A Sentimental Traitor

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘Anything up to life.’

  ‘Don’t threaten my client, Detective Sergeant,’ van Buren snapped.

  ‘Threaten? But I’m doing my best to help him, Mr van Buren. To understand just how deep he’s landed himself in it this time.’

  ‘I’m being set up.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either.’

  ‘Let’s not waste any more time, shall we? You clearly had motive for this attack. And opportunity. Your DNA has been found at the scene. You don’t even have an alibi. How much worse do you think it can get, Mr Jones?’

  The tape recorded a silence, where there was no reply.

  Arkwright smiled, thinly, no humour in it. ‘I think that wraps it up. Rather neatly, in fact.’

  The tape couldn’t record the look that Harry gave to van Buren, or the shake of the head that the lawyer offered in return.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss, you can’t bring coffee in here,’ the librarian said, bouncing on the toes of her polished shoes.

  ‘Then I’m the one who should be sorry,’ Jemma replied, putting the plastic cup carefully to one side. She’d been at it for hours, interrogating the Internet and rifling through back copies of newspapers and periodicals. She needed the caffeine. It had been like a game of blind man’s buff, trusting to fortune that she would not only bump into something, but recognize it when she did. The thirty-something librarian was still standing guard, officious, no ring, when Jemma’s phone jumped into life.

  ‘Jem, it’s me.’

  She knew by Harry’s tone that something awful had happened.

  ‘I’ve been arrested. Emily again.’

  The librarian was bouncing up and down once more, looking formidable and very cross; Jemma fled from her presence and into the corridor.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘At Charing Cross. Should move in here when they take my home away,’ he quipped, but it fell flat even before he’d delivered it. ‘You’re one of my two phone calls, Jem.’

  ‘What, to tell me you’ll be a little late for that dinner you promised to cook?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be making dinner, Jem. Emily was attacked last night. Something pretty nasty. They think it was me.’

  Only a moment of supreme self-restraint prevented Jemma from asking if they were right.

  ‘I’ve been charged. I’m up before the magistrate shortly. They want to remand me in custody.’

  ‘Oh, Harry . . .’

  ‘But can’t you see? This proves we’re right.’

  ‘About what exactly?’

  ‘How important this game is.’

  ‘I think we ought to stop, Harry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re so obviously bloody winning!’

  She could hear another voice in the background, interrupting.

  ‘Jem, I’ve got to go. You’re right . . .’ He faded in a rustle of confusion before his voice came back. ‘Be careful, Jem. I’m sorry to have got you into this.’

  Then her phone went dead. She didn’t know whether to smash it against the wall or on the floor. Instead, she walked back in to the reference room. The librarian was waiting to intercept her, a look of thunder on her face. Jemma decided to get in there first.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, waving a finger at the phone. ‘My ex-boyfriend. Total loser.’

  The librarian relaxed, nodding in understanding, and returned to her post behind the desk while Jemma went back to her labours.

  Harry didn’t like cells. Had a deep aversion to them. It had started with his training at Hereford, where his SAS mentors had inflicted many kinds of indignities upon him, in preparation for what was to follow, but, of course, it could never do that. He’d once even found himself inside a condemned cell in central Asia, listening to other prisoners being executed, waiting his turn. It had put him off being locked up.

  When they came to unlock his cell at Charing Cross, it was only for the stuffy pleasures of a white Securicor prison van, where he had his own tiny cell along with five other prisoners. And when, after a short journey, he was in turn released from the van, it was only into the arms of further security officers who escorted him down to the cells beneath the court complex in Marylebone Road.

  ‘Never expected to see you here, Mr Jones,’ one of the security officers muttered, leading him down. ‘I’m bloody sorry.’

  Harry assumed the man was a former soldier. It made him feel worse.

  Harry waited his turn, the sliding of doors like the clattering wheels of the tumbrel, the voices from beyond the cheering of the crowd. The prisoner before him returned to his cell in tears. ‘You bastard!’ he sobbed, raging eyes fastening on Harry, but Harry assumed it was a condemnation intended for the entire world, he didn’t take it personally. He was almost relieved when at last the door to his cell was opened and he was led up the short set of steps to the dock.

  The courtroom was new, laminated, none of the rich dark oak of traditional justice. It had replaced the old court complex at Horseferry Road, the site now sold off for luxury flats. Cuts. Already the discolouration on the bar in front of him betrayed the presence of an army of sweaty palms. Van Buren was sitting in the seat beneath him, the Crown prosecutor a little farther away, the district judge presiding over all beneath the royal coat of arms with its lion rampant. And it began.

  Harry was asked to confirm his name and address. ‘Yes, sir,’ Harry replied, standing to attention, on parade. Then he was ordered to sit, and played no further part in proceedings. He’d been told by van Buren that this would be the case, yet it did nothing to stifle his despair. As he sat down, his defiance seemed to leak away like a deflating balloon. He had wanted to deny the charges, protest his innocence, but van Buren had said that wouldn’t be possible, not at this stage. Don’t cause a fuss, Harry. In any event, as Harry sat, he found he couldn’t breathe. He’d often imagined such a scene, not with himself but with his father, who had sailed so very close to the wind that it had seemed merely a matter of time before he capsized. Only his early death had saved him, a heart attack brought about by overambitious fornication. Harry could hear his ghost mocking – ‘The way to go, Harry, not like this . . .’

  The Crown prosecutor was setting out the case. Section 18, Offences Against the Person Act. The Act dated from 1861, one part of the British legal system that appeared to have withstood the test of time. Grievous bodily harm, with intent. Trial by indictment. Seek permission for the case to be admitted to Crown Court. That was inevitable, given that the maximum punishment was so severe – life in prison, as Arkwright had warned him. The Detective Sergeant was sitting in the court even now. He was looking confident.

  The prosecutor asked that Harry be remanded in custody, objecting to bail. It was a most serious offence, he said, the evidence the prosecution intended to present would make a custodial sentence almost inevitable, it was not the only allegation made against the defendant by the witness, there was the all too serious possibility that the defendant might try to interfere yet again with the prime witness. And more.

  Then it was van Buren’s turn. He did his best. Argued that Harry was a man of previous unblemished character, a man who had given immense service over many years to his country, had medals, was far too well known to hide. This was, the lawyer declared, a man of substance, not likely to run off with his life packed into a suitcase. Yet, after a night in the cells, Harry was looking dishevelled, as if he were already on the run.

  The system of hearings before a district judge has been frequently criticized. Unlike magistrates, they sit on their own, and can come to highly individual and patently idiosyncratic decisions. The district judge in Harry’s case had never met him but had, of course, heard of the accused, even knew of the allegations of sexual harassment made against him by Emily – well, who hadn’t? But th
e judge also knew how casually and unfairly such allegations were thrown around by young women; after all, some years beforehand a close colleague on the bench had been accused of similar conduct. Hushed up and brushed over, the woman clearly hysterical, but judges rely on their own experience as well as that of legal precedent to reach their conclusions. The judge had a brother only recently retired from the military, while he himself had once considered a political career, all of which gave him an inclination to trust Harry. They had never met, but there were ties that bound men like them. What was more, the judge held a pathological loathing for journalists. Now he looked across his courtroom, at those press men present, all poised, ready to pounce, wanting to devour this man on their front pages. They gave him every excuse he needed. Anyway, the prisons were overflowing like blocked drains. Cuts!

  So Harry wasn’t remanded in custody, as Arkwright and the prosecutor sought, but released. Wasn’t even given a tag or put under curfew or required to pay a surety, merely ordered on pain of extraordinary punishment not to approach any witness and to report once a week to Charing Cross police station. Van Buren blanched, scarcely able to believe his client’s good fortune. On another day, before another judge, Harry would be chasing cockroaches around the Scrubs.

  Instead, Harry was released, into the clutches of a mob of journalists who were determined to get their victim, one way or the other.

  Harry suggested they meet up in St James’s Park. He couldn’t go home, which was under siege, and he was feeling desperately claustrophobic, in need of fresh air, wanting to breathe again. He sat in a deckchair, his face shaded by a sunhat even though the sun had gone, peering out at the pelicans squabbling on their perch in the lake and listening to the evening serenade provided by the musicians from the Wellington Barracks who were crowded onto the bandstand. Harry had walked through this park for years, from the Parliament buildings to the clubs and restaurants of St James’s, but usually with his head down, his mind elsewhere. How long had it been since he’d slowed down enough to soak up its gentle atmosphere, smell the fresh-mown grass, admire the reflections of Buckingham Palace in the lake and the chimes of the light-throated clock echoing from Horseguards? When had he last eaten an ice cream? Now, for a couple of hours, he’d done all of that. While he sat here, it seemed he had all the time in the world.

  ‘I was always worried I’d be bored when I left the Commons,’ he declared, as Jemma appeared through the trees and came to sit beside him, ‘but I could get used to this.’

  They both knew he was lying.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t cook you that dinner,’ he said, ‘the place is swarming with vermin. You wouldn’t like it anyway. It was only going to be pasta.’

  Again, they both knew he was lying. He’d been trained how to live off the land, deep in jungle or on the Arctic ice, but he had never taken to it and was an accomplished cook.

  ‘Pasta at my place, then,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t go back to the house, Jem, not tonight. They’ll rip me apart.’

  ‘Pasta – and a pillow. On the sofa. I’ll cook.’

  The look he threw at her suggested he wasn’t sure which prospect he found least appealing. Even she acknowledged that her skills in the kitchen might provide clinical evidence of why the Scots were burdened with one of the highest rates of coronary disease in Europe. She threw a file of papers into his lap. ‘And here’s a little appetizer.’

  He sat up and began to open it. The file contained photocopies of press reports and Internet printouts.

  ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for but we know it has to be big. Huge, in fact. But I couldn’t find it. I was so desperate, I even began imagining that it might have something to do with the recent deal between Russia and Brussels for the exploitation of ancient bogs, with some fanatical environmentalist wreaking vengeance on them.’

  ‘Mind you, they can be ferocious. When I was at uni I spent part of a summer vacation in a protest camp,’ Harry muttered, sifting the papers.

  ‘Getting to know the enemy?’

  ‘Were they the enemy? I’m not sure even now.’

  ‘So why did you go?’

  He looked up sharply, a look of incredulity on his face. ‘For the same reason you probably took a gap year and didn’t want your parents to visit your college digs too often.’

  The animated twitching of her nose suggested he had found his target. ‘Leaving aside your dubious environmental credentials,’ she said, ‘I came across this.’ She directed his attention to a particular press clipping from the file. ‘The Babylon pipeline. It will bring gas from central Asia to Western Europe and save us all from igloos. It’s huge. Original construction costs eight billion, currently estimated at fourteen, so you can guess there won’t be much change from twenty.’

  ‘Dollars?’

  ‘Pounds.’

  ‘That’s big enough to move a few mountains.’

  ‘Precisely It’s a huge piece of engineering. But there’s more. The real money comes from the supply of gas itself. Babylon is going to provide fifteen to twenty per cent of the EU’s gas needs. Year after year. Can you imagine how much power that gives those involved?’

  ‘So who is involved?’

  ‘The central Asian republics themselves. The gas companies that do the drilling. But there’s someone else. The countries through which the pipeline runs.’

  ‘From central Asia? There must be a number of different routes a pipeline could take.’

  ‘Exactly!’ It was as though her dullest pupil had suddenly discovered the theory of relativity.

  He was studying one of the maps in the folder, his finger following the track. ‘From central Asia, to Western Europe, via . . . Russia.’

  ‘It doesn’t own the gas, only controls it – so long as the pipeline goes through Russia.’

  ‘You remember a few years ago? Russia got into a bust-up with the Ukraine. Some bollocks about unpaid bills, supposedly, but it’s never that simple, not with the Russians. It was all about muscle. Making sure the Ukraine remembered who the bosses were. So when the guys in Kiev got a bit uppity, the guys in Moscow simply turned off the gas tap and left them to freeze. A gentle reminder of what the power game is really all about, and how to play it. Two weeks later, the Ukrainian government bends its knee and, like a miracle, the heating comes back on, with Stalin applauding from the celestial grandstand.’

  ‘The Babylon pipeline has always had to cut across the Caspian, but it had a choice of two basic routes. One that crossed into Russia . . .’

  ‘Ah, and one that didn’t!’

  ‘Russia already controls a huge amount of the gas supply to Western Europe. If Babylon had gone through the alternative route, Azerbaijan and Georgia, or some of their own frontier republics like Chechnya which they barely control, their stranglehold would have been broken.’

  ‘Moscow stuffed.’

  ‘End of empire.’

  ‘And I can imagine the Russians getting very upset about that. Very upset indeed.’ Suddenly his exhilaration had vanished. He turned to her, the file and its papers tumbling to the ground, but he didn’t seem to care. ‘Jem, that would explain a lot of what’s happened. Not the details, but the viciousness of it all.’

  She waved forlornly at the fallen papers. ‘These are reports, downloads from energy analysts, telling how the Russians offered all sorts of concessions, new licences, Siberian prospecting rights, in order to get Babylon approved . . .’

  Her voice faded away when she saw he wasn’t listening. He was looking at her, pain in his eyes, squeezing her hand. ‘But there’s one thing that makes no sense at all. The Russians have got the pipeline. So why all this aggravation?’

  ‘The press cuttings don’t tell me that.’

  ‘Jem, you’ve got to stop. This is dangerous.’

  ‘Of course it is. I’ve watched them destroying you, Harry.’

  ‘They’ll do the same to you if they think you’re getting too close.’

  ‘I think I am
getting close, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They spent some time staring quietly into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Are you going to stop, Harry?’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s what I do, what I am.’

  ‘Then I’m with you.’

  ‘I won’t let you get hurt, Jem.’

  ‘Not your choice. I’m a big girl.’

  ‘Yeah. I’d noticed.’

  ‘So you’d better take me back to my place. Just in case I need a little personal protection.’

  He started to protest some more, but knew it was no use. In any case, he needed her, and wanted her. His shoulders sagged in submission. ‘OK, but on one condition.’

  She raised a sceptical eyebrow.

  ‘Jem, please,’ he said, his voice filled with earnest, ‘let me cook the pasta.’

  Harry wasn’t the only one who had been showing an interest in Felix. Another man appeared at the Montreal, asked similar questions and got the same blunt answer from the barman. But this man had time, and plenty of it. He stayed and drank, and waited, night after night, so long that the regulars stopped taking any interest in this sad, lonely drunk.

  It was three evenings later that Felix turned up. That was when the man quickly slipped away, before he was seen, but he didn’t disappear completely. He lurked in the shadows outside, and waited a little more.

  She cooked. She was stubborn like that, and Scottish, and seemed to be making most of the domestic decisions. They sat at her kitchen table, quietly chewing.

  ‘So where the hell does the European Union come into this, Harry?’

  ‘If it hadn’t signed the contracts for the gas, the pipeline wouldn’t be getting built.’

  ‘Have I put enough ketchup in the pasta sauce?’

  ‘More than enough, Jem.’