Head of State, page 24
Dame Cecily Morgan had had enough. It had not been an easy week. She leaned across her desk, her lip curling and her formidable bosom aimed squarely at the retired general. ‘Quite right, Mike. The whole thing is simply incredible. Oh no, it couldn’t happen here. It’s as bonkers as – what? – two brothers fighting each other for the leadership of the Labour Party, or a husband and wife jailing each other over a pretty minor traffic offence, or two eminent members of the Conservative Party being in a gay relationship even as they proclaim family values, or a prime minister having an affair with one of his own ministers … Loopy. Loony. It’s as bonkers as manufacturing the case for an entire war and thinking no one would notice. Mad as cheese. No, no, none of that could ever happen here. The great British public simply wouldn’t let them get away with it. Quite right, Mike.’ With that Dame Cecily stomped off for a beer.
In Essex the journalists, who had been well-trained to believe anything they were told, were so excited by the sheer scale of the tale they had just been served up by Olivia Kite that they had all immediately fled Danskin House for their offices in London, or to feed pictures back from their vans. And so they missed the rest of the story, which began only once the cameras had been turned off and the miles of cable neatly rewound.
Female Wrestling
Sweet peas and tea roses. Lavender and freshly cut grass. Olivia Kite, trembling, had made her way down from the platform and was walking in a kind of post-coital daze back through the garden towards her library when she was interrupted by a shout.
‘You silly woman! You utter fool!’
Olivia swivelled. Myfanwy Davies-Jones stood with her legs apart, her purple face crowned by her blue fedora. Her gaudy tartan wool jacket, fine Welsh bones and emerald stare made her appear even more exotically colourful than the garden around her.
Olivia looked just as garish, and just as formidable. Behind her, in her shadow, stood Alois Haydn. Behind Myfanwy, with the gleeful expression of a small boy about to break his first window, was Lord Briskett. It was as if two female samurai, with their attendants, were preparing for a fight to the death.
Olivia brandished her riding crop. ‘I don’t know who you are. You look like Vivienne Westwood’s drunken elder sister. And I don’t know what you’re doing in my garden slinging insults at me either. But since this is my house I insist we go indoors. Whatever it is you want to say you can say to me there.’
Once they were inside Olivia, looking for any advantage she could grab hold of, chose a chair by the fireplace and sat there, stiff-backed.
Myfanwy strode across the room and stood over her. But her voice when she spoke was almost gentle. ‘Mrs Kite, all you need to know is that I am a woman of the world. And you have been manipulated, like a helpless puppet, by that man there’ – she indicated Alois Haydn with a contemptuous jerk of her thumb. ‘He has been pulling your strings for days. Even if you win this referendum your victory will be a hollow one. It will be tainted by the stink of corruption – and what’s more, Mrs Kite, of treason.’
Even the most devoted reader of her novels would have had to admit that Myfanwy Davies-Jones had a weakness for bombast.
‘Now look here, you mad old bat,’ retorted Olivia. ‘The treason is all on the other side. Lies. Bribery. The abuse of office. The only crime Mr Haydn here is guilty of is coming to his senses in time and making sure the British people heard the truth.’
Lord Briskett stepped forward and folded his arms to appear more authoritative, Oxonian. ‘Miss Davies-Jones here is one of the very finest novelists our islands have known, as well as having been a personal friend of mine for many years. And Mrs Kite, she is quite right. I have persuasive evidence that your friend Mr Haydn has bet a fabulous amount in the markets on a “No” vote tomorrow. He has done this by shorting the currency of Great Britain. But if that was intended to be a secret, it is already leaking out. Even now, other speculators are piling in. The combined effect of that and the referendum result on confidence in the City, and indeed on the entire British economy at this most sensitive and difficult time, will be catastrophic. And this man here is responsible. He is a corrupt, seedy little wrecker.’
Myfanwy took up the baton. ‘Alois here needed you to win the vote, so he gave you the ammunition for victory – but only in order to enrich himself in the most discreditable way possible. I have no particular hostility to his wish to become filthy rich, but I must protest when he tries to have his own sister, who is no more than a harmless girl, murdered to keep her quiet about his schemes.’
‘His sister?’ said Olivia.
‘My sister?’ quavered Alois.
Myfanwy suddenly remembered her pistol, took it out of her purse and waggled it in Haydn’s general direction. She drew herself up to her full five feet.
‘I can see right through you, Alois. I’ve always been able to, ever since you first appeared – wet and pink and horrid then, but much worse now. Yes, I realise this must come as a shock to you. But I can assure you that being your mother is a serious embarrassment for me as well.’
But Where is Ned?
Lord Briskett, Myfanwy Davies-Jones and Jennifer Lewis retired, reeling but victorious, to the Chelmsford Arms public house, which trumpeted food all day. Three microwaved meals explained the boast, accompanied by three large glasses of unspeakable wine. But the atmosphere around the battered wooden table seemed snug, homely and reassuring.
Actually it wasn’t, quite. Lord Briskett had not asked about Ned Parminter yet. But he would surely do so soon. Jen felt that she had some explaining to do.
Eyeing her mother with a new respect, she decided that she and her boyfriend could cope with the truth.
‘You must be wondering what’s happened to Ned,’ she began uncertainly, dipping a finger in her wine and drawing spirals on the tabletop. ‘Well, he was hot for me, you see. I was rather keen on him too. But I panicked, I’m afraid. I don’t know him very well really, and with everything feeling so weird, and me not knowing who was on who’s side, it seemed best just to give him a bit of a bop on the head. I left him at the side of the road about forty miles back, in a bit of woodland. I think he’ll be all right, though he’ll be having a headache today.’
Briskett did not take the news well. This girl was clearly more her mother’s daughter than either of them realised. Ned Parminter, for all his eccentricities, was a kindly and unworldly man, as well as a fine scholar. Apart from anything else, he had many of the notes Briskett would need when he came to write the full story of the referendum. Briskett’s worry and irritation were shown by his determination to go straight off in search of his assistant. But Myfanwy strongly approved of the bopping of Ned, and suggested that he must surely have hitchhiked to Danskin House, or more probably back to London, long ago.
‘I’m fagged out for the day,’ she added. ‘No wild geese for me.’
At the same time, in a bedroom on the third floor of the tower at the centre of Danskin House, with the shutters open and rich scents from the garden blowing in through the window, Olivia Kite and Alois Haydn were talking.
Alois had assumed that since they both wanted the referendum to go the same way their interests were in harmony. But Olivia was a keen student of all the media, from Witter to the Pirate website and the reviving Independent. She knew that the revelation of widespread betting against the pound by members of her inner circle would be something she could never shake off – like Gordon Brown selling the country’s gold reserves, or Tony Blair and Bernie Ecclestone. She had been educating Alois in all the ways his gamble would be exaggerated, excoriated and pinned on her.
‘You can’t campaign to make things better and then put money on the assumption that you’re going to make them a lot worse, you half-Welsh ninny. You can’t promise to save the people and steal their future at the same time. It’s an absolute political disaster. I should beat you into the dust.’
But the passion had gone out of her voice. Both of them realised it was too late. If the British people voted to leave Europe, Alois would become exceedingly rich – and exceedingly useful. And it was now too late for anyone to stop that happening. Clever Alois, she thought. No foreigner after all, but his mother’s son.
Before their conversation, which took place in Olivia’s bed, Alois Haydn had experienced a certain amount of mental anguish. All his life his sense of himself had been based on his solitary, free, independent state. He’d known from childhood that he wasn’t a blood Haydn, that the exotic and talented family had taken him in under mysterious circumstances that his adoptive father Ludwig Mises-Berlin Haydn never discussed. As a boy he’d fantasised about his true origins. Camille and Liddell had slyly called him ‘brother’, but he’d come to think of himself as an orphan, the self-directed author of his own fate. To discover at his time of life that he was not only not an orphan, but that he was closely related to that ridiculous woman and that dreary girl, was not something he relished.
No family instinct surged through him. After Myfanwy, Jen and Briskett had taken their leave he had retreated for almost an hour to Olivia’s bathroom, where he lathered himself with expensive unguents, lolling in warm water and scented oil. To massage his own body, to press his fingers into his own face and through his own hair – which was, yes, reddish, if not as red as Jennifer’s, or as spun-gold-auburn as Myfanwy’s – slowly helped him to calm down.
Eventually he began to think tactically again. Where was Aleksander, and could he rely on him to keep quiet? Would Jen press charges against her own brother, as he now was? Surely not – not now that she knew he had a witness to her mad moment with the wrench by the side of the road. That led back to Aleksander and his roll of tape. But nothing was irredeemable. By the time Alois had towelled himself dry, changed into clean clothes and was preparing to leave the bathroom, he was feeling almost optimistic.
His mood changed, however, the moment he opened the door and found Olivia standing before him dressed in nothing but a short black silk gown. ‘I am going to grind you into the dust. I’m going to have you weeping. And after that I’m going to fuck you,’ announced the next first minister of the United and Independent Kingdom of Great Britain. ‘So follow me,’ she added, turning on her heel and leading him up a spiral staircase to the rooftop.
Alois knew the story of Sir Rufus Panzer’s walk, and was therefore half prepared for what was coming. And indeed, with her gown blowing open and her feet entirely bare, Olivia Kite walked the length of the wall. At the end, without a wobble, she turned and beckoned to him. He took a deep breath, locked his eyes on hers and, attended by the spirits of Danskin past, did not fall.
The nature of the deal that the two of them struck, first on the wall and then in the satin luxury of Olivia’s bed, would be speculated upon by journalists, politicians and historians for many years to come. A dynasty was being born which would one day be spoken of, without irony, in the same breath as the Marlborough-Churchills or the Pitts. In its way it would change the course of British history just as much as any Westminster pact. The marriage of nationalist politics and City wealth began that day at Danskin House.
Marshmalice
Ajit Gupta had always disliked blood sports. So he was unfriendly when, as he was packing up his things at Rocks Point, two local wildfowlers hammered at the door. Both were dressed in a cheap mimicry of military fatigues and were carrying weapons under their arms. Bundles of bloody feathers protruded from bags strapped across their chests.
But the elder of the two, Bill Whiteford, who had taken the day off from his desk job in Chelmsford, wore a haunted expression as he grabbed Ajit by the hand.
‘You have to help us,’ he said urgently. ‘There’s something terrible out in the marshes, and it’s coming this way.’
Sure enough, through the miasma a bulky and shambling silhouette could be seen tramping towards the house. It was smeared from head to toe in mud and blood. Its face was a mask. The thing slowly raised one hand, and pointed. The hunters shrank against the house’s wall.
‘Gupta,’ said Aleksander. ‘We have to talk.’
It Isn’t Over
In the offices of the National Courier Ken Cooper ground his fingertips into his skull in an attempt to push the Lucien McBryde story from the front of his mind. It was distracting him too much. He was becoming too emotionally involved.
And things were changing terribly fast, by the minute. The cover-up of the prime minister’s death was the biggest British political story of modern times – bigger than the fall of Thatcher, bigger than Blair and Iraq. The twenty-four-hour news media were running Olivia Kite almost on a loop – she appeared on-screen every few minutes. Meanwhile, with their customary plonking sense of theatre, the police had arrived at Number 10 just in time to catch the early editions of tomorrow’s papers. According to the BBC’s political editor, who was standing outside the famous front door, for the first time in history the police were treating Number 10, ‘astonishingly, as a conventional crime scene’.
Indeed, there were far more police in Downing Street than usual, and they seemed less deferential too. The late PM’s communications secretary Nelson Fraser, his face pale but his back upright, was ushered out through the front door. He had one protective hand around Amanda Andrews, who was nonetheless perky enough to blow a kiss at the watching huddle of cameras. A police van was waiting for them. Then Ken leaned forward in his chair and uttered an expletive so dark, so long-forgotten, that it shocked even him. For after Amanda and Fraser the police led out the chief whip, Ronnie Ashe, and the foreign secretary, Jason Latimer. Both were wearing handcuffs.
Only after the police vans had driven away with their eminent detainees was the Downing Street podium carried out and set up a yard or two in front of the metal barrier behind which the world’s press and broadcasters were penned. After a long pause a new figure emerged from Number 10. The chancellor of the exchequer, Jo Johnson, had not been seen in London for a fortnight: he had been leading the pro-European campaign in Wales and the West Country. Now he stepped up to the microphone and gave the official confirmation of the prime minister’s death, which had taken place, he said, ‘some days ago’ but had been ‘illegally and improperly’ covered up, including from himself.
Even his own office in Downing Street, said Johnson, had been appropriated by persons unknown, some of whom apparently had detailed inside knowledge of the workings of Whitehall. The police were investigating, but, mysteriously, these people seemed to have left little evidence behind them. The late prime minister would, as Olivia Kite had generously suggested, be given a state funeral; and there would be a full independent inquiry into the recent deplorable events, with all its sessions held in public. Lord Aaronovitch had agreed to chair it, and it would report within seven years.
Johnson added that on the advice of the justice secretary, Mr Alois Haydn, who had been involved in the cover-up from its very earliest stages, would not be prosecuted, as he had provided invaluable information to Mrs Kite which had brought about the exposure of the plot before even more damage could be done.
Ken Cooper’s picture editor, who had also been watching events unfolding in Downing Street, banged on his boss’s office door and entered. After so many years working together the two men thought more or less exactly alike.
‘Ditch the front, boss?’
‘Yep. I want four sharp fucking grabs, one of each of the bastards.’
The pictures would run across the front page, the subjects’ expressions ranging from Jason Latimer’s calm dignity to Amanda Andrews’s flirtatious smirk, over the single-word headline, which Cooper sketched out himself – he still liked to work on paper with his first ideas: ‘TRAITORS’.
As any newspaper editor knows, when the story is really big, front pages are easy to do; the agonising problem is the rejection of the alternative fronts which would have conveyed a radically different message. Cooper was gutted about his own decision to reject his original plan. He was also surprised and upset by the suggestion that Alois Haydn was going to get away with it. Still, the story of the ‘nest of traitors’ took things forward. And Cooper knew that if you have to choose between sorrow and anger, go for anger every time.
He compromised with a picture of the late prime minister on the bottom half of the front, and a full pullout about him, written at breakneck speed by Lucy Scadding and the comment team. It dwelt on the PM’s long struggle to hammer out a workable deal for a leaner and more democratic Europe with the Germans, the Dutch and the other northern countries, his deeply disappointing summit in Paris, his passionate speeches. A separate article posed the question whether or not his apparently devastating final political broadcast had been no more than an elaborate fake. There were photos going back to his early years in the navy, his by-election success and his service as a junior minister in successive governments. The paper’s untrustworthy diarist was allowed to write a spiky little article about his failed marriage, but the overall tone was of admiration, sorrow and reverence.
When, later that night, Ken scanned the early editions of the Courier’s rivals, he was relieved to see that none of them was entirely clear about which story to run with. Both the Sun and the Mirror refused to be deflected from the vote that still lay just ahead – ‘Vote “No” for Britain’ and ‘Vote “Yes” for Britain’, they chirruped. The Times had a picture of Olivia Kite, whom it portrayed as a latterday Gloriana, in full spate, and a wry column by Matthew Parris. The Guardian had a complex story which appeared to suggest that the Downing Street plot had been run by the CIA, and that the prime minister might have been killed because of his opposition to Guantánamo Bay. The Daily Telegraph had found a picture of a beautiful young woman who was unsure which way to vote – or, apparently, how to fasten her bra. The Independent ran with a story about a refugee camp in Thailand.
