The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  He drained the lukewarm coffee and withdrew into himself. Everyone in the room would have their say and to a man and woman they would opt for an October election. It was the orthodoxy, the unchallenged product of group-think: you couldn’t find anyone in the media or political establishment who favoured an election now, although six months before the spring offensive had been all anyone talked about. Cannon knew that, the prime minister knew that, but still they had to sit there on a beautiful morning as the bloody economic adviser went through his predictions for lending activity and interest rates, food and oil prices, public spending, growth and employment in the second half of the year.

  From his chair beside the arcaded minstrel’s gallery he gazed at his boss with objective wonder. Like Lloyd George, Churchill, Thatcher and Blair, John Temple had energy and endurance. Having spent most of the night up with the American secretary of state, he’d completed forty lengths of the indoor pool donated to Chequers during the Nixon presidency, read all his papers and made notes for a speech. He did not stop and he never looked down – or back, perhaps another characteristic shared with the big names that had spent their weekends on this Buckinghamshire estate.

  Two hours elapsed. No drink, no food. Thank God for Bryant Maclean, who rose to leave, but said he was doing so knowing that the prime minister had got the answer he wanted: October was the only sensible choice.

  ‘I’m not persuaded of that,’ said Eden White from the window. ‘A spring election looks very doable.’ The voice was flat and curiously unimpressive. This was the answer Temple wanted. He needed to dive off the high board now, get it over with and settle into another term. Heads swung round. The two titans looked at each other across the room, grinning not with humour, but relish. Cannon remembered a poem by Ted Hughes about two wolves that meet in a forest – ‘Neither can make die the painful burning of the coal in its heart till the other’s body and the whole wood is its own.’

  White was utterly still; his face was polished alabaster in the reflected light from the courtyard. ‘From both the security as well as economic points of view,’ he continued, ‘I believe it’s better to go now. Prime minister, you know the circumstances you have to deal with, the criticisms you will face. Things are already beginning to improve. After years of the slump, difficulties with lending, there are signs that the public is feeling a little safer economically, yet they are still afraid for their physical well-being – two powerful reasons to support the status quo.’

  ‘That’s not what my papers have been saying,’ growled Maclean. ‘The polls are bad; the country is beset by problems that never get any better. You’ve got riots; you’ve got rot – a total breakdown of society in some of the big cities. You’ve all read what the bloody liberal columnists are saying about the country’s malaise. Look, John, people are beginning to like you; they appreciate your calm and competence. It’s taken time for them to get to know you, but now they are daring to think you’re doing a good job. But you need more time to prove it.’ He turned, shrugged and slipped a hand inside his cashmere jacket to knead the back of his hip. ‘And don’t forget you still have the option to go to the country next year.’

  ‘That would be a death wish,’ said White.

  ‘Not half as dangerous as going now,’ returned Bryant, and then he looked back at Temple and grinned. ‘But hey, prime minister, it’s your picnic; you choose the ant hill.’

  Was that a threat, or was Maclean disowning his power in the land? Everyone in the room knew that if Maclean were not onside the election would probably be lost, and if he defected to the Opposition with the full panoply of broadcast and print media plus the range of ‘independent’ attack dogs that he financed in the blogosphere, Temple would be crushed. But they also knew that Bryant Maclean faced scrutiny of his tax status as well as a monopoly inquiry if the Opposition won.

  A couple of beats later – the famously unnerving Temple pause – the prime minister rose with an unreadable expression. ‘You’re right to say what you have, Bryant. I appreciate your candour and your wisdom. You know how much we all value your advice. It was really very good of you to come all this way.’ He took him by the elbow and steered him under the minstrel’s gallery. ‘Are sure you won’t stay for lunch?’

  ‘No, I gotta be going. Gotta talk to the Chinese.’ Then he called out as they disappeared from view. ‘Cheerio, Eden. See you soon I hope. My regards to your wife.’ The wife that Eden had unceremoniously ditched after she suffered a nervous breakdown several years before.

  Cannon got up and followed. At that moment he was not so much dismayed as mystified by Temple bringing his two main supporters – both of whom lived abroad and so rarely saw each other – to come face to face and fall out. Now, whichever way he jumped he’d risk angering one of them. For a reason that remained totally obscure to Cannon, Temple seemed to have decided that would be Bryant Maclean.

  They reached the entrance. Temple signalled for Cannon to stay back and walked Maclean over the lawn to his helicopter. They stopped short of it, about a hundred yards from the house. Temple was having the last word, gesturing and craning to look Maclean in the eye. Maclean stared at the ground, then at the trees and after a minute or so began shaking his head. This he did not stop until he reached the door held open for him by one of the helicopter crew.

  Later, during the abysmal lunch of sandwiches in the Great Parlour conference room, the chief pollster used two screens to show the results of secret polling from the marginal constituencies, which – though few knew it – had been financed by Eden White. Because of the peculiarities of the British electoral system, the election would be decided by between 120,000 and 200,000 voters. The pollster team had names and addresses for that target group and every detail you could wish to know about their lives, from the brand of toothpaste they used to the number of times family members had visited hospital in the last four years. He knew the religion, the performance of the children at school, where they went on holiday, their commitment to the community – a particular obsession in these days of pro-social programmes for the responsible citizen. It was, he said, the most refined voter profiling in the history of elections: if you could get to these people – and there were ways of doing that which he wasn’t going to bore the prime minister with – he could guarantee a workable majority of twenty-five to thirty-five seats.

  They rose at three p.m. and all except Eden White, who went off to his room, moved to the western end of the Long Gallery for coffee. Through the window decorated with coats of arms, June Temple could be glimpsed beyond the bare trees flying about on the tennis court with a female member of the security detail. Temple watched fondly. It was Cannon’s moment.

  ‘Am I going to have to calm Maclean’s people down?’ he asked. ‘We don’t want them jumping all over this in tomorrow’s papers. Maclean is a hack first of all and he’ll leak if you parted on bad terms.’

  ‘Yes, I imagined he would,’ said Temple without interest.

  ‘Then we are going to have some trouble if he believes you’re going to call a snap election.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Temple, ‘but we needed to prepare the country somehow, even though a spring election has always been on the cards. Might as well have Maclean do it.’

  ‘You don’t want those bastards going over to the other side. I can talk to a couple of political editors this afternoon.’

  Temple put down his cup, spun the nearest of a pair of antique globes and gave an imperceptible nod of his head. ‘You look like you need a walk, Philip.’ He moved to the bookcases and opened a panel of shelves lined from top to bottom with dummy books. Behind it was an old linen-fold carved door, which he unlatched and closed behind them. Before the rest of the party knew what had happened they had vanished into a corridor of portraits. Cannon had seen the trick before and was amazed at the pleasure it still seemed to give Temple. ‘I’d like one of these in Number Ten – in the Cabinet Room preferably,’ he said.

  They stopped by Robert Walker’s portrait of
Oliver Cromwell in armour. ‘I need to get going on Maclean now,’ said Cannon. ‘If he’s really pissed off he will start running stuff on the web tonight.’

  ‘Yessss. I suppose he may be a little irritated because he doesn’t like being boxed in.’

  ‘How’s he boxed in? He is one of the most powerful men on earth. He doesn’t look boxed in to me.’

  ‘Put it this way – he’s now got all three major parties wanting to scrutinise his business empire in Britain.’

  ‘You threatened him with an inquiry – Jesus!’

  ‘I said it was on the political agenda and that being the case we obviously might have to respond to what was being said by the two Opposition parties. That was all. I didn’t threaten him.’

  ‘That was a threat, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ said Cannon. ‘And what can you possibly gain from it?’

  Temple worked his jaw as though chewing on this. ‘Well, he knows that he hasn’t got time to run to the other side and anyway it is the one thing the Opposition parties agree upon, so they are unlikely to go back on their word to gain his support at this stage. There’s nowhere for him to go.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘I am. If all three parties are threatening him it will affect his share price and Bryant cares a lot more about that than politics – or when I choose to hold an election.’

  ‘Or losing to Eden White?’

  ‘That too.’ He looked up at the picture of Cromwell. ‘The Great Lord Protector – an odd title to choose, don’t you think? Prime minister, first minister, president – none of these occurred to him. Yet I see what he meant. That is exactly what you feel leading the country: an acute desire to protect the people. I admire Cromwell more than most of the men who have occupied this house, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ said Cannon. ‘Standing there in that armour and sash like the Black Prince, he looks more royal than the king that the Parliamentarians beheaded.’

  ‘The armour is symbolic, Philip. They’d given up wearing full armour in battle by that time because of firearms. It’s a symbol of his readiness to defend and protect the Commonwealth.’

  Ten minutes later they were striding with three protection officers up the hill to Cymbeline’s Castle, an ancient earthwork not far from Chequers. From the summit there was a good view of the local village and the parish church, but no sooner had they got there than Temple set off southwards across the rolling grassland.

  Cannon hurried to catch him up. ‘Will you tell me exactly when you are going to call the election?’

  ‘Certainly Philip – on Tuesday March 26th. The election will be held a month later on April 24th. That will give us about four and a half weeks of campaigning.’

  ‘Then I’ll go back to London tonight, if you don’t mind. There’s going to be a lot to do.’

  ‘Not quite yet, if you don’t mind,’ he said firmly. ‘We’ve got one or two more meetings and I want to show you something over there.’

  A few hundred yards on they reached two large, round tanks, one covered and the other open to the air – the water supply for Chequers. Around the open tank several men in protective gear were sampling the water. A Range Rover was parked nearby, from which appeared Harry Tombs, the prime minister’s de facto personal photographer, who was always on hand at Chequers. Temple started putting on one of the suits worn by the men and then made his way to the edge of the open reservoir.

  ‘When President Nixon visited Edward Heath in the seventies,’ he said, peering into the water, ‘the Secret Service tested the water supply. They were right. Did you know that as of this morning, we’ve got six more reservoirs affected by TRA?’

  ‘Yes, I read that.’

  ‘That’s ten in all – and they have only just begun checking. We may have a very large problem on our hands. So we’ll get some pictures taken and you can distribute them this evening.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ asked Cannon out of earshot of the others. ‘It looks like you’re stoking a crisis and that may not be the wisest thing to do with an election in five or six weeks’ time. And this tank hasn’t got a trace of red algae – or has it?’

  ‘No, but you’re missing the point. This will show that I’m taking the crisis seriously. We all have to.’ He lowered a plastic visor from the safety helmet. ‘Remember Cromwell’s armour. This is symbolic, Philip, symbolic of my protective role.’

  19

  Country Matters

  A few moments after the postman left, Nock appeared carrying a toolbox and an engine in a sling.

  ‘So you’ve got your first post – word soon gets about the place is occupied.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, looking down. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The pump for your water supply, which needs some attention: I’ll use the workbench out the back if that’s OK.’

  She sat at the table and smoked, wondering about Nock. Presently she took out the unmarked envelope and looked at the contents. There were two sheets of unsigned paper. One warned that everything she did or said at the cottage was likely to be monitored and that on no account should she send an email or make a call that she wasn’t happy to be seen or heard by a third party.

  On the second sheet there was a map reference, which she went to look up on Eyam’s Ordnance Survey map of the area. The spot was several miles to the north-west of Dove Valley. The instructions told her to come alone at any time over the weekend, tell no one where she was going and avoid being followed, which would mean leaving under cover of darkness. Beneath it was typed a sentence: ‘Leave from that which is named for the Silures and walk back through time to those that remember the Ordivices.’

  The code – or in her opinion a damned silly riddle – had something of Eyam about it, and it was only that which made her contemplate deciphering it and following its instructions.

  ‘Who or what are the Silures and Ordovices?’ she asked Nock when he appeared with the motor.

  He blinked at her. ‘I think they are Celtic tribes of Wales. One lived in the north, the other in the south. But don’t take my word for it. I only know about them because their names were given to rock groups. I did a little basic geology as an undergrad.’

  ‘Rock groups,’ she said and thought of the run of geology volumes beneath the shelf where she’d found The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor. She found Geology of the Marches and returned to the garden bench. The book was peppered with Eyam’s notes – summaries of what he had read, together with the dates that he had explored different parts of a landscape that had begun life 500 million years ago, sixty degrees south of the equator. The story of its migration north to collide with the landmass that now forms Scotland interested her, but she found nothing to decode the sentence. At length she laid the book aside and made sandwiches, which they ate with a couple of bottles of beer at the end of the garden. Even at this distance from the house their conversation was murmured.

  ‘You fix the pump?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘It must be nice to be so practical.’

  ‘Well, I can’t figure all this out,’ he said.

  ‘You mean Hugh Russell’s death. How much did David tell you about his own problems?’

  ‘Not much, but I knew it got serious before he left. He just went out of range, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I am struggling with some of it myself.’ She stopped and looked into his tranquil blue eyes. ‘You’re not hiding anything from me, Sean, are you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, holding the beer bottle to his lips.

  There was silence between them. She lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Eyam was right. Nock wasn’t kosher.

  ‘I believe he came close to telling me something but never got round to it,’ he said eventually. ‘I wish he had now. It would explain things – why he went off without saying goodbye. To tell the truth I was a bit hurt.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ she nodded.

  ‘But you understand more than I do?’

&nb
sp; She shrugged.

  ‘That’s cool with me,’ he said with an odd, agonised expression. ‘Don’t tell me. I came out here for a life of peace.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. What were you doing before, Sean?’

  ‘I was a researcher with the Earth Science and Engineering Department at Imperial in London – dam structures and stuff – then I got sick of London and there was some trouble with the police and I ended up here.’ He swept his hand across the view of the valley. ‘You can have a good life here if you don’t mind the quiet.’

  ‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ve got to be going.’

  ‘You want company?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘And you won’t tell me where you’re going?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, stick to the back roads and you should be all right. You’ve got my number?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be fine,’ she replied, moving to the car and thinking about Hugh Russell leaving a few days before.

  The day was slipping away from Philip Cannon. It was now clear to him that he would not get back to London until late that night or even the next morning. Temple expected him to attend two more meetings and a dinner.

  The first of these took place in the Great Parlour conference room and went under the heading of a scientific briefing, in effect an unminuted meeting of the Security Council without – unsurprisingly – Admiral Piper. A procession of scientists wearing casual clothes gave their views on TRA. It soon became obvious that those who suggested the problem was not the threat to public health claimed in the tabloids, or that it could be handled with less hysteria, were not as welcome as those armed with theories about the likely cause of the algae and its means of spreading. These were treated to an intense cross-examination by the prime minister, who had mastered a little of the science of harmful algae blooms and several times used the word anatoxin, which he unnecessarily explained was a compound that caused convulsions – a kind of neurological meltdown and respiratory paralysis. The latest data was that fifteen reservoirs and lakes were now affected; the algae seemed to be able to travel hundreds of miles and leap over the quarantine lines that had been set up.