Urquhart turned off as the TV reporter continued the saga of the Royal aide, whom he described as 'much respected and well liked', against a background of footage from the just-completed tour. 'Selfish bastard,' Stamper muttered. 'I thought you wanted him out,' Sally interjected.
'We wanted him hung, not walking into the sunset with the applause of the crowd ringing in his ears,' snapped Stamper. Sally suspected he was irritated by her presence in what had formerly been an all-male preserve.
'Don't fret, Tim,' Urquhart responded. 'Our target was not Mycroft, but the King. And even as he surveys his realm from the mountain top, the ground beneath his feet is beginning to crumble. Almost time to give him a helping hand. In the small of the back, I think.'
'But you only have a week before… Those images of the tour are killing you, Francis,' she said softly, marvelling at his composure.
He looked at her with narrowed, hard eyes, as if scolding her for lacking faith. 'But there are images, dear Sally, and there are images.' A dark smile split his face but his eyes remained like rock. He crossed to his desk, extracting a small key from his wallet before slowly unlocking a top drawer. He extracted a large manila envelope and spilled its contents across the desk. Every action was meticulous, like a craftsman jeweller displaying his most precious stones. There were photographs, perhaps a dozen of them, all in colour, which he sorted through to select two, holding them up so that Sally and Stamper could clearly see. 'What do you think of them?'
She was uncertain whether he meant the photographs or the pair of breasts they prominently displayed. The two photographs, as all the others, revealed the uninhibited charms of Princess Charlotte. The only variation on the central theme was the precise position of her body and the contortions of the young man with her. 'Oh, I say,' breathed Stamper.
'One of the more onerous burdens of being Prime Minister is that one is entrusted with a variety of secrets. Stories that are never told. Such as the tale of a young military equerry to the Princess who, fearing that his favoured position at the side and on top of the Princess was in jeopardy, took out an insurance policy in the form of these photographs.'
'Oh, I say,' Stamper said once more as he rifled through the other shots.
'It was the equerry's bad luck,' Urquhart continued, 'that he should try to encash the policy with the wrong man, an investigative journalist who also happens to be a former operative for the security services. And so the photographs finished up in my drawer while the unfortunate lovesick boy has been told in no uncertain terms that his testicles will be ripped from his body should any copies find their way around Fleet Street.' He took back the photographs, which Stamper had been clinging to perhaps a moment too long. 'Something tells me, Timothy, that I wouldn't wish to be in his predicament in a few days' time.'
The two men laughed bawdily, but Urquhart noticed that Sally seemed not to be enjoying the moment. 'Something bothering you, Sally?' 'It doesn't feel right. It's the King who is doing the damage to you, not Mycroft or the Princess.' 'The limbs first…' 'But she's done nothing. She's not involved.' 'Bloody soon will be,' snorted Stamper.
'Call it an occupational hazard,' Urquhart added. His smile was stretching more thinly.
'I can't help thinking of her family. The effect on her children.' An edge of stubbornness was beginning to creep into her voice and her full, expressive lips pouted in defiance.
His response was slow and stonily firm. 'War breeds misery. There are many unfortunate victims.'
'Her only sin, Francis, is to be saddled with a healthy sex drive and an inbred English wimp for a husband.' 'Her sin is getting caught.' 'Only because she's a woman!'
'Spare me the collective feminism,' Urquhart snapped in exasperation. 'She's spent a lifetime living off the fat served at the Royal table, and the time has come for her to pay the bill.'
She was about to respond but she saw his eyes flare and pulled herself back. She wasn't going to win this argument and, in pursuing it, she might lose much more. She told herself not to be so naive. Hadn't she always known that a woman's sex was no more than a tool, a weapon, which as often as not fell into the hands of men? She turned away, conceding.
'Tim, make sure these get a good airing, will you? Just a couple for the moment. Leave the rest.'
Stamper nodded and took the opportunity to bend over the desk and rifle once more through the photographs. 'Now, Tim. There's a good fellow.'
Stamper's head came up sharply, his eyes flickering as he looked first at Urquhart, then at Sally, then back to Urquhart. The ember of understanding began to glow in his eyes, and with it rivalry. She was muscling in on his relationship with the boss, and had an advantage not even Stamper with all his guile and gamescraft could match.
'I'll get right to it, Francis.' He gathered up two of the images and looked sharply at Sally. 'Night, one and all.' Then he was gone.
Neither of them spoke for some time. Urquhart tried to appear nonchalant, taking great care to adjust the razor-sharp creases of his trousers, but the softness of the words when eventually they came belied their menace. 'Don't go coy on me now, O Gypsy.' 'She's going to get a very raw deal out of this one.' 'It's them or me.' 'I know.' 'Still on side?'
In answer, she crossed slowly to him and kissed him passionately, forcing her body up against his and her tongue into his mouth. Within seconds his hands were fondling, bruising. She knew his instincts were angry, animal. Roughly he bent her forward across his desk, sweeping his pen tray and telephone to one side and knocking over a framed photograph of his wife. Her skirt was lifted over her back and he was at her, tearing at her underwear, forcing himself inside, kneading the flesh of her buttocks with such intensity that she winced at the bite of his nails. She was prostrate across the desk, her nose and cheek forced flat into the leather top. And she remembered. As a young girl of perhaps thirteen she had taken a short cut through the back alleys of Dorchester on her way to the cinema and there had come face to face with a woman, bent low across the hood of a car. She was black, with bright crimson lips and gaudy eyes which were hard, impatient, bored. The man behind her was fat and white and had sworn at Sally, foul, disgusting words, but he had not stopped. The memory crowded back in all its chilling clarity, as Urquhart's nails dug ever more deeply into her skin and her face was pressed painfully into the scattering of photographs across the desktop. She felt like crying, not in ecstasy but in pain and degradation. Instead, she simply bit her lip.
Mycroft found him on the moors above Balmoral, where he often went when troubled and wanting to be alone, even in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and an easterly wind which had found nothing to obstruct or deflect it since it had gathered strength in the shadows of the Urals two thousand miles away. There were ageless spirits up there, he had once said, which lurked in the crannies of the granite outcrops and sang as they ran with the wind through the rough heather, long after the deer had sought the shelter of lower pastures. The King had seen him coming, but had not offered any greeting. 'I had no choice. We had no choice.'
'We? Since when was I consulted?' The regal tone betrayed a sense of insult and personal hurt. The anger – or was it solely the wind? – brought a bucolic flush to his cheeks and his words came slowly. 'I would have stuck by you.'
'You think I didn't realize that?' It was Mycroft's turn for exasperation. 'That's why I had to take the decision out of your hands. It's time to start following your head rather than your heart.' 'You have committed no offence, David, broken no law.' 'Since when did such things matter? I would have become a monumental distraction. Instead of listening to you they would have been sniggering behind their hands at me. You've taken such personal risks to carry your message across without interference and I would simply have got in the way, another excuse for them to sidetrack and confuse. Don't you see? I didn't resign in spite of you. I resigned because of you.' He paused, searching the mists which clung to the moorland around them and burying himself deeper inside the borrowed ski jacket. 'And, of cours
e, there's someone else. I had to think of him, too. Protect him.' 'I feel almost jealous.'
'That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.' Mycroft's hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away. 'What's his name?' 'Kenny.' 'He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.'
The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.
'Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,' Mycroft explained.
'Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.'
'I'm very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.'
The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land. 'It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.' 'Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.' 'Meaning?' 'I'm not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.' 'By whom?'
'By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.' 'It would require someone who could sink very low.' 'The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of you, have no doubts. There will be more.' 'Then I hope I can find your courage.'
'You already have. All you need is the courage to face up to yourself, that's what you said. To play the man – your own words. Facing up to others holds fewer torments, believe me. But I think you already know that.'
'I shall need your advice, David, more than ever if, as you say, it is all to get worse.'
Slowly at first, then with gathering force, drops of cold-hardened rain began to fall across the two lonely figures. Darkness was encroaching fast.
'Then the best advice I have for you, Sir, is for us to get off this bloody moor before we both freeze to death and save Francis Urquhart the bother.'
February: The Second Week
It took less than a second for the phone to be answered in the foreign-currency dealing room at one of the City's leading finance houses which squatted alongside the Thames, in a site near to where the Great Fire that had destroyed half of London more than three centuries earlier had started. It wouldn't take another fire to ruin the City again, they joked, just another Japanese takeover.
The phones never took long to be answered. The difference between disaster and success could often be measured in seconds, and the chief currency dealer couldn't afford to be caught napping by either the markets or any of the seventeen other currency dealers, all of whom envied his job and the commissions that went with it. He dragged his thoughts away from the ruinously fashionable forty-foot cruiser he had just agreed to purchase to concentrate on the voice at the end of the phone. It was not, however, a deal, but an enquiry from one of his many press contacts. 'Heard any rumours about some scandal at the Palace, Jim?' 'What rumours?'
'Oh, nothing very specific. Simply a buzz that there's something brewing which is just about to blow the Royal Yacht out of the water.' He didn't see the dealer wince. 'My editor's asking us all to check around, bit of a dragnet, really. But something's smelling pretty ripe.'
The dealer's eyes flashed up to his screen yet again, checking the mixture of red, black and yellow figures. Sterling seemed to be fine, all the attention today was on the rouble following news of a fresh outbreak of food riots in Moscow. A cripplingly severe winter seemed to have frozen both the capacity of its leaders and the nerve of its foreign exchanges. The dealer rubbed his eyes to make sure; his eyes ached from the constant strain, yet he didn't dare wear his prescription glasses in the office. His position was all about maintaining confidence and at thirty-seven he couldn't afford the slightest sign of age or physical decline; there were too many waiting eagerly to push him off his seat. 'Heard nothing this end, Pete. There's no activity in the markets.'
'I can tell you, the flies are definitely beginning to buzz at this end.'
'Maybe it's just another load of Royal bullshit being spread about the Royal parks.'
'Yeah, maybe,' responded the journalist, sounding unconvinced. 'Let me know if you hear anything, will you?'
The dealer punched the button to disconnect the line and returned to massaging his eyeballs while trying to figure out how he was going to stretch his already crippling mortgage to cover his latest material indulgence. He was dreaming of naked girls covered in smiles and coconut oil and laid out across glass-fibre reinforced with kevlar when the phone rang again. It was a client who had heard similar rumours and who wanted to know whether to make a quick switch into dollars or yen. More flies. And as the dealer looked once again at the screen, the sterling figures began to flash red. A fall. Not much of one, only a few pips, but it was another hint. Could he afford to ignore them? Hell, he was getting too old for this, maybe he should pack it all in and spend a year sailing around the Caribbean before getting himself a proper job. But not yet, not before he had made one last big hit, to cover the boat and the bloody mortgage. He tuned in his aching brain to the box that connected him to the brokers and their constant dangling of buy and sell prices, pressing the button which put him through.
'Cable?' he enquired. It was dealers' kvetch for the price of sterling, harking back to the days when the two great financial empires of London and New York were connected only by unquenchable avarice and a submarine cable.
'Twenty, twenty-five. Five by ten,' came the crackling response. Even in this age of space travel they still couldn't fix the lines connecting them with the brokers' rooms less than a sparrow's fart away. Or were his ears going, too? He sighed. In for a penny, in for five million. 'Yours. Five.' The selling had begun.
The door to the editor's office had been slammed shut. It wouldn't make any difference; everybody in the building would hear about it within minutes. The deputy, news and picture editors stood around the chief editor's desk in a formation which gave the impression of Sioux circling a wagon train, but he wasn't giving up without a fight.
'I'm not holding the front page for this. They're disgusting. An invasion of privacy.'
'They're news,' responded his deputy through clenched teeth.
'You know the proprietor's breakfast rule. Nothing on the front page that would offend two old ladies reading the paper over breakfast,' the editor countered.
'That's why there's no one other than old women who read our paper nowadays!'
The editor wanted to shove the words straight back down his pushy deputy's throat, but since they were precisely those he had used in his increasingly frequent rows with the ageing proprietor, he couldn't. He stared once again at the two plate-sized photographs which had already been cropped in red pencil to concentrate the attention away from extraneous features such as the bed, the disarranged pillows and entangled legs, and onto the body and face of the Princess. 'We can't. It's simply obscene.'
Without a word the picture editor leaned across the desk and, with red pencil and ruler, drew two neat lines cutting both photographs just above the nipple. What was left had all been seen before in countless beach photographs of the Princess, but it made no fundamental difference; the expression on her face, the arched back and the tongue in her ear told the whole story. 'What does the Palace have to say?' the editor enquired wearily.
'Sweet bugger all. Since Mycroft publicly deflowered himself they're in something of a mess.'
'First Mycroft, now this…' The editor shook his head, conscious that he would be hounded off the society dinner circuit if these went out under his name. He found another burst of resistance. 'Look, this isn't the bloody French Revolution. I will not be the one to drag the Royal Family to the guillotine.'
'There's a real public issue
here,' the news editor interjected, somewhat more quietly than the deputy. 'The King involves himself in all sorts of matters, stirring up political controversy, while quite clearly he is ignoring what's going on under his own palace roof. He's supposed to be the personal embodiment of the nation's morality, not running a knocking shop. He's turned out to have more blind eyes than Nelson.'
The editor lowered his head. Sterling had already dipped nearly two cents on the rumours; it was inflicting real harm.
'No one's asking you to lead a revolution, just keep step with the others.' The deputy took up the cudgels once more. 'These piccies are all over town. By morning we might be the only paper not carrying them.'
'I disagree. I don't give a damn about the foreign rags. This is a British affair. Every editor in this town knows the consequences of using these photos. No one's going to rush, not in British newspapers. No.' He braced his shoulders with patriotic pride and shook his head in determined fashion. 'We are not going to use them unless we know for certain that someone else has. It may be throwing away a scoop, but it's the kind of scoop I don't want etched on my gravestone.'
The deputy was about to make some comment that the accountants were already chiselling the circulation figures on his gravestone when the door burst open and the gossip columnist rushed in. He was too excited and breathless to make any sense, his words wrapping themselves in impenetrable knots, until in exasperation he threw his hands in the air and made a dive for the TV remote control on the editor's desk. He punched the button to call up one of the satellite news channels. It was German-owned, run out of Luxembourg and had a footprint that covered half of Europe, including most of Southern England. As the screen came to life they were greeted with the images of an ecstatic Princess Charlotte, nipples and all. Without a further word the deputy grabbed the pictures and rushed off to save the front page.
To play the king fu-2 Page 22
