Ambrose gave her the disdainful look he reserved for politicians and the gutter press.
‘Ignore it, is my advice. Politicians are like children. Always seeking attention.’
‘Can’t ignore it, Papa. It’s news.’
‘Well if it’s his private life you’re talking about it shouldn’t be …’
He’d never approved of her work. She was relieved they didn’t have cable down here and couldn’t see how downmarket the News Channel was.
‘Unfortunately, Jer and I are going to have to leave. Pretty soon … I’m sorry.’
‘Charlotte …’ Verity whispered, tilting her head towards Ambrose. ‘You can’t …’
Charlie felt horribly torn. She knew in circumstances like these family should come first. But then, if she couldn’t talk to her father about anything that mattered …
‘It’s the job. Always on call, you know that, Mum.’
‘You’ll stay for lunch at least.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’d better see if it’s ready.’ Verity padded back to the kitchen.
‘They want me in too?’ Jeremy asked meekly.
‘Yes.’
Charlotte didn’t look at him. The thought that he’d traipsed round the office dropping hints that he was seeing her made her seethe.
Halfway through lunch Charlie’s bleeper trilled again.
‘How can you live with that thing …’ Verity gasped.
Charlie checked the display. Ted asks are you on your way yet? Mandy. She pushed the remains of her food away.
‘I’m sorry. We really do have to go.’
Her mother cried openly when they said goodbye in the hall. Charlie cried too.
‘I’ll come again soon,’ she assured her. ‘And ring me!’
Verity thought long-distance calls extravagant.
Charlotte returned one last time to the dining table where her father sat surrounded by the debris of lunch. He stood up stiffly and gave her a hug.
Hadn’t done that since she was a child, she realised.
She shivered. For a split second it had felt as if he sensed she wouldn’t see him alive again.
Hadden House – Warwickshire
14.50 hrs
A tall woman with yellow-blonde hair, Sally Bowen put down the trowel and looked at her watch. The chief constable had said he’d have someone round within half an hour. The flower-bed hardly needed weeding, but it kept her busy and away from the temptation to put the phone back on the hook.
There’d been two calls from the media before she’d decided to ring the police. The chief constable was a friend from the cocktail circuit. Should’ve rung sooner, he’d said, but then he didn’t know how used she was to covering for Stephen’s absences.
She removed her gardening gloves and pushed at her hair with elegant fingers. The sky was azure but rain was forecast. She turned to the eighteenth-century stone farmhouse which had been in her family for four generations. The long-case clock in the hall said nearly three. Too early for tea, but she would put the kettle on anyway. Aged forty-two, she looked fifty today in the pine-framed kitchen mirror. Bloody Stephen!
Being married to an MP was everything people said. All the shades of hell. Inconvenience, suspicion, the feeding of the bloody man’s ego. She’d had more than enough in the past eighteen years.
Stephen had been due in Warwickshire on Saturday morning. Phoned last Tuesday from Jakarta in typical self-congratulatory mood, to say he was having a couple of days sightseeing before flying home on Friday. Told her to confirm with his agent he’d be at the weekend ‘surgery’. Since then, not a word.
Reliability had never been a byword in their marriage. On countless occasions he’d broken promises and changed arrangements without telling her. So when he’d failed to appear on Saturday it was just typical Stephen. Then she’d begun to worry, checking the teletext for disasters in Indonesia.
At eleven on Saturday the agent had rung. She’d put off phoning him, for fear of finding that Stephen was there already and hadn’t told her.
‘Christ, Sally, there’s a huge list of people to see him.’ The agent had sounded exasperated. ‘Was he on the early train?’
‘I don’t know,’ she’d replied. ‘He was supposed to be coming back from Indonesia on Friday. The Foreign Office say he was making his own travel plans, and they’re still expecting him in on Monday.’
‘Not at the Westminster flat last night?’
‘I rang twice. Just the machine each time. What should I do?’
‘Maybe best to leave it a while. There’s probably some perfectly rational explanation …’
They both knew what. Another woman, or a game of cards …
It had been after midnight when she’d gone to bed. With the children both at boarding school she was alone in the house. In the dark silence of the countryside her imagination had run riot.
For Stephen, an evening in a casino could drag on interminably, his sense of time erased as he struggled to stem his losses. She guessed too that on the few occasions he won, a pearly smile and a trim bottom could turn his head and part him from his money. Sometimes she thought he had the hormones and sophistication of a pubertal teenager.
Twenty-eight minutes ago the chief constable had told her to leave the phone off the hook so she wouldn’t have to speak to journalists. But she worried suddenly that Stephen might be trying to ring and replaced it.
She crossed to the huge sash window that faced the drive. She loved their home. The house belonged to her not Stephen. And the money she and the children lived on was hers from a family trust, not his. As far as she knew, every penny he earned as a minister went on gambling.
Why the prime minister tolerated him she’d never understood. They must all know what he was like. Perhaps they didn’t. Maybe the screen of respectability she had provided had worked too well.
At times she’d been close to walking out on him, but had never had the courage. Maybe this little indiscretion would be the final straw.
She heard tyres on gravel and looked up the drive. A plain blue car but the two men inside were unmistakably police.
One turned out to be a flat-chested woman, in a mannish jacket. They introduced themselves as Special Branch.
She gave them tea and filled them in on her husband’s vague travel plans. From the look on their faces she guessed the chief constable had told them what Stephen was like.
‘Was he er … on his own for this sightseeing?’ the male officer asked, awkwardly.
‘I really don’t know. He didn’t say. But I doubt it.’
The man and woman glanced at one another.
‘Look, Mrs Bowen … we need to ask some personal questions. D’you mind?’ the man asked. ‘I can leave it to my colleague here if you’d rather just talk to a woman. I can take a stroll round your lovely garden.’
‘No. That’s sweet and old-fashioned of you, but let’s get on with it.’
‘Then, first off,’ the woman began, ‘how would you characterise your relationship with your husband?’
‘My relationship?’ Sally swallowed. ‘Umm … formal, I suppose would be the word. What I mean is … we don’t have a personal relationship any more. In other words … no sex.’
Her frankness made the male officer’s eyelids flicker.
‘Our marriage is a convenience. He needs me for his image as a family man … and that’s vital for an MP around here. And I don’t want our children to come from a broken home.’
‘But he does live here some of the time?’
‘Weekends when he has a surgery. And in the parliamentary recess when the children are home from school. He’s fond of them in his own way.’
‘And the flat in London?’
Sally understood the question.
‘Does he have another woman there, you mean? I simply don’t know. I’m told men can’t go without sex for long. But whether it’s call-girls or secretaries at the Commons, I have no idea.’
‘Ther
e’s never been an affair that you’ve known about?’
‘No. But then I’ve never asked.’
‘So you’ve no idea if there’s a woman with him in Indonesia?’
‘You really should put that question to the Foreign Office. Maybe they’ll communicate more with you than they do with me. To them I’m just the minister’s boring wife, who refuses to come up from the country for Whitehall cocktail parties.’
The phone rang. The one in the kitchen was cordless and emitted a shrill warble.
‘Shall I answer that for you, Mrs Bowen?’ The woman officer was on her feet. ‘If it’s press, you’re not wanting to speak to them, is that right?’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘Hello?’
A female voice at the other end.
‘No. I’m sorry she’s not available.’
More jabber in the earpiece.
‘Well, if she ever does want to talk to you, I’m sure she’ll find your number. Goodbye.’
‘Who was it?’ asked Sally.
‘The News Channel. That’s the new one on cable,’ the woman replied. ‘Don’t suppose you get it here.’
Sally shook her head. It was hard enough already limiting the amount of TV the children watched in the holidays.
‘Now, Mrs Bowen, I have to ask about money,’ the male officer continued. ‘Did your husband have any financial problems? I understand he gambles a little …’
‘A little? He’s an addict. Unfortunately he usually loses. Several years ago he got into serious debt. Over a hundred thousand pounds. Tried to get me to bail him out. I have my own money from family trusts, you see – and this house. Stephen asked me to mortgage it to pay his debts. Well, I refused.’
‘And his financial situation at the moment?’ the man asked.
‘No idea. He knows I won’t help, so even if he was in trouble he wouldn’t tell me.’
The police sat back and looked at one another.
‘Can I speak frankly?’ the man asked.
‘Of course. I have.’
‘Well, if your husband’s just been a naughty boy, but turns up at the Foreign Office tomorrow, then it’ll probably be best if there hasn’t been a great hue and cry. See what I mean?’
She did. But doing nothing didn’t seem right.
‘Can’t you make a few discreet enquiries? What about the ambassador in Jakarta? He might know something.’
‘Of course. Scotland Yard will deal with that. But what say we just keep an eye on things for the next twenty-four hours, yes? Give us a ring if you hear anything, right? Day or night. Or if you just want to talk …’ He gave her a card.
Sally stood in the porch until the blue car had gone. Then she heard the trill of the phone again and ran inside.
‘Hello?’ She tried to sound like her fourteen-year-old daughter.
‘Sally?’ The caller wasn’t fooled.
‘Peter.’ Stephen’s agent.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes. Just had the police here.’
‘Ah. What do they know?’
‘Nothing. They asked a lot of questions.’
‘And what are they going to do?’
‘Wait, basically. Until tomorrow. See if he turns up.’
‘Hmm. Have you had the press on?’
‘Non-stop. Can’t someone ring their editors? I mean, you know as well as I do what’s probably behind all this.’
‘Yes.’ His voice betrayed his weariness of nearly two decades of coping with Stephen Bowen. ‘I just think it’s ridiculous they allowed a government minister to be completely out of touch for five whole days.’
‘He was owed leave,’ she explained.
‘Even so. I’ll speak to the big boys in London about the media. Talk to you tomorrow, Sally.’
‘Thanks Peter.’
In the centre of the room was a low mahogany table. She picked up the silver photo frame that stood on it. She and Stephen on their wedding day eighteen years ago, a couple of months after he was elected to the seat. He was terribly good looking then. Still was.
And now someone else was getting her kicks from him. Sally flopped on to the cream, damask sofa, straightened her long, navy-blue cotton skirt and laid the photo face down on the table.
Good luck to her, whoever she was. And she would need luck. Because it would end in tears. With Stephen everything always did.
Northwest London
15.25 hrs
For Detective Sergeant Nick Randall this Sunday was special. A guaranteed day off. No interruptions, no demands to do an extra shift on overtime. All so he could see his daughter.
He’d not often put family first in his life – one reason he was now divorced. But Sandra was fifteen years old and very special to him. She lived with her mother. Lindy had rung last night to check he was coming, and to tell him there was trouble brewing. She’d found pills in Sandra’s room. Contraceptives and something else she thought was Ecstasy.
Randall turned the car into the grid of rundown suburban streets where they lived – red-brick semis with dead Vauxhalls in the paved front gardens. Not the sort of neighbourhood he wanted his daughter brought up in, but there was no choice.
He stamped on the brake. A football had rolled between parked cars. A small, brown face peeked out to check it was safe. Nick beckoned the boy on and waited until he was clear. Every other family here was Asian.
He’d been wet behind the ears when he married. A dropout from the comfortable middle-class home of his adoptive parents, he’d ended up in the army. At twenty-one as a lance-corporal in the Redcaps, Lindy had swum into his field of vision, a nubile tease of a girl, a squaddie’s wet dream. She was just seventeen, with a company sergeant major for a father who had the charm of a puff-adder.
Randall had been smitten. Blinded. All he knew was that he had to have her. Not easy with the CSM on the prowl. But he’d found a way. Four months later she’d announced she was pregnant. The CSM had told him to marry her or get his neck broken.
It was eight years after that when he bought the little house in Wembley. He’d just left the army after two years unaccompanied in Hong Kong. The marriage was in trouble and he’d signed with the police in the half-witted belief he would spend more time at home. He and Lindy had stuck it for another year.
Sandra had been eight when he moved out, her face a tight button of bewilderment. And now she was fifteen, on the pill and doing drugs like every other teenager in the nineteen nineties. On the back seat he’d brought a horror pack. Police photos to show her. Morgue shots of dead junkies.
He turned into the crescent and found a parking space two doors from the house, recognisable by its peeling front door and the old bath left in the garden by a lodger who’d done Lindy a plumbing job in lieu of rent.
He switched off the engine, then his mobile phone rang.
‘Fuck!’ He reached into his briefcase. ‘Yes?’
‘Nick? Chris here. In the Ops Room. Where are you?’
‘Wembley.’
‘Right …’ Hesitation in the voice. ‘Summat’s come up. We need you in.’
‘Chris I can’t. Not today. I told you why on Friday. In the pub.’
‘Sorry. Boss’s orders. He needs someone and you’re it.’
‘Look, at least give me a couple of hours.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Fuck you, Chris!’
‘It’s tough at the top, chum. Here in half an hour?’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
The Security Group Operations Room on the sixteenth floor of Scotland Yard’s Westminster headquarters was the combined nerve centre for Special Branch and the Anti-Terrorist Branch, a long, narrow room full of VDUs, with a panoramic view across northwest London.
On the back wall behind the duty sergeant’s desk hung the roster list known as the ‘chuff board’, so called because when a policeman got a day off he was ‘chuffed’. This being a Sunday, the list of those off duty should have been long, but following the City bomb,
the surveillance net had been widened. Manpower was stretched.
Four men were in the Ops Room when Randall walked in. Two looked up and nodded. Chris, the duty sergeant, studied his watch pointedly. Just thirty-five minutes since he’d rung.
‘What kept you?’ he needled.
‘Fuck off.’ Randall wasn’t in the mood.
‘Look, sorry to drag you in, mate,’ Chris said, softening. ‘I did try to tell him. He’s waiting for you.’ He pointed to the SIO’s office at the far end, separated by a glass partition.
The senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Terry Mostyn, was an old hand from the Irish Squad with a face like a large, lumpy potato and the look of a man who’d just emerged from under a car. He saw Nick coming and opened the door.
‘Sorry, ’bout this, old son,’ he mumbled. Mostyn was from Birmingham and sounded it. ‘I know today was sacred. Your kid, isn’t it?’
‘Yes sir. My daughter Sandra. Only see her once a month.’
‘Sorry. Couldn’t be helped. We’re down to the sodding bone.’
‘So, what’s up, sir?’
‘I’m taking you off the Revenue Men. For the time being, anyway.’
Nick gulped. Didn’t make sense. He knew as much about the case as anybody.
‘I’ve no alternative, son. I need someone experienced. There’s a government minister gone missing.’ Mostyn handed him a single sheet of typed paper.
Randall read the name Stephen Bowen.
‘Number two at the Foreign Office,’ Mostyn droned on. ‘Should’ve been in Warwickshire at the weekend but never turned up. Spent last week in Indonesia – that arms deal?’
Randall nodded, scanning the biog while listening. ‘I know the one you mean.’ The protesters he’d photographed at Downing Street.
‘At the end of his official visit, he took a few days leave, saying he’d travel back Friday. No one’s sure if he did. Could be woman trouble. Could be money. The Right Honourable Gentleman’s second home is a casino apparently.’
‘Sounds a natural for high office …’ Randall quipped.
‘The Foreign Office lost track of him, so Downing Street’s got the jitters. We’re being asked to start the ball rolling in case he’s still missing tomorrow morning, but to keep it discreet. The media’s been sniffing around apparently; the PM’s spin doctor has told them it’s just domestic.’
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