The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  He had a pile of papers to get through and four meetings that consumed three hours. Just before noon he crossed the street to Paul’s office, leaving Lucy behind.

  Gwilym was managing the coffee cups. Paul picked up a file. ‘This is a summary of the post-mortem report that has come from Osterley. Naturally, I haven’t seen the original.’ He managed a smile. ‘After all, it has nothing to do with any of us.’

  Nonetheless, his hand shook as he read the report. Post-mortems on dead spooks should have nothing to do with him.

  However, he said that they could be sure that, despite every tribulation, one blessing had come their way. This was a death whose cause was known, beyond doubt. He gathered strength from that fact. ‘Let’s remember, just because an event is odd and shocking, it doesn’t mean that we have to fall apart. There is every reason not to.’

  Manson’s death seemed straightforward enough, despite the circumstances. A heavy overdose, a mixture of unmentionable things that were familiar to the medics, and had guaranteed that some day, it just happened to be last Thursday, he’d come to a horrible end. ‘There is evidence of prolonged abuse. He’s almost certainly had previous seizures, probably a while back. Interestingly enough, they don’t think he’d used needles before. They’re surprised, but apparently that’s often how it goes. You can’t tell when they’ll try something new. He’s been on and off the stuff for years – every cocktail you can imagine. From our point of view, that’s good news, if you see what I mean. It may have been an unnatural death in one sense, but it will not warrant, in official minds, a criminal investigation. As far as we can tell at this stage.’

  Paul would be cautious to the end, Flemyng thought, until the last trump sounded.

  ‘Where he got it, and when, we don’t know. In the depths of Wednesday night, it’s assumed. They always know the places to go. In the little envelopes found in his room there was enough for our people to know what he’d taken. With some extra ingredients in the syringe, they say, for luck. Not good at all, obviously.’

  They all leaned back. Flemyng noticed that Paul was tensing up again.

  ‘That, I suppose, counts as the good news.’

  Now for the rest. Paul first.

  ‘You will remember that we had some bits and pieces here, produced by our friend Osterley. The notebook and the papers. This is considerably trickier, and not good news at all, I’m afraid.’

  Flemyng was stiffening, absorbing the alarm that he could see had settled in Paul so that it had become something like a permanent state. He watched as Paul picked up a blue file, the one that had remained unopened the night before.

  ‘Think about the message, Friend Flemying knows. I imagine you’ve been trying to work it out.’

  ‘You could say that,’ Flemyng said.

  ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘I wonder if “knows” is a more important word than “friend”.’ He left it there.

  ‘Our people have been quite busy, and productive,’ Paul said. There were some American numbers listed in Manson’s notebook, and they had been traced. ‘I may say more about those later,’ he said. But first there was one page of the notebook in which Manson had used a crude code to conceal four numbers, jumbling them up with a formula that various clever people – Paul’s phrase – had been able to crack easily.

  ‘If I were in a flippant mood I would ask you to guess those numbers,’ he said. ‘They are in addition to Brieve’s, which was written without a code on another page.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ said Flemyng. ‘Forbes, Ruskin, Sorley, and me.’

  Paul spread his hands in a gesture of congratulation. Not difficult to win the prize. He said, ‘Back to our questions. Whose friend am I supposed to be? And what am I supposed to know?’

  Paul made a small gesture of understanding. He said he could not have given an answer to that question the night before, which was why he had decided to keep the blue file’s contents to himself, but light was beginning to dawn. ‘Not that it will help us. At least, not if we want this to get easier.’

  He waved an arm as if to settle them down for a long story. His listeners saw a change in him. Flemyng thought his voice took on a distant quality; and he noticed that Gwilym, for the first time since the start of the crisis, appeared expectant. His political senses had quickened again, aware that the game was approaching a climax. ‘I have a very strange tale to tell,’ Paul began.

  Flemyng was in the wide chair by the window, with Gwilym on the other side of the room. He had one hand on his scar, massaging it through his light blue shirt. Anyone might have thought it an absent-minded gesture; but in the last few moments he had felt his concentration kick in, the old gear change he loved. He knew for a certainty that the end game was beginning.

  And Paul delivered.

  A couple of hours before they arrived in his office, he said, he’d had a visit in that very room from one of their colleagues. ‘Out of the blue.’

  ‘A colleague?’ said Flemyng.

  ‘That is an accurate description,’ said Paul, giving no more.

  He said he had been surprised by his visitor, because the person concerned had no troublesome business that might bring him to the cabinet office at that hour, let alone into Paul’s sanctum. Usual end-of-term arguments flying around Whitehall, but nothing out of the ordinary. There had been no trouble in the air, no warning of an urgent meeting. He had simply arrived.

  Unusually, his visitor had used the underground passage in Whitehall that was a useful back way into the office for avoiding prying eyes, or cameras. They had been alone in his room and, said Paul, he had been told an extraordinary story.

  ‘My problem, as you will learn in a moment, is whether to believe this. I have no reason not to. On the other hand, if I do believe it, I’m aware of the consequences. I have no choice about whether this complicates matters or makes them easier. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear it. The first thing is, I couldn’t send him away. I had to listen. So do you.’

  Paul cupped his hands behind his head, and looked upwards.

  ‘Our colleague has been told – he wouldn’t say how it came to him, but he was determined that I should hear, so I didn’t waste time with questions – that there has been American… concern… about someone in this government. He wasn’t clear whether it was a minister or an official somewhere around here who was the source, but someone of substance, and considerable alarm.

  ‘He had no name for me, and I wasn’t going to get into a guessing game, for reasons that will become apparent to you – or maybe they are already.’ He looked up at Flemyng. ‘When he began, I realized that I should let him talk. Whether he was speaking the truth or not, he had to get it out.

  ‘According to him, it would be wrong to say this worry is about security as we usually think of it. More accurate to call it personal. But sadly, we may not be able to separate the two. Given what we have been discussing these last few days, that will not surprise you. I did feel, I should say, as if I was being patronized just a little. But never mind.

  ‘He has learned, from his own source, or sources, why Manson came to London.’

  Gwilym leaned forward at the words. Flemyng was perfectly still.

  ‘But – and this is very important, and helpful to us I think – he knows nothing about Manson’s demise, unless he is a better actor than I can imagine. I am fairly certain he does not even know Manson’s name. I need hardly say what a relief that is. I was able to play the daft laddie up to a point – thank the good Lord, I didn’t let anything slip too soon – and it was clear that he knew only that there might be someone poking around who was interested in what Manson was interested in, if you follow me. He was also given no indication by me that I had heard anything about such a person. We might have been talking about a ghost.’

  The story the visitor brought with him was clear enough, said Paul, and appalling.

  There was a sexual accusation, private at the moment, but potentially public and embarrassing, not only to
the individual involved, but to the government as a whole. ‘Catastrophic’ had been the colleague’s word.

  ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, the story is about a rape. Apparently – as with all these stories – the truth would be more or less impossible to establish, but the evidence would be a sensation, and that’s all that matters. The aggressor was someone in this government. There was a child – a young man now – and it all happened about twenty years ago, or a little more. Ancient history, but come back to haunt us.’

  Flemyng brought to mind the travel itineraries that Paul had produced the night before, still lying in his beige file. It was a natural connection for him; Gwilym would just have to catch up.

  ‘I repeat. He has no idea against whom this accusation is being made, or might be made. None. Doesn’t know whether it has already been made, or has yet to happen. He is not working to our timetable, I’m glad to say.

  ‘But he said he did know that some person of an intelligence kind’ – a strangely touching phrase to Flemyng’s ears – ‘might be dispatched, or perhaps had been sent already, to dig around in London, and that I needed to know, as well as your old friends across the river, Will. I have no doubt that he has passed it in that direction too, as a matter of duty.

  ‘And that was the sum total of the story. I expressed natural concern, thanked him with some warmth, said I would make my own enquiries, established that he understood the sensitivities, would swear silence, and he left. Whether he will respect that request or not, I’m afraid I can’t say.’

  Paul said he had been struck by his visitor’s sobriety, untouched by any skittishness or relish. His mood had been serious, even dark, and there had not been one sardonic note in the conversation.

  ‘It fits,’ he said. And turning his hands out, palms upward he said, ‘Agreed?’

  Flemyng looked out to Horseguards Parade and the park beyond, knowing that he was at the point at which all pretence vanished, the curtains were drawn back and they gazed on the ugly truth that lay before them, the knowledge that there was no escape from a man-to-man confrontation with someone as yet unknown, with consequences that were uncertain but fraught with menace.

  ‘So, in a way, it’s an affair of the heart,’ he said. ‘The whole business.’

  Paul said, ‘I think we are clear where we now stand,’ as if absorbing his thought. ‘Manson had these numbers in his notebook for a purpose. He had taken steps to get them in the hours before he left Washington. He also made a note of your name separately – Friend Flemyng knows – and carried your phone number in his pocket.

  ‘The information I have just received fits all that. We know that Manson rang Tom Brieve, though he didn’t manage to speak to him directly. At least on that occasion. He may have made calls to others, too. He had a purpose, after all, and didn’t come here by accident.’ Realizing what he had said, he stopped, as if making a silent apology to Joe’s shade.

  ‘Will, this may be the most awkward question I have ever had to ask anyone in your position. You see my difficulty. We have been given a glimpse of Manson’s mission, and names. One of them is yours.’

  Flemyng said that he quite understood, but he could be clear. There was nothing in his past that would fit the story. Nothing. ‘I realize you know how often I’ve travelled across the pond over the years’ – he remembered Manson’s records, carefully annotated – ‘and I don’t know about the others on that list. You’ll just have to take my word. It isn’t me.’

  He looked at them both, smiling for the first time since Paul began speaking. ‘You do believe me?’

  Paul said that he had already come to that conclusion, although he had been obliged to think it through in the course of the preceding hour after the departure of his visitor. ‘I do think I know you well enough, but I’ve been surprised so often in this office.’

  Flemyng’s behaviour when he’d seen the travel logs in the file, Paul had decided, simply didn’t match the reaction of someone carrying that kind of burden. A guilty man would have cracked.

  ‘But there is something in those lists, and we have to find it.’ Paul was on his feet again, trying to follow a story that was moving too fast. His hands clutched at the air, trying to grasp the invisible.

  ‘I suspect the reason Manson leaped on a plane wasn’t because somebody here was going to be embarrassed. That happens all the time, as we know, and Washington wouldn’t care at all. It was because of something we had decided to do – the way we’re playing the game. That must have been the reason for the hurry. There are complicating matters of another kind as well.’ He glanced at Flemyng.

  ‘Let’s start with them. It was planned – until this morning – that this week a new ambassador was going to be named for Washington. It hasn’t been finalized – won’t be until the big chiefs get back from Paris – but I can tell you that in all probability it is one of the names on that list. Well, let’s forget probably. A final choice, I should say, has not – I repeat not – been made.’

  He caught Flemyng’s eye, and even Gwilym noticed the depth of the glance.

  ‘That’s obviously on hold now, but remember this. The embassy was not mentioned to me by my unexpected visitor this morning. He made no connection with the appointment of an ambassador. Didn’t suggest the link.’

  Flemyng muttered, ‘Very clever,’ and Paul heard him.

  The problem was, said Paul, that if they were connected in some way, disaster beckoned.

  ‘Well,’ said Flemyng, ‘you have to talk to everyone. I’m spoken for, I hope. Brieve’s not far away, unless he’s left for Paris. Forbes, I assume, is over the road in his office. Sorley? Is Jonathan in the building?’

  Paul shook his head. ‘He’s just left for Oxford to make a speech. The reason I’m smiling is that I’ve read the advance text. It’s all about the calm that’s descended on the government.’

  He couldn’t help a nervous laugh. ‘He’s promoting a new phrase, ahead of Paris. He calls it “The Politics of Optimism”.’

  Gwilym had found himself in recent hours retreating to his schooldays, his natural escapist trick at moments of crisis, and had slipped easily out of the moment. ‘I’ve got a better title,’ he said. ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum.’

  ‘The Aeneid,’ he continued, into the silence that followed. Paul and Flemyng waited for more. ‘Aeneas is crying, it’s quite a moment. I’m a great one for loose translations, and there’s an especially good one – the tears of all the world.’

  Flemyng, one hand stroking his cheek, said that Gwilym probably remembered the rest of the line, and smiled at him as he gave it.

  ‘Our mortality cuts to the heart.’

  22

  The brothers would meet in the afternoon. Mungo had sent word around that he might be something of a minor star at the Tablet summer party, which happily coincided with the weekly’s publication of his account of the eighteenth-century Flemyngs, their bloody travails and the adventures of their first descendants. At the party the brothers would arrange their dinner plans for the next night. So in the little clusters of guests that came both ways along Pall Mall and up the steep steps of the Travellers’ Club, Flemyng and Abel made separate appearances, one having walked through the teatime crowds in the park and the other dropped off by cab. They climbed the stairs to the library, about ten minutes apart, and found Mungo in his element, framed by bookshelves and warm leather chairs, a few shafts of evening sunshine illuminating a cheerful tableau.

  Abel watched his brothers together – tossed into uncertainty, imagining that they might be loosened by an accident of birth from the family they’d thought was theirs, but beaming, and feeding happily on the energy generated by their crisis. Abel was still able to picture himself as an observer of the scene, and smiled at the eldest brother, in his element: it proved Mungo was one of them, after all. At the centre of the crowd, and glowing.

  For Flemyng, order was being restored for a moment. He moved and spoke easily, comfortable with the choreography of party talk. The
re was a mixture of Catholic grandees, a good sprinkling of pick-and-mix hangers-on who were limbering up for the French embassy garden soirée a little later, and a couple of wizened and talkative priests, stooped and smiling, one of them wearing, to Flemyng’s amusement, a soup-plate hat of the kind he thought the Vatican had long since banned. They held court in a corner like two presiding aunts at a family funeral, sizing up the crowd, watching for an exciting social faux pas, and willing the tide of gossip to lap around them.

  Abel hugged Mungo with a warmth that was evident to everyone. He whispered in his brother’s ear, ‘Can’t wait to talk some more.’

  Mungo’s article in the latest issue was passed around and admired for its story-telling. Abel scanned it. ‘There are parts I still can’t get. You’ll have to explain – at greater length.’ He waved the magazine. Mungo roared with laughter. ‘And keep the family story going,’ said Abel. ‘Will you put sex in the next one?’ And raised his eyes.

  At that Mungo heaved another laugh and, to Abel’s astonishment, winked.

  They were interrupted. A figure emerged from the crowd that had swarmed to the high open windows to catch the air, and took Mungo’s hand. ‘May I introduce myself? I admire your piece very much, and I’m also new on the Tablet advisory board so I’ll be seeing a bit of you. They pull us in, from wherever they can. I’m Archie Chester.’ They began to talk.