The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  Flemyng walked to Parliament Square, lingered with a police officer at the gates of New Palace Yard for a minute or two, knowing that if there was a hint of spice in the daily round of gossip, he’d pick up the scent. Nothing. ‘Quiet as the grave,’ said the copper. A Friday heavy with tasteless phrases.

  He strolled through the arches and turned into the service passageway running under the building towards the terrace and the river, the natural route for a habitué looking for air, or a drink. Within two minutes he was on the stairs that led to the room where Joe had been found one floor up. Flemyng kept climbing, to the main floor.

  Lunchtime on a summer Friday, and silent. A party of workmen was attacking the ceiling in the library corridor, long starved of attention, and plaster mouldings were leaning against the walls. The men’s newspapers looked incongruous on the green leather benches to each side, the Page 3 girls in The Sun still a novelty, and turned upwards. Further along, a pair of picture restorers was starting work on a wide battlefield canvas, brushing away the first layer of dust. He heard a gaggle of tourists being led from central lobby up the stone staircase to the committee corridor, and exchanged words with another policeman who was on his way down to the terrace, for a smoke or an early pint in strangers’. All quiet, and nothing to break the surface calm.

  Doubling down a short stairway he was at the store-room door. There was no key. From inside he jammed a heavy oak chair under the doorknob. It held tight.

  The room in which he stood was square and high. It was part attic, part church vestry, with a jumbled collection of furniture and ceremonial implements, cast-offs and broken remnants. There were two formal pictures hanging above head height, one of a prime minister, the other of a sea battle with the smoke of cannon wreathing the ships and tongues of fire on their sails. He examined what lay around him.

  There was a set of damaged wall-hangings to one side, and a collection of broken pediments, window sashes and oak panels on the other. Beside them on the floor, a pitted stone gargoyle lay tilted back so that his eyes met Flemyng’s. He had a sharp mental picture of the sight that had shaken Denbigh, the clerk who had found Joe. Gwilym had said that his open eyes, whose lids he could not bear to close, were the most poignant touch.

  Flemyng lifted aside an old curtain and revealed two dark oak cupboards, with a collection of glass inkwells stacked on top and some metal boxes filled with doorplates, hooks and window latches. Covering them over, he turned to the bust of Gladstone lying on the floor. The Grand Old Man had taken a grievous blow to the head. He was cracked from top to bottom through the left eye and, Flemyng fancied, would soon split in two. Apart from a glass-fronted bookcase, on the top of which the syringe had been found, and which was dust-free, there was a collection of institutional bric-a-brac, and a rolled-up carpet which would never grace the Palace of Westminster again, its threads rubbed bare.

  On the floor where Joe’s body had lain there was no mark. Flemyng poked around for a few minutes. Nothing. Then, as he took away the chair that had secured the door, his eye caught a flicker of white on the carpet. He was able to pick up a thin sliver of stone when he swung the door inwards. He turned it and held it up to the light. Then he placed it in his dark blue handkerchief and folded it carefully into an inside pocket.

  Passing through central lobby and down the steps towards the public exit, he imagined Joe’s progress. Had he met someone there, where visitors congregated for arranged appointments, and been spirited out of public view? A gamble. He need only have hung around for more than a minute or two if he’d got his timing right. On the other hand, getting into one of the inner corridors alone without being challenged would have been difficult, and for a man wearing jeans almost impossible. A police officer would have asked an awkward question. A meeting must have been fixed; it was the only way.

  Flemyng considered the risk Manson had taken, then burst into laughter that startled the tourists waiting in line. So simple. Joe hadn’t known he was on anyone’s radar. The prospect of danger hadn’t occurred to him.

  Didn’t know there might be watchers; didn’t know he was going to die.

  Flemyng left the building and strolled through the gardens along the river.

  He’d ring from the call box in Smith Square to see if there was a message from Abel in Washington to Francesca or – even more unlikely – to the office, get some energy back, and then there was Sam. He’d take a cab to Mansfield Mews, confident that his friend would have understood the summons from ‘Mr Massie’.

  The temperature was refusing to dip, and everywhere he saw the comatose signs of a lazy weekend ahead. Building sites abandoned, grass patches turned into communal sun lounges, the pace on the pavements slackening in the sun. When he reached Mansfield Mews, deliberately early, he walked slowly past number six and was able to read the names on the brass plates. He got confirmation of what he’d expected, and understood why Sam had been bound for that black door. He rounded the corner, and a minute afterwards his friend had arrived behind him. He was smiling.

  ‘I’ve pounded the corridors on your behalf this morning. Ministerial instruction after all.’ He leaned in. ‘I left no tracks.’ Flemyng acknowledged the compliment, and the reassurance.

  ‘I may be able to help, even if it’s not as much as you’d like. To start with anyway. We’re talking about the Americans, right?’

  Flemyng dipped his head. ‘Naturally.’ They were off.

  They had cut into a square where there was one empty bench. Sam threw his jacket across it, a signal that no one else was welcome, and they sat down. ‘There’s a game on,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t got a handle on it. We live in compartments, now more than ever. Battery hens. For you and me, it’s The Service and always will be, but believe me, they’re starting to call it The Office. Not I, mind you. Three-year plans and crap of that kind flying around. But people still talk, thank God. And I know there’s something up, have no fear.’

  Sam leaned in. ‘Janus Forbes’ – the proper name for once – ‘is in on it. He was in the conference room this morning. Four of them altogether. Saw me passing the door and shot me a nasty look.’

  Flemyng digested this simple fact. A ministerial visit to Sam’s office was rare, business between their political masters and the spies more often done on home ground. But Forbes would love it, his grip on the delicious knot of status and secrecy. Flemyng dealt with a shiver of jealousy, and bowled a googly at Sam.

  ‘I assume Guy Sassi was with them.’ He got a wide grin in return. Sam said that was one of his little surprises, although he had others tucked up his sleeve.

  ‘Bingo. Got it in one.’

  ‘He’s been in and out these last two weeks. Not in my little patch. I’ve been shoved up a bit of a siding, as you may be aware.’ Flemyng shook his head, and said nothing, out of respect. ‘I hear he’s connected with an old Paris friend of ours.’ Looking up, waiting for a response, which after a moment they gave in unison, Flemyng’s eyes sparkling with enjoyment.

  ‘Maria Cooney.’

  The first piece on the board had moved. Sam picked up. ‘And naturally he’s a friend of all the brainboxes in their puzzle palace, dreaming up computer programmes for the new age that’s coming. Very friendly, I hear.

  ‘So, my old fellow traveller’ – Flemyng enjoyed Sam’s relish for the story – ‘I poked around and blew air on to the embers, to see what would glow in the dark.’ His language, as always when he became the raconteur of the moment, was taking off in all directions. It was a signal that he was in charge, telling his tale at his own speed in his own time.

  ‘I got one spark going, and it shed a little light. A mutual friend of ours,’ said Sam, ‘no name, not necessary, is just as intrigued as me. And he knows more than I do. Bloody should, I may say, it’s his job. Came up with a name – not of a person, I should say, but an old operation. A clue. To be straight, I don’t know if you’ll remember this one, having been many miles away at the time. Your need to know was probably nil.’ />
  Flemyng said, ‘I remember how it was.’ He drank in the warmth of Sam’s presence, the generosity that lurked behind the lugubrious mask.

  ‘Operation Empress?’

  Flemyng’s mystification was unfeigned. ‘Means nothing.’ He tapped his head. ‘Not a sausage.’

  Sam was pleased. ‘Pin back your ears, then. The operation is buried these days, only used a bit for training – different name, mind you, and presented as a fiction. Old Tyson’s work, I expect, God rest his soul. Gone to the big archive in the sky. Anyway, back to my tale. I’m not surprised you never heard the name, it was buried full fathom five. But it happened more recently than you might like to think… much more recently.

  ‘And here’s the thing, Will. I’m told the current little imbroglio has an echo of Empress. That’s the link.’

  He put out a hand in warning. ‘Mind you – here’s the bad news – I’m not sure in what precise respect that’s true, why it’s spoken of in the same breath, only that it is. I should take you back, shouldn’t I?’

  Flemyng said, ‘I wouldn’t want to stop you, even if I was meant to.’

  Sam adopted an emphatic tone, and said Empress was unique. ‘I don’t use that word very often,’ he said, which was a whopper, but never mind. He had known nothing like it. Perplexing, spraying embarrassment all over the shop, and the ones who were in the middle of it carried the secret with extra-special care, as if it might infect them, even when they gathered at the service’s private ceremonies when gossip from behind the veil was allowed to flow free.

  ‘And when it was over, the shutters came down with an almighty bang. Everyone’s hands tied. Mind you, some of the boys could be heard speaking about a famous victory, and others – elsewhere on our battlefield – about the nadir. The end. I’ll explain.’

  Flemyng found it easy to be patient, liking to take his time at such moments.

  ‘I would say,’ said Sam, ‘that our text for today is Pride, with a capital P.’

  Flemyng remembered the unlikely fact that Sam was the holder of the office of churchwarden in a parish under the Sussex Downs, where those who enjoyed his reading of psalms at evensong in their Norman church were under the impression that he had spent his whole career in government public relations. Which, as Sam often said, was not too far off the mark.

  ‘Pride,’ he said. ‘The cancer and the blessing of our trade. Cherished, but eating away at our innards all the time.’

  He wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to give the story his full treatment, language cavorting wildly now. In this mood of excitement, he had left his desk far behind and returned to the street, where he was most at home. Flemyng watched him turn once more into the wide boy he had loved.

  ‘A long time ago, deep in the forest, there were questions being asked about someone in a position where he could do great damage.

  ‘A minister, no less, and higher up the ladder than you. Well settled in cabinet, and the subject of nasty rumours. Very nasty indeed. No one knew where they’d come from, but they wouldn’t go away. This person was accused of loose talk, perhaps indiscretions in bedrooms here and there, and worse. Maybe playing footsie with bad people, people on the other side.

  ‘Blackmail, even. Who could tell? All we knew was that there were leaks, a bloody torrent it seems, and anxious talk, on both sides of this river. At the top – the very top – it was decided that he’d have to be watched, and listened to. The works, day and night.

  ‘And who, my dear Will, was asked to do it?’

  He gestured with his hands held up and outward, fingers curling in towards the palms. ‘Come on! Remember we’re talking about a minister here, not a poxy functionary like me. Maybe even a leader some day, who could say?’

  Flemyng said nothing, wasn’t expected to. Sam wanted to ring the bell himself.

  He whispered, ‘A friendly power did the deed.’

  Knowing that he wanted to spin it out, Sam became a one-man chorus. ‘I repeat – a friendly power,’ his voice rising.

  Flemyng was eager now.

  ‘The God of Gods sitting at the top of the mountain over there, agreed that one of our own people – a minister of the crown, God save us – should be put under surveillance by the operatives of another country, working from their own government’s buildings in London. Not ours. Theirs.

  ‘Think about it. The boys with the bugs and microphones in their knapsacks, cut out on their home turf. Not wanted on voyage, while others padded the streets in their name, patrons of another master doing the Queen’s business that we’re sworn to pursue. All dressed up as a way of not breaking the promise that elected parliamentarians are never spied on. Balls on stilts, as we know. Humiliating, or what?

  ‘Jesuitical hardly begins to describe it.’

  Flemyng was enjoying Sam’s free-flowing language again, which he thought of as some kind of jazz improvisation on the usual order of his thoughts, an expedition to who-knows-where. In another life he imagined Sam as a blues balladeer, with a soulful tune always ready.

  He was up to speed now, keeping his voice down as they looked across the square. The evening passers-by saw nothing of the excitement they were sharing, but Flemyng’s antennae were tuned to every nuance. Sam’s curls lifted in the breeze, and his arms were starting to move like the sails of a stumpy windmill.

  ‘Empress is lined up there with the best of them in the secret attic. The old boys are spinning in their graves just thinking about it, and trying not to.’

  Flemyng was avoiding the obvious question, which he often did, and asked another instead. ‘Did it work?’

  Sam held up a hand. ‘I’ve no idea what precisely came out of the washing machine when it was all done, old friend. But I know that it did work, and how.

  ‘They got what they were after. He was nailed to the floor, although no one was allowed to hear the screams, and dealt with in the dark. No more politics for him. And, hear this, I’m told that when the stuff started to come in, everyone stood around and joined in a sing-a-long.’

  Flemyng cocked an eyebrow.

  ‘The Maple Leaf Forever,’ said Sam, answering the unasked question. ‘Didn’t know the words, but gave it a good go.

  ‘After all, what are allies for, if you can’t ask them to spy on one of your own?’

  He liked that one, and hooted with mirth. Flemyng smiled back.

  ‘But sadly, old mate, that’s where my story ends.’ Sam had his arms out, a gloomy salesman with an empty bag.

  Flemyng expressed no disappointment, but said, ‘You spoke about pride.’

  ‘It’s what Empress was about. The game made sense – ’course it did. Got the stuff, relations closer than ever with the ally in question, great gratitude. But, oh dear, the pride that was hurt: we couldn’t do the business without help, needed rescuing. Symptom of decline, they said. Same as the economy, unions, phones that don’t work. The bloody gas board.’ He stood up and took a few steps across the grass to loosen himself up.

  Resuming, he said, ‘Whatever is going on right now – and I’ll crack it – there’s pride at the bottom of it. Wounded, precious, self-deceiving, I don’t know. But pride.’

  One more word, said Sam, or four to be precise. ‘A mutual friend of ours gave me a phrase. Make of it what you will.

  ‘A surfeit of allies.’

  Flemyng said he would remember that.

  He asked no further questions about Sam’s story, but said instead, ‘Something else. I need your help.’

  ‘Any time.’

  He took an envelope from his inside pocket. ‘When you told me yesterday that you had an appointment over there’ – he nodded in the direction of number six – ‘I am assuming this was who you were going to see. I’ve done a little research.’ He showed him the name he had written on the envelope, and Sam smiled. ‘You haven’t lost your touch.’

  Flemyng said, ‘I want you to deliver this letter to number six right now. I shouldn’t be seen going in there. You’ve been more than once,
I’m guessing, so it’s easy for you. Just drop it off, and there’s no need for explanation. OK?’

  Sam took the envelope without a word, and they shook hands. ‘Thank you,’ said Flemyng.

  He was turning away when Sam spoke again. He was kind in the way he said it, because he understood the power of the moment and Flemyng’s vulnerabilities. Sam’s motto was that on such journeys there was always one more door to open.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard,’ he said, looking away from Flemyng for a moment, and pausing for a couple of beats, ‘but we have an interesting visitor in town.’ He spoke gently.

  ‘Your brother.’

  The parting was silent. Sam rested his hand on Flemyng’s back, then hurried away without waiting for an answer.

  Flemyng went the other way. As he faced the western sun there were tears in his eyes.

  11

  A Wherry dinner party was generally a cheery affair. Their home, plucked from the second-top rung of embassy houses to match his status and the guest list he was required to attract, made its own determined and overdone pitch against informality with too much deep-polished mahogany, boardroom décor and a piano that was two sizes too big. But Betsy Wherry was better than that, and had swung into London with the small-town traveller’s spirit that she’d protected like a candle flame in her years touring the world with Jackson, braving every hostile wind.

  She had surprised American friends with her sprightly arrival, the town where they would talk about trains that didn’t run and movie theatres where you couldn’t get popcorn, where there wasn’t a pizza outside London they said, a land of past glories and seeping alarms. But Betsy loved the old country, and had made it known that if anyone came from the embassy to her table and began a conversation about the British disease, she’d tell Jackson that they’d have to work a hard passage back to her house.

  Her furniture was wide and comfortable, built of oak and cherry, the rugs and drapes the colours of the foliage of the New Hampshire fall that she loved, and she’d managed to infuse the high-corniced reception rooms with the personality of a jumbled den that was always a little out of control but had style. After its latest re-modelling her home boasted Indian silks and carvings from their last posting, giving it another layer of colour and what she called, in her rich cackle, ‘a dash of spiritual chic’. The result was that first-time guests found themselves having the welcoming stiff drink in a mood of intense relief that often had them loosening their ties with one hand and reaching with the other for one of Jean-Luc’s specials from the tray. And that was just how Jackson liked it. Surprise ’em, he’d been saying to Betsy for years, and you got ’em.