‘And you? What do you think?’
‘I think we should be careful.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…’ Ellis frowned, gazing out at the traffic, inching down Piccadilly ‘… there’s a hole in his past. What we know, genuinely know about him, goes back to the sixties. Before that, if we’re honest, it’s a mystery. He says Fukien province but he could have come from anywhere.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘It might. Depending where you’re sat at the time.’
Louise looked amused. ‘I don’t want to risk a compliment,’ she said lightly, ‘but you’re talking like one of us.’
‘I know. And you can imagine how popular that makes me at Victoria Street. My guys are in it for the money. Find them a customer and they’ll sell him anything. Zhu could be Saddam Hussein’s brother for all they care.’
Louise’s eyes shone behind the enormous glasses. ‘You realize Six should be doing the legwork?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ve decided to talk to me? Is that it?’
‘Obviously.’
Louise signalled the waiter. When he’d written out the bill, she produced a twenty-pound note from her purse, telling him to keep the change and complimenting him on the gateau. Only when they were outside, flagging down an approaching taxi, did she take the conversation further.
‘Do you know it at all?’ she said. ‘Singapore?’
Labour Party headquarters for the constituency of Portsmouth West comprised four ground-floor rooms in a property that had once served as a fruit and veg shop. Kate Frankham found a parking spot half a block away from the premises. A small typed notice on the door directed the membership to the nearby Baptist church hall. Meetings to select the constituency candidate traditionally attracted a biggish turnout, far too many for the converted corner shop, and Kate could hear the clatter of chairs through the open door across the road. She pulled her coat around her and checked her watch. The meeting was due to begin at eight. Ideally, she wanted a full house before she made her entrance.
She returned to her car and got in. She’d spent most of the afternoon rehearsing her speech, pacing up and down her living room, trying to shut out every other distraction. In the first place, she’d handwritten it, drawing on a checklist of what the ex-poly lecturer on the executive committee liked to call ‘bullet points’. This list included items from the Walworth Road menu that she knew she couldn’t afford to ignore, but as the speech began to take shape on paper, she’d done her best to fashion it into a personal statement of beliefs. Why it was right to acknowledge the free market. Why the old abuses of union power could never return. Why the party had to shed its reputation for high spending and high taxation. Why the Tory quango state was an insult to democracy. Why education and jobs should be the priorities for anyone interested in creating a half-decent society. Why the Social Chapter belonged at the very heart of Labour’s first Queen’s Speech.
The list went on and on, a sensible, moderate, voter-friendly mix of traditional Labour Party values and real-politik. When it came to labels, as it always did, Kate had settled on ‘ethical socialism’ as the closest she could get to describing her own political credo. She’d picked up the term at conference, in conversation with a young researcher, and she was pleased with the way she’d managed to build it into her peroration. Candidates for selection had just ten minutes to make their case, and her eighteen months as a councillor had already taught her the importance of seeming to speak from the heart. People, in the end, weren’t interested in the small print. What mattered – what made the real difference – was passion.
She glanced in the mirror, folded her speech and returned it to her bag. The stream of figures hurrying into the hall had slowed to a dribble and she knew she ought to join them. She got out of the car and locked it, glad she’d worn the jersey trouser suit against the bitter wind. She crossed the road, quickening her step, suddenly alarmed that she might be late, but when she got inside the hall she found the usual buzz of conversation as people stood in groups, gossiping.
Seats on the platform at the front were reserved for party officers. Kate spotted the secretary, a formidable ex-teacher whom she still found slightly intimidating, and offered her a sheepish wave, making her way through the mill of people. The secretary kissed her cheek briskly and wished her luck. Straws had already been drawn for the order of speeches and Kate was to go second after Frank Perry. The secretary squeezed her arm and turned away to join the rest of the executive committee up on the stage. Seconds later, she was calling the meeting to order.
Kate found her name on a seat at the front. Billy Goodman was already sitting beside her. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt beneath his leather jacket. On his lap lay a folded copy of Militant. Kate sat down. She’d known this moment would arrive and she’d been dreading it. Billy Goodman was her conscience, the watching face in the front row that she knew she couldn’t avoid. He’d declared his own candidacy, she was convinced, to make things difficult for her, to remind her of all the times they’d tried to pull the issues apart, all the times they’d tried to disentangle the bullshit from the people’s real interest. In most of these discussions she’d agreed with him, she knew she had, though more recently she’d come to accept that gaining power wasn’t simply a matter of proclaiming one’s beliefs. You had to gauge the public mood. You had to sniff the electoral wind and trim your sails accordingly. Otherwise, you’d be in opposition for ever.
Billy was watching Frank Perry climbing the steps to the stage. The chairman’s brief opening remarks were over and for the next ten minutes the meeting would be his. There was a microphone on a stand in front of the long committee table and Perry stood behind it, looking uncomfortable. He was a tall, thin, stooped man with a smoker’s cough and a wardrobe of nylon shirts. He’d spent his entire working life in the dockyard and his devotion to the party was unconditional. As a councillor, he’d laboured tirelessly for his constituents and he’d won a substantial following but he had neither the talent nor the appetite for public speaking and Kate knew he’d be a disaster on the hustings. Frank Perry was what happened when you refused to turn your back on the past. Only a party with a death wish would ever nominate him for a parliamentary seat.
As Frank began to speak, Kate followed Billy out of the hall, remembering to her relief that party rules forbade rival candidates to be present during each other’s addresses. A room behind the stage had been set aside for the candidates’ use and Billy made sure he left the door an inch or two open. Kate could hear Frank Perry’s thin voice fighting a heavy cold.
‘He’s got it all sewn up.’ Billy had found himself a chair in the corner. ‘Did you see the fax from Walworth Road?’
Kate shook her head.
‘What fax?’
‘Bloke called Beatty. Blair’s office. Official endorsement.’
‘Kelvin Beatty?’
‘Yeah, that’s him.’
Kate felt the blood pulsing into her face. Kelvin Beatty was the staffer she’d been supposed to meet at the restaurant in Belgravia, the young turk she’d run into at conference. He’d spent the best part of an hour telling her why people like Frank Perry were a luxury the party could no longer afford. They had to be marginalized. They had to be pensioned off.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. I saw it just now.’
‘Who showed you?’
‘Frank.’
Kate looked away. Outside, on the stage, Frank Perry was lost already, bogged down in the small print of some ward dispute. The noise regulations simply weren’t being enforced. The police should be under firmer democratic control. Quangos had turned them into an arm of the Tory Party. The line drew a ripple of applause. Billy Goodman was smiling.
‘I thought you knew this bloke Beatty?’
‘I do.’
‘Friend of yours?’
Kate didn’t answer. She opened her bag, fingering the speech inside it. Beatty, she thought, co
uld have written every line. Indeed, the prospect of his approval, his blessing, was partly what had shaped it in the first place. She closed the bag again, her confusion giving way to something far closer to anger. She’d seen it his way. She’d listened to his elegant little lectures. She’d pored through his carefully highlighted photocopies from The Economist and the Guardian. She was word-perfect on why the party machine needed overhauling, on why effective power had to be pooled in London. Politics, she’d believed, was about winning. And now this.
Frank Perry was coming to the end of his speech, a traffic jam of promises that tailed into silence. There was a brief round of applause, shyly acknowledged, and Kate heard him blowing his nose before calling for questions from the audience. The questions lasted less than ten minutes, then the secretary appeared at the door, beckoning to Kate. Meeting Frank outside in the narrow corridor, she felt the touch of his hand on her arm, and she dimly heard his whispered good luck before she was up on the stage herself, her speech forgotten, her careful précis of the Walworth Road masterplan utterly discarded.
She gazed out at the blur of faces in the hall. Politics, she began, is about people. People you know. People you care about. People whose lives you shape, and improve, and help dignify. Being an MP should be part of that process, but being an MP had – instead – become part of the problem. Why? Because the party had become too restrictive. Because discipline had become too tight. Because the struggle for power had become all-consuming. Power mattered, of course it did, but power should never become an end in itself. But that’s what was happening. Up in London. Away from the grass-roots. Away from the people.
Kate bent to the microphone, her anger and her contempt driving her on. Parliament had become a charade, she said. MPs with any courage, MPs with any voice of their own were ignored, or sidelined, or quietly threatened with de-selection. The only line that mattered was the party line and if you refused to toe it, you were out. She paused, only too conscious that she was arguing herself out of a job she hadn’t even got, but she didn’t care. She was speaking from the heart. She was telling it the way she saw it. What might happen to her candidacy was irrelevant.
A voice behind her asked if she’d finished. She nodded and left the stage without a backward glance, not bothering to stay for questions. Billy Goodman was waiting for her in the corridor. There was a smile on his face. Plainly, he’d heard every word. The secretary appeared again, calling for Billy to take the stage. He shook his head, still gazing at Kate.
‘No need,’ he murmured. ‘My colleague said it all.’
The closest Barnaby could park the Mercedes was nearly a hundred metres down the road. He had the Dom Perignon and the glasses in his sports bag on the back seat. In his heart, he knew that Kate would win.
Ten minutes later, much earlier than he’d anticipated, figures began to emerge from the hall. Kate, another surprise, was amongst them. She was standing under the porch beside the open door, deep in conversation with a man in a leather jacket. Barnaby was too far away to see the man’s face but he could sense that the two were friends. Kate was doing most of the talking, using her hands a lot the way she did when she was excited. At one point, the man put a restraining hand on her arm and when they parted shortly afterwards she kissed him on the lips before he turned on his heel and disappeared back inside the hall.
Barnaby flashed the Mercedes’ headlights, attracting Kate’s attention. He’d told her he’d be outside. He’d said he’d be waiting. He watched her hurrying towards him, aware of the knot the last couple of minutes had tied in his stomach. This morning he’d been angry with her, shocked at her breach of the agreed rules. Phoning him at home was something she’d promised she’d never do. His life with Liz was his own affair, nothing to do with her. That was the pact they’d made. That was why it had worked so well. Yet here he was, half a day later, insanely jealous, wanting her back in the car, wanting every last particle of her.
Barnaby leaned across, unlocking the door. He’d never been so pleased to see her. He kissed her, smelling the cigarette smoke on her coat, and he felt her responding, burying her face in his sheepskin jacket. At length, they disengaged and Barnaby looked at her, the obvious question unvoiced. She offered him a small, tired smile and he saw how close she was to tears.
‘Frank,’ she said. ‘By a mile.’
‘Frank? Frank Perry?’
‘Yes. I blew it, my love. The most important ten minutes of my life and I blew it.’
They drove to the top of Portsdown Hill. The car park overlooking the city was deserted. He pulled the Mercedes to a halt and switched off the lights. The island lay below them, mapped by street lights.
Kate’s hand found his. She’d told him about the meeting, about the speech she’d made, about her refusal even to call for questions. The audience had been bemused.
‘I expect they thought I was being hysterical, just another bloody woman. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re better off with Frank.’ She sniffed, staring woodenly into the darkness.
There was a long silence. Barnaby squeezed her hand. A car sped past on the hilltop road behind them.
‘What happened this morning?’ he asked. ‘Why the phone call?’
‘I missed you,’ she said simply.
‘You were at the pool?’
‘Yes.’ She glanced across at him. ‘I’ve just got used to it, I suppose. It’s become a routine. I’m not supposed to like routines, am I?’
‘No.’
‘Well, there’s another surprise. I’m human, after all.’ She was silent briefly. ‘There was something else, too.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ll think this is crazy. Maybe it is crazy.’ She withdrew her hand. ‘There were a couple of women in the changing room. I think they must know your wife.’
‘And?’
‘I was in the shower. They were talking about her.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They said … that things were pretty good, you know, for her …’ She tailed off. ‘… It’s not the kind of thing women say, not without good reason.’ She twisted a lock of hair. ‘That’s all really. But it upset me.’
‘So you decided to phone?’
‘Yes. I don’t really know why. I just did. I felt… helpless, especially after, you know, everything in London. How good it was.’
Barnaby sensed relief flood through him. This woman loved him, she really did, and here was the proof. He kissed her softly on the lips. Then he reached into the sports bag for the champagne. The bottle was still cold to the touch and he began to untwist the wire around the cork.
Kate was looking at him, uncomprehending.
‘There’s a couple of glasses in the bag,’ he said lightly. ‘I thought we’d celebrate.’
‘But I lost.’
Barnaby smiled at her in the darkness. ‘You think so?’ he said, the cork beginning to ease as he levered it upwards.
Louise Carlton was on her way to bed when the call came through from Shepperton. The intruder team had been lucky. The property had been empty all evening and they’d had the place to themselves. Entry to the barn had been a doddle. Louise smiled, still half-way up the stairs with the cordless phone, listening to the account of exactly what they’d found. The thing had looked amazing, a real work of art, must have cost a fortune, and there’d been a note attached with a location and a time. Someone was calling tomorrow at dawn. They’d need a truck to ship it south.
The conversation came to an end shortly afterwards and Louise returned to the lounge, searching for a notebook in a drawer before picking up the phone again, and dialling the Thames House switchboard. The duty officer put her through to Registry and the woman in charge of the night shift apologized for the delay in checking her PIN number.
Finally, Louise’s clearance confirmed, the woman asked how she could help. Louise had found a biro now, and a clean page in the notebook. ‘I’m interested in the Anti-Racist Alliance,’ she said. ‘Check if there’s a
Portsmouth branch.’
Billy Goodman heard the phone from the kitchen. Picking up the takeaway vindaloo, he went through to the tiny hall. The phone was on the floor beside his bicycle. Kate had mentioned she might ring. ‘Yeah?’
The voice at the other end belonged to a woman, someone a good deal older than Kate. She spoke slowly, the way you might pass an important message to a child, or a foreigner, and then she put down the phone. Billy sank to the floor, his back against the wall, balancing the takeaway on his knees. He picked at the chicken, deep in thought. Then he got to his feet again and returned to the kitchen, storing the takeaway in the oven. His address book was in his bedroom. He fetched it down, trying to remember who had access to transport. His first call went to a fellow ex-Trot, now living in Petersfield. He described what had happened. The woman had given him a time and a place and one or two other details. She sounded kosher. They should get bodies organized. They should be ready.
‘Wheels?’ he enquired. ‘Can you help out at all?’
The contact in Petersfield obliged at once. He did a morning run for disabled kids, hauling them round to a day centre. The Sherpa minibus was standing in the road outside his flat. It was brand new. He was looking at it now.
‘A van for the disabled?’ Billy grinned. ‘Perfect.’
Next morning, as promised, Barnaby was at the Imperial Hotel by nine o’clock. Bairstow, the police superintendent, was waiting for him inside the foyer.
‘No promises,’ he muttered, ‘but I think we’ve cracked it.’
The two men walked through to the restaurant. All the decorations were in place now and a two-man news unit from the local ITV station was busy getting pictures of the extravagant display of paper lanterns, silk hangings and elaborate lacquerwork. Barnaby watched them as they wandered around with the big video camera, glad he’d managed to limit the fall-out from the banner incident the previous afternoon. Not even the Sentinel had picked it up.
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