A return trip downstairs to Who’s Who yielded two further nuggets. Dodson had never appeared in it, which was not surprising for a minor computer boffin, and Michael Ratcliffe was still alive.
Ratcliffe, Adm. Michael Keppel, KCB (2013–30); DSO (2000); RN (ret’d); Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command 2012–14: b 15 March 1954; s of Leslie John Ratcliffe and Agnes Mary Sorenson; m 1978, Joan Catherine Thorpe (d 2011); 1 s (decd). Educ: Pangbourne Coll., Naval College, Dartmouth. Served: Falklands (Malvinas) 1982, Fleet Signals Officer, Home Fleet 1989, Persian Gulf 1990–1, Comdr; HMS Ajax 1997; Capt 1999; Capt 2nd Frigate Squadron 2001; Dir Signals Div; Admiralty 2004–12; Rear-Admiral 2008; Admiral; 2010 Dep. CDS (Systems) 2010–12; ret’d 2014. Dir: Racal-Philips 2014–20, Aerospace Communications 2014–29; Consultant; Siemens-Plessey 2021–34. Recreations: cricket, sailing, gardening. Address: The Rectory, Ibworth, Hants RG2 4RW. Phone 011131 47602 Clubs; Euro Yacht Squadron, M.C.C.
No mention of his role in the Referendum, Horatio noted. And the Classlessness legislation soon abolished both his knighthood and Pangbourne College.
Horatio’s memory wandered back to that extraordinary period. He had gone up to Westminster School for the Michaelmas Term of 2030. He was fourteen, tiny and terrified. After those bizarre first ten weeks, his mother had told him that the Classlessness Directive meant that for reasons of social equality the school was to be closed. There was some talk of his going to the Eton being set up in some Norman château, but when another Directive announced that all private education ran contrary to the Euro-citizens’ right to classlessness, that too was abolished. The only thing, apart from his friendship with Marty, that he took away from Westminster was his Queen’s accent, which had only got him teased and bullied by the likes of Tallboys later in life.
Horatio packed up and shuffled out of the building to make some calls in private. There was a very light drizzle, not enough to get him too wet as he stood under the only tree in the middle of the deserted autopark, but just enough to discourage other people from coming out unless they were going to their autos. He pressed the Record button on his pager.
It took some time to get through to Percival. Was it The Times, or All Souls which opened the doors?
‘I must say Dr Lestoq, after your first two pieces I am somewhat nervous about speaking to you.’ Percival sounded not in the least degree nervous.
‘Oh really Commissioner, and why’s that?’
‘To be called a “smooth operator”, and my former master a “wily Eurocrat”, can hardly be described as complimentary.’ If Percival had really minded he could easily have fobbed Horatio off. In fact, he was quite vain enough to enjoy being described as a smooth operator in The Times. In Horatio’s experience it was often the éminences grises who actually secretly enjoyed publicity the most. As for Mackintosh, who had died back in the early Thirties, loyalty to one’s deceased former boss could only go so far.
‘I do hope I didn’t offend you, but on reflection I feel both descriptions are justified. Now, might I ask you a blunt question?’
‘Blunt and sharp at the same time, Dr Lestoq. You never fail to impress.’ Horatio suspected Percival was just amusing himself, playing with him, sparring with an intellectual equal for the sport of it rather than out of any ulterior political motive or sense of professional obligation. Very well, the next question almost asked itself:
‘Who were Messrs Dodson and Ratcliffe?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Pretending not to hear properly or recognise the names. A classic delaying tactic?
‘Dodson,’ enunciated Horatio carefully into the pager, ‘and Ratcliffe.’
‘I don’t know. A smart shoe shop perhaps? Or one of those small stockbroking firms from the days before community broking?’ It was a good performance, but the flippancy betrayed him.
‘Jacob Dodson and Admiral Michael Ratcliffe?’ persisted Horatio.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of either of them.’ Pressing the phone as close to his ear as possible, Horatio thought he could detect, beneath the charming veneer, and albeit to an infinitesimal degree, a tiny note of fear. It was no more than a hint, a frisson, if it was there at all. Not guilt. Nor embarrassment. Still less regret – the man could hardly have the capacity for those emotions in his job – but actual fear. Horatio wished he had used a vid-phone and could see whether the same lightning twitch had crossed Percival’s face.
‘You wrote about them to Mackintosh at the time of the Referendum, might that help?’
‘No.’ The voice was serious now. ‘As you must know, one writes scores of such notes every day. It was thirty years ago and a very busy period. Now, if you were to g-mail me the text, or better still send the actual thing itself, I might be in a better position to comment on it. What was the reply? That might help jog my appalling old memory.’ Not wanting Percival to know he didn’t have either the note or the reply, if ever there was a reply, and not knowing if Percival knew he hadn’t got them, Horatio answered the second question.
‘You said no reply was needed if he approved the note.’ How had Percival known it was a note at all, rather than a letter or memo, if he could not remember writing it? ‘Might Dodson and Ratcliffe have had anything to do with the Referendum in your opinion, sir?’
‘Look, I’m not certain I like your tone. As I said, I’m sorry but they really ring no bells at all. Truly they don’t. They can’t have been very major figures in the whole thing, though, otherwise I’m sure they would. If I were you, Dr Lestoq, I’d concentrate on the major issues raised by the Referendum on the Aachen Treaty. Like you did in your first two rather irritatingly perceptive pieces. This looks like a red herring to me.’
Horatio was about to pursue a different line when Percival continued: ‘Now, as you can imagine with all this New Zealand business, I am tremendously busy at the moment. Indeed, I see I’m already late for a meeting.’
‘Goodbye, sir. I’m sorry for troubling you and thanks for your help.’
‘I look forward to seeing you in college sometime. I’ll be looking out for your article. Goodbye.’
The speed with which he had been dismissed spoke libraries. It convinced Horatio more than anything else that something was definitely up. If Percival had been late for a meeting, why had he accepted Horatio’s call?
Returning by the 18.00 tram, Horatio experienced the same sense of exhilaration he had last felt during the Mill/Carlyle affair.
The Demon Document Detective was back in business.
CHAPTER 8
22.10 FRIDAY 30 APRIL
There was really only one reason why Horatio bothered to go along to Marty Frobisher’s May Day Eve party. The women. They could keep the rest of it: the boozing, the networking, the Hunky-Regular-Guyishness. Not only did great-looking women gravitate towards Marty’s third-floor flat in Lower Sloane Street every 30 April, but there were also sometimes a smattering of the slightly quirky ones who had proved in Horatio’s limited experience to be the people most liable to fall for him, or the least likely to shy away.
It had been there two years ago that he had met the Estonian Esperanto expert Leila Haapsalu. She had seemed just too lovely to be for real. Sure enough, she wasn’t. A member of the Baltic separatist underground movement, she was trying to make contact with the English Resistance Movement. Europol had somehow got onto her and taped everything that went on in his flat. He still sometimes woke up sweating with embarrassment at the thought of it. Thank God Marty had been able to get hold of the vids before Tallboys could give them a public airing around the Political Intelligence Department.
Horatio had never even had a chance to say goodbye to Leila. The first inkling he got that she was anything out of the ordinary came when P.I.D. Special Branch smashed his door down at 03.00 one September night and dragged them both off to Paddington Green.
He’d had no choice but to turn Union evidence at the trial. There wasn’t much he could say. The entire proceedings had been held in camera. He had testified by vidli
nk, so he had not had a chance to see her then, either. He later learnt she had been charged with the catch-all ‘activities prejudicial to the integrity of the Union’ offence and sentenced to twenty years in a Finnish detention camp, where she was kept completely incommunicado. He still thought about her.
Right now, though, he had to concentrate on the present. One glance on entering the party and he had categorised everyone in Marty’s large drawing room solely in terms of their sexual availability. It was a technique he’d learnt at Oxford from David Fraser, the Conservative Democrat hack. Fraser had told him how within thirty seconds of entering – i.e. in the time it took to cross the room, say hello to the host and get to the drink and pills – he had divided everyone into one of five distinct political categories: safe supporters, probables, dodgy/don’t knows, floater/waverers and opposition.
Fraser would then spend the rest of the party steering himself towards the maximum-return groups. He would greet the first – but not waste time actually talking to them – chat up the second and third and virtually salivate over the fourth. He’d always ignore the last. It was cynical, Fraser readily admitted, and it reduced any sort of university social life to a constant stream of hackery, but it paid dividends come election time. Horatio remembered thinking at the time that he had never spoken to Fraser at a party when he hadn’t been constantly looking over his shoulder for more important people. This he had hitherto put down to mere social climbing. He found it strangely gratifying to discover that there had been a far more calculating and ambitious reasoning behind Fraser’s irritating habit.
Having been President of the Oxford Union and Chairman of the Conservative and Christian Democrat Association, Fraser had gone off to a stagiaire internship in Brussels. Today he was a junior spokesman in the Commission Secretariat in Whitehall, the acknowledged first rung on the ladder to a seat at Strasbourg. If he was interested in wielding real power he might even find a job in the Commission itself.
Fraser was at the party, over in a corner standing under one of Marty’s huge post-post-modern nude paintings, sucking up to the Deputy Director of South English Region P.I.D., Joachim Bittersich. Old habits die hard. Even from behind, Horatio knew it was Bittersich. His bald, oval head sticking out of his black polo neck and inclined at an angle looked like a rugby ball just before kick-off. Horatio watched Fraser leaning forward with a glass of something doubtless non-contraband and probably non-alcoholic too, nodding sagely and occasionally over-laughing at Bittersich’s heavy Teutonic jokes.
Fraser’s other piece of advice to Horatio had been to let the seducees do all the talking, as no compliment one could ever pay is half so impressive as being listened to attentively. Fraser looked as though he believed Bittersich to be the most fascinating person at the party. Possibly the world.
Horatio, simply by exchanging women for voters in the formula, trusted in the Fraser method implicitly. Yet he had never had much luck with the opposite sex. He must be the only person in either English region, he told himself, who had more ex-girlfriends in Finnish detention camps than in London.
He avoided the middle of parties if possible. The noise made it harder to shine conversationally. Better to stay at the margin and pick off stragglers. He liked to think of himself as a Russian wolf tracking retreating French soldiers in 1812. Wait until the victim is weak, tired and ideally also drunk. Then pounce. Horatio would love to be able to say it never failed, but with him it almost always did. Every time he went to a party he reminded himself of the basics. It should be second nature by twenty-nine, but he had never got on with Dick or Marcia or their friends when he was young. While his contemporaries were experimenting with flirting, pills, alcohol, party-giving and sex, he was reading Dead White Anglo-Saxon Male literature at home.
So he went over the rules again, just like Marty had told him a thousand times. Identify your victim. Lots of eye-contact. Affect a jokey modesty to put her at her ease. Surreptitiously drop in All Souls if she shows any intellectual interests at all. Flirt mildly and above all talk about her, her, her. ‘The rules have been the same since the dawn of human communication,’ Marty had told him, ‘but it’s astonishing how often they’re broken.’
Well, tonight they weren’t going to be.
This party seemed harder than ever though. They looked a real Generation-Z crowd. Endless H.R.G.s looking bicepful. The very latest Paris, Milan and Bonn fashions were all on display. And that was just the men. Enslaved to the latest federal fashions, the girls mostly wore little navy blue numbers. Horatio made a mental note to speak German only if there was one present; he was not about to fall for this absurd new fad of speaking it amongst English people.
He estimated about a hundred people had turned up already, all invited by pager at the press of a button last month. He had to confess himself impressed with the bunch Marty had got along. The flat looked magnificent as usual. How could he afford such a luxurious pad in Central London, let alone all those ludicrous Damien Hirsts on the ceiling? Marty didn’t appreciate or value art, but he certainly knew what appreciated in value.
‘Horror my man, very well done on those Aachen pieces.’ Mike Hibbert had steered his way towards him from the other side of the room. Tall, cadaverous, ambitious and very clever, Hibbert had always personified for Horatio the old Shakespearian line about Cassius. Hibbert also had a disconcerting habit of taking confidences but never giving any. But Horatio’s instinct not to waste any valuable party time talking to other males was easily overcome by his love of praise.
‘I’m pleased you liked them.’
‘You sailed pretty close with some of your remarks, I thought.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment, however it was meant. Might I rate being watched by your lot one day?’ Mike worked with Marty.
‘Shouldn’t imagine so. We know you’re a patriot at heart, despite all that Estonian business. I can’t quite imagine you spending your weekends putting on a balaclava and burning down German holiday homes in Herefordshire!’
‘And what are you up to, Michael?’ Hibbert raised one eyebrow. Horatio had always wished he could do that. ‘I’m sorry, of course you can’t say. Stupid question. It’s one of the great drawbacks about having friends in P.I.D. that you can’t exhibit even a polite and superficial interest in their jobs. It tends to cut out rather a large area of conversation.’
‘Well, let’s keep it on you then,’ said Hibbert. ‘When’s part three out?’
‘Tuesday, to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary.’
‘Of course. Anything in it to shock us?’
‘Guten abend, Herr Doktor, und wie geht’s Ihnen?’ It was Peter Riley. His ruddy-orange hair, which he always liked to call ‘auburn’ or ‘russet’, was getting quite thin on top now.
‘Oh sod off Carrot Top, you’re as South English as I am and anyhow it’s “Wie geht’s dir?” Familiar form.’
‘But I haven’t seen you since this party last year.’
‘Doesn’t matter. We know each other, that’s what counts in German grammar.’
‘Does it, Mike?’ Riley turned to Hibbert.
‘Think so. It’s a beastly language, whatever it is.’
‘Beastly?’ said Horatio. ‘Beastly? Why’s everyone speaking in Nineteen-Thirties prep school language all of a sudden? Alex Tallboys was saying “Golly gosh what a swiz!” to me this morning.’ Horatio enjoyed exaggerating.
‘I think on matters of German grammar,’ said Mike, ignoring him and nodding towards Fraser, ‘we ought to ask David over there. Only from the looks of things he’s so far up my boss’s Arsch – that’s one German word I do know – that only the soles of his shoes are visible.’
‘Jawohl!’ agreed Riley.
A waiter refilled the glasses and offered crisps. Horatio took a handful. He shouldn’t have, but he had long ago lost any self-control he might ever have had over matters concerning his weight. Despite his back problems, the sweating when he ran for a tram, the palpitations when he walked
up more than two flights of stairs and, worst of all by far, his gross unattractiveness to women, he knew he could do nothing about it any longer. He had never bought Cyril Connolly’s old cliché about how inside every fat man there was a thin one trying to get out. Horatio knew that inside him was someone obscenely gross struggling to get out. He had played no sports since some rather agricultural hockey at school. Recently he’d considered hiring a tapeworm from Slimfast Inc., but couldn’t really justify the 180 euros a month it would cost.
A few weeks before, Horatio had convinced himself he was diabetic. Yes he was always thirsty, yes he did need to go to the unisex lavabo cubicles a lot, yes his hair was starting to recede, and so on. Until it was pointed out by his long-suffering doctor that another major symptom was severe weight loss, Horatio was pleased with his self-diagnosis. Now he appreciated that it was just the same hypochondria which had four months earlier made him rush to the doctor complaining, with no evidence, that his tongue was getting bigger. Over that fantasy, too, he had required a third opinion.
It was largely down to this hypochondria that he didn’t pop pills. Unlike everyone else who claimed it was a bad habit they were trying to break, he rather respected those who did it, believing it to be ‘a cool and sexy thing to do’. But he suspected pills destroyed brain cells, however much the Surgeon-General denied it. As his brain was really his sole asset, Horatio knew he simply couldn’t risk it.
‘God there are some awful people here,’ said Riley. The malice had already started and Horatio was only on his second glass. Splendid.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 6
