The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  ‘But why did he need you?’

  ‘These things don’t start out as a plan, but as it worked out he built an organisation of good people.’

  ‘You mean Diana Kidd and her Bell Ringers?’

  ‘Can you just shut the hell up for a moment, Sis?’ he said fiercely. ‘And why don’t you relax and sit down?’ She perched on the arm of the chair opposite him and rested one foot on a low coffee table. Eyam continued. ‘Tony’s organisation was rather bigger than you imagine. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Bell Ringers. To these people he was known as Eclipse. He chose that as his code name because he believed that the darkness would lift eventually. He was philosophically an optimist. Very few people knew who Eclipse was.’

  ‘Where did you fit in?’

  ‘I was the evidence – I knew how to get it and organise it. I knew how everything fitted together: the money, the policy, the people behind it and the implementation.’

  ‘So why did you go and shoot your mouth off at the Intelligence and Security Committee?’

  ‘We didn’t start out with a plan. Mary MacCullum’s information was leaked not to me, but to Sidney Hale at the ISC. He came to me privately. That was the moment that I decided to put it into the very confined public domain of Westminster village and try to start a debate. Tony was behind the leak. Mary was in touch with him from an early stage, but she never told him about her sister. Mary was an early Bell Ringer and contributed to one of his sites. Eventually she made contact with him. Through her trial and imprisonment she protected him. Never said a word.’

  ‘So after all that you arrive in High Castle with your hoard of documents and start planning with Tony Swift. It seems all a bit amateurish.’

  ‘I had acquired most of what we needed by the second appearance at the ISC. It was merely an exercise to establish the existence of DEEP TRUTH. The reaction that followed took us by surprise. So we had to play things cool and wait. If I had gone public then I would have faced prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and received a term in jail. Nothing would have come out. The issue would have been buried. We decided then to wait until an election.’

  ‘You still could be sent to jail.’

  ‘The threat seems rather theoretical now,’ he said, glancing at her.

  ‘Why did they start watching you in the country after Temple had agreed to leave you alone?’

  ‘Something I did, maybe. We had no idea what it was, a phone call, a tip-off, a piece of local intelligence. Who knows? By that time we had put everything in place and I had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, and things didn’t look too good. Then I discovered what they had put on my computer. You know the rest.’

  ‘So Swift had the idea of faking your death?’

  ‘Yes, though my father came up with the same solution. I talked to him a lot in the weeks before he died. He was very adept with money and made most of the arrangements for me.’

  ‘Yeah, I wondered why he hadn’t left you anything.’

  ‘That’s because he’d already made it over to me.’

  ‘Was there a lot of money?’

  ‘Yes, that’s how I paid for everything. There still is and it will all come to you eventually, Sis – my only living relation.’ He grinned.

  ‘I’m beginning to think that I liked you better when you were dead,’ she said, also smiling. ‘Oh, God, this is such an appalling mess, Eyam.’

  ‘Actually, it isn’t. We have this one opportunity. Everything is right. One way or another, all that information will be pitched into the general election and Temple and Eden White will be exposed. Let the people decide.’

  ‘That’s what worries me.’ Her gaze travelled around the soulless sitting room with its empty glass cabinet and dreadful oil studies of ballet dancers, no doubt bought in bulk to decorate what was described as an ‘executive haven’. ‘God, I wish you had let me love you, Eyam,’ she said as her eyes came to rest on him.

  He flinched, then his fingers, which were formed in a lattice bowl under his chin, opened in submission. ‘We may disagree on the details of that statement, particularly the word let, but what does it matter now? Here we sit, “one another’s best’’. That’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘“Our hands firmly cemented with a fast balm.”’

  ‘Well remembered, Sis.’

  ‘I should do – you were obsessed with John Donne. You said you were sure that he walked in New College cloisters, although I seem to remember he was at another college.’

  ‘Hertford when it was called Hart Hall.’

  ‘And you used to recite his poems from that bench on the green instead of reading economics papers.’

  ‘God, what a poseur!’

  ‘No, you were brilliant and beautiful and a little bit conceited.’

  ‘Come here, Sis,’ he said.

  She stood. ‘I will if you never call me Sister again.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’ He patted the cushion beside him.

  She moved over to him and he sank back on the sofa with his emaciated grin spreading with expectation and a kind of curiosity. She sat down on the edge and turned to look at him, nervous or inexplicably shy – she didn’t know which – and he laid a hand on her shoulder, then his splayed fingers ran up through her hair. She sighed and let her head fall forward, luxuriating to his touch. ‘Can you do this?’

  ‘Take you to bed? Yes, of course I can.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant are you able to get through the next couple of days on those drugs? Have you got the strength?’

  ‘Yes, I feel pretty good at the moment. My old self.’

  ‘Your old self?’ she said, her eyes closing. ‘No, your old self is gone: you’re different. Perhaps we did bury part of you at that funeral. You’re a lot less pompous and not quite so pleased with yourself.’ For a minute or two he stroked her head. His fingers strayed to her ears and neck and travelled across her face, lightly tracing the line of her eyebrows and nose. When she could bear it no longer, she twisted round and seized hold of his face with both hands and kissed him, at first lightly then with an animal need that she had hardly known was there. His hands moved up to her shoulders. She straddled him and he pulled her weight down on him and murmured her name, relishing its novelty. She tried to remember what it had been like during those few days and nights in his college rooms, but all the memories which she’d kept in such good repair seemed to have been suddenly erased, like a dream on waking, and now she wondered whether it had been fantasy. She stopped kissing him, pulled back and gazed down at him. ‘We have done this before, haven’t we? I mean, I didn’t imagine it all?’

  He moved his hands to her ribcage and gripped her just beneath her breasts. ‘Yes, and I remember it very well, and you talked all the time.’

  ‘No, that was some other lover of yours.’

  ‘No, it was you: you didn’t stop talking – day and night on and on and on.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry. I was probably so thrilled that I was in bed with you that I couldn’t shut up.’

  Eyam grunted sceptically then put his hand up to her cheek. ‘You are loved,’ he said.

  She frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s not small print, Kate. It means that you are loved. Loved by me and needed by me and admired by me and that you cause such awe in me, and now such pride, that I feel utterly at a loss to know how to tell you. I am stricken with love. It was right there on the tip of my tongue when I found you in my old suede jacket poking around that shed. That is all I wanted to say when I saw you again, but then you slapped me – quite right too, but I felt less like saying it after that.’ He stopped and considered her, his hand brushing the hair from her face so that he could look into her eyes. ‘You’ve changed too: you’re much more – how do I put it? – self-possessed. You are utterly yourself. I’ve never met anyone who’s so completely uninfluenced by the world, untroubled by what people think.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,�
�� she whispered. ‘I’m just an average, pathetically oversensitive, self-absorbed human being. I care what people think about me.’

  He snorted a laugh and reached up and kissed her. ‘Delusion,’ he said. Then she just collapsed on him and sank her face into his hair and kissed his neck. He undid the buttons of her shirt, then the buckle of her belt and slipped his hand, rather expertly she noted, inside her waistband. He withdrew to unclip the fastener of her bra.

  ‘What the hell were we thinking about in New York?’ she said to his ear. ‘Why didn’t we go to bed then?’

  She felt his shoulders lift in a shrug. ‘We weren’t paying attention.’

  ‘No, you weren’t paying attention,’ she said, biting his neck. ‘Your head was full of the UN and swishing about with Temple in an armoured limousine.’

  ‘That’s unfair,’ he said and pushed her up a little. Her bra was undone and hung loose. He reached up to kiss her breast, his hand cupping and bringing it to his mouth. She heard herself let out a ridiculous moan but held his head there none the less, desperate that he should not stop.

  At length his head fell back. ‘I need to lie down,’ he said.

  They stumbled to the bedroom, where she tore the ghastly dragon-motif cover from the bed and slipped out of her clothes. Eyam stood watching her, fascinated. Naked, she shuffled on her knees across the bed to help him with his shirt and T-shirt, then his trousers. ‘Kilmartin’s right. You’ve got to get something to wear.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. He was naked and again she thought how good he looked. He shivered and she could feel the goose pimples rising across his back.

  ‘Come,’ she said, pulling him towards her.

  ‘I hope to.’

  ‘Such a very bad joke.’

  They slipped between the sheets and she held his head across her chest. ‘You’ve got to get treatment,’ she said to the crown of his head. ‘I can’t lose you a second time. I could not go through that again.’

  ‘But I heard you were rather composed at my funeral.’

  ‘More so than Darsh,’ she said and giggled. ‘I wish he’d slugged Glenny.’

  He laughed into her flesh and then began to move across her belly with his lips, slowly, deliberately, inch by inch, first circling her navel and then moving up to her breasts, tasting her and murmuring that he had screwed up his life and should have been doing this every night for the last decade; and what did he know about anything if he let such a beautiful woman – his complete friend – languish in New York while he was wasting time with a lot of fucking power-crazed mediocrities. All he wanted was to return to the Dove and wake with her in the morning and, come winter or summer, look across the valley and make love to her and live.

  The words came with his kisses, each one planted on her skin, impregnating it with the message of hopeless devotion and love. She absorbed them and responded with her own thrilled endearments, though with nothing like the fluency of Eyam’s requisition of her body. He whispered that he had never expected to make love again, let alone to her. Although he did not say it, she knew that he was thinking that this might be the last time.

  She drew his head up so that she could look at him. He moved his hand been her legs and let it graze and explore with the tiniest of movements until she closed her eyes and descended into herself to observe the regular pulses of pleasure build until she climaxed quite suddenly and opened her eyes to Eyam’s steady gaze. She kissed him before pressing one hand on his shoulder to push him on his back. Then she straddled him and made love to him with a slow, rhythmic purpose.

  They slept.

  At five a.m. she woke to an insistent buzzing. Her mind groped for explanation. The alarm? No. The timer on the cooker? No.

  ‘It’s the bloody door,’ she whispered. ‘Someone’s at the door.’

  She felt Eyam tense beside her. ‘See if they go away,’ he said.

  But the noise continued.

  ‘Maybe it’s Kilmartin or Freddie,’ she said. ‘They may need to be let in.’

  She put the light on and scrambled to find her clothes.

  Eyam was now sitting up, alert. She went to the intercom and pressed the button.

  A voice sounded. ‘It’s Oliver Mermagen, Kate. Can you let me in? I want to speak to you.’

  ‘Oliver, for God’s sake. What time is it? I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘It’s very important that I talk to you.’

  Eyam was behind her, fully dressed and doing up his shoes.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said and took her finger off the button.

  ‘You’d better find out what he wants. I can make myself scarce, then come back.’

  ‘There’s a fire exit on the top landing.’

  ‘Can’t this wait?’ she said into the intercom. Mermagen replied that it was a matter of great urgency. She watched Eyam grab his jacket and seize the drugs from the table.

  ‘OK, I’ll get dressed,’ she said to Mermagen. ‘Wait there.’

  ‘No, buzz me up, Kate. There’s no time to lose.’

  She released her finger and turned to Eyam. ‘He may have someone with him. Be careful.’

  ‘If they knew I was here, they’d be storming the place. Phone me when he’s gone.’ He slipped from the door and made for the stairs.

  ‘Are you alone?’ she asked Mermagen.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake open the door.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, pressing the second button. ‘I’ll put something on.’ She glanced round the room and noticed the two empty glasses, the bottle of wine and the double indentation in the cushions of the sofa. Having cleared and straightened everything, she arrived back at the door as Mermagen’s frantic knocking began.

  ‘What do you want at this hour, Oliver?’ she demanded as she opened the door. He was wearing a raincoat and a tweed cap that made him look as if he had just come from some country pursuit.

  He took the cap off and shook it. ‘It’s good to see you, Kate, even in these trying circumstances.’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Very simple: you were obviously not in a hotel. I had my assistant check the community charge records for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where all short-term lets have to be registered. You probably didn’t know that. She simply found the address for the apartment let out to Calverts. I am the only person who knows where you are, Kate. Is Eyam with you?’ he asked, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Ah, but no doubt you know how to get hold of him.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Initially, some coffee, then I want to put a proposition to you.’

  ‘Tell me while I make it,’ she said. Mermagen followed her to the kitchen, sat down and placed his cap on the table. ‘I tried calling you. But your phone wasn’t switched on. I left half a dozen messages for you.’

  ‘Oh really,’ she said.

  ‘As I explained, I’ve been authorised to act as an intermediary by Eden White and to put a deal to you. The long and short of it is that he will guarantee you and Eyam safe passage out of the country in exchange for all the information that Eyam possesses on government systems and of course all the supporting evidence. He further guarantees that once abroad you will not be threatened or in any way disturbed. He still nurtures a deep affection and respect for David Eyam and he does not want this affair to end unhappily.’

  ‘By that you mean . . .’

  ‘There are any number of outcomes that you can imagine for yourself.’

  ‘A sniper’s bullet, a truckload of sand.’

  Mermagen shook his head with annoyance. ‘You have very little time, Kate. I will soon be compelled to say where I have seen you. You will be arrested and they will pick Eyam up. He will be charged and put in jail.’ The kettle boiled and she poured the water into the cafetière. ‘They know about Eyam’s money,’ he continued. ‘They have traced nearly all of it and they can freeze the bank accounts under international money-l
aundering agreements and using terror laws overnight. Mr White guarantees that this information will not be passed to the government and that David will be free to benefit from this considerable fortune, unmolested by the Inland Revenue. However, he insists that Eyam does not return to this country and maintains the fiction of his death. As far as Mr White is concerned, David Eyam will remain dead. He also expects you to leave this country within the next twenty-four hours. Whether you return to the United States or choose another place to settle is of no concern to him, as long as you abide by the agreement not to reveal that Eyam is alive, or anything of the material that he is believed to have collected.’

  She poured the coffee into two mugs and pushed one towards Mermagen’s little hand. ‘Tell me something, Oliver. Why haven’t they released the fact that Eyam is still alive? The former head of JIC fakes his own death in a Colombian bomb explosion to escape charges. I mean, it’s a gift.’

  ‘Because Eden wants to resolve this with as little fuss as possible: he realises that it could be damaging to all the things he holds dear.’

  ‘No, he read the email that is doing the rounds and realised that Eyam would destroy him. That’s why he is offering us a deal: as soon as we are out of the country he sends a team of assassins after us.’

  ‘He’s not a gangster. He has a very high regard for both of you. Up until he read that email yesterday he fully intended to offer you a job.’

  ‘You say he isn’t a gangster, but he worked for some pretty shady people in Las Vegas, Oliver.’ She sipped from the mug. ‘How come you’re acting as his bagman?’

  ‘I too have a high regard for both of you.’

  ‘And all your contracts depend on Temple remaining in power with White’s backing.’

  ‘I have to make a living, Kate,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway, I have no idea where Eyam is.’

  ‘But you can contact him.’

  ‘And I have no intention of leading you to him. I’ve acted as the pathfinder for one murder: I am not going to do that again.’ The realisation that she might already be doing so gave her an idea.