It was nearly three before Jephson picked up Louise from her house in Cheam. The director of F branch had phoned before lunch, alarmed by the second call in an hour from Sir Giles Jeffrey. Not only was the Portsmouth situation troublesome but, thanks to an extraordinary breach of commercial confidence, it now had all the makings of a major crisis.
Jephson threaded the BMW through the tangle of slip-roads that led to the M25. Giles Jeffrey lived in some style on a forty-acre estate out near Henley. He’d only been in residence for a couple of months and he’d warned Jephson that things might be a little chaotic. They were expected for afternoon tea.
‘It’s evidently our friend Zhu,’ Jephson was saying. ‘He’s been talking to the local paper. As far as I can make out, they printed pretty well everything. Hardly helpful, under the circumstances.’
Louise was watching the speedometer. To her surprise, 110 m.p.h. felt perfectly safe.
‘Is it true?’ she enquired. ‘About the sale?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And the terms? Zhu’s got it right?’
‘Sadly, yes.’ Jephson flicked his headlights at a dawdling Porsche in the fast lane. ‘Samuels won’t bother to deny it either. Backing down isn’t his style.’
He and Louise exchanged looks.
‘But why us? Why call for Five?’
Jephson laughed. He shared his contempt for politicians with few, but Louise was someone he’d come to trust. ‘The Tories are in big trouble,’ he said, ‘and they know it. Their little boat’s sinking and they haven’t a clue what to do. If you think it’s pathetic, I’m afraid you’d be right.’ He paused. ‘They’ve sent up a distress flare. They’re desperate for help.’
‘But why us?’ Louise asked again. ‘What are we supposed to do?’
‘God knows.’ Jephson glanced sideways at her. ‘That’s why I’ve asked you along. I thought you might have a few ideas.’
When they arrived, Sir Giles Jeffrey was waiting for them in the drawing room. To Louise’s eye, the house was beautiful, a rambling confection of half a dozen period styles, doubtless the work of successive generations. The windows in one wing were still boarded up and there were builder’s skips amongst the new owner’s fleet of family cars on the broad sweep of gravelled drive.
Louise and Jephson settled into comfortable armchairs while Jeffrey’s new wife knelt in front of the fire, toasting crumpets.
‘To be frank, Central Office thought nothing of it,’ Sir Giles was saying.
‘Until when?’
‘Last night. Philip Biscoe had the sense to mark the chairman’s card. He’s sharp, young Biscoe. When chaps like him get rattled, I fancy it’s time to listen.’
‘And the chairman?’
‘Gave me a ring. And again this morning, of course. Once the wretched dockyard thing had broken.’
Louise was watching Sir Giles’s wife buttering the first round of crumpets. The national news organizations had picked up the Samuels exposé from the Sentinel’s morning exclusive, and after Jephson had rung she’d listened to the midday news. Pressed for reaction, Tory Central Office had thrown up the shutters, retreating behind a curt statement that ‘the situation was under urgent review’. In Whitehall parlance, that was as close as politicians ever came to an admission of guilt, and it was a measure of the situation’s gravity that Sir Giles had felt it necessary to surrender an hour or so of his precious Sunday afternoon.
He passed round the crumpets while his wife loaded the toasting fork again. Louise bit deep, savouring her first mouthful. ‘We have assets down there,’ she said absently. ‘We may be able to help.’
‘Assets where?’ Sir Giles was trying to refill the milk jug from a carton beside his chair.
‘Portsmouth.’
‘Oh? Anything helpful?’
Louise glanced at Jephson. In the car, they’d agreed that she should lead. She was running Ellis. She was the one who’d heard from the man Tully. She knew best.
‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘But it rather depends on your timetable. I imagine it’s a bit tight.’
‘Bloody right it’s a bit tight.’ He glared at the puddle of milk that had appeared on the carpet beneath the carton. ‘We have to get something into Number Ten by Tuesday lunchtime. Twelve o’clock absolute latest.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘PM’s Questions,’ he said briefly, looking helplessly at his wife. ‘Tuesdays and Thursdays in the bearpit. Blair’s bound to lead on the dockyard story. National heritage. Jobs. Misleading statements from government ministers. It’s a real dog’s breakfast, whichever way you look at it.’ He watched his wife as she hurried from the room. Seconds later she returned with a cloth, pushing her husband gently aside and mopping up the milk. ‘We’re so bloody disorganized,’ he was saying, ‘that’s the real problem. The fuss about the dockyard’s a killer but at least there’s a clear line of ministerial responsibility. It’s down to Samuels and he’s got to bloody sort it out. But that’s only half the story. It’s the other bit that bothers me.’
‘Other bit?’
‘Pompey First. In my book, Biscoe’s right. Give these chaps a crack at real power, and there won’t be a city in the country safe from something similar. These people mean what they say. They’re fed up with us. I’m not joking. It’s bloody sinister. And bloody worrying, too.’ He went on, ‘Problem is, there’s no one obvious to sort it all out. It’s not a departmental matter. It doesn’t fit anyone’s brief, and to be absolutely honest everyone’s a bit woolly about Portsmouth.’ He looked across at Jephson. ‘So what do you think, David? Can do? By Tuesday? Sparrow fart?’
Jephson was looking engaged. His favourite hobby was moving Five’s tanks onto other people’s lawns and this, quite literally, was an open invitation. The government was facing humiliation at Thursday’s polls. In time those wounds would heal but Sir Giles was right. Pompey First could turn a temporary setback into something far more permanent. The loss of a major city to a party no one had ever heard of was unprecedented.
Sir Giles’s wife was on her feet again. Jephson watched her disappear towards the kitchen.
‘We’re debriefing someone tomorrow morning,’ he said slowly. ‘He’s flying home from Singapore overnight.’
‘Singapore?’ Sir Giles was baffled. ‘Is that relevant?’
‘Yes.’ Jephson looked at Louise. ‘I understand it might be.’
*
Lolly was dragging Oz along the beach when the bull terrier saw the little girl at the water’s edge. She must have been three or four, certainly no more, and she was standing beside an older child, possibly her brother. The older child had thrown an empty can into the water and the pair of them were trying to hit it with handfuls of tiny pebbles.
Attracted by the splash of the pebbles in the water, Oz made for the little girl, tugging Lolly behind him. The child was wearing a pair of yellow wellington boots, and when she turned to face the dog, Lolly saw the red Comic Relief ball on the end of her nose. It dwarfed the rest of her face, and her hand went up to it instinctively, holding it on. She looked, thought Lolly, just like her own Candelle.
The child stared at Oz, stepping back when he tried to sniff her. She reached for him, tentative, uncertain, trying to pat his head, then she bent to the beach picked up another handful of pebbles. As she did so, Oz snapped at the red plastic nose. Lolly heard a gristly noise and then a piercing scream as the little girl’s hand went to her face again.
She fell on her back, inches from the water, looking up at her hand, rigid with shock. Lolly kicked the dog, and tried to haul him off, but Oz was too strong for her. Straddling the child’s body, it lunged again at the torn red plastic, sinking its teeth into the fleshy softness of her cheeks. The child was shaking her head from side to side, trying to get away, trying to stop the pain, but the movement drove the bull terrier to fresh efforts and he snapped again at the scarlet pulp that had once been her nose.
The older child was struggling up the beach, shouting for h
is dad. On the promenade, passers-by had stopped to watch. Then a man in a silver shell suit appeared from nowhere. He had two ice creams, one in either hand, and they left a trail of drips on the pebbles as he ran towards the water’s edge. Beside his daughter, he abandoned the ice creams, falling on the dog, trying to prise open the massive jaws. The little girl had stopped crying now, and she was lying on the wet pebbles, motionless, her face a mask of blood.
It was Harry Wilcox’s phone call that brought Charlie Epple to the Sentinel’s offices. With the dockyard special safely on the streets, the editor was holding an impromptu party, and the dozen or so journalists and production staff who’d worked through the night were now demolishing an assortment of takeaway pizzas delivered from a restaurant round the corner.
Spotting Charlie making his way across the newsroom, Wilcox emerged from his office. His jacket was off and his tie was loosened at the collar. In one hand he had a bottle of pils while the other encircled the girl from the subs desk who’d sorted out most of the interviews that had featured so prominently in the supplement’s back pages.
‘Fucking wonderful,’ Harry was saying. ‘Fucking shafted the bastard.’
‘What bastard?’
‘Samuels.’
Charlie was delighted. The phone call to his mobile had found him on the train down from London. He’d picked up a copy of the Sentinel at the station and read it in the back of the cab. Wilcox was right. The Sentinel had cleared the B-52s for take-off. Pompey First could at last go nuclear.
‘Go what?’ Wilcox was drunk.
‘Nuclear.’ Charlie was grinning at the young sub. ‘Air war’s over. Ground war begins. Dagga-dagga-dagga…’ He drew a bead on a passing journalist. ‘Time for the big push.’
Wilcox wove back towards his office, returning with a bottle of Scotch. The sub was laughing, amused by Charlie’s playful offer to protect her in the event of hostilities. Wilcox uncapped the bottle and passed it to Charlie.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘have one on us.’
Charlie raised the bottle in a toast and enquired about photos. He fancied something in the dockyard, something that included Samuels. Wilcox nodded at once. ‘How about Wednesday? Ministerial visit? Lord High-fucking-Executioner?’
‘Nice line.’ Charlie swallowed a mouthful of whisky, feeling it torch his empty stomach. ‘Might even use it.’
‘For what?’
‘The ground war.’ Charlie winked at the sub. ‘Where do you keep the pictures?’
Wilcox hesitated. As drunk as he was, he still knew the dangers of blurring the line between benign neutrality and open support. Quiet encouragement to the likes of Hayden Barnaby was one thing. Offering help and succour to this lunatic was quite another.
The sub had spotted a winking light on a keyboard on a nearby desk. She bent to answer it, pulling a pad towards her as she did so. Lines of shorthand appeared. Wilcox wanted to know more about the pictures.
‘Just curious to see what you’ve got,’ Charlie said.
‘Then what?’
‘Fuck knows.’
The sub was looking up. She had a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Little girl on the beach,’ she said. ‘Savaged by a dog.’
Hearing the call of the trumpets again, Wilcox seized the phone. The sub felt the gentle tug of Charlie’s hand on her arm.
‘Boss says it’s cool,’ he murmured. ‘Show me where you keep the photos.’
The picture library was housed in a long narrow office at the back of the newsroom. The sub, whose name was Gina, knew exactly where to look for Wednesday’s coverage of the dockyard visit. Charlie pulled up a chair and cleared a space beside the light box. He’d picked up a thick wedge of pizza on his way through the newsroom and he began to eat it, brushing crumbs off a pile of discarded prints.
‘Here.’
Gina was going through a file of contact sheets. She passed one to Charlie. The contacts featured tiny black-and-white prints from strips of negatives. There were twenty-four in all and Charlie worked quickly through them, his finger returning to a shot of Samuels looking more than usually pleased with himself. In the background, a gaggle of workmen were trudging away towards a distant gate, most carrying the heavy canvas bags in which they stored their tools. Like all the best photos, it captured the entire story in a single image.
Charlie looked up. A glass partition separated the picture library from the newsroom and Gina was staring at the circle of journalists around Wilcox. He was off the phone now and Charlie could tell from the expression on his face that the party mood was evaporating fast. Someone appeared from his office with a jacket. Wilcox grabbed it.
Charlie tapped Gina’s arm. Time was running out. He showed her the contact sheet.
‘Number twelve,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a ten by eight?’
Gina returned to the file. Blown up, the picture was even better. Charlie laid it on the desk, beside the remains of his pizza.
‘Brilliant,’ he muttered. ‘One in the bollocks for Mr Smug.’ He had another thought. He’d been talking to Barnaby on the mobile. There’d been some trouble last night – vandalism at a local printer’s, the place they used for the posters – and he was keen to keep the cap on the story. ‘Anything tasty last night?’ he asked idly. ‘Anything for tomorrow’s paper?’
‘Not to my knowledge. I’ve been here all day. I’d have heard if there was.’
At the other end of the office the door opened and Charlie looked up to find Wilcox bearing down on him. He was trying hard to sober up. He’d phoned one of the staff photographers. The guy would meet them at the hospital. He’d asked for a couple of rolls of HP4, in case the colour shots were too horrible.
Wilcox was staring at the photo of Samuels. Charlie remembered the child attacked by the dog. Wilcox’s face was quite blank.
‘The kid’s only three,’ he said to Gina. ‘You’d better come too.’
In Singapore, it was 10.15 p.m. Ellis sat in the lobby of the Furama Hotel, waiting for Lim, the young investigator from the Commercial Affairs Department who’d volunteered to take him to the airport. The last London-bound flight left in two hours. With luck, for once, they might resist talking business.
Lim’s Proton saloon stood outside. A gusty wind off the sea stirred the single palm tree in the tiny crescent of garden. Outside the hotel, the bustle and swirl of Chinatown crowded the narrow pavements, and gazing out, Ellis regretted that he hadn’t been more adventurous. Maybe, after all, he should have risked a night on the town. Maybe, for just an hour or two, he should have forgotten about Louise Carlton and his ever-fattening file on Raymond Zhu. The receptionist at the hotel had given him her latest telex only minutes ago. Something had blown up in the UK, something pretty major, and his return was now urgent. On no account was he to miss the midnight flight. A Thames House driver would be meeting him at Terminal Three. He was to look for a placard bearing his name.
Ellis spotted the first of the overhead signs for the East Coast Parkway, a splash of green against the night sky. He wound down the window and closed his eyes, hoping Lim wouldn’t mind half an hour without air-conditioning. He loved the feel of the sweaty heat on his face. Even now, a week after he’d arrived, it still felt immensely exotic.
Lim was asking about Zhu. He was a relative junior in the CAD team and he’d always been puzzled by the sheer depth of Ellis’s interest in the man. The trading regulations in Singapore were as stringent as anywhere in the world, and if Zhu had been anything but 100 per cent clean, the zealots at the CAD would have been the first to know. In the financial columns of the Straits Times, quite properly, Raymond Zhu was a hero, a giant. So how come the British were so keen to nail down every last biographical fact? Why the interest? Why the suspicion?
Ellis wearily described Zhu’s designs on Portsmouth’s naval dockyard. The dockyard was still important, if not strategically then certainly in terms of sentiment. Given the likelihood of new ownership, it might pay to make a few checks.
‘S
entiment?’ Lim looked amused. ‘Or votes?’
‘Both. We live in a democracy. You might try it some time.’ Ellis looked across at Lim, softening the comment with a smile. ‘Zhu is simply someone we need to know about. It’s not sinister. And we’re not suspicious.’
‘You’re not? And you come all this way? Trade all this information? And you’re telling me it doesn’t matter?’
Lim shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and Ellis fell silent, listening to Lim rephrasing the question. The Commercial Affairs Department had only been prepared to open the files on Zhu in return for payment in kind, and the material he’d brought out on Barings’ London operations was far too high-grade to swap for anything trivial. For some reason the Brits were after Zhu. But why?
‘I’ve been telling you all week,’ Ellis said patiently. ‘He’s brought us a lot of business. We may be trusting him with a national asset. Wouldn’t you feel happier with the full story?’
‘Of course.’
They were on the Parkway, speeding towards the airport. Lim lit a cigarette.
‘So are you content now? Do you have enough?’
‘I think so.’
‘Any surprises? Things you didn’t know?’
Ellis looked away, staring into the hot darkness, wondering where to start. Conversations in Singapore, however well intentioned, had a habit of turning inquisitorial, a process of challenge and disclosure that Ellis found immensely tiring.
‘It’s good to know he comes from Shanghai,’ he began. ‘We rather thought he was a southerner, from Amoy.’
‘Is Shanghai important? Lots of Singaporean Chinese are from Shanghai. Lots of Hong Kong Chinese, too.’
‘Like Zhu, you mean?’
‘Exactly. They follow the money. After the Communists came, the money went to Hong Kong. Just now, the money’s coming here. One day… who knows? Maybe the money moves on somewhere else.’ He glanced sideways at Ellis, then tipped back his head, expelling a thin plume of cigarette smoke. ‘We Chinese aren’t sentimental. Superstitious, yes, but not sentimental. Money has no smell. Zhu knows that.’
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