by Jack Gatland
‘William Fitzwarren, sir,’ Billy replied to Declan. ‘Guv likes to call me Billy, to apparently mock my heritage.’
Declan thought for a moment. ‘Fitzwarren… Are you one of the—’
‘Yes, he’s one of those Fitzwarrens,’ Monroe interrupted. Declan understood the tailored suit now. Billy was probably a Viscount or something.
‘And no, he’s not here as a favour to someone high up,’ Monroe continued as if reading Declan’s mind, ‘he’s a good copper. They both are. Billy’s our resident cybercrime whizz. Sits at a computer all day, scared of doing the real work.’
‘Cybercrime is the real work,’ Billy grinned.
‘I have issues with cyber experts,’ Declan said, remembering Mile End again. Billy’s smile simply widened.
‘Everyone does,’ he said.
‘But we don’t talk about our pasts here. We start here with a fresh slate,’ Monroe finished.
‘Who’s she?’ Declan pointed at the third member of the team; a girl no older than nineteen, in jeans and a hoodie, currently flicking through Instagram on her phone.
‘That’s Trixibelle,’ Monroe started.
‘Trix.’ the young girl corrected, her eyes glued to the screen.
‘That’s Trix,’ Monroe continued. ‘She’s here on work placement. Don’t expect much from her.’
He clapped his hands.
‘Right then,’ he started. ‘Now we’re mostly here, shall we get on with it? Dump your stuff on that desk, Declan. Good lad. Now! With me!’
And with that he walked into one of the rooms at the back of the open plan. Following him, Declan saw that most of the plasterboard wall was a plasma screen rather than a whiteboard. Monroe followed his gaze, smiling.
‘You see, laddie; we do get some toys here,’ he said as he moved to the front of the room, standing beside the whiteboard as Billy, Anjli and Declan sat in chairs facing him.
‘So,’ Monroe said, tapping the screen. A photo of Victoria Davies appeared. ‘I’m guessing you read the note, DI Walsh?’
Declan nodded, noting the formality of the name. Monroe was all business in this room.
‘I did, sir.’
‘Good. Then you’re as up to speed as the rest of us,’ Monroe replied, tapping the image on the screen. ‘Victoria Davies. Maiden name Victoria Devington, and heir to the Devington Industries trading fortune.’
Tap. The image changed to a tabloid photo of a young Victoria and Michael, out on the town.
‘Met Michael Davies while at Cambridge; they were both studying Sociology. Both joined the local Socialist movement in 1990, becoming more active in the Labour Party during the Kinnock years, culminating in the Labour defeat of 1992.’
‘So Victoria was a Left Winger? I bet that didn’t sit well with daddy,’ Anjli muttered. Monroe nodded.
‘Devington Senior wasn’t a fan of this, but at the same time she was his eldest daughter. And first born daughters always get a little more leeway in things.’
‘I’ve always found that,’ Billy replied. Monroe paused.
‘You’ll always be my prettiest princess, DC Fitzwarren,’ he said in a mock serious manner. ‘Can I continue now?’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry sir.’
Monroe looked to the digital board. Now Declan could see a paparazzi wedding photo.
‘They married in 1995,’ he continued. ‘Shortly before that, Michael was working in the Devington Industries sales office. He was promoted to CEO that year, right after Devington senior passes away.’
‘Pays to marry high,’ Declan said as he looked out of the door into the office. Trix was still on her phone, her finger swiping upwards with incredible speed.
‘Now, things start to fall around about now,’ Monroe tapped the screen as a series of images popped up on it. Photos of Michael and Victoria arguing, attending galas with stone faces or even attending alone. ‘We don’t know what it was, but around 1998, their relationship started to fracture. Perhaps it was because Michael was a major donor to Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’, while Victoria still kept to her Socialist beliefs. Maybe it was because he snored. All we know is that by 2000 he was sleeping with his PA, Francine Pearce, while Victoria was…’
He sighed.
‘Actually, that’s the problem we have here. We don’t know what she was doing. When questioned, Michael Davies claimed that Victoria was pregnant with someone else’s baby, and that his vasectomy from a few months earlier invalidated her claim that it was his.’
‘Vasectomies have been known to fail, sir,’ Anjli replied. Monroe nodded.
‘Aye, but we’ll never know,’ he said. ‘The night she told Michael about it, she fell from the roof of Devington House.’
‘And Michael was charged with her murder,’ Declan finished.
‘It was pretty much an open and shut case at the time, we felt,’ Monroe stared at the photo of Victoria, now on the screen. ‘They’re seen fighting, husband goes onto the roof, nobody else is allowed to follow, she falls… But now it seems more like one of those bloody ‘closed room’ mysteries, because of this.’
The screen now showed a scan of the letter and the envelope.
‘Okay then chaps, we’ve all seen the evidence now, some more recently than others. What do we know?’ Monroe asked, leaning against a table.
‘Letter was sent to Susan, her younger sister, but under a fake surname,’ Anjli read from her notes. ‘In late 2000, Susan Devington was more of an activist than Victoria ever was.’
‘Little sisters always like to outdo their elders,’ Declan mused. ‘So what, she used a fake name so they didn’t know she was a rich girl slumming with the proles?’
‘Most likely,’ Billy continued. ‘The address the letter was sent to was on a watch list for road protestors back then. Bit of an ‘anyone can stay’ squat locale.’
‘So Susan was a road protestor?’ Declan wrote this in his notepad.
‘Oh yes. She was arrested at the Newbury Bypass protest in ’96, and again in ’97. Carried on until 2001.’
‘What happened then?’ Declan asked.
‘She started using her surname again and took over Devington Industries when Michael was convicted.’
‘Poacher turned Gatekeeper,’ Monroe mused. ‘What about the letter itself?’
‘House of Commons stationery,’ Billy started.
‘Which proves that Victoria was either in Parliament, or was able to gain access to the paper,’ Anjli continued.
‘Could have been Portcullis House,’ Declan suggested. ‘Many of the MPs have offices there.’
Monroe shook his head. ‘Portcullis House wasn’t opened until early 2001, a few months later,’ he replied. ‘This has to be elsewhere. But where…?’
Declan leaned closer to the screen, looking at the scanned image.
Something was missing.
‘It’s not there,’ he said suddenly, getting up and walking out of the office.
‘What’s not there?’ Monroe shouted as outside the office Declan went to his jacket, pulling out the envelope and pulling the letter out of it as he returned.
‘This,’ Declan said as he held the letter to the light. ‘The scan doesn’t show it, but there’s a watermark. It’s very small.’
He was right. In the bottom right hand corner and easy to miss were a small series of incredibly small watermarked numbers.
9845.76
‘What is it?’ Anjli asked. Monroe started to pace as he thought.
‘It couldn’t be that simple,’ he whispered to himself.
‘What couldn’t be that simple?’ Declan said as he put away the letter. Monroe looked back, his eyes bright.
‘Back in 1994, John Major’s Conservative Government were getting hammered from all angles,’ he explained. ‘Cash for questions, about half a dozen affairs in his Cabinet all coming out… All from leaks that were emanating from Parliament.’
‘MPs getting some pretty public kicks in to their rivals?’ asked Billy. Monroe nodded as he look
ed back at the scan of the letter on the screen.
‘This was before emails, remember. When these things were sent to journalists, it was often through leaked memos. Headed paper.’
‘Paper just like this.’
Monroe nodded.
‘It came out later that Major had managed to stop this by secretly tagging the stationery of each office. If I’m right, then that number there gives the location and the room where the letter came from. So when a leak came out, they could back trace it.’
‘And fire whoever sent it, I assume,’ Billy nodded. ‘Vicious.’
‘When Blair took over, it seemed pointless to change the stationery, so they kept using the watermarked supply,’ Monroe was already walking to a desk phone, picking it up and dialling, ‘and they didn’t change it until, as DI Walsh there correctly surmised, Portcullis House was opened. After that, emails took over.’
‘So the code says whose office Victoria took the paper from?’ Declan asked. ‘It’ll tell us who was in it?’
‘Sort of. Remember that Portcullis House was built because of MP overcrowding,’ Monroe replied. ‘Many MPs shared the same office—yes, hello?’ Now he was talking into the phone. ‘Can you put me through to Anthony Farringdon? Tell him it’s Detective Chief Inspector Monroe. He knows me.’
Now on hold, he looked back to Declan.
‘Luckily I know someone who can tell us exactly who was in that office when Victoria wrote the letter,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to send you and DS Kapoor to speak with him today.’
He grinned.
‘Welcome to the Last Chance Saloon.’
7
Deals And Consequences
Charles Baker had never been a fan of the Pugin Room.
There were thirty bars in the Palace of Westminster; throwbacks to the days when ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’ were all the rage. These days however the bars were as different from each other as they could be; from the stately rooms of the House of Lords bars all the way down to the Sports and Social Club, in the basement, by the bins.
They played darts there.
Charles Baker had never been a fan of darts, either.
But here he was, smiling at his two dining colleagues as he sipped expensive tea and pretended to give a damn about what they said. The Pugin Room wasn’t busy right now; probably something more exciting happening on the members’ terrace. And there was a distinct lack of journalists in the room right now, probably more by choice and arrangement than accident.
As Walter Symonds, current Chairperson of the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee talked about some West End musical that he’d recently been to see, waffling on about how opera was still a very underrated art form Charles let his attention wander, looking around the room while trying to look invested in the conversation. It was papered with a hideous gothic red/gold wallpaper known as Gothic Tapestry, based on the Italian red velvet tapestries of the Renaissance, leading up to the ornate stencil patterned roses of the ceiling. A giant gilt brass and crystal chandelier hung in the middle. It had once hung in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s house, Alton Towers, but of course these days people knew the place for a far different reason, as Alton Towers was now the UK’s biggest theme park.
Charles noted that Tom Wylde, SNP Member of Parliament for Strathclyde North was currently sitting under it, and a wistful desire to see it fall crossed Charles’ mind.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was one of the builders of the new Palace of Westminster, more known as the Houses of Parliament in the 1840s. He was an accomplished architect and a visionary of his time, but what wasn’t mentioned as much was that Pugin was quite mad. In fact, he was committed to Bedlam Asylum at the age of forty. If you visited the Houses of Parliament, you’d find a lot of Latin carved into the wood; the same saying, time and time again. It was even written around each of the four faces of Big Ben. Domine Salvam Fac Reginam Nostram Victoriam Primam. It meant O Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First; A prayer to his patron Queen Victoria, Pugin apparently believed that by the simple act of seeing these words, of MPs and dignitaries walking under them, through them hundreds of times a day, they would give power to the prayer, effectively Deifying Queen Victoria.
Charles wondered if it actually worked; whether Victoria was watching down on him right now.
But which Victoria.
Pushing back the sudden macabre thought, Charles forced himself to sip at his tea as he looked to Walter, still going on about some Military Tattoo that he’d been to the other day. Overweight and sweating, and as much a dyed in the wool ‘Old guard’ Tory as you’d ever see, Symonds looked like he’d run a marathon rather than walked the few steps from the members’ canteen where he’d had his second lunch of the day. Wiping his hand through his thinning, grey hair, Symonds carried on with whatever new, boring anecdote had crossed his mind.
The second man at the table was Malcolm Gladwell. Known for being the ‘trouble-shooter’ of the Conservative Party, Gladwell was a weasel of a man that you really didn’t want to have appear in your office doorway. Stick thin and with curly ginger hair, Gladwell was in his late forties, but looked a decade younger. Gladwell was a biohacker, and ate more weight in supplements and pills in a day than Charles had in the last year. He was also sickeningly fit, too; often Charles had heard Gladwell talk about his hobby of ultra-running, his holidays spent effectively running alone across deserts.
He must be a joy at parties, Charles thought to himself.
Walter was reaching to a pile of scones in the middle of the table. He used a butter knife to open one, spreading clotted cream on one of the sides before taking a large mouthful.
‘Anyway, I suppose we should get down to business,’ he said, the half-eaten scone in his mouth visible to the world.
Charles straightened in his seat.
‘Yes, please,’ he replied.
Symonds looked to Gladwell.
‘Charlie, you know what they’re going to say,’ Gladwell began. ‘They’re going to point at your past allegiances as to why you shouldn’t be considered.’
‘I left the Labour Party fifteen years ago Malcolm,’ Charles replied. ‘I’ve been here longer than pretty much every other candidate on the list.’
‘But Labour is Labour,’ Symonds added.
‘Blair’s Labour!’ Charles snapped, bringing his voice back down so as not to draw attention to the meeting. ‘Come on, Walter, the man was practically a Tory. His father even tried to run as a Conservative MP in Durham.’
‘The 1922 Committee hasn’t made any choices on this as yet,’ Symonds continued.
‘After all, we still have complete faith in our leader,’ Gladwell added.
‘Of course you do,’ Charles smiled. ‘As do we all.’
Gladwell leaned closer to Charles, looking around to ensure that he couldn’t be heard.
‘Look, Charlie,’ he whispered. ‘Even though you definitely kept that old red flag flying back in the day, you’re a popular choice amongst the backbenchers. We see that. We really do.’
‘But?’
‘But hypothetically, if you did go for the brass ring, we’d need to ensure that you’re squeaky clean.’
‘You know, any issues in the past that could come out and bite us, cause us some problems,’ Symonds said through another half-eaten scone.
‘Such as?’ Charles sat back up now. Gladwell mirrored him.
‘You know the sort of thing we mean,’ he said, ‘affairs, illegitimate children, sticking your todger in a dead pig’s mouth, a certain ‘liking’ for kiddies…’
‘Selling guns to the Ugandans, you know the rules.’ Symonds chimed in.
Charles thought for a moment. It was true that some of their more recent choices for Prime Minister had been less than stellar, only kept in power by the Left’s inordinate ability to place someone as equally dismal in opposition.
‘Then let me say this as straight as I can,’ he started. ‘Since joining the Conservative Party, I’ve been sure to keep my
nose clean. There are no skeletons in my closet.’
‘And when you were one of Blair’s golden boys?’ Gladwell asked.
Charles didn’t say anything. A single moment, a memory hidden for decades flashed up.
Holding a broken necklace, Victoria’s necklace in his hands
‘I said—’ began Gladwell.
‘I heard what you said,’ Charles interrupted angrily. ‘There’s nothing.’
Gladwell nodded, looking back to Symonds who, stuffing the last of his cream scone into his mouth like it was a race nodded and rose from the table, shaking both Charles and Gladwell’s hands in turn.
‘Then we’ll be talking soon, Minister,’ he said. Or at least that’s what Charles thought he said. His mouth was so full, he could have been talking about another of his god awful West End musicals again.
And then Symonds left, leaving Charles and Gladwell alone at the table.
‘You know it’s going to be a no,’ Gladwell said matter-of-factly.
‘You’re kidding me,’ Charles replied. ‘Have you seen who’s on the list? Nigel Dickinson!’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Gladwell picked up his glass of wine, sipping at it as he gathered his next words. ‘They’ll want someone younger to gain the youth market. Maybe the Chancellor after the next budget, if he does a nice one. And let’s be honest, your loyalties are still a concern.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Charles muttered. ‘I’m further to the right than half of them.’
‘I might be able to turn them around,’ Gladwell said. It was such a simple statement that Charles almost didn’t realise what Gladwell was offering.
‘You can?’ he asked. ‘Why?’
‘Honestly? Because I think you could be the man to get us back to where we need to be,’ Gladwell replied. ‘And, because I think you understand how things truly work around here.’
‘What, you scratch my back and I scratch yours?’
Gladwell laughed. ‘Oh Charlie,’ he said, ‘if I scratched your back on this, I’d expect you to get down on your knees and take my entire bloody load.’
