You Think You Know Someone

by J B Holman

  ‘So? Everyone knows that.’

  ‘So . . . we form a new party.’

  ‘What?’ he said in an Are you mad? tone of voice.

  ‘A new centralist party.’

  ‘What are you going to call it? The Bland Party?’ he said with scathing sarcasm. ‘You know that centralist parties are just parties that are neither one thing nor another. Flimsy, platitudinous parties with no real policies.’

  ‘You think I would let that happen?’ Her eyes added an unspoken, Of course I wouldn’t. The DPM was momentarily silenced. He hated it when she did that. She paused, just to make a point, then continued.

  ‘I had a team of interns interview 92 per cent of all MPs, asking each of them for their personal top five manifesto items. Then they were presented with the notion of a party that reflected the majority of their manifesto views and a policy of strong social support based on solid economic principles that will make widespread change in key areas that really matter to people. There’s a lot of party disenchantment on both sides of the House. We compiled all of their top five manifesto ideas and they are mostly the same, with very few being mutually exclusive. It’s gold dust. We’ve a written a manifesto that incorporates the must-have top fives of over 83 per cent of all MPs. It’ll make real change and be anything but dilute. It will make radical social change and build a network of prosperity.’ She slapped a thick, typed document onto the table. ‘We have a manifesto, we have over 500 MPs that will sign up to it. All we need is a leader and we have ourselves a party. This is your chance to fly!’

  ‘It’s my party and I can fly if I want to?’

  ‘Exactly. You could shine. This is your time to shine. You would have to resign from the Liberals and start a whole new party. People want change. You would get 500 seats out of 650. Think what you could do in Europe if you had unity behind you in Britain. Think what legislation you could pass. Think about the difference you would be able to make. That has got to be worth fighting for.’

  She had piqued his desire. He drilled her with a barrage of questions testing her theory. She had already started stirring up discontent in the Labour back benches. They strategised on what they would do with all that power. Slowly, step by step, she convinced him of the credibility of the idea.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like it. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Just one thing,’ she added, right at the end. ‘You can’t.’

  This was a typical Bettie power play; give and take away. She continued.

  ‘You can’t do it now. In fact, you can’t do it at all, not unless the Prime Minister resigns. That is key; that’s how you get your followers, by releasing them from their previous loyalties. The PM has to resign.’

  ‘Or get shot,’ said the DPM with dark humour.

  ‘No. Definitely not. His ratings go up if he gets shot at. Though, if he actually did get shot, that could work, but we really need him to resign, we need his support and he can’t give that if he’s dead.’

  ‘Well, that’s the end of that plan, then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll never resign. Especially not now he has been shot at. People will say it is cowardice and he’s not going down in history as the PM that gave way to terrorism. Not to mention Brexit; the French would annihilate us if we showed the weakness of letting our PM resign mid-negotiations. They’re pushing so hard, at this rate they’ll want all the land claimed by William the Conqueror. He’ll never resign, not until Brexit is done and dusted, which means that when I take over, I will inherit a significant majority in a broken and divided country. For this to work it needs to be done before Brexit is signed, but he won’t resign until afterwards. Catch 22.’

  ‘You’re such a wimp! Make it happen. If you can’t do this one simple thing, you can’t be PM. Listen; whatever it takes, get Palmer out.’

  16

  St James Park

  ‘Black or Gold; do they mean anything to you?’ asked Foxx, as they sat together on the wall of the Embankment, overlooking the Thames. She shook her head.

  Foxx was puzzled. Why had Brekkenfield discharged himself from hospital for six hours, just two days before the assassination? Only two words appeared in his diary for that day: Black and Gold.

  Julie was surfing Hoy’s social media. His CV said he’d been missing from action for four months. Where had he been? His profiles gave nothing away. His wife’s social media: nothing. Her friends: nothing; until she floundered, almost by chance, on two pictures on a seemingly random Instagram account. A picture of Hoy in full Arab garb, in the desert - it said Iran - and another of him and his wife making a sign of solidarity as they stood by sand-covered ruins. The timeline fitted. The caption read The Pact. What pact? And what had they been doing there?

  No answers; only more questions.

  Foxx and Connor turned their joint attention into drilling down into Tenby’s finances. It was a confusion of unanswerable conundrums. His money was tied up in a tortuous tangle of trusts and potentially tenuous torts that neither of them understood.

  ‘I need coffee,’ he said and hopped off the wall. ‘D’you want one?’

  ‘Yes. A flat white, please, no sugar. Can I have my phone? I’m going to call my friend in the Cabinet Office.’

  ‘When I get back. Stay here. Don’t move an inch.’ He wanted to trust her. This was a first step.

  ‘OK,’ she said and he headed for the nearest coffee shop. He disappeared from sight and she didn’t move an inch . . . but she did talk to a kindly passer-by.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘may I borrow your phone for a quick call? I’ll give you £20.’ The fourth person she asked said yes. She dialled. After two rings, the switchboard answered.

  ‘Commander Storrington, please, I have some urgent information for him.’

  ‘Hello, is that Commander Storrington’s office? Good, please put me through to the Commander.’

  ‘No, I need to speak to him personally.’

  ‘No, I won’t leave a message. I need to speak to him. Now. Tell him, it’s about Pookey.’

  She waited, the phone was on hold. There was a click then a voice, strong and male.

  ‘Storrington here. Who are you?’

  ‘Eduard Foxx has just broken into your flat. He saw the punch bag with the face on it, your half-written letter to the PM and your album.’ She paused, ‘your Pookey album.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘He will be in St James’ Park at 15.00 this afternoon for five minutes. That’s all.’

  ‘Connor. You’re Julie Connor. I know it’s you. Listen to me carefully. I know what you did. I know about you and Foxx in your flat and I know how you were involved in last Thursday’s assassination attempt. I can get to you and I will definitely . . .’

  A cold sweat consumed her body, like a wave of death. She hung up before finding out what he would do. She feared Storrington, but knew he was on the side of good. This is the right thing to do, she told herself. Years of obeying rules had conditioned her. Her belief in the authorities was bigger than her belief in Foxx.

  How she wanted it to be the other way round.

  She saw Foxx in the distance, approaching slowly, a paper cup in each hand. She was sitting exactly where he’d left her. He gave her the phone. The firewall he’d put around it now had made it untraceable by SSS software. She hit the number of her long-lost friend in the Cabinet Office and within minutes was chatting and giggling as relaxed and animated as a schoolgirl after a first date. She explained that this was an unofficial call, she was working on increased security for the PM and, after the PM had broken protocol at Oxford to shake hands with well-wishers, she wanted to know if that was normal behaviour for him.

  ‘I know people say he’s a buffoon and intransigent,’ said Julie, ‘but what I need to know is, does he go off script or will he stick to a security plan? Can we trust him? I mean, he is pretty dishonest and self-centred by all accounts.’

  ‘Off the record,’ her friend began, ‘politicians are not hone
st at the best of times; negotiators are rarely honest; Brexit is riddled with dishonest misinformation; and foreign policy is the least honest of all politics. So if you’re a politician negotiating Brexit with foreigners, all hope of honesty is gone. Now the trouble with that for any PM, but especially Palmer, is that he has no choice but to pass that deceit on to the UK people, because foreigners read UK newspapers and he can’t give away his negotiating position. So, Palmer comes over like a buffoon - dishonest, disorganised and unable to do a decent deal - but it’s all part of the negotiating approach. He’s doing brilliantly making something out of nothing, but he has so little to work with. He’s doing a good job, but the British public don’t get that.’

  ‘But he’s still an idiot?’

  ‘Far from it. He’s a smart, thoughtful guy. Actually he’s a lovely man, doing a rotten job that no one else wanted to do. He doesn’t even want to be Prime Minister. He was shafted into it. You’re too young to remember, but we call it the Jim Callaghan Syndrome. Callaghan was not a spectacular politician, but he got voted into the leadership just to prevent Dennis Healey from getting it. If Palmer weren’t PM, then Jacobson would be, and the world would be a much darker place.’

  ‘But Palmer is stubborn, right? A bit of a bastard?’

  ‘Heavens, no! Palmer’s a really good guy. He has a great record behind him, but he doesn’t shout about it. I’ll send you some background stuff on him. I gotta go, the boss is calling.’ And she clicked off the line, but Julie kept her phone to her ear and continued the conversation with an empty line.

  ‘So I wanted to talk to you about security, do you know about the GCHQ-2 email protocols? I don’t suppose you know who Dominion1431 is? You do? For definite? Can you tell me? Yes, of course not. Well how about a face-to-face meeting? OK, I’ll see you at three o’clock, St James’ Park, on the bench in the middle of the triangular lawn. Do you know it? OK, see you then. Oh, I might have a friend with me. Secret service, top guy. It’s him you need to tell. Are you OK with that? Yes, I do, absolutely. He’s 100 per cent trustworthy. That’s great. Then I’ll hang back and just let the two of you talk.’ She hung up.

  The trap was set. Serafina Pekkala, espionage agent in the making, set her phone to beep at 2.45. It would be the notification of a fictional conference call to be held at 3.00 with GCHQ-2 chiefs about where they were with the hunt for the assassin.

  ‘I have to be on it,’ she explained to Foxx. ‘I might learn something valuable. I can’t be in two places at once. You can lock me in the car and check my phone afterwards. I’ll record the call if you want. Are you OK meeting my friend on your own?’ Teams are built on trust. And they were a team now, weren’t they? He needed to know. It was time to put it to the test.

  Hoy phoned St Mary’s Hospital. It had been on his list for a few days now and it was not a call he was willing to delegate. It wasn’t part of his investigation, just routine. He just couldn’t help himself.

  ‘You’re the second person to call today and ask exactly the same thing,’ was the reply. ‘I’ll tell you what I told the other fella. He was in for three weeks, didn’t leave his bed.’

  ‘Didn’t leave it at all at any point?’

  ‘That’s exactly what the other fella asked and I told him the same as I am telling you now, he didn’t leave his bed, except for last Tuesday, when he was out for six hours. He said he had something to do, so was temporarily discharged, but was back late Tuesday and then didn’t move from his bed until Friday morning. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what the thing was he had to do.’

  ‘And who was the other person who called?’

  ‘It was his nephew.’

  ‘Did he leave a name?’

  ‘Yes. Edward, Edward Fox.’

  Armed with a picture from LinkedIn, Foxx left Julie to meet her informant.

  ‘Stay in the car and wait. I’m leaving your phone and I’ll check it when I’m back,’ he said. She smiled and nodded. A shot of remorse pricked her heart. She didn’t want him to go, but she said nothing and watched him walk away.

  It was sunny day. The flowers had come out of their buds in their thousands and the people had come out of their offices in their hundreds. The park wasn’t packed, but it was busy. Foxx surveyed it carefully. He circled the perimeter, then circled the triangular lawn, surveyed the whole scene and approached with care.

  ‘Target located,’ whispered a park cleaner into his jacket. The hunt was on.

  Were they a team? Foxx needed to know. His mind flicked back to Julie accidentally lighting up his phone and broadcasting his whereabouts in Cheltenham. He looked around for anomalies. His eyes swept past a park cleaner waving a brush in the region of some leaves. Then he turned 180 degrees, and there was another park cleaner. He headed for the bench in the middle of the grass of the large triangular lawn. It was not a lawn, it was an expanse.

  As he walked, nonchalantly oblivious to the world around him, he identified two business people chatting by a tree, a man dressed in builder’s clothes walking briskly and another park cleaning council operative pushing a refuse trolley . . . and a fourth. This was not right; four park cleaners. And it was a hot day. Their clothes were not loose and baggy, but big enough to conceal a bulletproof vest; the trolleys were council issue but each large enough for an arsenal of trouble.

  He had his answer about Julie Connor. It was time to leave. He turned. Another trolley was heading straight for him.

  Julie watched from the top of the slope on the south side of the park, concealed by the branch of a cypress tree. She watched with more than a little regret. She looked for men in uniform, she looked for people dressed as agents. Then she saw them, the bin men. She looked harder and saw a gardener, a female gardener, with a wire in her ear. She recognised them from Cheltenham.

  She felt a twinge of guilt, but it was the right thing to do. Her phone buzzed with an email: she half-read it and half-watched the slow build-up of the rat-in-the-trap being taken out of circulation. She told herself again: It was the right thing to do.

  Foxx didn’t run. There were people in the park, innocent people, crossfire could cost lives. It was a game in slow motion. No one rushed, no one ran: it was vultures slowly circling their prey, getting ever closer. Foxx edged towards an exit, his route was blocked. He turned, he aimed for another path of escape and his pursuers slowly re-positioned. There was no way out.

  The email was from her friend in the Cabinet Office, the background on the PM, as promised. It didn’t matter for now, but she read with half an eye, as the action on the lawn ahead of her slowly moved the pieces into place. The PM was underrated. He had saved thousands of lives when working in the Health Department; cut costs and raised wages when working for Education - a quietly Christian man, a man of values.

  She looked up. The vultures were in position; slowly, so slowly, closing in, but no one wanted to cause panic. She looked down and flicked through the pictures of Prime Minister Palmer as a younger man. There were newspaper articles showing him on emergency aid trips, where he’d worked alongside aid workers in the dirt and the mud. He had fostered a child, Simon. There was a picture of Simon Palmer in the article. She enlarged it with her fingers and stared.

  Oh my god! She knew that face. It was Foxx. He was younger, but unmistakably handsome. It was him. Foxx was the Prime Minister’s son, his adopted son.

  She read more. Simon had previously been thrown out of sixteen other foster homes, had been a troubled youth, rescued from a certain life of crime by William Palmer MP, as he was then. He had settled down, taken the family name, stayed in school, passed exams and gone to university.

  And now that troublesome teenager with big-hearted foster parents, was going to be taken away and no doubt executed for something he did not do.

  Julie Connor had screwed up massively. He was telling the truth. He had been saving the PM’s life, not plotting to end it. He was not a terrorist; he was a protector. He was an orphan, had suffered, had found new parents and was now
fighting single-handedly to save them from unbelievable horror. And she had just condemned him to death.

  The six refuse men and a female gardener had surrounded maybe a hundred people, and one of them was Foxx. There was no way out. She just watched and waited and withered inside. A policeman came up behind her and spoke. She jumped.

  ‘Move away, madam. The park is closed. Please walk quickly and quietly out of the park and out of the area.’ She had no choice but to obey. There were three people-carriers behind her, each disgorging its load of policemen, all in combat gear and a serious mood. There were fourteen more vehicles surrounding the park and well in excess of a hundred officers moving rapidly and intently to the triangle lawn and their target. Foxx was finished.

  The police cordon prevented her from watching and the wave of people washed her away from the area. She was helpless. There was nothing to do. She sat in the car. She waited for Foxx.

  He didn’t come.

  Sorry Eduard, she said to herself, as she left. I am so sorry.

  17

  On a Knife Edge

  Julie let the door of the hotel room click closed behind her.

  The room felt like her life. Empty.

  She looked at the bed they’d shared last night; the central line between left and right, the line she had told him not to cross. Strict rules. No trespass. But only one of them had wanted him to break those rules, and the other was him. Now she was alone and life was a mess.