Davies-Jones was experiencing an almost sexual satisfaction as she looked at the tiny ebony-handled object in her hand. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ she said to the taxi driver. ‘It felt divine.’
The Second Message
They left Aleksander lying by the side of the road. Jen, badly shaken but able to give the driver directions to Danskin House, sat with Myfanwy in the back of the taxi while Briskett followed them in the Bristol. Jen could give no coherent explanation as to why Aleksander had wanted to kill her, but she felt there might be safety in numbers. Myfanwy listened to her daughter’s story with rare restraint, then asked exactly what Jen had taken to Olivia Kite.
‘You see, Jennifer dear,’ said Myfanwy, ‘darling clever Lord Briskett found out that the prime minister was dead, and that there had been some terrible racket to cover it all up. It turns out that some friends of mine in London were actually helping to do it. Precious as you are, darling, it hardly seems worth killing you over an outlandish story that was about to leak out anyway. So we haven’t yet reached the final chapter.’
Jen told her mother about the London Library and the message from Lucien McBryde. The information it contained had seemed such a bombshell, ‘But the funny thing was, when I told Olivia she didn’t seem surprised at all. How do you suppose she knew?’
Suddenly Jen remembered McBryde’s second message, which she had only glanced at as she arrived at Olivia’s the previous day. The one that – although she didn’t know it – he had scribbled down in haste at Gordon’s wine bar on the night he died. It was still there, tightly folded into the back pocket of her jeans. She fished it out, smoothed it over and carefully read it through twice, then handed it to Myfanwy, who had been loudly debating with the taxi driver about her right to smoke in the back of his cab. The note read:
Addendum
Jen, there’s a bit of a twist, though I can’t properly stand it up. We were always told in hack school to answer all the Ws – Who? What? When? Where?
But the greatest of the Ws is Why? And it was nagging away at me ever since that conversation last night with Alois Haydn. He was part of the plot. So why did he want to destroy it? And why did he tell me, of all people?
I couldn’t let it alone. I’ve just asked an old school friend of mine, who used to work in the City, whether it was possible that Haydn could benefit in some way from knowing the result of the referendum in advance. He couldn’t give me many details, but he said that Haydn could make an awful lot of money. I just had to ask the right questions of the right people and it would all become clear. I don’t know what that means exactly, but I’ll bet Olivia Kite’s people do. Hope this helps. I think I still love you.
Lucien xxx
‘It does help, it certainly does,’ said Myfanwy. ‘It’s the final chapter. Now it all makes sense. If Alois is working some scam and he doesn’t want Olivia Kite to know about it, well …’ She inhaled deeply, then fell silent and stared at the low hedges lining the road towards Danskin House.
‘It’s obviously about money,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘Alois is up to something, and he thinks you might know what it is. I suppose he thinks McBryde must have told you. As to what he’s planning exactly, I know just the man who will know how to find out. But it seems that Alois really was prepared to bump you off. I’d never have believed it of him, even though he’s been a little shit all his life.’
She yawned. ‘I’ll have to have a word with him.’
A Dénouement
As they drew nearer to the house they found the narrow road almost blocked by vehicles parked on either side. Lumbering BBC outside-broadcast vans festooned with aerials and dishes, a Channel 4 minibus and a huge pantechnicon with ‘Sky News’ stencilled on its side were all wedged among numerous cars. Men employed to unwind black cabling were happily unwinding black cabling. Self-important adolescents were barking into mobile phones.
Lord Briskett paid off the still-grumbling taxi driver and plunged eagerly into the middle of all this. He was soon having a lovely time. He knew almost all the senior political correspondents by name, and found himself at the centre of a huddle of dark jackets, busily telling them the sensational news that Olivia Kite intended to reveal at her press conference. None of them believed him. Their sceptical expressions, which showed quite clearly that they thought he must be demented, made him even more pleased.
So he was almost jigging with pleasure when Myfanwy took him to one side and slipped him Lucien McBryde’s second message. Ignoring her suggestion that he contact one of her many friends, Briskett immediately called Dame Cecily Morgan, convinced that she was one of the few people in London who would be able to find out within minutes exactly what Alois Haydn had done. After a brief telephone conversation with an embarrassed Sir Solomon Dundas, who confessed everything, Dame Cecily called Briskett straight back.
‘I’m not an easy woman to shock, but he’s shorted the whole fucking country. He thinks sterling’s going to tumble after the “No” campaign wins the referendum. In fact he wants it to. The damage to London will be immense. And we thought we were working with him all along …’
Just then, as if the media pack had a single brain (which, mostly, it does), the scrum of cameramen, sound engineers, research assistants and junior reporters commissioned to keep the best seats free for their superiors poured through the gates and across the front lawn of Danskin House. Behind them strolled the senior correspondents and television presenters, for it is a curious fact that as politics has diminished in stature and importance, those who merely report it have grown steadily grander. Bringing up the rear were four BBC work-experience trainees in their early twenties, straining under the weight of a palanquin, or sedan chair, on which reposed the corporation’s political editor.
In front of several score gold-painted chairs and a raised enclosure for the cameras Olivia Kite’s team had erected a four-foot-high platform festooned with Union flags. Behind it a banner hung from the top storey of Danskin House, reading ‘BRITAIN’S SHAME! THE GREATEST LIE EVER TOLD?’
On the platform were a dozen well-known faces – actors, businesspeople, even a couple of politicians. Sitting centre-stage, Olivia herself had rejected her customary black trouser suit and was strikingly dressed in a cobalt-blue outfit with scarlet piping and a frilled white shirt. Always pale-faced, she was now chalk-white, her eyes dark and flashing, her mouth a wanton strip of carmine. The effect was of a collision between Elizabeth I and Lady Thatcher, but it was undeniably effective. Beside her, small, mouse-coloured and with a nervous smirk on his face, sat Alois Haydn.
As the hubbub of journalists arranged itself on the seats with much elbowing and jostling for position, Olivia spotted Jennifer Lewis standing at the back of the crowd between Myfanwy Davies-Jones and Lord Briskett. So did Alois Haydn, who was by now looking decidedly uneasy. But Olivia gestured imperiously at Jen, summoning her up beside her on the platform. It was a brilliant stroke. The presence of the dishevelled and mud-stained young woman confirmed that this would be a press conference like no other.
Olivia, her slim fingers holding, for no apparent reason, a riding crop, opened proceedings by bringing it slashing down on the long desk in front of her. A shiver ran through the press pack. Then she leaned into the microphone.
‘For almost a year now, ladies and gentlemen, I have been telling you that we, the British people, have been lied to. (The crop slashed down again for emphasis.) We were lied to (Whack!) when we were first invited to join the Common Market by Edward Heath. We were lied to at every turn (Crash! Wallop! Bang!) by almost – but not quite – every subsequent prime minister as the market became a union and the union became a superstate. So my accusations of deceit levelled against this wretched (Crack!), cowardly (Ker-rack!), dishonest (a bigger crack, as the desk began to splinter), contemptible government will hardly surprise you. Today, however, the British people will finally discover – just in time – the depths to which that government has been prepared to sink in order to pull the wool over their eyes.
‘Yesterday I learned, through unimpeachable sources, that the prime minister – to whom even now I pay tribute as an impeccable public servant and a man of honour – passed away nearly a week ago. His speeches, his interviews, his public appearances and his political broadcasts since then have been mere fakery, accomplished by means of a series of childish tricks. The country has yet again been lied to. Now, I say, that is not the fault of the late prime minister himself, and today I demand, on behalf of all of the people of Great Britain, a state funeral for a man who in death has been cynically misused by midgets …’
The rest of Olivia Kite’s superb speech, which has passed into political history and is still taught in English grammar schools, is too well-known to repeat here. She was so overcome by her indignant eloquence that she completely forgot to put Alois Haydn on the spot about his involvement in the conspiracy, but her fiery words were broadcast in their entirety by every television and radio network. Every newspaper devoted pages to her speech the following day, along with pieces by their commentators explaining why they had suspected all along that something of this kind was going on. Reactions to the speech trended on Witter for an unheard-of eighty hours.
Back at the offices of PLS in London phones were ringing off the hook and inboxes were pinging frantically as clients scrambled for inside information. The company had been up to its neck in a national – indeed an international – scandal, and now found itself comprehensively outsmarted. If the referendum went against Europe, vast sums would be written off the balance sheets of half its clients – the very clients that paid PLS handsomely to be kept well-informed about such events.
General Sir Mike Patten was trying to reassure Baroness Tessie Fremantle. No one, he said confidently, would ever know about PLS’s part in this wretched business – and in any case, he was by no means certain that the referendum was lost, despite all the furore. ‘The whole Lazarus trick is just too bizarre, frankly. In this day and age, who would believe it?’
