The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  ‘I’m afraid it gets worse,’ said Gwilym. Denbigh had taken the next bit badly, and had to be spoken to by Osterley in a manner that verged on the brutal. ‘The policeman told us not to worry. He – the body, the cadaver, call it what you will – would be found again, somewhere else. That’s when Denbigh protested, started to melt down really, and was told to shut up. I didn’t like Osterley’s ghoulish grin – it’s the only way to describe it – but you can see how stuck we were. Frankly, we were scared. And I knew that we had rather messed it up.’

  Flemyng asked if the policeman had given any indication where this second coming might occur.

  ‘No,’ said Gwilym, miserably. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’re assuming natural causes. Surely?’ His eyes moved from Flemyng to Paul and back again.

  Having pulled himself round in the course of his story, he now slumped back in the chair. ‘What could I do? They backed a bloody van, a black one, right up to the point where the passage gives on to Speaker’s Court, locked the door at the top of the stairs beyond the store-room, and before I knew it they’d wrapped it up – the body – and it was gone. They took all its… his things with them.’ He paused before the significant addendum: ‘And the piece of paper that came out of his pocket.

  ‘I’m sorry, Will. There was no name on it, but it’s so distinctive, your number, I’d always know it – the last four digits stick in the mind. I use battle dates as an aide-mémoire, you’ll remember. Just a trick. You’re Agincourt. I’m Trafalgar, as a matter of fact. Nice. Anyway, when Osterley produced the paper I knew immediately what was written on it. Bells rang in my head, and I told him it was the private number in your office. Apologies.’ His eyes were anxious, gleaming with the pathos of the moment.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ said Paul. ‘They’d have identified it in a few minutes anyway. Quite right to help out. The question is – why?’

  He signalled to Gwilym, allowing him to rest for a moment. ‘I should tell you all that I have had a first account, on the phone, from Osterley. I want to go through some of it alone with you, Will, but there are a couple of things that we all need to know. This body will be rediscovered soon and normal procedures will kick in. The embassy will be informed by the police – not Osterley and Special Branch, but by whichever regular officers are called to the scene.’ He looked down at his desk, and Flemyng understood the profound discomfort that was gripping him. He saw fear. ‘From then on an investigation into the cause of death will continue.’

  He added, ‘as normal,’ spoken in a near-whisper.

  ‘There are naturally some complicating factors…’ At this Gwilym snorted a laugh. He subsided. Paul went on, ‘You and I will discuss them on our own, Will.’

  Lucy rose and nodded to them both. Gwilym slung his jacket on and opened the door for her, following her from the room, to leave Paul and Flemyng alone.

  ‘It’s nearly two o’clock,’ said Paul. ‘I’m getting a full briefing by three, much of which I assume I’ll be able to share with you. But I can tell you one or two things now, your ears only, ask you a couple of questions, and suggest what you and I might do next. There’s also the opera tonight, and I hope that I can make that work to our advantage. You’ll realize why when you get there.’ Flemyng was surprised, assuming it would have been scratched from the diary.

  ‘We don’t need to rehearse your past connections, Will. I’m not only talking about the phone number when I say that you can’t avoid this one.’ Paul prepared to start the story proper.

  ‘McKinley, Aidan. That’s the name on the passport. I’m going to tell you now why it caused alarms to sound. Osterley was off the mark like a shot. An Irish name so he was thinking bombs, naturally.’ Paul spread his arms. ‘Rang the bell to see if there was any current interest, and indeed there was, but of a quite different kind. I think you can forget any Irish connection.’ He poured two glasses of water from the jug on a side table and gave one to Flemyng. ‘You’ll get something stronger later.’

  Paul began to pace the length of the room. ‘The passport was clocked at Heathrow, early yesterday, Wednesday, because it popped up as one that caused us a little difficulty not long ago in Colombia, of all places, and was put on the watch list. Your old friends’ – he waved a hand towards the door, as if they might be gathering just outside – ‘were surprised it had turned up again. They didn’t expect that, so a decision was made on the spot not to challenge him but to find out where he went. They got help to put a scratch team together and saw him check into his hotel. The Lorimer, at the back of Harrods.’

  Flemyng, knowing of the pressures on such operations, was surprised that they had taken the trouble. ‘Any more on him?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I’ll be better briefed later today. But you won’t be surprised to learn they couldn’t put a full surveillance team on him. Frustrating, but how could they justify a twenty-four-hour tail? An American posing no threat? We’re friends, after all.’

  He put out his arms. ‘Same side.’

  ‘Now to the guts of it. This man, we’re all but certain, was operating for his government. Did he try to ring you? Your office will have a note, even if it was your private line.’

  Flemyng met his eye. ‘I’ve been told of no call of that kind. What exactly do you want? Time to tell me, Paul.’

  Instead, the cabinet secretary returned to his story and began to add pieces to the jigsaw, laying them down one by one. ‘There are things you need to know. First, that we are dealing here with an overdose of drugs. I’m told – it’s preliminary so I must be careful – that it looks that way, and there’s every chance that will be the finding at a post-mortem and an inquest. Not much doubt. I don’t want to sound callous, but that’s a relief. Second, I am positive that our two American guests at the opera tonight will know of it. It will certainly tell us something if they don’t. No more now, but if we assume that the embassy’s official channels learn in the next couple of hours that one of their citizens has expired in his hotel, which I am told is how it will happen, and then do a couple of basic checks, I can assure you that our visitors will come prepared. That’s the sort of people they are. Think carefully how you want to proceed.’

  Flemyng looked out of the window towards the park, where two hours earlier he had dodged Lucy and made for his rendezvous. Paul Jenner’s story gave no clue to the operation that had caused that nervy summons and Sam Malachy’s warning about surveillance. Instead there was a hint of supplication in it. Flemyng wore the lopsided smile that in him always signalled excitement. ‘I think I know what you want. But we’ll come unstuck. You realize that?’

  ‘I’m betting we won’t,’ Paul said, ‘because we can’t afford to.’

  He turned towards the books behind him, as if to search for something he had lost but gazed blindly at the shelves. ‘I’ll try to explain why. You need to be aware of something that I can’t yet describe to you in detail. Only half a dozen people in this whole jungle have the picture, and most of them only fragments. In all my time, I’ve never known anything like this. Deep, with not a trace on the surface.

  ‘I can tell you this much. There’s a negotiation going on with Washington right now that’s bloody sensitive beyond words.’ His face was hidden from Flemyng. ‘A big one.’

  Turning back, he said, ‘We can’t afford trouble on that front. There is no evidence that this guy is connected to it, whoever he may be, but anything’ – he was almost growling – ‘anything that upsets this apple cart could be a disaster. Not just messy, I promise you. A nightmare. But no more of this now. I’ll have a word with you after the opera.’ He sat down, resting both his elbows on the desk, and finished, ‘Believe me.’

  The exchange had swung increasingly fast between the two, the questions flowing from Flemyng and the answers from Paul. Now was the moment to switch. Flemyng wanted clarity. No misunderstanding.

  ‘I’m not going to ask, I’m going to tell. Forget the stuff about wanting my political brain. You know my past. And you kno
w that Lucy knows, because of where she sits and the papers she sees from my old friends in the course of office business. You’re taking me back there, without telling anybody, aren’t you?’

  Paul leaned back behind his desk, perfectly relaxed.

  ‘You want me to be a spy again.’

  Paul smiled, and it was over.

  5

  Francesca searched for a card to send to Lucy. Another conversation so soon after the first might raise alarms; a note should do away with any awkwardness and be a natural progress for them both. In her office, she had a stack of cards showing operatic scenes, but didn’t want an image that might be thought to carry its own message. She shuffled through and discarded the broken heroes and mad lovers, with all their tears, choosing instead a painting of an Italian garden with a still pool at its centre, the cypress trees casting long, solid shadows on the water. The scene calmed her. She turned it over, and wrote.

  Lucy – let’s make that lunch next week. Wednesday? It’s a day when the diary says Will should be out of town. I was so touched by our conversation, and there’s much more to say. Let me know. I hope the office is not too wild.

  Warmly,

  F

  She considered what she had written, re-read it and placed the card in an envelope which she addressed to the office, confident that it wouldn’t reach her husband’s desk by accident. Everything passed Lucy first, and Francesca could be sure that it would stay with her. She took the back staircase and walked to the post box in Bow Street to catch the first afternoon collection. But she slowed down as she went, disturbed by a thought that swept over her without warning. She stopped, and after a few moments tore up the envelope and dropped the pieces in a litter bin on the corner. It took about ten minutes in the sun for her feelings to settle, then she went back to prepare alone for the evening, first to the private dining room behind the royal box near the stage.

  With a seating plan before her, she wrote names on place cards for supper in a free-flowing hand. Three to each side of the oval table and one at each end. She looked round the small, high room, saw the flowers in place beside the ormolu clock and the drinks tray ready on the table. From the opening that led from the dining room to the royal box, muffled by a curtain drawn across the door, came the sound of a single horn. A player had slipped into the pit for some private practice, the gleam of his instrument just visible in the gloom under the overhang. Above him a crew was banging around on the stage, making the last checks on a revolving set that would turn for the first time in public that night. Their voices were louder than usual, and reflected the excitement that had crept through the building. A new production, an atmospheric Thursday, and Francesca shared the shiver of tension that everyone around her craved. ‘Penny Jenner,’ she wrote. Then one for Paul.

  The American party had almost arranged itself, doors flying open. She knew that the visitors – one from the embassy in Grosvenor Square and the other from Washington – were aware that their host would be Paul Jenner, the mandarin of mandarins, and she’d learned from his office that they were turning up the heat with two cabinet ministers. Yet it would be a chance for Flemyng to relax, free for a while from the family troubles that were disturbing Francesca because he had told her nothing of their origin. She saw brother Mungo as one of her charges, needing a woman’s helping hand without asking for it. He had said how well she understood him and his gratitude touched her, but she knew he would never call for help. That was beyond Mungo, who with every year that passed settled more firmly into the solitary routine at Altnabuie. She made a mental note to ring him, and turned back to her plans.

  The guests would use the private staircase that ran up from the quiet side entrance in Floral Street and led straight to the dining room, from where they could enter the box in the auditorium after the lights went down, to take their places in the shadows, only noticed by those in the audience who were watching for them. They could slip in and out without fuss. She checked the cards, wrote ‘Mr Wherry’ and ‘Mr Sassi’ for the Americans, listened to the horn player doing his runs for a few moments and then walked round the horseshoe of the grand tier to start the obstacle race through the warren of corridors behind to her office high above the stage, looking out to the old market square.

  She played with the seating plan in her mind. It should be easy, although there were only two women in the eight, and she turned over the permutations as she approached her tiny office, stopping to make way for a high trolley hung with wigs that creaked past her as it wobbled towards the chorus room.

  The two ministers who were coming, neither bringing his wife, would add colour. She liked Jonathan Ruskin, known for being the tallest man in the cabinet, which was a useful identifier and had served him well, who was gently spoken and always an engaging companion. She enjoyed his bookish side, and he’d spent long evenings on their sofa in Putney chewing the fat of politics. She and Flemyng enjoyed his sense of adventure in all things – his account of a walk along the Rhine had been their holiday reading the year before, and he’d almost won a literary prize for it. Because he had to bend his elongated frame most of the time to avoid aloofness, he appeared in company to be a natural listener, always leaning towards the person who was speaking. He had no choice, but it made him seem willing. His eyes were as blue as gas jets. Francesca knew him rather better than Harry Sorley, his ministerial partner for the night, although there were tales of hidden depths.

  Physically, Sorley had none of Ruskin’s style, being porky. There was a reputation for womanizing and sexual adventure. Dark where Ruskin was fair, he exuded a mid-forties vanity, his curls well-tended and not to Francesca’s taste, because they oozed with a seducer’s oil. She knew, however, that the effect on some others was different. And he was sometimes fun, if you didn’t mind the eyes, which reminded her of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Not enticing. But the friends who clustered round her husband made a happy gang, and she enjoyed their naked relish for the game. She was a natural collector of the tales they told but protected her own sense of propriety with the promise that she would never keep a diary.

  The favourite stories clinging to friends and rivals were shadows that never lifted. ‘Everybody has a past and we all know it,’ Flemyng had told her on one of their first weekends together. But she enjoyed them, stags of a common age including Ruskin and Sorley, who’d both slipped ahead of him by virtue of having started earlier, and the likes of Forbes and McIvor who were at his level, waiting for the next jump to a cabinet seat, and looking for a helping hand from anywhere. Sparger too, although he had once propositioned her when drunk, whispering all the while that music made him cry. But Francesca knew that one day their band of brothers would break up and there would be pain. Their life of rivalry made that a certainty, the fervour of the moment coming from the knowledge that it would pass.

  Because she loved the risks of the stage, the life of politics worked on Francesca. Flemyng’s friends confided in her in ways that she found surprising, leaving their own wives in ignorance, and within months of Flemyng falling for her she’d been adopted by the gang. Forbes had shared the story of his failed marriage; Ruskin his desire for children and his wife’s distance from politics. She kept their secrets.

  With her husband she’d developed the honesty that he needed. Her love for him, which had grown, obliged her to be tough. He wanted nothing less, and she could often see in his eyes, behind the dancing smile, an appeal for an openness between them that might one day be uncomfortable. He’d told her that without it he feared that he would drift, and maybe fall.

  There would be politics around the table later. Francesca opened her window in search of some air, checked her clothes, and responding to the chatter from the cobbled street below, set off in search of strong tea to ready herself.

  *

  Back in his office, Flemyng dived into a red box of paperwork and sat alone. He was told that Lucy would be delayed so he took relief in his work. He spoke to the Beirut embassy, composed a message
for Damascus about his September visit, and re-read a hostile Treasury paper on the cost of embassy entertaining in North Africa. The note on tactics from the official representing him at the following day’s budget wrangle seemed to do the job, so he scribbled a quick note of thanks and support, read the daily batch of embassy telegrams, which took an hour, and put away the last of his papers. Lucy hadn’t returned. He asked her assistant to let Ruskin’s office know they could talk the next morning, and made sure that the message would be passed on immediately. A letter of thanks to his party chairman in the constituency, and he was done. There was time for a quick shave and shower, in the poky bathroom he shared with the minister next down the pecking order, and he thought he had won himself some thinking time.

  Instead he was summoned to a meeting, for the second time that afternoon. ‘Thomas Brieve rang,’ Lucy’s assistant announced through the doorway. Because she was junior, she used his full name.

  Brieve. Prime ministerial foreign affairs adviser and, in Flemyng’s mind, the most obnoxious of the new breed. Fixers appearing in ministerial offices, confidants hired to do their masters’ business round the clock, and known for their lapdog loyalty. Brieve was their model – a Cerberus at the gate who sent unwanted ministers on their way, the boy scout who followed the paper trail wherever it went, the man who never missed a meeting. His memos, Ruskin would say, were like toxic lava from a volcano: get in its way and you’d be swallowed up. Tom Brieve, although his skinny, angular frame was physically unsettling and he had a boyish manner that multiplied the effect, had power. Gatekeeper and enforcer, he had secrets stuffed in his pockets. But Francesca was always surprised by Flemyng’s reaction to him, and puzzled. Brieve hardly seemed like Rasputin, she had said after first meeting him. Nor even Machiavelli. Flemyng said that she would be wise not to bet on it.