WHISPERS OF BETRAYAL
MICHAEL DOBBS

DEDICATION

For Jill Dando.

An everlasting friend.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Aftermath

Acknowledgements

Also by the Author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

‘Bugger London.’

Peter Amadeus swore softly to himself as he stepped out from beneath the shelter of the theatre doorway and into the semi-darkness. Shaftesbury Avenue was under assault from the rain and was on the point of surrendering. Gutters ran with garbage and puddles like oil slicks were collecting on the cracked pavement. Even here, in the heart of the West End, it seemed that London was falling apart. Its streets echoed to the constant noise of nothing, while strangers huddled inside their cars, cutting corners so they could be the first to arrive at the next traffic jam, sounding their horns in impatience as they splashed down life’s muddy road. No one gave a damn about anyone else. That’s what life in the city was all about.

He lit a cigarette, drawing deep on nicotine and dank night air. The evening lights reflected from the damp roadway, forming a chorus line of red-and-yellow neon that danced around the soaked shoes of two figures beside a taxi. They were coming close to blows. One door handle, two hands. Raised voices. A dispute over occupation rights. Wars had been started for less, Amadeus supposed, but only by politicians.

Beyond the battle, on the other side of the Avenue, Amadeus searched for signs of his country, the homeland for which he had fought and on more than one occasion almost died. He found a Turkish restaurant, a Balti house, a pizzeria and three Chinese wok shops brushing up against a branch of his own bank that recently had been taken over by the French. There may be some small corner which was forever England, but it wasn’t here.

He’d been right first time. Bugger London.

Black fingers of rain began to burrow their way behind Amadeus’s collar. He shrugged, welcoming them like old friends, stamping impatiently as he waited for his wife. Marriage, he had long since concluded, was much like an examination of his prostate, something that left him wanting to be on his own for a while. She was still inside the foyer where he had left her, cheeks flushed, voice trilling as though in the heat of sexual excitement, launching opinions on a tide of gin-and-diet-tonic about a performance that had pitted two notorious thespian queens against each other, locked in a battle for inclusion in the Birthday Honours List. The only sort of combat they were fit for. And as close as she’d got to an orgasm in years. Unless, of course, she’d been …

Suddenly he felt the blood drain from his cheeks, overwhelmed by one of those fleeting moments of honesty that left him feeling physically sick. Who the hell was he to sneer at others? Amadeus was nothing but a paper warrior, whose weapons were bulldog clips. Whose battlefield was a bursar’s desk at some inconsequential fee-paying school in the suburbs, whose only recent victories were against misdirected invoices, and whose Commanding Officer was a woman intent on exacting exquisite revenge for the years she’d spent following in the dust of his career. A once-and-would-be man who now smoked too much and swore too little, who over-tightened his belt and whose bed was as cold as an Arctic foxhole. Who found himself lingering outside playhouses like some cuckold in the rain.

He needed more narcotic. He lit another cigarette. He wasn’t to know that it was a cigarette that would change the course of his life.

Life disgusts Amadeus – no, it’s worse than that. He disgusts himself or, more precisely, is disgusted at what he’s become.

His mind wanders. He’s no longer on the steps of the theatre but back behind his desk in the office at Aldershot where he commands 3 Para. He distrusts this desk, indeed any desk, and despises the fact that so much of modern soldiering is fought from behind barricades of paper. It’s one of the reasons why he leads from the front, hoping to leave much of the paperwork scattered in his wake. This is also why his battalion will follow him anywhere, for Amadeus is a soldier’s soldier.

Yet some pieces of paper refuse to be ignored.

After months of deliberation, the Defence Council has reached its judgement. The Army has been weighed in the scales that balance political convenience against the many bad cheques signed by politicians at election time, and it has lost. An Army that once ruled a quarter of the globe and refused to bow to Thug or Zulu or Hun is to be brought to its knees by a mixture of recession and the awesome incompetence of its political masters, who have ordained that an entire third – the legs, one arm and both balls – is to be hacked off. Discarded. The letters of redundancy have just arrived by courier. They are sitting on Amadeus’s desk, accompanied by details of the appeals procedure and glossy brochures about how to survive in the life ever after. More worthless paper.

It is Thursday. The letters are to be locked away in the regimental safe waiting for distribution to the miserable wretches concerned on Monday. Amadeus, of course, has been told that he is entirely bombproof, that his exceptional military record stretching from the battlefields of Goose Green to Bosnia and the Bogside means that his position is beyond question. They can’t touch him.

So why is his own name on one of the envelopes?

They’d avoided him after that, all his colleagues and fellow officers who had any part of the decision and who might have been able to tell him why.

Why? Why me?

In fact, it was true, Amadeus had been bombproof, right up until the very last moment. The computers of the Directorate of Manning had whirred and identified the targets for redundancy by age and by rank, and Amadeus only just crept into the zone. When the Army Establishments Committee had sat in deliberation, they’d even asked Amadeus to give evidence.

Perhaps his evidence had something to do with it. The five members of the committee had sat like hooded crows in Historic Room 27 on the third floor of the Ministry of Defence, beneath chandeliers that hung from a magnificent stucco ceiling and lit walls crowded with oils in gilded frames. They were here to discuss economies. Cuts. Surrender. The chairman was a brigadier with a reputation for soaking up whisky in much the same manner as a teabag soaks up hot water, a process that afterwards left them in much the same condition. The only traces of colour in his face were the red rims of his eyes and the reflection of last night’s decanter that still clung stubbornly around his cheeks.

‘I’m still not sure, Colonel Amadeus, why you insist that an air mobile brigade couldn’t be commanded by another cap badge. Perhaps a Royal Marine, say, rather than by a Para officer.’

‘I would have no problem with that.’

‘Really? But I thought you’d just been telling us at some length and with considerable vehemence why putting a Royal Marine in charge of a parachute unit would be tantamount to disaster.’

‘But the Parachute Regiment is not an air mobile unit, Brigadier. We’re air-borne, part of the airborne brigade. The sort of rapid deployment unit that took the Rhine crossings and Goose Green and –’

‘Yes, yes! A slip of the tongue, Colonel, you know what I mean!’

‘You ask me how we might make economies in the Parachute Regiment without undermining its effectiveness. I tell you it’s not possible. Our political masters cut the Army by a third in the 1990s, yet they kept tasking us to do more. Not just in Northern Ireland but Cyprus and Bosnia and Kosovo and Timor and Angola. And now they want to cut another third? It’s madness. Madness! They’ll be able to fit the entire British Army inside Wembley Stadium and still leave plenty of room for the other team’s supporters. Although come to think of it, we might have to leave the tank outside.’

‘No need for impertinence, Colonel.’

‘My apologies, sir. Must have been a slip of the tongue.’

The brigadier’s red eyes flashed mean and filled with the desire for retribution. ‘Let me return you to the issue. Economies have to be made, those are our instructions. So the armed forces must become more flexible. After all, since the end of the Cold War there’s no longer a need for great standing armies –’

‘Which is why we need to be more flexible and mobile. Which is why we need the Paratroopers.’

‘The threat is more “up and down”, if you like, I’ll grant you that. Yes, more flexible, I agree. So why not use the Territorial Army to plug any gaps at a time of occasional crisis?’

God, watching this man fumble with his brief was like watching a child play with a loaded pistol in the school playground. ‘The Territorial Army, sir?’

‘Yes, the Territorials, Colonel.’

‘You mean the same Territorial Army that the Government cut in half only three years ago? It would be easier to plug the gaps with traffic wardens. There’s more of them to spare.’

‘Take care about your tone, Colonel. We have a job to do here. It may be distasteful but do it we shall.’

‘So who’s going to stand up for the Army, then?’

‘I resent that, sir! I’ll have you know that my ancestors fought at Waterloo.’

‘On which side?’

The brigadier was out of his chair as though a grenade had rolled beneath it. ‘Enough! We’ve heard enough from you, Colonel. Evidence over!’

Typical of bloody Amadeus, they all said, and smiled. Yes, somebody had to stand up for the Army. Amadeus was safe.

Until the last minute. For it was only at the last minute, as the main outlines of the recommendations were being prepared for consideration by Downing Street, that someone remembered the Prime Minister had a constituency interest, a Royal Marine base on his doorstep, and a majority that was anything but robust. So the Royal Marines had to be spared. The outlines were redrawn and an additional lieutenant colonel from the Parachute Regiment was put in the slot instead.

Amadeus.

They couldn’t tell him that, of course, couldn’t even hint they’d destroyed his career for the convenience of the Prime Minister, so many of them simply avoided him. They left it to a wretched captain to meet him when he travelled up to the Personnel Centre of the Military Secretariat in Glasgow to exercise his right of appeal. (He was meant to be seen by a colonel, equivalent rank, but the colonel in question had heard of Amadeus’s reputation for being bloody-minded and had suddenly discovered a mountain of urgent paperwork to sort through. So he’d delegated and the captain had drawn the short straw.) The Personnel Centre was next to the bus station, a place which came complete with its full quota of derelicts and dossers, men with outstretched hands and reluctant eyes who had been unable to manage some transition in their lives. Former soldiers, perhaps. As Amadeus passed them by he wondered with a flash of alarm whether he might even have served with some of them. Yesterday’s heroes. He hurried on, ashamed.

The Personnel Centre was gaunt, built of red brick, economic, cold. This was where he had come to argue for his life. Inside Amadeus found nothing but a heartless open-plan room with cheap industrial screens providing the only means of privacy. He also found the shifty little apple-polisher who passed as a captain in the New Model Army.

The captain had Amadeus’s file open in front of him. Twenty-five years’ worth of bravery and dedication. Top in ‘P’ Company. Director of Infantry’s Prize at Platoon Commander course. His tour with the SAS out of Hereford. Instructing at Sandhurst. And the battles – the South Atlantic, the Gulf, the Balkans. The season ticket to Northern Ireland and the Queen’s Gallantry Medal that went with it. Even the little details like Warren Point, where he’d shovelled what was left of his companions into plastic bags after the bomb. Everything was there. Not many files as thick as that in this place.

‘You’ve done extremely well, sir,’ the captain began. ‘I see from reports that you’ve had an excellent career …’ The captain read on, prattling, patronizing. Anything to avoid looking Amadeus in the face. ‘A difficult matter, sir. But you see, a decision had to be made. And I see you have a problem with dyslexia.’

‘It’s only a problem if you can’t tell the difference between an order to shit and shoot, sonny. Haven’t made that mistake yet. So how about you?’

‘Sir?’

‘You ever had an order to shoot?’

Flustered, the captain pushed a piece of paper across the table. ‘If you want to go through the formal appeals process, Colonel, you will need to fill in this form.’ More nervous shuffling of papers. ‘And I’ve got some additional details of the assistance we offer with resettlement, just in case.’ At last the captain summoned up the courage to look into Amadeus’s slate green eyes. ‘Do you need any help filling out the form, sir?’

Amadeus picked up the form, and with it a glass of water. His mouth had suddenly gone dry. And as he read, and sipped, he realized something had happened to him. Tiny almost imperceptible waves upon the water in the glass were catching the light from the overhead bulb. As he watched, transfixed, he thanked all the gods that the bumped-up little creep of a captain couldn’t see what had happened.

For the first time in his life, Amadeus’s hand was shaking.

He is back outside the theatre, in the rain, feeling homeless in his own homeland. In a moment of silent fury he tosses away the half-burnt cigarette, the cigarette that will change his life, then in considerably less silence he mouths a curse more suited to a sergeants’ mess after the beer has run out. As the wind carries his curse away into the raw night, a figure darts from the shadows, barely dodging the front end of the now-departing taxi and forcing it to a sudden halt. The brakes screech in protest but the figure pays no heed. It is a figure that belongs to the night, of no definable appearance, swaddled in a grime-streaked blanket. A man, by its size, bent and scurrying awkwardly, with no apparent care in the world other than to retrieve the still-smouldering cigarette from the damp, evil pavement.

From beneath the blanket a thin, bone-filled hand reaches out to snatch up its prize. Eyes flicker, yellow in the night and on fire. A stare is held. A glimpse of recognition passes.

Then the eyes are gone.

Amadeus freezes, paralysed by memories of another life. Another place.

Mount Longdon in the Falklands, on the march to Stanley. Amadeus no more than a first-flush lieutenant, a Para platoon commander on a night assault in the swirling snow, up against Argentinian lines that were well dug in. In the dark it had come down to hand-to-hand combat, bayonets and guts. A lot of guts, mostly theirs. Sleepless for three nights. Exhaustion to the point of hallucination. And carelessness. When he’d jumped into the trench he’d assumed that the spic was dead, like the other three, killed by his grenade, and so he’d turned his back. That was when he had seen those eyes, and the man, advancing on him through the darkness and snow with murder in mind and a bayonet already caked in blood. He remembered a lunge, a scream, another gut-spilling twist of the blade.

But no pain, not for Amadeus.

Behind him the Argentinian, rifle still clenched in his hands, had fallen dead.

‘Behind you, bastard!’ Amadeus had heard. ‘Why, there are Welsh Guardsmen out on this fucking hill and the sheep have all scattered or been blown to buggery. No telling what those Welsh fairies might get up to without their sheep. So remember. Watch your bleedin’ back, you stupid bastard. Sir.’

And with that the eyes were gone once more, away on their mission of murder.

The eyes had belonged to Scully. ‘Skulls.’ Albert Andrew. At that time a camouflage-covered, crap-chewing corporal, and later the Regiment’s finest and most formidable Sergeant Major with an MM, a QGM and a mention in despatches as proof, and a portrait hanging in a position of honour in the mess. A man who had risked his life on occasions beyond remembering in the service of his country.

A man who now values his life as no greater than a discarded cigarette butt.

Scully.

They’d betrayed him, too.

One minute he had been sitting in a bar off a cobbled backstreet in Osnabrück, having a last drink before being sent out to Kosovo, the next he’d been spewing his mince and tatties into his partner’s hands, his leg and his career shattered by a coffee-jar bomb. Kids’ stuff, those bombs. A simple affair, nothing more than a glass jar filled with scrapyard confetti and a compression detonator, and the top screwed on. The coffee jar had been thrown from the back of a motor scooter which disappeared into the night even before the coffee jar had hit the floor. The one brief sighting of the bombers suggested they were teenagers. Truly kids’ stuff. When the glass broke less than a dick-length away from Scully’s right foot, the detonator had decompressed and exploded, and the confetti – sharp, murderous chunks of metal with razor teeth – had chewed a path halfway through his leg. All in a day’s work for a Para keeping the peace on the streets of Djakovice or Pristina, perhaps, but not in a backstreet bar in Germany, not when he was off duty. Which is why, when they decided they had no further use for a soldier with only one leg, they offered him their very best wishes but no compensation beyond a meagre disability payment. They argued that Osnabrück wasn’t a war zone, the sort of place where you budget for a heavy cripple count. Hell, he was off duty. Drinking! Couldn’t expect the Treasury to pay for every last damned scratch. It was unfortunate, of course, and unexpected, but that’s what goes with being a soldier. Have to expect the unexpected. Of course, the two youths on the scooter might have been members of the pro-Serbian Prince Lazar terrorist group that was chucking bombs all over the place. That was entirely possible, but not provable. So, sorry, Skulls. Now, if you’d actually reached Kosovo, that would’ve been different, and Northern Ireland, too. Part of the home country. Sensitive. Soldiers weren’t supposed to get blown up and butchered on home turf, so if Scully had copped it there he’d have got a thousand pounds a stitch.

But Osnabrück wasn’t the Bogside. Scully hadn’t been an innocent victim. He’d simply been … well, unlucky. Wrong place, wrong life. A trooper with a bad break. And only one leg. As if he’d fallen down stairs on a Friday night. And if they paid out to every soldier on the basis of bad luck, where would the System be?

So Scully’s career had disappeared, and with it his wife. Then Scully, too, shortly after that.

Until tonight.

Amadeus was about to launch himself after the RSM, but now his wife was at his side, dragging him back, as always she dragged him back. Anyway, Amadeus knew there was little point in pursuit; if Scully didn’t wish to be found then he would not be found.

Suddenly Amadeus found himself overcome by a feeling he could only describe as envy. Envy of Scully, of this man in the gutter. Of his freedom, his ability simply to be able to disappear and leave the whole miserable mess behind him. God’s bollocks, it had come down to that. He was jealous of a fucking tramp.

His wife was summoning him, demanding he find a taxi. The call of duty. At one point in the Gulf War, during his tour with the SAS, Amadeus had been leading a Scud hunting patrol and in the darkness of the desert night had stumbled across a recce company of Iraqis. They shouldn’t have been there, according to the oxymorons at Army Intelligence, and even if they were they shouldn’t have offered any resistance, certainly not a fire fight. With only seven men Amadeus had captured 43 Iraqi regulars – 49 if you counted the body bags. Stopped an entire Iraqi company. For that they’d given him the Military Cross. Now all he did was stop taxis. Two young women brushed by, arm in arm, their young faces full of life. They were laughing – not with him, not even at him, they simply hadn’t noticed he existed. To them he was just another anonymous, middle-aged man stuck in a crowd. A cold, sodden cloak of self-loathing suddenly wrapped itself around Amadeus’s shoulders. He found himself reaching for another cigarette, his hand shaking, the cigarettes all but tumbling from the packet.

Then the loathing overwhelmed him. His hand clenched tight and, with all the strength he could find, he crushed the pack of cigarettes as once, when his rifle jammed, he had crushed the neck of an Iraqi conscript until the terrified eyes had begun to bleed in their sockets. All in the service of his country. A country that no longer wanted him, and thousands of others like him, like Scully. A country whose leaders had betrayed those who had served them most loyally.

He spilled the offending cigarettes into the gutter, slamming his heel down and grinding them to pulp underfoot. He didn’t want them any more. What he wanted, what he truly bloody wanted out of this mess, for himself, for Scully and all the others, was … what? Not their careers back, not even justice, it was surely too late for that. But perhaps an apology, an acknowledgement that they had been treated wrongfully, that all this cut and slash had gone too far. Belated recognition that they were men. Of valour, and of value. Not to be discarded like some cigarette pack in the rain.

It wasn’t much to ask for, an apology, but to men of honour even a small sign of contrition can heal so many festering wounds. Amadeus stood in the rain, at one of those turning points that mark a man’s life and throw his future unto the hazard, looking up and down this foreign-infested street, and decided upon his course. It was time for action, in the tradition of any wronged British soldier.

He would write a letter. To the Daily Telegraph.

Less than half a mile away from the cracked paving stone on which Amadeus stood resolving to change the world, Thomas Goodfellowe was entering upon a personal crisis of his own. The rain had hesitated and he decided to avoid the scramble for taxis in New Palace Yard after the House had adjourned. With a wary eye cast at the low clouds swooping overhead, the Honourable Member for Marshwood unlocked the chain securing his bicycle – it wasn’t safe nowadays, even left in Speaker’s Court – and resolved to risk the ten-minute ride back to his apartment in Chinatown.

He needed the fresh air. The last two hours had been spent in the manner of a small schoolboy on detention duty, wriggling in discomfort on his seat while he endured a debate about the war against drugs. The war was going exceedingly well, according to the Minister, a former car assembly worker by the name of Prosser who had MUM tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and DAD on the other, a diminutive man who kept rising and falling on the tips of his toes as though peering over the top of a trench under enemy fire. Drug seizures had declined sharply in the last year – proof positive, in the Minister’s view, that the smugglers and cartels no longer saw Britain as a soft touch, scared away by sniffer dogs and the force of his own Napoleonic will. His new shoes squeaked in acclamation.

Trouble was, this was the self-same Minister who, a year previously, had bobbed up and down at the Despatch Box to claim credit for a sharp increase in drug seizures, ‘unambiguous evidence,’ he had claimed at the time, of his ‘commitment in the war against these weeds of evil’.

Fair enough, Goodfellowe had concluded, consistency in politics was usually nothing more than evidence of a closed mind, but in Prosser’s case it seemed scarcely a mind at all. The man hadn’t the wit to appreciate the absurdity of his logic, nor the grace to laugh it off when it was brought to his attention. Goodfellowe had done so, brought it to his attention, intervened in jovial fashion to remind the House of the words the Minister seemed to have lost somewhere along the way.

The Minister, however, had been unappreciative. His eyes narrowed, his knuckles cracked, Mum had chased Dad around the Despatch Box and Goodfellowe had been reduced to parliamentary pulp. Such was the prerogative of Ministers. And the lot of backbenchers.

Goodfellowe had shuffled tediously through the final Division Lobby feeling much like a cow passing through the gates of a milking shed. It had been a long night and several of his colleagues were showing unmistakable symptoms of ‘the staggers’, the parliamentary equivalent of BSE in which the victims stumble aimlessly about their democratic duties, particularly after a heavy dinner – although the political variant of the disease rarely proved fatal. Many members had been known to survive in that condition for years. Thank God they had the Whips to prod them along and to take over when their own faculties failed.

Particularly Whips like Battersby.

Battersby was an oversized man with a figure like a deflating balloon and a face that brought to mind a cauliflower. A couple of outer leaves stuck out from the top of the cauliflower in passing imitation of hair. The Battersby mind could never be described as broad but, in the exercise of his duties, it was extremely singular. He was what was known as the Whip of Last Recourse. It was his function to deal with those Members who had reached that point of utter confusion in which they started rambling about ‘conscience’ and ‘principle’ and refused the invitation to enter the milking shed. At that stage Battersby would reach into his badly cut and over-large jacket and pull out a little black book. The production of this well-thumbed volume was a gesture that inspired remarkable piety, for in it were recorded all the known telephone contacts for that particular Member. Starting with The Wife, of course. Then The Parliamentary Secretary. Also The Constituency Agent. In the case of an alcoholic, the book held the number of The Doctor or The AA Group, and with a gambler, perhaps even The Accountant or The Bookmaker.

But the most potent entries in that little black book seemed to be those numbers that a Member struggled to keep most private – the ‘OI’ numbers, as they were referred to in Battersby’s shorthand. What those in the Whips’ Office called ‘the numbers of the night’. The places where the Member was mostly likely to be found in the hours after the sun had set. The numbers of The Mistress or The Lover.

In Battersby’s book and in his meticulous script, these names were divided into two categories and marked as either ‘OI-1’ or ‘OI-2’. These categories differentiated between ‘Occasional Indiscretion’ and ‘Ongoing Involvement’. Of course, the collection of these numbers was more of a hobby than a necessity since all his Members had waistband pagers by which they could be contacted, but Battersby liked to keep ‘that little personal touch’, as he explained it.

The errant Members themselves were marked with an ‘FU’ designation. ‘FU-1’ indicated ‘Family Unaware’, thereby rendering the Member open to coercion. These Members he liked, even had affection for, so far as his politics allowed. But he drew the line at the ‘FU-2s’. From Battersby’s point of view, those marked with the awesome ‘FU-2’ branding were outcasts, worthy only of eternal exile or – still better – execution as soon as an appropriate scaffold could be nailed together, for it indicated the small number of Members who had not only sniffed at the skirts of perversion but who had grabbed at them and lifted them high. These were the most dangerous of parliamentary colleagues, the Members who were in the habit of switching off their pagers. Who were ‘Frequently Untraceable’. And therefore ‘Fundamentally Unreliable’. And many other things besides.

All were recorded, noted down in Battersby’s lexicon of lusts. His diagnostic skills were something of a legend; a Member need only to have tarried for a few hours beneath a duvet he hadn’t bought himself and Battersby would have discovered not only the number of the bedside telephone but even the tog-value of the duvet. Production of the dog-eared manual at the regular surgery he held in the Whips’ inner sanctum had a similar effect to a cattle herder producing a revolver – cures amongst those beasts afflicted by the disease of conscience proved almost miraculous.

Battersby was a bully. Goodfellowe found him breathing down his collar as he waited his turn in the milking shed.

‘Still shagging that waitress, Goodfellowe?’ Battersby enquired, addressing the back of Goodfellowe’s neck. It was meant without undue maliciousness, almost as humour, as one might have asked after a result at tennis, but Goodfellowe had already played the victim once that evening and was in no mood for a rematch.

‘Did you have garlic for dinner, Alfred?’ Goodfellowe responded, not bothering to turn round. He sniffed. ‘Yes, definitely garlic. And Guinness.’

‘Something’s taking your eye off the plot,’ the Whip growled, responding in kind, his tongue working around his teeth as though in search of a lost sweet. ‘Must be the waitress. ‘Bout time you came round, old chum, and remembered the first duty of every backbencher.’

‘Which is?’

‘To be loyal to his Prime Minister, of course.’

‘And his second duty?’

The question seemed to startle Battersby. ‘Hell, there’s a second?’

Goodfellowe at last turned to face his pursuer. ‘Ever wondered why they keep you in the Whips’ Office, Alfie? Why they never give you a proper job or allow you out amongst real people?’

‘It’s because I’m loyal. An inspiration to others.’

‘It’s because if you fell ill in the outside world they wouldn’t know whether to take you to a hospital or the Natural History Museum.’

‘Don’t push it, sunshine.’

‘And what are you going to do? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You’ll confiscate my bicycle pump? Or cover my saddle with superglue?’

Battersby remained silent for a moment. Goodfellowe was a notoriously awkward sod, a man who had a mind of his own and absolutely nothing of relevance to the Whips. No position, no ambition, nothing to lose. So no weak points, no leverage. An archetypal FU-2. And Battersby was beginning to feel uncertain of his ground. Had they really put garlic in the steak-and-kidney?

‘Anyway, something you ought to know.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The waitress,’ Goodfellowe continued. ‘She owns the restaurant.’

With that, Goodfellowe was gone, democratic duty done and on his way home, leaving behind him the over-ripe odour of the milking shed and savouring the fresh air – although in London everything was relative, particularly the concept of fresh air. Whitehall was still crowded with traffic grinding its way towards Trafalgar Square and even the rain hadn’t managed to wash the taste of burnt diesel from the night. He spat, then spat again when he found a glistening maroon Ministerial Rover parked ostentatiously across the new green cycle lane, blocking his route. The vehicle’s driver was leaning against the wall of the nearby Cabinet Office, smoking a cheap Dutch cheroot.

Goodfellowe felt his fuse beginning to burn. It was barely a month since they had painted this cycle lane, and then only after years of lobbying. It represented a small stream of green hope washing through Whitehall. Now Ministers were using it as a car park.

Yet like all London cyclists who lived in hope of survival, Goodfellowe was prepared. Whistle to his lips, as was his custom when fighting heavy traffic, he blew to attract the driver’s attention. The driver turned, stared impassively from the shadows of his wall, dark eyes unblinking, his face lit like a Halloween mask, then returned to his cheroot.

Goodfellowe blew again, impatiently, a shriller blast, but Ministerial drivers were a law unto themselves – why, they even had little silver badges issued by the Metropolitan Police to prove it. This bastard wasn’t for moving. And the rain was back.

Exasperated, Goodfellowe engaged a lower gear and began to manoeuvre his small collapsible bicycle out into the roadway. But the gears were stiff, unoiled, reluctant, and the distraction caused him to be careless. He bent to his task, head down, and twitched at the handlebars, but no sooner had he moved out from the kerb than his world was all but turned on its end as he found himself hurled back towards the gutter by the bow wave of an advancing double-decker. The bus screamed past, almost brushing his shoulder. A collapsible bike pitted against fume-belching spray-spewing red-metal monster. No contest. Goodfellowe ended up drenched.

The front wheel wobbled in despair. The Ministerial driver smirked.

Suddenly Goodfellowe realized he knew the fellow. From years ago, but reasonably well. The smirk belonged to a driver from the Whitehall motor pool who on frequent occasions had driven Goodfellowe during those heady days of fame and good fortune when he’d been a Minister at the Home Office. At that time their relationship had been all smiles and shared Polo mints, larded with gossip about the fumblers and fallers in the great parliamentary steeplechase, but now the driver stared at him, oblivious and unrecognizing.

Goodfellowe could feel the rain creeping like slugs down into his socks and his shoes. His suit had about as much chance of surviving its next encounter with the trouser press as Battersby had of winning Mastermind. It had been a mistake to use the bike. In weather like this it made him look a prat. Hell, perhaps it made him look a prat in any weather. But that still didn’t give the bastard the right to block the cycle lane!

There was some part of Goodfellowe that was Irish, on his father’s side, from old Queen’s County before they renamed it Laois. In spite of the English overlay, which was supposed to consign all of life’s furies to safe storage in some form of spiritual Tupperware, he took immense pride in these roots, if for no better reason than that it provided an ideal excuse for the occasional outburst. He was also on a diet, nothing but salads and crackers and no second glass of wine, which would make any Celt feel irritable. So, as another bus thundered past, Goodfellowe began to feel mightily and irresistibly pissed off. The whistle fell from his lips. He stood to his full height on the pedals, and let forth a stream of foulness.

The driver looked up once more, dull eyes staring, casting around to make sure no one else was observing him. Then slowly, almost reverently, he offered Goodfellowe his middle finger.

In his capacity as the Honourable Member of Parliament for Marshwood, Goodfellowe had sworn a solemn oath by Almighty God to uphold the Crown and its laws, but here it was dark, another world, and now he was drawing alongside this bloody car. Perhaps God wasn’t watching. He shifted his weight in the saddle, took a deep breath, summoned a curse to his lips. Then he was upon it!

He lashed out at the panel of the driver’s door with his heel. The panel gave a low cry of abused metal, giving great satisfaction to Goodfellowe, who wobbled onwards, taking a yard or two to recover his balance. He turned in his saddle to claim his triumph.

The driver simply shrugged and returned to his cheroot. He didn’t give a stuff. Wasn’t his wretched car.

Goodfellowe pushes on into a night that is rapidly coming to resemble the rinse cycle of his local launderette, an awareness growing inside him of two things. The first is that he’s made a bloody fool of himself – but that feeling will pass. It always has before.

The other feeling he knows will be more difficult to handle. As a politician he is accustomed to finding self-justification for almost anything he does – hell, hadn’t he just spent all afternoon voting for an Access To Welfare (Disability) Reform Bill he knew in his heart was rubbish and deeply inequitable? – but the upswell of rage about the cycle lane is more, far more, than a bruised sense of justice. What has really got him going is that the bastard driver hasn’t recognized him. That’s what really hurts and has got so far up his nose that it’s pinching his brain. Suddenly he’s become aware that he loathes his feebleness, scuttling around Westminster like a spider crab, getting soaked with every incoming tide, his only function to act as target practice for the likes of Battersby and every passing bus driver.

He wants to change the world, but before he can do that he will have to change himself.

A hot flush passes through him that is very masculine and slightly menopausal but which seems to dry his collar and warm his wet toes. He is directly opposite the Old Shades pub in Whitehall, on a night of storms and sticking Sturmey Archers, when suddenly the clouds part and everything becomes clear to him.

He knows. He hates his impotence and he hates the crumpled clothes, even more than he hates that insolent bloody driver.

It is a moment of personal conversion. Goodfellowe wants out of the laundry basket that his life has become. Before it’s all too late.

TWO

Dawn had arrived gently, like a baby at its mother’s breast, but already the farmhouse was alive with the noise of a new day. Magpies squabbled on the reed roof while its ancient beams, salvaged from a shipwreck on the nearby coast some three hundred years earlier, stretched in the warmth of the slow yellow sun. Somewhere near at hand a loose shutter began a quarrel with the morning breeze.

In a room at the top of the house, directly beneath the thatch, Captain Mary Wetherell (retd), formerly of the Royal Corps of Signals, lay in her bed, tracing the path of a rivulet of condensation as it trickled uncertainly down the windowpane, and identifying each and every noise, just as she had lain awake through long hours marking the noises of the night. Those noises of the dark hours had been less comforting. The screeches of hunters and the hunted. The insistent ticking of the long-case clock in the hall. The snoring of her husband.

Mary was one day into her thirty-first year. Her birthday had been celebrated – if ‘celebration’ were the appropriate term – the night before with a small dinner for herself and a few friends. Her husband’s friends, to be precise. She had almost none of her own in this distant corner of Exmoor where the gorse and heather did battle with the sou’westerlies and on a damp day the slurry trickled in the general direction of Withypool. This was her husband’s house, his world and his life, as it had been his father’s before him. Something she had accepted when they had married seven months before and something that, in the loneliness of night, she knew had all been a wretched mistake.

It wasn’t as if she had been a naive spinster. There was little to be naive about growing up in the cobbled backstreets of Burton-upon-Trent, in the shadow of the breweries and the Marmite factory with their rich, overpowering smell of yeast. Mary had been one of four sisters with a father who had a serious problem with both alcohol and employment. Too much of one, none of the other.

To say her family was dysfunctional would satisfy only the most unimaginative of sociologists. It wasn’t dysfunctional, it was a disaster. When her father was drunk but still capable, which was often, he would inflict on Mary and her younger sisters, but particularly Mary, the most appalling suffering and indignities. Fuck anything at hand today, for tomorrow would bring oblivion. By contrast, her mother lived not for today but for the afterlife, being utterly devout. She was also stubbornly blind and deaf, a woman who never saw, and never heard, who refused to believe in the presence of evil even when it was sitting at her breakfast table. Life for Mary, even as a nine-year-old, was already a bitch.

When she was eighteen, shortly before she was about to go to university, her father had come home with a drinking mate, someone to whom he had lost a substantial and ridiculous bet. Mary was supposed to be the payment. As the two men had stumbled through the front door, she had fled through the back in her bare feet. She never returned. University was out and within six months, in desperation, she had ended up at the only warm place on the High Street that would welcome her, a recruiting office, so she had joined the Army. It didn’t take them long to recognize the raw but irresistible talent of their new recruit. Soon it had been Sandhurst where sheer persistence had made her runner-up for the Sword of Honour, and simple excellence had put her at the top of the academic order of merit. Then it had been Blandford (top of the troop commander course). 30 Signal Regiment at Nuneaton. Germany. Angola. Bosnia. Northern Ireland. Namibia, where she had helped plug an election structure into the creaking southern African country even as she was being shot at by rebels. No postcards home, not from here, even if there had been anyone to send them to. Then Ethiopia, coordinating food drops. Training for life, and for death. She’d discovered the stench of death in abundance on the flood plains of Bangladesh, a country which, in her view, should never have existed, and probably wouldn’t for much longer if the sea levels continued to rise. Signals were ‘teeth-arms’, at the cutting edge of every major military encounter, and she had been there, anywhere there was a challenge, at the edge. Sometimes too near the edge.

Yet in the armed forces a woman is inevitably a target. A target of fun, and occasional abuse, of discrimination and desires. Mary Wetherell was more of a target than most, because she was not only cropped-blonde with a figure that was athletically feminine, even in mud-washed fatigues, but she was also remarkably determined – hell, in order to survive a father like hers, you had to be. She asked for no favours, nothing more than the chance to stand and compete upon that most elusive of hallowed plots, the level playing field, and the Army was an equal opportunities employer, or so the recruiting officer had told her.

It hadn’t worked quite like that. She never seemed able to shrug off the fact that most of her colleagues were men with unfair advantages like university degrees, while in turn they never seemed able to accept that she was as good as or often better than them, or to forget that she had breasts. No one ever stopped noticing that she was a woman, whether under instruction on the Staff Course at Camberley, in the officers’ mess at Rheindahlen or stuck in the middle of the fratricide of Bosnia. If she eased up and was too friendly with the men, they regarded her as a regimental recreation centre, yet when she refused the first offer of a drunken fondle on a Friday mess night they called her a frigid little feminist. Bike or dike.

Never just plain Captain Mary Wetherell.

Her Commanding Officer was a particular problem. Lieutenant Colonel Abel Gittings was a very modern warrior with an OBE and MBE to show for it. That’s what you get when you fight all your campaigns at what they call the ‘politico-military interface’ inside the Ministry of Defence rather than on a battlefield. A filthy job, he’d been known to say, surrounded by cigar smoke and politicians, but somebody had to do it. He’d fought with such skill in the Directorate of Military Operations that they’d promoted him to be Military Aide to the Chief of General Staff. You weren’t going to get much farther away from the bullets than that. Chances were he’d probably survive to become a general, once he’d finished his tour as CO of Mary’s regiment. Yes, a very successful soldier, was Abel Gittings.

Didn’t stop him being a prick, of course, and it took a totally unambiguous prick to wander over to Mary’s Troop Sergeant during an exercise on Salisbury Plain to enquire whether the troop was ‘taking care of their little lady, making sure she’s tucked up at night, got her bed socks on’. A few patronizing words that in a fleeting moment had destroyed all the respect she’d sweated so hard to build.

When he and Mary were alone, his eyes said it all. They wandered over her like a route march through the Brecon Beacons, marking every turn and undulation, and rarely making it as far as her own eyes.

One evening in the mess she had joined in a game of ‘tunnels’. Simple rules. Pile all the soft furniture into the centre of the room to form the tunnel. Then two teams, one at either end. The object was to force your way past each other in the narrow and dark confines of the tunnel, run back to the starting position and down a pint of whatever was on the list before the next member of your team took over. A relay game of high spirits and considerable quantities of alcohol. When it had come to Mary’s turn, Gittings had arranged for himself to be her opponent, intent not so much on pushing past her in the tunnel as grabbing and fondling every last soft bit of her. His hands were all over her, half an arse and a full raw nipple, and when the buttons started popping she’d decided she’d had enough, even from her CO. She’d left him with a fiercely bloodied nose. Yet he’d thought it great fun. Later he bought her a drink at the bar and quietly propositioned her. ‘Swift and Sure, my girl. Swift and Sure!’ he’d whispered, expropriating the Corps motto.

She told him in the most lurid terms to shove his active service up his own tunnel, and had been overheard. After that it was never going to be the same between them.

Two months later the Regiment was sent on its second tour of duty in Bosnia. An O Group was called and troop dispositions were announced. Bosnia was prime posting, a real war, everyone wanted in, and Mary’s troop was to be sent again.

Without Mary.

Her troop was to be deployed under the command of a different officer, and Mary was about to be reassigned. As Families Officer. She was out of the loop, sidelined, humiliated. Nothing wrong with her performance, the adjutant had told her later when she’d kicked down his door demanding to know what the fuck was going on. It’s simply that the CO thinks it’s time for you to move on, take the next step. As a Families Officer? Anyway, Bosnia was inappropriate for her. That’s the term he’d used, ‘inappropriate’. She hadn’t needed an Army field manual to translate. Inappropriate for a woman. After all, the men had to keep their eyes on the enemy, not on her arse.

Gittings had confirmed these details in the mess after dinner one evening, elaborating with a few more lurid descriptions of what he thought the most appropriate position for a woman like Mary should be.

It was, of course, unprofessional for Mary to respond in the way she had but, even in hindsight, the sweet-sour pleasures of the moment hadn’t lost their freshness. She would for ever cherish that look of bewilderment in his alcoholic eyes – her father’s eyes – followed by the first flush of pain in the moments after Gittings had hit the floor. She had bloodied and bent the CO’s nose once again, and broken a tooth for good measure, but this time without the covering screen of the tunnel. She’d thumped him out in the open, in full view of the entire mess.

‘Was that swift and sure enough for you, sir?’

The matter couldn’t be left there, of course, but Gittings decided against a court martial. His bloody nose had quite a history of its own, there would be too much scope for awkward questions at a trial. Anyway, Mrs Gittings had already put up with as much lurid rumour as she would tolerate about what she referred to as his ‘campaigns on foreign fields’. So, instead of a court martial, Gittings had held forth about the dangers of PMT and claimed credit amongst the men for ‘doing the decent thing’, protecting the regimental honour by having Mary sent away. Like a leper. Which in the Signals meant a posting to a Territorial Army regiment somewhere north of Newcastle – although to cover their exposed legal backsides they’d offered her the alternative of organizing the appeal for an extension to the military museum at Blandford. She’d have preferred the court martial and a firing squad.

Within five months she had quit in despair, her career destroyed, her confidence shattered as completely as a discarded bottle.

That’s why she had married Oscar. In a moment of weakness. He was a stooping gentle giant of a hill farmer, a widower with two grown sons, and a good companion. OK, so he was old enough to be her father, but he was unlike her own father in so many ways. Oscar, for instance, had worked diligently, drank in moderation on every day except Friday and showed only fleeting interest in her sexuality. She hoped that at last she had found a partner who would share her needs rather than treat her body as an excuse for violence or as a prize in some Friday-night rutting festival, but Oscar showed almost no interest at all. He had a family, had already done his duty. At last she had found that elusive level playing field for which she had been searching, only to discover that it was as empty as it was flat.

Beside her, Oscar was beginning to stir, the smell of last night’s stale cigar smoke still on him. She didn’t feel like waiting for the usual exchange of greetings which were no longer meant, on her part at least – did he realize? A pang of confusion and guilt burst upon her, driving her from her bed. He wasn’t a bad man, not like the others. It wasn’t his fault they couldn’t get newspapers delivered to such an isolated spot and had no conversation to share other than the tumbling price of milk quotas and the closure of the local post office. But it was his fault that they lived there, and her fault, too.

She stood in her bathroom shivering, and not just from the cold, failing to recognize the face in the mirror that was melting in tears at the thought of another day in their half-forgotten world on the middle of this moor, with its empty hearths and closed hearts.

She knew she would do anything for a change.

Goodfellowe was enjoying the prerogative of a Member of Parliament, exercised on days when the Government wasn’t about to fall, of loitering in bed.

Not that he was idling, of course. He was preparing himself for the tribulations that lay ahead by devouring the Daily Telegraph. Back to front, as was his custom in matters of the mind. First the sports section, where he discovered that something called Charlton Athletic was sitting on top of the Premiership. Mystified, he rubbed the shadows from his eyes and turned to the obituaries. The Lord Drago had died, leaving no family. Goodfellowe knew him – had known him – but then he seemed to know more and more of those featured in this column with every passing year. He read about a progress through the ranks of Party and Parliament that was written like the eulogy for a modern-day Alexander and was, of course, complete bollocks. Forty years ago, before they had changed the law and lowered the age of consent, Drago had avoided imprisonment only because he had once served in MI5 and had friends in necessary places – although fourteen-year-olds were still beyond the pale, even today. He should have ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, instead he’d ended up in the House of Lords, and now he had ended up dead. Goodfellowe sighed and wondered what sort of obituary he would get, indeed whether he would get one at all. He decided not to dwell and hurried on through business and fashion, discovering what he might do with his money. If he had any. Then, finally, a splendid front-page story reporting a bravura speech by Brenda, the Environment Secretary, in which she claimed to have ‘honoured this Government’s covenant, not just for today but with future generations,’ by announcing an increase in spending on the environment. No mean achievement during these turbulent and tight-fisted times.

Sadly, as the newspaper reported with considerable malice, Brenda’s rhetorical sophistication hadn’t markedly improved since the days of last year’s drought when she had advised the nation to ‘dig deep and do whatever it takes’ to conserve water, and her husband had been discovered showering with their next-door neighbour. A finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth, had our Brenda. Several pounds short of a pension.

Oh, but what would the Telegraph do without her? On a bad news day – no divorces, no disasters, almost a day of despair for the newsroom – they were able to reveal that Brenda’s citadel had been built with bricks of straw – and not even her own straw. In fact, she had done little more than rhetorically to raid the contingency budget that had been set aside by the Ministry of Agriculture to prevent hard-pressed farmers from starving, then in a gesture too far had classified it all as environmental expenditure on the grounds that most of the money was keeping the countryside green. Or, more accurately, being poured down a hole in the ground. Too bloody blatant, even for this Government. One day it would spin itself entirely out of control.

The letters page made for scarcely more comfortable reading. Clerics featured prominently this morning, with epistles deploring everything from the inaccuracy of church clocks to the most recent outbreak of pew power in which a congregation in Durham had mounted a picket line outside the cathedral. Their objective had been to insist on a return to King James and a few snatches of traditional organ music in place of all the clapping and community kissing. As Goodfellowe was frequently moved to note, God moves in a mysterious way; perhaps it would be better if God stopped dashing around and simply rested for a while to enable all these confused souls to catch up with Him. Or Her.

Another letter caught his eye. A broadside against the Government, damning it for its broken promises and fractured budgets, much like many other correspondents over the months, but this letter was of particular interest to Goodfellowe. Full of anger, yet written with simplicity and considerable dignity. It described the Defence Secretary as doing ‘what no tyrant has been able to do since the days of the Norman Conquest, namely, single-handedly to threaten the security of the entire country.’

That description was inaccurate, Goodfellowe reflected. The Defence Secretary was no tyrant, rather an inferior form of ministerial life who had proven himself wholly incapable of standing up to the grasping demands of the Treasury, which was precisely why he had been allowed to linger in office so long beyond the point where any signs of usefulness had expired.

‘Self-sacrifice is part of the military tradition,’ the letter continued, ‘particularly in order to save the lives of others, but to be sacrificed in order to save the life of an ebbing administration is an extraordinary breach of faith. There is nothing in this but shame for the Government, and growing danger for the country as a whole.’

Goodfellowe wriggled his toes in discomfort beneath the duvet. He agreed. The cutbacks had been appalling, even dangerous. He had thought so even as he’d marched through the lobby to vote for them. But what was he to do? Unlike the military, a backbencher is not immersed in thoughts about the nobility of self-sacrifice.

The letter fired its final salvo. ‘For most soldiers, to be cast aside by their country is a greater humiliation than surrender. Most soldiers would prefer the simple dignity of being shot.’

The letter was written by Colonel Peter Amadeus, MC. The Parachute Regiment. Retired. Obviously forcibly.

Goodfellowe gave a quiet squeak of surprise. ‘I know this old bastard.’

‘Which old bastard?’

He looked up.

It was Elizabeth.

‘Nothing better to do in bed than read the newspaper?’

She was smiling. Bearing a breakfast tray. And completely naked. For a moment all his senses were filled with her, the soft curves of her body that caught the light from the window, those places of shadow and mystery, the almond-and-marzipan lips and eyes of … Eyes of what? He always had difficulty describing the colour of her eyes. Marmalade was about as close as he ever got. Full of sunshine and Seville. Not that he’d ever been to Seville, or had any idea what it was like. Except it produced lots of marmalade.

There were some questions he would never be able to answer about Elizabeth. Theirs was a relationship that had covered the spectrum between hell and the hurricane, and visited most of the storm centres in between. They had never fully trusted each other, since they were two people who found considerable difficulty in trusting themselves, particularly Goodfellowe, who had battled for what seemed half a lifetime to come to terms with his guilt and anger. His guilt arose because he was married to Elinor, his anger, even greater than his guilt, because Elinor was no longer, and could never again be, his true wife. Poor, tormented Elinor, locked away within the darkness of her starved mind and confined to a nursing home since the death of their son, Stevie. Not her fault. Perhaps not his fault either, but enough torment to have laid a trail of confusion upon his love for Elizabeth.

‘It’s Amadeus,’ he announced, placing the newspaper to one side as he accepted the proffered tray. ‘I know him. Or knew him, to be precise. At school. Didn’t know him well, but pleasant enough. Very intense for a fourteen-year-old. Not a name you forget in a hurry.’

‘You didn’t enjoy school much, did you?’

‘Not that school,’ Goodfellowe agreed. Not any school, in truth. ‘Got expelled.’

‘You? Expelled?’ she burbled in surprise. She perched on the edge of the bed, intent on discovering more.

‘The headmaster and I suffered from fundamentally differing viewpoints.’ He rallied, tore his eyes away from her body, knowing he would have to finish the story first. ‘Hoare – unfortunate name for a headmaster, don’t you think? Left him rather distracted, I suspect. Christened his daughter Amanda. Can you imagine her school register? Anyway, during a dull interlude in one of his lessons when perhaps my attentions were drifting, Old Hoary thought it was in order to throw his stick of chalk at me. Which is where our fundamental disagreement came into play. Because he didn’t think it was appropriate for me to pick it up and throw the bloody stuff back. Caught him smack on the bridge of his spectacles. Knocked ’em clean off. Smashed. You could hear the noise all over the school.’

‘So he expelled you? For throwing chalk?’

‘No, not for the chalk. It was for my artwork. As he was shaking the hell out of me for breaking his glasses, one of my illustrations fell out of a textbook.’

‘Illustrations?’

Goodfellowe looked reflective, painting in the air with a piece of toast as he refreshed the picture in his mind. ‘An amateurish but highly annotated illustration of a woman. Entitled “Martha”.’

‘Naked?’

‘Of course. Vividly so. Accompanied by a brief but entertaining sexual history. One which was highly accurate too, according to fourth-form rumour. To which the headmaster, even without his glasses, took great exception on the quite narrow-minded grounds that Martha was also the name of his wife. Copped merry hell for that. Not to return after the end of the term, my parents were told. Copped a packet from the old man, too.’ Goodfellowe bit into a corner of the toast, trying to avoid the thick smear of butter that clung to its surface. ‘Amadeus was in the year below me. Came to say goodbye when he heard I was being thrown out. Asked for a copy of the drawing. Offered me a shilling for it. Damned decent gesture, I thought.’

Goodfellowe pulled a face.

‘Unpleasant memory?’ she enquired, concerned.

‘No, unpleasant toast. How can you ruin toast, for pity’s sake?’ He dribbled crumbs onto his bare chest, which she brushed tantalizingly with the tips of her fingers, tracing the fragments of scorched bread down towards his navel.

‘Why do you think I own a restaurant? It’s the only way a girl like me can get a decent meal. Either that or joining an escort agency. Come to think of it, an escort agency would offer much better hours. The overheads would be lower, too.’

‘In my opinion, which is anything but humble, the chaotic hours of running a restaurant are ideal for you.’

‘Why?’

He beamed wickedly, pulling her back towards him. ‘Because they precisely match my own.’

‘You selfish bastard, Goodfellowe,’ she cried, picking up his newspaper and beginning to hit him around the head.

‘Don’t do that! I want to keep Amadeus’s letter. Invite him for a drink, perhaps. When you’ve put your clothes on.’

She began to laugh, like wind chimes disturbed by a summer’s breeze. She was remarkably unselfconscious about her naked body, and with good reason. Even in her thirty-somethings it was still finely crafted with, as Goodfellowe had once put it, ‘excellent long-term potential’. She had thought it a clumsy phrase, while he thought it summed her up exactly. So they fought a lot, misunderstood each other, had to compromise. But, as they fought, he learnt, about himself, and about that other half of humanity they called Woman. He liked learning as he neared his fiftieth, almost as much as he’d done in the fourth form. As for compromise, he found it easy when he was in her bed. Elizabeth de Vries. Excellent long-term potential. A body. Brains. A superb Russian restaurant thrown in, too. What more could a man want?

Except for an uncreased copy of the Telegraph. He grabbed it back.

‘Anyway, what does he say in his letter, your friend Amadeus?’ Elizabeth asked, conceding.

‘That the Government is crap. He’s probably right.’

‘But it’s your Government, poppet.’

She sounded the words slowly, with a smile of saccharine, as though she were lecturing a small child, but he wasn’t in the mood. Nowadays he was rarely in the mood. He had developed a fundamental humour loss when it came to this Government. His Government. A Government that was deep into its menopause and now so bereft of ideas that it had all but run out of things to leak.

‘That’s naïve,’ he responded, he hoped softly enough to smother the sounds of his own imploding frustration.

‘You vote for it every day of the week.’

‘Like all women, you don’t understand …’

‘What’s the matter, Goodfellowe, the only place you discover your balls is in bed?’ She laughed, claiming victory.

‘Ridiculous female logic.’

‘Typical male inadequacy might be closer to the mark.’

‘Elizabeth, you’re being emotional,’ he protested, knowing already that his banners were in tatters and the field was hers.

‘I know I’m nothing more than a weak and wanton woman, but you aren’t. So why don’t you do something about it?’

The coup de grâce. A single blow. Delivered with unerring accuracy.

‘Do something? Do something?’ he repeated, as though the question was struggling to penetrate the wits of a drowning man. ‘I can’t! I wish I could but I can’t. I’m a miserable backbencher with no power and a bike that’s going rusty while these bloody Ministers …’ He clenched the rescued newspaper in his fist as he spoke, unaware that he was crumpling it beyond redemption.

‘Most of them are cock-ups scuttling around Whitehall in search of an occasion,’ he continued. ‘They sweep past in their Ministerial limousines, their spin doctors strewing rose petals and whisky in their way, while we are expected to stand idly by in the pouring rain and wave them onward. And, to hell with it, look what you’ve done to my newspaper!’ he howled in the manner of some Dickensian villain.

‘No, Goodfellowe, you did it. And it’s my newspaper. My toast.’ She picked up the tray. ‘And my bed. Time to get out of it. The second shift arrives in half an hour.’

He looked at the disappearing tray with a sharp edge of hunger. Damn the diet. The toast didn’t look that bleak after all. ‘You know what I really want, Elizabeth?’ he called after her, his imagination full of the sight and succulence of a full English from the Connaught.

She turned at the door. ‘I know exactly what you want, poppet,’ she said with a certainty that for a moment completely overwhelmed him. ‘You want to be a Minister once again.’

For a moment he was stunned. Was it so bloody obvious?

‘It would cause problems for me, of course,’ she continued, her lips puckering. ‘The Minister’s mistress. I’d become a cliché.’

‘Would that be a very great problem?’

She stared at him directly, glints of orange fire in the marmalade. ‘I’d manage. If that’s what you wanted. In fact, old darling, I think I’d manage rather well.’

The words hung between them, persisting. It was the first time they had admitted to each other, perhaps even to themselves, that they saw their futures together, as a team. This was not easy for either of them to admit. There was something often a little theatrical about Elizabeth, like Vivien Leigh, all extravagance and dramatic passion as though she had stepped out of ‘Gone With The Wind’ with high cheekbones and expressive lips that could squeeze submission from almost any man. But if so much of her life was an act, it was only because, in those secret places inside, she had spent much of her life feeling inadequate. She had first learnt the mechanics of satisfying a boy at the age of fourteen. She had also learnt of the potential consequences when, once satisfied, he had simply walked away. Abandoned her to the sniggers of his friends. Made her feel like a slut. She had decided there and then that if anyone was going to do the walking away after that, it would be her. She had been walking away ever since, from her ill-prepared university exams, from her ill-starred marriage, from any sort of personal commitment she felt she could not control – until Goodfellowe had come along on his bloody bike. He was different, confusing, didn’t run by the normal rules. He was both infuriating and fun. So maybe it would be different this time. Maybe.

Goodfellowe understood some of this, although he had never been allowed to penetrate behind all the layers of tinsel. It meant that his love for her could never be a comfortable matter but, hell, he’d had years of respectable marriage, done the comfort thing and collected the T-shirts, all of which were starched and ironed and filled the locked matrimonial closet. He needed something different, not order and contentment but a challenge that would strip away the restraints and leave the T-shirts crumpled and torn, something that would allow the man beneath to show through.

As he listened to her words about Ministerial office and advancement, an uneasy sensation scoured his stomach. At first he hoped it might be nothing more than the echo of an unfinished breakfast, but quickly it overwhelmed him. A sensation he hadn’t felt in so very long.

Excitement.

Twisting inside him once more.

He had Elizabeth. And now, with her encouragement, once again he had that other inspiration missing from his life.

He had ambition.

The hour is late, well beyond evening. A solitary shaft of light cuts across the prep school lawn. The turf is immaculate, which is much more than can be said for Boris, the caretaker’s cat, a ginger-walnut tom with missing ear and the look of battles past, many of which he appears to have lost. He pauses, cautious, sniffing the air in suspicion before padding across the river of light.

The old clock above the quad takes its time about striking ten, disturbing the screech owl that had found a perch on the weather vane. There is no disguising the fact that the bell is badly cracked, and getting worse. The entire clock tower is a disgrace, so dilapidated it will soon need replacing if Amadeus can find the money, or silencing if not. Another tedious battle which as bursar he will have to fight with the governors, hand to hand, a tussle that will soak up as much of his energy as did the recapture of ‘Full Back’ on Mount Longdon, and maybe leave as many scars.

He turns up the volume of his CD player until the voices make his office vibrate. Not a problem, since there is no one left to disturb, apart from the cat and the owls. Mozart’s Requiem. The work of a dying man that was destined to be left behind, uncompleted. Amadeus has revisited this music many times recently, feeling its power, beginning to understand how wrathful the composer must have felt in his frustration, and sensing his fear. So much unfinished business.

‘… fac benigne ne perenni cremer igne,’ the chorus sang. ‘Grant that I burn not in everlasting fire.’

How Amadeus loathes his job. A travesty of his talents. Surrounded by children who have no respect and teaching staff who show no interest, parading in their crumpled jackets and tatty liberalism. When he was interviewed for the post, the headmaster suggested he had no management experience. Sure, he didn’t know how many paper clips he had in his desk drawer. But he had planned a Para battle group assault with eight hundred men and heavy drop kit, all loaded onto twenty Hercules that were then flown five hundred miles and dropped on precisely the right bloody spot at exactly the right bloody time so that no one drowned or broke his fucking back. That wasn’t management, of course, not in Civvy Street. He’d just have to get used to such subtle distinctions. ‘Look, it’s an income,’ the Officers Association had encouraged when they pushed the bursar’s position at him. Yeah, but so was mugging grandmothers.

He took the job because there was nothing else on offer at the time, apart from the still greater humiliation of his wife’s incessant nagging. And when he sat down and considered all the options, beneath all the doubts there was the bedrock of his pride. Amazing what a man’s pride could make him do.

Amadeus turns from his post at the window and wanders back to his desk, a route he has crossed and recrossed at least a dozen times during the evening, restless, like a refugee. From beneath the puddle of light thrown by the solitary lamp upon his desk he retrieves the copy of the Telegraph, tightly folded to the letter page, which contains the reply that has been printed to his own. It comes from the Minister for Defence, Gerald Earwick. He reads it again, and still his soul burns.

‘… distortion of the truth … time for the country to decide, arms or Accident & Emergency wards … our duty to defend our hospitals and schools, our old and infirm … an end to feather-bedding in the armed forces.’

On that night in the black snow on Mount Longdon, he had watched the youthful Argentinian conscript die, Scully’s bayonet stuck in an inch below his twelfth rib, the young man scrabbling uncomprehending at his emptying stomach while hope drained away between his fingers. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like a feather bed.

‘We should not allow the argument to be distorted,’ Earwick’s riposte continues, ‘by the self-interested pleading of a small number of disgruntled former officers. The truth of the matter is simple. The nation’s security remains safe in this Government’s hands.’

He reads it yet again, even though every word has already dripped like acid across his heart. The music of the Day of Judgement echoes in his head.

‘Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla … Nil inultum remanebit,’ they chant. ‘O, day of wrath, that day will dissolve the earth in ashes … Nothing will remain unavenged!’

Nothing will remain unavenged. Eternal words that reach out across the ages. At last Amadeus stops his pacing. He pours himself a large whisky, a Talisker, neat, the colour of amber, sits at his desk and lights a cigarette. He drinks and inhales, both deeply. His mind reaches out to places far away but not so long ago. The slopes of Longdon with its stench of rotting fish. The drive through Sniper’s Alley in Mostar, and the ridge above Konjic where death jumped out of the virgin snow. Kigali, with its piles of bodies strewn like yesterday’s newspapers along the fetid roads, bloating in the sun. Places, and times, when he had been needed.

The music has stopped. The only sound in the room is that of his breathing, which is deep, as though he has been running, or is about to start. Perhaps he should put it all behind him, bury his anger and wait for salvation in the life hereafter. But he can’t. Forgiving the enemy is for saints, or politicians, or oil companies. Not for him. For Amadeus, every dark corner hides an injustice, every breath grows into a sigh of protest.

And while he breathes, he will not let it go.

He sucks at his cigarette until it glows brightly, like a star shell hanging in the sky, illuminating the field of battle. Then one more drag before he grinds it out. He uses Earwick’s reply as an ashtray.

As the paper curls in protest and the acrid smell of burning stings his nostrils, Amadeus makes three vows. He is not a man who takes vows lightly.

The first is that this cigarette will be the last he ever smokes.

The second vow, more difficult, is that he will drink less. Pity, but this will be the last bottle of whisky. From this point, only an occasional glass of wine or beer.

The third, however, gives him great pleasure.

He has been trained all his life to deal with difficulty, not to turn his back and bow his head. Earwick, that bag of shit, wants a fight, so that’s precisely what he’ll get. But not the fight he might expect, not a gentlemanly duel in the letters column adjudicated by the editor of the Telegraph. This will be a different contest, on grounds that Amadeus will choose. ‘Safe in this Government’s hands’? We’ll see. From this point on, he vows, Mr Earwick is going to be a desperately busy man.

Amadeus is back.

From within the locked drawer of his desk Amadeus retrieves a thick bundle of letters, mostly from military men, many of them old comrades, which have arrived from all corners of the country in the last few days in support of his protest in the newspaper. He reads a dozen of them yet again, and then once more, reading slowly as he tries to assess not only their wealth of support but also the strength of the passions behind them.

Letters, letters, letters! Letters have been the greatest burden of his life. Letters with his wife’s overdue bills, letters of protest, of accusation, of incitement. Letters of redundancy. He hates letters, has treated them as enemies, ever since his mother thrust that first alphabet book into his hands. He tore it up, and she beat him with the book’s empty covers, not understanding his problem with letters.

From another drawer within his desk he takes a few sheets of personal notepaper, sits before his word processor, gives thanks to IBM and the Almighty for voice recognition and spell-check software, and dictates three more. These are letters of invitation.

The printer gives out its strange pattern of binary bleeps and, like messages from an alien world, the letters tumble forth. He signs, stamps and with great care seals the final envelope, then runs the tip of his tongue around his lips. They feel coarse from the glue, his mouth is dry. Needs a drink. He picks up the tumbler and holds it to the light. Liquid peat. Rich. Soothing.

Oh, and as steady as sunlight!

For the first time since his discharge from the Army, his hands are still. The trembling has disappeared. As the last mouthful of whisky trickles down his throat in long farewell, he rejoices.

The music beats out. Resurrection is at hand!

THREE

‘George, this is all you ever do. I watch you, your lips move as though you’re talking to me, I listen, I even concentrate, but all I hear is gobbledegook. Incomprehensible nonsense about PPPs and PSBRs and OEICs and PESC rounds. Like you’re still on some acid trip at Oxford. Can’t you come down to earth for once? Say what you mean?’

George Vertue, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man noted for his East Anglian reticence and who at university had experimented with nothing more lethal than an occasional mutton biryani, winced and sought time by smoothing out some invisible flaw in the nap of the brown baize tablecloth. ‘I’m trying, Prime Minister,’ he replied. ‘Believe me, I’m trying.’

The two sat alone in the Cabinet Room on opposite sides of the table, the leader young, with foundation still upon his cheeks and hair a suspicious shade of chestnut, the second-in-command neither young nor old, simply beyond time, with a sad, almost molten expression reminiscent of a walrus that had spent too long at Whipsnade.

‘Seriously, George, we need something that’s going to sell in Salford.’ The Prime Minister had just returned from a tour of the north-west and was, as ever, keen to reveal his roots on the factory floor, even though in practice they amounted to little more than a student vac spent sweeping the floors of a metal-bashing operation outside Basingstoke. ‘Up there,’ he continued, eyes raised as though Salford were part of the spirit world, ‘they think a PESC round is a day out ratting with terriers. Language, man. Language. Remember the focus groups.’

‘What I’m attempting to communicate’ – the Walrus counterattacked in an attempt to stifle the Prime Minister’s march through the provinces – ‘is that unless we do something quickly, all they’ll be selling in Salford, or anywhere else, come to that, is their wives and daughters. We’ve got to find another five billion or else.’

‘Or else what?’

‘Or else our masters in Brussels won’t allow us a permit to run a car boot sale.’

Jonathan Bendall studied his Chancellor, a former don, of media studies, bottle-bottom glasses and eyebrows like seaweed washed up on a shore. Depending on one’s point of view Vertue was either a notoriously dour man or a cold-blooded bastard. Perhaps in the end it didn’t really matter which. A Chancellor’s personality always played second fiddle to his navigational skills, and right now the economy was stuck fast on a sandbank and facing an approaching riptide. Whispers of impending crisis had even penetrated behind the closed doors that led off the Treasury’s endless oval corridor, and they were always the last to know.

Bendall took a classical view of such situations. If the gods were angry, they needed placating. A sacrifice, some head upon the plate. He had a reputation for being a willing carver and had already put two Chancellors to the sword since the last election, but it had been a cut too far and now the dining rooms of Westminster echoed to the cries of angry ghosts auditioning for the role of Banquo. No, laying down the life of yet another Chancellor was no longer an option; they were in this together, up to their necks. He would have to continue to wade with the Walrus, no matter how dire it got.

‘What about the Contingency Fund, George?’

‘What Contingency Fund?’ The seaweed wriggled on Vertue’s brow. It was as close to a display of emotion as he ever came. ‘The last of that was swept away during the autumn floods.’

‘Nothing left?’

‘Not even a tidemark.’

The Prime Minister sighed and felt the sand shifting beneath his feet. ‘OK, George, so that’s the bad news. What’s the good news?’

The seaweed wriggled once more, but then subsided.

‘Come on, George, humour me? Or do I book an appointment at the Palace this evening?’

They both knew this game. The Chancellor was a man of little traditional charm but meticulous planning, which made him an excellent player in the guerrilla warfare of Whitehall. He had a reputation for never opening negotiations without at least one hand grenade to toss across the table. The Walrus always went armed.

‘My suggestion, for what it’s worth …’ – the Walrus examined his leader with an expression he usually reserved for a plate of bad oysters – ‘is that we lay to rest the Youth Unemployment Programme.’

It was as if he had suggested legalizing incest.

‘Scrap the Yuppie initiative? But that was a core election commitment.’

The Walrus flapped his fins distractedly, as if he were irritated by flies. ‘We could always close a few hospitals, or even cut the old age pension. If you’d prefer.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Bendall responded breathlessly, struggling to keep up. The approaching sea seemed to have become boiling hot. The Walrus smiled. It was not a natural act.

‘Cut Yuppies?’ Bendall continued. He drew in a deep breath. ‘We’d lose the Employment Secretary.’

‘A tragic loss.’

‘But wait a bit.’ Bendall was lengthening his stride. ‘He’s muttering about wanting to go at the next reshuffle anyway. So why not get in there first, bring the changes forward? Better to push him, don’t you think, rather than let him jump?’ Already Bendall’s keen presentational nose was to the fore. It was said he could sell snow to Eskimos but his speciality was selling indulgences to the middle classes, a task he had performed with remarkable success in every region from Hampshire to the Highlands. Up to now.

‘We’d need some justification,’ he continued. ‘Apart from the bloody obvious.’

The Walrus blew his nose on a large red handkerchief, shaking himself as he collected his thoughts. ‘Well, I suppose we start by rounding up the usual suspects. You know, the competition from Eastern Europe. The financial crisis in Latin America. Short-sighted bankers. That sort of thing.’

‘Perhaps we could get Brussels to bail us out.’ Bendall threw the suggestion into the air to see how it might fly. ‘Could we get the Commission to rule the Yuppie programme invalid? You know, not only save the money but also get a good stand-up row with the French.’

‘It might be arranged.’ The Walrus nodded in appreciation. ‘But we’d still be stuck with a substantial increase in the unemployment figures.’

The Prime Minister brightened, as though television lights had been switched on. ‘No, not necessarily. You see, I’ve long been of the opinion that the unemployment figures are …’ – he paused, like a conductor with baton raised to attract the attention of the orchestra – ‘that the unemployment figures are exceptionally crude. One enormous rubbish pit into which everything is dumped. Young people who’ve never had a proper job. The middle-aged who may never get another job. The unqualified, the infirm, the idle and apathetic.’ He loved toying with phrases. Many of his policies had been built on little more than the appeal of alliteration. Phrases were so flexible. If one didn’t work out, you changed it, found another. Didn’t do much for continuity but made for great sound bites. ‘You know, I feel an overwhelming sense of public responsibility to make sure the unemployment figures are cleaned up. And broken down. Into their constituent parts. They need to be rationalized. Redefined. Redistributed. Add a few categories here, maybe take a few categories there.’

‘Create so much smoke that no one will be able to see through it clearly enough to know what the hell is really happening.’

‘Precisely. Just as we did three years ago.’

Their deliberations were disrupted by a knock upon the door. It swung open slowly and from behind it appeared the timid-eager face of Anita Chaudury, the Member for one of the Leicester seats and the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. The ‘Parly Charlie’ was little more than an unpaid parliamentary gofer, a runner of errands, tasks which at times were of such menial standing that in any other profession they might have led to a lawsuit, but she loved every minute of it, from making sure there was enough Frascati in the fridge to keeping her master’s compact available but unobserved. It mattered not a jot to her that she had been chosen for the role solely to prop up the Prime Minister’s credentials on sexism and racism, his ‘double whammie mammie’, as he had been know to refer to her. For Anita it was the first rung on the ladder, the pathway to higher things.

‘Excuse me, Jonathan …’ She looked flustered but couldn’t hide the reverence in her voice. ‘I thought you ought to know straight away. It’s Sampson.’

‘Who?’

She took a couple of tentative steps into the room. ‘Sampson. One of our Members in Leeds.’

Bendall knotted his brow, trying to locate him. ‘So what’s young Sampson gone and done?’

She coughed. ‘Old Sampson,’ she began, anxious about the necessary correction. ‘I’m afraid he’s gone and died.’ She made it sound as if it were her fault.

The furrows on the Prime Minister’s brow deepened. ‘I am inconsolable, Anita. What’s his majority?’

‘Over ten thousand.’

‘A fine man. And a fine legacy. Arrange the usual letters of condolence.’ Bendall was on the point of returning to his business with Vertue when he became aware that she was already clutching a sheaf of letters. ‘Ah, you have them already. Well done. I’ll sign them immediately.’

She retreated half a pace. ‘No, no, Jonathan, these are … from the public. In response to Gerry Earwick’s letter in the Telegraph about defence cuts. Didn’t go down too well with some of the Old Contemptibles, I’m afraid.’

Bendall sat back in his chair, contemplating his assistant. ‘Tell me, Anita, what did you think of the letter?’

Her brown eyes grew large, she thought she had entered heaven. She was in the Cabinet room. Her opinion being sought. On her way. ‘To be frank, I thought it brutal.’

‘Absolutely right. Man’s a bloody Tojo.’

‘It would have been better, in my opinion,’ she continued, emboldened by his support, ‘to have found some common ground. Conciliated. Extended the hand of understanding.’

Oh, and that’s where you are absolutely wrong, Bendall concluded silently. Politics is not a game of apologies. It’s war, bloody, at times bestial. No prisoners. If Earwick’s remarks had been a trifle intemperate, they had at least revealed all the brutal instincts required to ward off sharks. A necessary man. Which is why, at the forthcoming reshuffle, he will be getting a promotion. While you, little Anita, will be cast adrift alongside the Employment Secretary. With a big label marked No Longer Needed On Voyage.

‘Tell me, Anita, can you swim?’

‘N-no,’ she stumbled in surprise.

‘Thought not.’ He dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

‘The full tide of existence is here,’ Dr Samuel Johnson had once remarked about the crossroads that are now Trafalgar Square, and Goodfellowe was inclined to agree with him, although for the moment the tide seemed to have ground to a halt.

Goodfellowe had retreated in late afternoon to his flat in Chinatown in order to escape the inevitable demands of the Tea Room. He had both a diet to defend and a backlog of personal correspondence to clear and was behind schedule on both, but now he was scurrying back to Westminster, braving the evening rush hour to make the seven o’clock vote. Except nothing was rushing. As he manoeuvred his bicycle around the queue of cars waiting their turn to enter the square he found his path obstructed, the intersection jammed. From his eyrie, the figure of Nelson presided over a maelstrom of anger and abuse.

The square had been hijacked.

Goodfellowe struggled on for a few precious yards, only to find himself in the middle of a demonstration that had been planned with the precision of a Prussian cavalry assault. Several hundred eco-warriors mounted on bicycles had charged upon the enemy’s divisions, taking them by surprise at a time when their manoeuvrability had already been reduced to a rush-hour crawl. Within minutes the bicycles were masters of the field. Their numbers were so great and their presence so dangerously disruptive that the flow of traffic had been forced to slow, then stop completely, the way barred by impenetrable picket lines of bikes. Dozens of policemen were falling upon the square but as soon as one cycle was moved on, another took its place. So what were they supposed to do? Arrest several hundred bikes?

A young cyclist drew alongside Goodfellowe. ‘Shove it up their exhausts!’ his fellow biker greeted him, clapping him painfully on the shoulder.

Goodfellowe was inclined to agree, but only up to a point. After all, the good citizens of the rural constituency of Marshwood relied on cars for everything, including delivering his majority on voting day. There were two sides to this one and such moral dilemmas were best considered at leisure, not while rushing to make the Division Bell. He dismounted and attempted to press on through a warcry of car horns, whistles and increasingly angry noises of complaint.

In front of him a uniformed inspector was shouting into his personal radio, demanding that reinforcements be winkled out of the police canteen at Charing Cross, while nearby a Sky TV news crew had arrived just in time to witness a cyclist moaning in the gutter after being knocked from her bike by a confused motorist. Around the base of the column a group of protesters were unfurling a banner half the length of a football pitch: ‘Save Our Streets!’

Bedlam.

It took Goodfellowe several minutes to force his way to the south side of the square. He was now directly beneath the superb equestrian statue of King Charles, one of the few to have survived the Civil War. The hapless monarch gazed down Whitehall towards the site of his scaffold, around which the crowd had watched in silent disbelief as the head had been struck off at the fourth cervical vertebra with a single clean blow. Goodfellowe glanced at his watch – he was late, very late, if he missed the vote he doubted that the Whips would be as merciful – but with a final heave of his handlebars he found that salvation was at hand. The police, reinforced and now regrouping, were throwing barriers across the top of Whitehall to prevent the demonstrators descending on Downing Street itself. Beyond the cordon lay the Houses of Parliament, the way to which was entirely clear.

‘And where d’you think you’re going, Sunny Jim?’

‘Let me through, please, Constable. I’m a Member of Parliament and I’ve got a vote to catch.’ Anxiety and lack of time made him sound pompous.

It riled the policeman. The constable inspected the figure clad in luminous yellow helmet and baggy trousers that had appeared before him, then stood his ground. ‘Piss off before I nick you for obstruction.’

‘Don’t be offensive.’

‘Piss off – sir. Will that do you?’

‘Look, I’ve got a vote in the House of Commons in less than ten minutes. Let me pass. I insist!’ Goodfellowe reached out and shook the metal barrier that stood between them.

‘Don’t get violent or I’ll …’

‘Violence? Is that what you want? Because that’s what you’ll get when I report this to Chief Superintendent Ainsworth.’

The mention of his superior’s name gave the constable pause both for thought and for a little anxiety. ‘You really an MP?’ he demanded, sucking a broken front tooth. ‘Where’s your ID then?’

‘My ID?’ Goodfellowe began slapping his pockets in frustration. ‘I’m not carrying it. I rarely carry it.’

‘No ID, only cycle clips? Then they’re not going to let you into the House of Commons, are they?’

‘They all know me there, for God’s sake. Let me through!’

By this time a number of other cyclists, genuine demonstrators, had drawn up to witness the confrontation and to heckle Goodfellowe on, demanding not only that he be let through but that they all be let through. Goodfellowe groaned.

‘Look, Constable … 169OW. You prevent me from getting through and you’ll be in breach of the Sessional Order of the House of Commons. Can’t remember the exact quote, but something about the police ensuring that no obstruction be allowed to hinder the passage of Members to the House on pain of being inflicted with all sorts of cruel and unusual punishments. You’ll not only be on the Chief Super’s doorstep first thing tomorrow but also find your way into the pages of Hansard. Ainsworth’ll boil your balls for his breakfast. The rest of you’ll go for mince. You’ve got …’ – Goodfellowe glanced despairingly at his watch; he wasn’t going to make it – ‘about ten seconds to make up your mind or end up on the back shelf of your old mum’s fridge.’

The constable hesitated. If he let one through the others might follow and he’d have caused a cavalry charge down Whitehall. On the other hand, whoever this man was, he clearly knew Ainsworth and his appetites. God, if only he’d joined the gendarmerie he could have beaten the crap out of them all and no questions asked. The constable tossed the consequences back and forth, weighing his doubts against the merits of his manhood, until eventually he relented. ‘The rest of you get back,’ he shouted at the demonstrators, ‘just this one’s getting through.’

It took more agonizing moments of delay before they complied, the barrier was dragged back, with a muttered apology from the policeman for any misunderstanding, and Goodfellowe was allowed to pass.

As he remounted his bike and began pedalling furiously, he could hear Big Ben striking in the distance, tolling for the bodies to be brought in for counting. Already he was sweating and he’d feel like a dish rag when he arrived. He had only a few more minutes before the doors of the voting lobbies would be locked. He took a huge breath to fill his lungs with oxygen. His legs ached with the effort and suddenly he felt very middle-aged. Time was running out for Goodfellowe, in all sorts of ways. There was still so much he wanted to do, to achieve, but he knew he could do none of it left out in the cold on a bicycle. There was also the matter of Elizabeth. How was he going to hang on to someone as classy as that if all he could offer her was the back of a bloody tandem? As he raced past the Red Lion, he knew that the time had come for him to move on in his life. The bicycle clips had to go.

Goodfellowe cast a despairing, angry look over his shoulder at the confusion he had just left behind. To his surprise he thought he caught sight of Sam, almost buried in the crowd on the other side of the barrier. But no, it couldn’t be. His daughter was in her first year at London University, she’d be busy right now with lectures or essays or something, not out causing mayhem. No, it couldn’t be, wouldn’t be Sam. Anyway, he didn’t have time to stop.

Now he was on the long sprint towards Parliament, putting his back into it, the noise of battle fading. As he pedalled he reflected; how easy it had been for a relatively small number of people armed with nothing more than a little initiative to overwhelm a modern city, to clog the arteries and bring the heart of a great metropolis to the point of seizure. The Cold War military blocs had amassed their arsenals of nuclear-tipped missiles along with chemical and biological agents, weapons that they could launch from land and sea and air and even from space. Vast military machines constructed at huge and often crippling expense. When all they’d needed was a few bicycle pumps.

Goodfellowe chuckled in relief. Thank God the Soviets hadn’t been plugged in to Sky News.

‘Tom!’ A high, almost musical note, a sound of welcome.

Then: ‘Oh, Tom.’ Softer, deeper. About six feet deep. ‘By my mother’s beard, I really don’t know what to do with you. An angel in hobnail boots, if ever I saw one. Never know whether you’re coming into my office to bring me good news or give me a bloody good kicking.’

The Chief Whip waved him onto the single leather sofa and, without prompting, handed him a tumbler of whisky. ‘First you ask to see me. Then miss a bloody vote so I have to have you dragged in here by the cods anyway.’

Eddie Rankin sank wearily into the sofa beside Goodfellowe. The Chief was a Border Scot whose family over generations had seen all sides of the question as armies had tramped their way north and south across his country. His family had fought on all sides, too. Resilience and reticence were woven into the Rankin genes, which made him an ideal Whip. So unlike Battersby.

Goodfellowe had arrived at the House, panting after his dash down Whitehall, his collar askew, his hair like a nesting site for sparrows. He’d missed the vote. Battersby had been waiting for him. Wearing yellow socks. Yellow, for Christ’s sake.

‘Amazing what rubbish floats past if you sit by the river long enough,’ the Whip had weighed in. He was a little drunk, his tongue slow, and he was having trouble with the words, like some badly dubbed film.

‘Damn it, Battersby. I bust a gut trying to get here. Not my fault.’

‘Too busy shagging the waitress, were we? You gotta be careful, Tom, or the News of the Screws is gonna find out about that little arrangement of yours. Fact is, think I can guarantee it.’

‘You should be studied by ornithologists,’ Goodfellowe had countered. ‘As living proof of an old Chinese proverb.’

‘What Chinese proverb?’ the Whip had responded cautiously.

‘That everything which craps on you isn’t necessarily a bird.’

Battersby’s eyes narrowed. He was supposed to be in charge of this, yet somehow Goodfellowe always put him on the defensive. Still, he had one weapon in his locker. Time to produce it. ‘It’s not me you have to worry about, my old deary. The Chief wants to see you. Bit of a command performance, I’m afraid.’

‘Don’t worry. I had already made an appointment with him,’ Goodfellowe had smiled generously, leaving Battersby in confusion, which wasn’t all that difficult once one had progressed beyond counting to ten.

The Chief Whip was a different breed. Subtle. Even a friend, so far as politics allow. ‘You see, Tom, we’ve known each other so many years. I watched you when you were a Minister. Thought you were the one, perhaps the only one of our generation, who had the ability to make it to the top. Seriously I did. Yet now you can’t even make it to a bloody vote.’ His fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of the sofa. They were delicate, almost feminine fingers, carefully manicured, the mark of a man who had once played the classical guitar with the Scottish National Orchestra, fingers that could pick the conscience from a backbencher’s pocket without him ever knowing.

‘Not my fault, Eddie,’ Goodfellowe responded. ‘Not this time, at least. Got caught up in a demonstration at Trafalgar Square.’

‘Tom, just listen to yourself. Missed a vote because you got caught up in a mob demonstrating against your own Government? What do you think this is? A kindergarten class?’ The colour drained from Rankin’s voice. Goodfellowe was going to have to earn his whisky the hard way. ‘You’ve spent the last couple of years being about as much help as a nun in a knocking shop. We’ve been patient, sympathetic. Hell, after you lost your son, and Elinor cracked up …’ He paused in sorrow. The ancient leather of the sofa creaked as he leaned forward to refill their glasses. ‘You know as well as anybody that we’re not all prehistoric like Battersby. But we all have to move on, Tom. I’m running a parliamentary party, not a dog pound.’

‘Aren’t we allowed the occasional bark?’

‘I haven’t got time to waste on rounding up stray mongrels,’ Rankin retorted. ‘In your case, some would argue that it was better simply to have you put down. Including, so I’ve heard, some in your own constituency party.’

So, the ripples on the Marshwood pond had reached as far as the Chief Whip’s lair. Goodfellowe ran his finger around the rim of his glass. An average blend, not a single malt. Unmistakable evidence that this was serious rather than social.

‘Look at it from my point of view, Tom. If you were standing in my socks, what would you be saying?’

Goodfellowe stifled a sarcastic response – this wasn’t the moment for cheap lines – and gazed around the panelled room with its dark window and conspiratorial atmosphere. On Rankin’s desk lay a small pile of folders. Personnel files. Files from the safe, the armoury where the Whips stored most of their weapons, those little secrets and shames that were committed to paper and locked away, to be brought out and brandished whenever one of the dogs started barking. (No computer files here, too easy to copy, only the handwritten daily notes torn from the Whips’ Book, along with a few press cuttings and unpaid invoices. Perhaps even a couple of charge sheets, too.)

There were some secrets that even the Whips were unwilling to commit to paper, matters so sensitive they were confined only to that collective memory that bound together the brotherhood. Such as the whereabouts of the Foreign Secretary’s first wife, whom he had inconveniently forgotten to divorce before marrying the second. Her bank account number, too, although a slip of paper recorded details of the regular payments. There was also the identity of the MP’s daughter who fed her drug habit by prostitution and by playing the Stock Market with exceptional good fortune following her occasional visits to a Junior Minister for Industry. Nestling alongside the other secrets was the identity of the Whip, one of their own, who’d had a heart attack in his room, tied to his chair with underwear around his ankles. Women’s underwear. No need for a paper record. They would for ever remember him as Little Miss Naughty, baby pink, extra large. For a moment Goodfellowe wondered whether Rankin had been running through his own file, and what might be in it.

‘If, as you say, I were standing in your socks, Eddie,’ he responded, picking up the Chief Whip’s challenge, ‘I would say here was a mongrel of some talent. Awkward sometimes, to be sure. The sort of dog who waits until you’ve built the kennel around him, driven home the last nail, then jumps over the bloody gate. But a dog who’s looking for a new …’ – he took a deep breath while he hunted for the right word – ‘adventure.’

‘Adventure? I prefer the quiet life. No surprises.’ Yet curiosity drew him on. ‘What sort of adventure?’

‘One that doesn’t require me to cycle in the rain around Westminster and get caught up in the crowd.’

‘You want money?’

‘No, you Scottish teuchter!’ His voice rang unnaturally jocular in his own ear, too loud, trying too hard. He sipped his whisky, finding it difficult to plead. ‘I want to be back with the team, Eddie. It’s a tough game in this place and I’m tired of trying to score goals all on my own.’

‘This is a new Goodfellowe,’ the Whip responded wryly. ‘Why the sudden change?’

‘I’ve got new interests, new friends …’

‘I’d heard.’

‘New enthusiasms,’ Goodfellowe continued, now certain that Rankin had undoubtedly reviewed his file, and that Elizabeth was on it.

‘You want back on the inside of the tent?’

‘It would be more comfortable than staying on the outside. For you, too. I’m so messy when I put my back into it.’

‘So you want in. And you thought the best way to impress me was to balls-up a simple vote?’

‘Think positive. Get me off my bike, Eddie, and you rob an old rebel of his excuse.’

They held each other’s gaze, testing.

‘You pick your moments, Tom,’ Rankin eventually responded. His tone was considered, contemplative. Not dismissive. ‘The tom-toms are beginning to beat from Downing Street. Testing the tune of an early reshuffle. One or two braves to be burnt at the stake, so rumour has it. Somebody will need to take their place.’

‘I’d like it to be me.’ There, he’d said it. No ambiguity, ambition to the fore. It felt good, like favourite shoes.

‘Ah, the appetite returns!’

‘Put it down to menopausal vanity. An insane desire for a higher profile. Before I have to start dying my hair.’

‘And suddenly you’ve become enamoured of our beloved leader?’ There was no hiding the sceptical note. Rankin was a musician, he could recognize a duff score.

‘You know me better than that, Eddie. Y’know Brother Bendall better than that, too. One day there’ll be a great shaking of the ground and he’ll get buried beneath an avalanche of his own bullshit. But while History makes up her mind as to when the burial will be, I can be helpful. I want to be helpful.’

‘And some might say he needs all the help he can get,’ Rankin responded, so softly that it wouldn’t carry as far as the walls.

‘Will you put my name forward?’

‘It’s my duty, now you’ve offered.’

‘But will you recommend it?’

The Chief Whip took a slug of whisky. ‘Recommend you? Bit like recommending jumping as a cure for vertigo. Who knows? You’re such an awkward sod, Goodfellowe …’

The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 banked gently over the sea as it positioned itself for a final approach to the airport at Odessa. The sight that greeted her through the cabin window was remarkable and Elizabeth hoped it would prove to be something of an omen.

Through the window of the Austrian Air flight she could see a fleet of aircraft set out beside the runway, a testament to the might of the infant and independent republic of Ukraine. Bombers, transports, fighter planes, helicopters, MIGs, Tupolevs, Yaks and Sukhois, all ranged in straight rows like the tentacles of a great war machine ready to form a guard of honour.

‘Our air force,’ the male passenger in the seat beside her indicated. ‘Big bloody air force,’ he added. Yuri’s English was not good and was very guttural, like an engine running on its last drop of oil, but somehow throughout the afternoon flight from Vienna he had managed to make his meanings entirely transparent to his unaccompanied companion. She had already turned down his repeated invitation to dinner.

As they taxied past the aircraft on the ground he returned to his theme, jabbing his finger for emphasis. ‘Air force in mothballs. Big bloody moths, eh?’ A laugh originated from somewhere near his large intestine. ‘But no bloody balls!’

She could see what he meant. The aircraft that at a distance had looked so imposing at closer quarters revealed nothing but disaster. The place was an aeronautical knacker’s yard. There were old military planes with engines stripped, their sides still covered with Soviet stigmata, single-seater fighters shorn of their canopies and propped up on concrete slabs, helicopters with some rotors missing, the others sagging in surrender. Passenger planes, too. One huge hurry-before-they-rot-and-rust clearance sale. You could buy anything here, she’d been told, even buy a navy to match if you took a trip to Sebastopol, and for a price that was always right. An omen, indeed, she hoped.

She had heard about the wine from a Ukrainian customer who had come to dine at The Kremlin after delivering his son to his Wiltshire public school. The wine was not his personal business, that at least she had managed to gather from his fragmentary command of the language, although what his business was remained something of a mystery. When she had enquired, he frowned in concentration, hunting for elusive English words, then picked up an imaginary weapon in both hands and, with a juddering motion, sprayed the restaurant with bullets. ‘Ah, a soldier,’ she had deduced. He shook his head. ‘A policeman, then?’ He scowled in contempt, at which point she had let the matter rest. A man with access to weaponry and sufficient hard currency to send his son to English public school was not someone she wanted to press too hard. Anyway, he left a substantial tip along with a mysterious reference to wine. There was a specific mention of the Tsars, and mutterings about a lost cellar.

A few days later she received a warbling international phone call from someone who called himself Vladimir Houdoliy and whose English was, thankfully, exceptional, although delivered with intonation that was entirely American. His mastery of metaphor also left something to be desired. He introduced himself as a man who ‘has a lot of experience tucked away beneath my belt,’ which left her crippled for days. He apologized for the intrusion, called her Madam Proprietor, and explained his purpose.

He spoke in colourful tones, so engaging to Elizabeth on a day of leaden London skies, of his homeland and of a magnificent palace that overlooked the sea. A place of dreams, he said, somewhere on the coast of the Black Sea, a former summer residence much favoured by the last Tsar and Tsaritsa and equipped, in their time, most magnificently. Vast floors of the coolest Italian marble. French chandeliers that outshone diamonds. Statuary that would have graced Florence, fountains whose waters tumbled like a constant peal of bells, and beneath it all, dark and secure, an extensive wine cellar whose contents were the pride of the owner of the palace – Vladimir’s grandfather.

In those ancient times when riot and unrest had rushed towards revolution, Vladimir’s grandfather had grown increasingly concerned. The Bolsheviks showed such little respect for palaces let alone for French chandeliers, and no respect at all for cellars, particularly those holding the Tsar and Tsaritsa. So he had shipped out the statues, turned off the fountains, draped sacking around the chandeliers, even allowed peasants to sleep in the stables. He also decided to brick up the wine cellar in the hope that he could liberate it at a later time.

That time had never come. Grandfather had been put to the purge, the palace had been stripped of its marble and then nationalized. Lenin had promised to turn it into a sanatorium, but instead it became a munitions factory and, after a period in World War II when it had been occupied by the Germans, it had been used as a mental asylum. No one had bothered with the cellar, its secrets preserved behind crumbling brick and in faded family legend.

Yet, thank God and Gorbachev, the New Revolution had changed all that. Vladimir had been able to reclaim his inheritance and was planning to restore life to the crumbling palace by transforming it into a headquarters building for a Western company. A great opportunity for him – except for the problem of his cash flow. The chaos in those wretched currency markets, you understand? So would Elizabeth be interested in some rather fine wines? Mostly reds, of course, fortified, from the Crimea, plus a wide range of local spirits. All Russian imperial, pre-1917 vintage? At prices in hard currency that would do them both a favour?

Timing is everything in a woman’s life and Vladimir Houdoliy found his timing was all but perfect. Elizabeth needed Vladimir, or someone just like him. Recession had begun to nibble at Westminster’s sense of well-being and takings at The Kremlin were down. Not desperate, but down. There was a black hole emerging in her accounts and her bank manager, although appropriately primed with an excellent lunch and one of Elizabeth’s most daringly cut dresses, had proved unsympathetic. He had accepted a large Remy then whined throughout the refill about the slim margins and poor security of the restaurant trade. Wanker.

Elizabeth was resolved. A little fun needed to be put back into the business, and a few cases of good Tsarist vintages at the right price might prove a very considerable source of amusement.

Houdoliy turned out to be fun, too. Tall, sixty-something, with a sea of silvery waves for hair, he greeted her at the terminal with a chauffeur-driven Audi and a look of gentle mischief in his grandfatherly eyes. There was also a bouquet of yellow roses. ‘For a beautiful and most welcome guest,’ the card announced.

They had driven along the gentle tree-lined boulevards of Odessa with its pastel-painted mansions, once clearly a graceful mercantile capital, now desperately wrinkled at its many edges. ‘But safe!’ Vladimir had emphasized. ‘At night, the most dangerous things on our streets are the potholes.’

‘Why so safe?’ she had enquired.

‘Because our local mafia requires all muggers to be off the streets by sunset,’ he had exclaimed, before clasping her hand and bursting into laughter. She noticed he had smooth hands, not at all leathery like some men of his age.

He made her most welcome. He had booked her into the Shevchenko, a floating hotel moored in the harbour that had been converted from an old passenger ferry. Its rooms were small but comfortable, although the main attraction for most visitors seemed to be the much larger bar. That night he took her to The Valday, a restaurant that stood at the very top of the Potemkin Steps. The exterior was inconspicuous but it was beautifully decorated inside and offered the most absorbing dishes of fish, both fresh and smoked. There was also black and orange caviare by the forkful, a little vodka and a remarkably good local sparkling wine. Modern Ukrainian wines had a poor reputation but by heavens they were getting better – although nothing like the pre-1917 vintages, of course, Vladimir had insisted forcefully.

She discovered that for herself the following afternoon. The palace was a short drive along the coast, at a point where the cliffs swooped down to the great sand beaches of Odessa Bay to play tag with the sea. A place of princes, exactly as he had described, although not as large as she had imagined, brooding, with a cracked whitewashed portico. Outside in the grounds there was nothing but a toppled sundial and a few empty plinths, crumbling like long-forgotten graves in gardens that had been tended by nothing but a few grazing cattle for more than half a century. Inside, the palace was guarded by echoes that swirled around columns and scurried across floors that had been stripped of their marble and patched with bad cement. And deep within, behind a new steel door, he led her to the cellars, rows of musty underground enclaves that smelled of old souls where the bottles were laid out like corpses.

Oh, but what a confusion of wines! Dessert wines that had been protected by their high sugar and alcohol contents, some of which were still improving. Heavy ports, red and white Muscats, Tokays. Many of the wines were from Massandra, the bottles bearing the double-headed eagle that marked them as once belonging to the Tsar himself. Like a magician, Vladimir would produce yet another surprise, stroking away the layers of dust and encrustation with the tenderness of a young lover to reveal still more wonders. An 1896 Prince Golitzin Lacrima Christi. An Alupka White Port. A Muscat in a bulbous bottle with a huge royal seal on its shoulder, made for the Tsar in the very year they had dragged him from his throne.

They sat at an old wooden table stained the colour of dried blood from the lees, and in the candlelight Vladimir subjected her to a series of temptations, first with a wine from the Crimea, then a bottle from further along the coast. They tasted wine after wine, nine in all, mostly reds but with two darkly sweet whites and a brandy. Not all of them had worn as well as Vladimir, but they inspired in spite of that, simply because of their history. From the shadows of the wall an icon of a gilded Madonna smiled contentedly, while Vladimir entertained Elizabeth with more stories of his family, of the palace, and of the purge that had emptied it of his grandfather’s family.

‘He was killed in this cellar by the NKVD,’ Vladimir explains, with a hint of pride. ‘Stood up against the same wall he had built to hide this wine and shot. On the very day they murdered the Tsar and Tsaritsa. This is more than wine, this is the blood of my country.’

‘You must find it difficult to part with.’

He nods, a short bow of his head as though submitting to God. ‘Of course. But necessary in order to restore the palace. Sadly, our bank managers are less trusting than yours.’

Which must put them in the Crippen league, she muses. Money has been mentioned. It is time to begin. ‘I suppose you’ll be expecting a good price for the wines?’

He holds his head to one side, as though considering the matter for the first time. ‘A good price, yes. But not a great price. I need to sell some of the wine quickly. Direct, not through an agent. They’re all mafia! They would charge a huge commission on the wine they sold, then steal the rest as soon as they knew of its whereabouts. No, by selling direct to you we can both gain.’

‘So … how much?’

‘Ah, Elizabeth. You are young. You are beautiful. And you are impatient!’ He chuckles as though scolding a granddaughter, but his smile is anything but grandfatherly. He is a man of refined tastes, in both wine and women. ‘Before we discuss business, let us try one last wine. Not a great vintage but a young Ukrainian wine. A Cagur. A little sweet. Like port. But strong and honest. Like our friendship!’

It is as he has promised, clean, honest, brimming with the taste of blackcurrant. This bottle they drink, not taste, as they sit across the flickering flame of the candle and he quotes the prices he expects. For the Tokay, twenty thousand hryvna a case. Which is fair. For the Madeira, nearly thirty. But it is too dense, she protests, like ink. It is like a woman’s virtue, he replies, you will get double for it in London.

She laughs, returns his stare, which in the candlelight suggests more than simply business. He is exceptionally good-looking for his age, his frame elegant and self-disciplined. Undoubtedly experienced. To her surprise she wonders what he is like in bed. She’s never been to bed with a man over sixty.

‘You are wondering, perhaps, what an old man like me is doing with such longing for a beautiful woman like you, Elizabeth?’ he enquires with startling insight. ‘Have no cares,’ he laughs. ‘Before we are even halfway through this bottle I shall probably not even be able to stand.’

Suddenly she feels elated. For as they discuss the wines she might buy and she struggles with the mental arithmetic of conversion, it’s as though a great weight has been lifted from her. She will take twenty cases. Average cost quoted by Vladimir of £2,600. She will sell half the cases at auction through Sotheby’s for what she estimates will be double the price paid. Which will leave her with another ten cases absolutely free, and available for sale at an even larger mark-up at The Kremlin. With only a little luck she might clear £75,000 on this deal, enough to sort out all her own cash-flow problems. Next time that undersized, illegitimate and copulatory bank manager of hers can pay for his own lunch.

‘Vladimir, I like this place. I like this wine.’ Without wanting to admit it, she likes him too. ‘I think we have a deal.’

‘Magnificent! So tonight we shall have a little party, you and I. But first, a toast. To beauty.’

Vladimir drains the last of his wine and with an agile flourish throws the empty glass against the cellar wall. Elizabeth, giggling and a little intoxicated from the alcohol and excitement, does the same.

Vladimir leans across and kisses her, in celebration, and not like a granddaughter. He feels warm, smells good, masculine. She notices he isn’t having the slightest trouble standing.

FOUR

Mary Wetherell climbed out of her taxi in front of the Army & Navy Club, wondering what dinner might hold in store for her. You could never tell with Amadeus. Bit of a mad bugger, was the Colonel.

He’d been one of her course instructors at Sandhurst and even at forty he’d been able to flay most of them around the cross-country course. A warrior, not just a soldier. He wasn’t the type who fitted neatly into the little boxes so favoured by the planners and their flow charts. Instead Amadeus adopted an idiosyncratic and almost detached approach to authority which inspired as much enthusiasm from the junior ranks as it raised eyebrows amongst the apple polishers. He would make a point of wearing his camouflage trousers so crumpled, for instance, that they might have been taken from the back of a teenager’s closet. They were battle fatigues, he explained, they weren’t intended to be covered in spray starch but in mud and unpleasant bits of anatomy, preferably someone else’s.

There was also the leg of lamb. It had been served up as an excuse for dinner, a joint so gruesome and gristle-bound that it probably contravened several provisions of the Geneva Convention. Amadeus hadn’t just complained, he had acted. On the spot and in full view of the entire Sandhurst mess hall, he had convened a field court martial at which the carcass had been accused, tried and summarily condemned, whereupon amidst much cheering and ribaldry it had been taken to the firing range, propped against a sandbag and repeatedly shot. ‘And when we’ve run out of carcasses we’ll start on the cooks,’ he had announced. Standards in the mess hall improved rapidly after that.

No, dinner with the Colonel was never likely to be dull.

That wasn’t the only reason she had accepted the invitation. It had arrived on a day of purple clouds over Exmoor that melted with the dawn, when the rains drummed interminably upon her patience and the rivers of slurry hadn’t stopped until they reached the Bristol Channel. It got her to thinking, which was bad. She hadn’t been out of the valley in two months, had trouble remembering when she had last seen anything as exciting as a traffic light. She was spending more time than ever on distractions. On the Internet, on solitary walks. Away from her husband.

They’d had a row when she said she was going to London, a silly, pointless grumbling match, and endless, too. Had he sensed what she sensed, that it was all going wretchedly wrong for them? That this wasn’t simply an invitation to London but an excuse to run away? He didn’t regard himself as her jailer, but she knew it would hurt him if she went. Trouble was, things had got to the point where it would do more harm to stay. She needed to breathe once more, to stretch her wings. To fly away.

‘Glad you’ve come. You can add a bit of class to this bunch,’ Amadeus offered as he made the introductions to the other two dinner guests in the bar. ‘This excuse for illegitimacy is Captain Andrew McKenzie, late of the Royal Engineers. Met him in Bosnia when he was with 33 EOD, dragging out a Scimitar crew that had run themselves into the middle of a minefield. He’s completely mad. The other one comes from a much longer line of bastards – may I present Major the Honourable Freddie Payne? Grenadier Guards, which was formerly commanded by his father. Known as the Great Payne amongst his colleagues in the regiment, for some reason …’

As they exchanged greetings, Mary found her instincts immediately abraded and sensitised. The Army & Navy Club was an unambiguously male bastion, she felt out of place here, and it seemed as though she were watching them all from a distance. She felt uneasy about Freddie Payne from the moment he opened his over-confident mouth. Too much bloody nose, a class thing. Yet there was hunger in his eyes and, she thought, a glint of fear. Like a man who every day has to cross a tightrope just to live, knowing that one day he must surely fall. The air of confidence was a mask as carefully constructed as his expensively capped teeth.

Her feminine instincts played an entirely different game with the other guest, McKenzie, a Highland Scot by upbringing and accent. He was quieter, more intense, not so much withdrawn as watching. On watch, even. He was softly spoken but his sharp blue eyes never rested, as though searching a Highland river for salmon. She could smell the animal in him. She was both shocked and amused to discover herself looking for his wedding ring; she was still more amused to discover there wasn’t one. For a moment, Exmoor seemed very far away. So was Cambodia, from where McKenzie had recently returned after several months’ defusing land mines.

‘Why d’you do it, Andy? After all, there’s damn all money in it,’ Amadeus probed.

‘Perhaps I simply like making things go bang.’

‘Bloody dangerous work.’

‘Even more bloody dangerous if the work’s no’ done.’

‘Trouble with you, Andy, you are the most dangerous kind of soldier,’ Amadeus concluded. ‘Not only a rifle and a sackful of explosive, but principles as well.’

‘Little wonder there was no place for me in the modern Army,’ the engineer replied softly. He gave a perfunctory smile to take the cutting edge off his comment, but Mary noticed the humour failed to reach as far as his eyes. She also noted that Amadeus had spoken in the present tense, like a man who couldn’t let go.

Payne had arrived at the club by an entirely different route. Amadeus had met him during a tour of duty in Northern Ireland which, according to every other unit in the Army, was one of the few postings where Guardsmen did active duty with anything other than pink gins and pussy. Payne’s speciality had been reconnaissance, tracking bandits through the rough terrain of the border country and into the bad-arse areas of Belfast and Derry. Seeing without being seen. Not a soft posting, for had he been caught his ultimate fate was undeniable. A bullet in the back of the head. The only matter left to argument was what they would have done to him before putting him out of his agony. The choices ranged from a portable Black & Decker drill through the kneecaps to a sledgehammer applied with vigour to both his feet. Either way you weren’t going to walk to your funeral.

Payne had seen Amadeus’s letter while in a crowded commuter train on his way to his job in a Mayfair gallery. He had stood – he’d had no choice on that front, for even if he’d fainted he would have been kept upright by the press of bodies around him – and melted with self-recognition as he had read it, particularly the line about ‘a greater humiliation than surrender’.

He understood humiliation. On a daily basis. For Payne had married both well and badly. Well, because of his wife’s connections, the daughter of a former Governor of Bermuda whom he had met when serving as the Governor’s ADC; badly, appallingly badly, because she had turned out to be such a genetically untameable shrew. Her ceaseless harassment had been tolerable while Payne remained an officer in the Guards, their lifestyle maintained by regular subsidies from his father which covered mess bills, polo ponies, skiing in Villars and two spoilt daughters. Yet nothing lasts for ever. His father had fallen into that black hole of financial despair called Lloyd’s and, seeing no respite, had blasted his cares away with both barrels of a shotgun. A Purdey. Tortoiseshell stock, beautiful balance. A family heirloom, later to be sold along with all the rest. ‘The simple dignity of being shot’, in the words of Amadeus’s letter. ‘Nothing but spite and selfishness’, according to his wife, who regardless of Lloyd’s expected her comforts and connections to be maintained, may blisters abound in her crotch.

Payne couldn’t break away. There were times, dark times, when he understood how his father must have felt. He knew he had no grand intellect, that’s why he’d failed the Staff College exams. Twice. There were times when blowing out even a half-brain seemed like a reasonable option, if only to annoy his wife. But here, at least, in the Army & Navy Club, he felt safe, with his wife out of sight and hearing on that dark side of the moon they call Crawley. He felt revived, almost like old times, glad he had written to Amadeus.

The Colonel led them upstairs to the dining room, where they were seated in a quiet corner overlooking St James’s Square. On all sides towered portraits of great men.

‘How about a toast? To the heroes of our nation,’ Amadeus offered.

‘England expects?’ the Scot muttered.

‘Expects too damned much nowadays,’ Payne responded. ‘Lay down your life. Then pay for your own fucking funeral. Bit like marriage.’

With that, the game began.

As the hors d’oeuvres arrived, they began to compete with each other. During the first bottle they fought to prove how the British Army was still the best in the world; during the second they began to acknowledge that, arguably, this was no longer the case. Their best battles were behind them. By the time the third had been ordered, the game had focused on finding ever more vivid means of expressing their contempt for the politicians who had broken faith with them and with so many of their colleagues. The fourth bottle made it clear how much they thought it still mattered to them.

‘Know what those useless sons-of-Soviets are up to? Flogging everything – enriched uranium, any sort of surface-to-air stuff, even full-scale C&B armouries. It’s a nightmare … I know a private collector who bought a T-60 tank last month. Arranged it on the Internet. They even offered him high-explosive squash-heads for the bloody thing, just imagine … That pond life we have for a Foreign Secretary whines on about an era of peace. Doesn’t he know there are at least three active war zones less than a couple of hours’ flying time from London … Don’t bother flying. Fuck, come home with me. Hell of a lot closer than Chechnya. Warfare every damned day … D’ya ken, there are more terrorist groups out on the streets of Europe now than there were when they bulldozed the Berlin Wall … Hey, more means of delivery, too. Not just missiles but suitcase bombs, toxins … How long would it take to wipe out half of London Underground, d’you reckon? Probably got time to do it before the cheese course. Come to think of it, great idea, getting wiped out. Before those bastards in the Inland Revenue do it for me. How about another bottle?’

‘And when you’ve finished ordering it, Peter, shall we stop playing with ourselves and get you to tell us what the devil we’re all doing here?’

‘Ah, Mary, always the direct one. Tell me, how is your former Commanding Officer? Still crawling around on his hands and knees looking for the pieces of his tooth?’

‘I sincerely hope so.’ For a moment memories tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘But enough of the diversionary tactics, Peter. Cough. What are we celebrating?’

‘Celebrating? Not quite the word I would use.’ Amadeus’s tone grew pensive, almost sad. ‘Met a man the other day, my old RSM. You know the type – would take a raw recruit at breakfast, scare the shit out of him by lunch and by supper have him ripping tanks apart with his teeth. One of the most remarkable men I ever had the honour of serving with. Or getting legless with, come to that. Saved my life once. Mount Longdon. That’s when I swore I would always be there for him.’ He paused. ‘Know where he lives now? On the street. Swapped his uniform for an old dog blanket. Nearly killed himself rushing to pick up one of my cigarette butts.’ He rolled his glass between his palms but didn’t drink. ‘I felt ashamed. To the bottom of my being. I said to myself – this shouldn’t be. I owe him. And all the others like him.’

‘So you write a letter to the bloody newspaper saying so, and the Minister tells you to go fuck yourself,’ Payne interjected, a shade too forcefully. Amadeus studied him carefully, suspecting that the Guardsman had had a drink or two before he’d arrived at the club.

‘What you say is true. I wanted an apology from the Minister. Some sign of remorse. It would have helped. Only words, I know, but words are important in a matter of honour. And this is a matter of honour. But the Minister wouldn’t have it, insisted on telling me and every other man and woman connected with the armed forces to … How did you so eloquently put it, Freddie?’

‘To go fuck ourselves.’

‘Precisely. So unnecessary, I thought. Not a gentleman, our Mr Earwick.’ For a moment it appeared as though he had finished while he attacked his rump steak until the blood ran around his plate.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘Mary, what gives you the idea that I plan to do anything about it?’

‘Because I remember Swanleigh.’

‘Swanleigh?’

‘The cadet who fell asleep in one of the classes you were instructing at Sandhurst.’

‘Aaahh …’

‘You had him stripped and thrown into the river. That’s you all over, Peter. You don’t take crap lying down.’

‘But I was so soft,’ Amadeus protested.

‘Soft? You had his feet tied!’

‘I left his hands free.’

‘It was the middle of bloody February. There was ice on the river …’

‘Was there?’ He sounded almost distracted. ‘Splendid. I bet the dopey bastard never fell asleep in class again. Or on patrol, either.’

Mary laughed. Her laughter was like a call from a distant mountain, noises from a time past. Suddenly she realized how much she was enjoying her day – the invigorating chaos of London, the adventure of meeting new people, even someone like Payne, the excitement of discussing something other than warble fly and infected udders around the dinner table. She was engaged in life once more. She’d almost forgotten what it was like. Suddenly, she dreaded going back.

McKenzie took up the challenge. ‘So what are ye going to do, Peter? Grab Earwig and douse him in the river, too?’

‘What would be the point, Andy?’

‘To encourage him to more vigilance. To change his mind, perhaps.’

‘Assuming he has a mind to change.’

‘Then what about the unadulterated pleasure of revenge? That’d be enough for some.’

Amadeus pushed aside his glass of wine, which had scarcely been touched. It was as though he were making room on the table cloth in front of him for a plan of battle. ‘I think we need more than that. Much more. We need to move the Government. To change their mind.’ Gently, almost tenderly, he smoothed out the creases in the linen. ‘Or have it changed for them.’

‘What, bloody revolution?’

‘No, not revolution. Perhaps more along the lines of a little encouragement. A gentle prod in the right direction. I think they need reminding that the world can still be full of misfortune.’

‘Tell us ’bout it,’ Payne muttered, heavy tongued, as he refilled his own glass.

‘That’s why I invited you all here for dinner. To see whether any of you might be interested in … a matter of honour.’ He returned to the phrase once again, like a call to arms. Or an alibi, perhaps.

He gazed around the table. All three of his guests returned his stare, even Payne, through eyes that were turning to glass.

‘It would require a little risk. And perhaps more than a little time. Here in London, Mary,’ he added, addressing her directly.

‘Not a problem. I’m not going back to Exmoor.’ Her words startled her. The words were entirely unexpected; she hadn’t known until this moment. Yet it seemed so obvious.

‘But what is it that four of us can do?’ McKenzie pressed.

‘Look at yourselves. All of you specialists. The finest the British Army can produce. Communications. Reconnaissance. Munitions. One lunatic Paratrooper. Expertise and madness – the sort of talents that ought to scare the hell out of anyone with a little imagination. And what could we do?’ He looked slowly around the table, staring once more into their eyes, testing them. ‘Why, practically anything we damn well wanted!’

He began to beat his fists upon the table, as though beating a drum, until the cutlery rattled and the glasses sang. And, one by one, the others joined him, a war party, until the noise became so loud that it echoed around the large dining hall.

The waiter turned and slowly shook his head. He might have known it. Ah, Colonel Amadeus. Bit of a mad bugger, that one. Or so he’d heard.

Goodfellowe’s pager stirred. He uttered something rude and not at all profound. The wretched thing made him feel like a criminal, allowed to roam only on condition that he was electronically tagged. For tuppence he’d have thrown the thing in the Thames, but for ambition he now kept it with him, and switched on.

The small screen lit up and began to flash a sickly green.

‘UNLESS YOUR AREA WHIP ADVISES YOU OTHERWISE YOU ARE NOW ON A ONE-LINE WHIP.’

Simon says stand up. Simon says stand down. Turn around. Go jump …

Was it any different when he’d been a Minister? Had high office given him any more control over his life? Control over others, certainly, but his own life? He tried to remember, but couldn’t. It all seemed so long ago, wrapped up with the death of his son Stevie, and he’d spent much of the intervening years trying to block it all out – as his wife Elinor had done, to such terrifying effect.

Goodfellowe rebuked himself; he should stop being churlish. A One-Line Whip meant he didn’t have to bother. It was good news. An evening off. And his thoughts turned to Elizabeth, away in the Ukraine. Half seven in London, two hours later in Odessa. Should be back at her hotel by now.

So he rang, but there was no reply. Nor when he tried again half an hour later.

He hated the feeling of emptiness that struck him when she was away, the insecurity that bit into his humour at times like this. Was it that he felt inadequate? Or didn’t trust her? Or was it that he didn’t trust himself? The more he struggled with the questions, the more he realized he wasn’t likely to enjoy any of the answers, so he stopped. He telephoned Sam instead.

In the years since the death of Stevie and during the misery of his wife’s final and irreversible mental decline, Samantha had often been his only hold on happiness, the rock on which he had managed to rebuild his shattered life. She was now eighteen, studying the history of art at London University, and had digs less than two miles from his own apartment, yet he hadn’t seen her in almost a month. His fault. Things always seemed his fault. Time to do something about it.

But life somehow never quite fell into place for Goodfellowe.

‘No, don’t come round, Dad,’ she insisted when he called. ‘I’m meeting a friend in half an hour. At the coffee shop. But …’ – a sudden decision – ‘come and join us. He’d love to meet you.’

Whoever ‘he’ was.

Goodfellowe made it there five minutes early and commandeered a table with a good view of the window. They arrived holding hands. ‘Dad, meet Darren. And so forth.’ She waved the two together.

Darren’s hand was firm, his eye steady, his hair neatly trimmed, indeed everything that one might expect of a graduate student at the Business School, as Darren turned out to be. He was amusing, ambitious, evidently a young man of the world. Holding hands with his daughter. Touching. Brushing against her. Being almost proprietorial.

Goodfellowe decided he’d have to be adult about that. Trouble was, he wasn’t always very good at the ‘grown-up’ thing when it came to his daughter. Every time she produced a new boyfriend it was always the same, that initial feeling of panic and distress. Like sitting in the dentist’s chair watching the needle approach, knowing it was likely to hurt.

‘It’s been too long, Sam,’ he smiled, extracting the teabag from his mug. There was nowhere to put the dripping mess. That’s how they made tea in a coffee shop.

‘S’pose it has,’ she offered, trying to bend her youthful mind around the elusive concept of Time. ‘Almost like when I was younger. You remember? Those years when I only ever saw you on television?’

It wasn’t intended to make him feel guilty. She succeeded nonetheless.

‘Not quite the same, I dare say.’ He made a fuss over his hot tea, as though his lips were burning rather than his cheeks. ‘But since we’re discussing seeing each other at a distance, did I catch sight of you the other day? At Trafalgar Square?’

She beamed. ‘Sensational, wasn’t it?’

‘Bloody inconvenient. But I got your point.’

‘You should have joined in, Dad.’

‘I did. No choice. But for what it’s worth, I agree, something has to be done.’ He bit into a croissant, the pleasure of which was considerably devalued by the avalanche of flakes that was sent tumbling down his chest.

‘That’s not quite what I expected to hear from a politician, Mr Goodfellowe,’ Darren interjected.

‘My party bosses frequently tell me that I’m not what they expect from a politician,’ he responded, picking crumbs from his tie.

‘I don’t understand … You agree something ought to be done. Everybody seems to agree. So why doesn’t it happen?’

Goodfellowe rubbed the motif on his tie, wondering whether it was a stain or the design. ‘Because I am a humble backbencher. Parliamentary pond life. If I speak sense no one will hear it above the noise of the rabble. If I shout loud enough for anyone to take notice I simply make myself part of the rabble.’ Damn. Stain. ‘Anyway, it’s all very well setting yourself up as Robin Hood, rushing around trying to right all those wrongs, but I can tell you it gets damp and very cold out there on your own in the forest.’

‘You’re saying parliamentary politics are pointless?’

‘No, not at all. But if you really want to make things happen – as you put it – you need to have your hands on some of the levers. Be a Minister.’

‘So it’s being a backbencher that is pointless?’ Darren pressed, before realizing the unintended slight. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Goodfellowe …’

Goodfellowe laughed, wondering how Darren managed to keep his tie so straight. Did he use a different knot? Somewhere he’d read there were seventeen different ways of doing it. ‘Call me Tom. And, no, being a backbencher isn’t entirely pointless. It only seems that way at times.’ Most of the bloody time, actually, but he didn’t want to take honesty too far. Might scare the children.

‘But I thought you rather enjoyed being Robin Hood,’ Sam joined in. ‘You know … the independence. The free life. Getting out among the serfs.’

‘Sure, but … It’s one of the things I wanted to chat with you about, darling daughter. Get your view. Of course I enjoy playing Robin Hood. It’s just that at times – perhaps too many times – you feel about as much use as a fly on a windscreen. That’s why I’m thinking of becoming – trying to become, at least – a Minister once more.’

‘You? A Minister?’ Sam sounded startled.

‘Bit like you at Trafalgar Square the other day. In fact, just like that. You know, wanting to make a difference.’

‘You want to become a Minister?’ The question was repeated, very slowly, the breath rattling hoarsely in her throat, with every syllable emphasized as though the words were being constructed from first principles.

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t believe you.’

‘Why?’

‘You want to join the most bankrupt Government since …’

‘The economy’s a mess, sure, but …’

‘I’m not talking money,’ she bit back, her voice raised. ‘Whatever happened to principle? To all those promises that Bendall conned us with at the last election? About education? About the environment? About the future?’ She was trembling, her half-drunk cappuccino spilling into the saucer. ‘I thought you cared about all that. And now you want to climb into bed with those sleazeballs?’

‘It’s precisely because I care that I want to help. Make changes. Push the system along from the inside.’ He had been taken aback and was grasping for suitable words to explain. ‘A wise old Tibetan once said that a single drop of rain upon the desert …’

‘Dad, this isn’t sodding Tibet,’ she butted in, shoving her way past his words. ‘You’re selling out.’

‘I’m not. Be reasonable, for God’s sake. There has to be a bit of give and take.’

‘What – like last time?’ There were tears brimming in her eyes, now they were tumbling down her cheeks. ‘Haven’t we given enough? Mummy? Stevie …?’ She could say no more, choking back the pain, scrabbling for a tissue from the bottom of her bag.

Goodfellowe found himself utterly lost in the midst of this sudden blizzard. Hadn’t he given enough, too? What was he supposed to do, give up his ambition, his desire? Turn his back on the new life he had embarked upon, with its influence and its authority? And with Elizabeth? Simply because the Prime Minister had the scruples of a timeshare salesman?

‘Sorry, Darren,’ he apologized for the family scene. ‘Politics are all about passion.’

‘I agree.’ His voice had remarkable authority for his years. ‘That’s why I voted for Bendall. He talked about all the things I feel so passionately for.’ He shrugged. Broad shoulders, athletic. ‘But perhaps I’m naïve. I agree with Sam. Above all politics should be about principle. And for Bendall to take a stand on principle is about as likely as Scunthorpe hosting the next Olympics.’

‘That’s a little harsh …’

‘A very flexible man, is our Prime Minister. He promised us the earth at the last election. Trouble is, we’re still waiting for it. Bit like a drunk in the bar who promises to buy a round but always has to borrow the money to do it. Well, if he won’t pay, he’ll just have to be forced to pay. And if that means screwing up Trafalgar Square and every other part of London, so be it. Nothing personal, you understand, Mr Goodfellowe.’

‘Hang on, I thought you were in business studies,’ Goodfellowe offered breathlessly.

‘I am. I’m also chair of the university Environmental Alliance. That’s how Sam and I met.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s all very wonderful being young and able to ride two horses at once. Business. Environmentalism. But, sadly, life forces us to make choices – yes, even to make compromises. Just like politics.’ He knew it was patronizing crap a millisecond after it’d left his mouth.

‘I don’t see why. One day I want to run a major corporation. Where better to be if you’re passionate about the future of the planet? Or are you still locked in that time warp where all environmentalists wander around in dreadlocks and live in some sweaty tunnel beneath a motorway?’

‘Somehow I feel I’m the one who’s just been digging himself a hole.’ He looked across at Sam, moved his hand towards her. ‘I need help. Should I send for a shovel?’ It was meant to lighten the moment, a peace offering. She threw back a look of bloodshot betrayal.

Once again Goodfellowe’s life had turned into a battlefield upon which the two halves of his being, family and politics, were waging war. Stevie had drowned while Goodfellowe was attending to his red boxes. Too busy to play dad. No one’s fault, really, just one of those bloody unfair things. No one had said anything, but Goodfellowe knew that Sam, his wife, everyone, blamed him. He knew that beyond any doubt because he, too, blamed himself. So a family at war, a war that was undeclared but never forgotten. It was the reason why he had resigned as a Minister in the first place, from a sense of guilt and also a sense of duty to his wife and to Sam, to find the space in which he could sort himself out. Yet now his life had become more complicated than ever, with Sam on one side, Elizabeth on the other. Damn.

Sam left without saying goodbye, one arm wrapped in proprietorial fashion around Darren’s waist, the other wiping an eye. Her parting words were little more than an accusation. ‘Daddy, you’ve changed.’

Had he? Was his mind already shuttered? Had he already fallen into Ministerial mode? He was clambering back over the wall, but did this mean he would have to leave Sam behind? She was pleading with him to stop, while Elizabeth, and all the other things he wanted for himself, were pushing him onward. Torn to pieces by the two women he loved most in the world.

He got back to his apartment around ten, and telephoned Elizabeth once more. He wasn’t checking up, merely wanted to say goodnight.

Still no reply.

It took Amadeus three days and nights to find him.

He was all but unrecognizable in the lamplight beneath the covering of cardboard. The face was blackened more effectively than any camouflage stick could manage, because the dust never stopped swirling at gutter level.

Amadeus squatted beside him in the foul-smelling doorway, squeezing him aside to make room, silencing the storm of protest by producing a full pack of cigarettes.

‘So, Albert Andrew, I was sort of wondering.’

‘Won’ring what?’ Scully snarled, in between hungry draws on the first cigarette. ‘Sir,’ he added as the nicotine began to calm him. Old habits.

‘Whether you’ve had enough of sitting on your arse in shop doorways. Bumming drinks and cigarette ends. Smelling like a field latrine.’

‘Wha’ the fuck’s it gotta do wi’ you?’

‘Oh, Skulls,’ Amadeus scolded. Of course it had to do with him. ‘I’ve got something of a proposition. See if you want to get back into the business.’

‘Business?’ The eyes were darting in agitation around the alleyway as though he feared someone was about to pounce and steal his precious cigarettes. He didn’t seem to want to look at Amadeus.

‘Red Devil business.’

‘No such bleedin’ business any more. They don’t fuckin’ want me. An’ I’ve got a busted fucking foot.’

‘I want you, Skulls. You were the best soldier who ever served with me. You see, me and a few pals, we’ve got a little skirmish planned. We want your help.’

The red-blown eyes steadied, lost their look of a wild ferret, and considered. Somebody wanted him again. It had been such a long time since anybody had wanted him.

‘Fuck you, Co’nel.’

Slowly a hand extended from beneath the dirty blanket. Scully pushed a cigarette towards Amadeus. A peace offering.

‘No thanks, RSM. Given it up all of a sudden. Got better things to do.’

Scully’s lips were cracked and sore, but working hard now to rub a little precision back into his speech. ‘You think I’m up to it?’

‘After a wash and a good breakfast, sure. Can you give up the booze?’

‘Booze? You think I’m a drunk? Wha’ do you reckon I’m trying to do, fucking kill meself?’

‘No, I want you to leave that to me.’

Slowly, in the manner of an elderly dog, Scully began to shake himself. Layers of blanket and bad times began to fall from him until he was standing, almost erect in spite of his foot.

‘Breakfast, eh? It’s a deal. Dunno about the fucking bath, though.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know what it is I want you to do?’

‘Don’t need to. Not if it’s you askin’, Colonel.’

A silence. Then, softly: ‘Thanks, Skulls.’

Scully began to scratch himself with considerable vigour. ‘Only one question, sir.’

‘Give it.’

‘Which way’s the fucking canteen?’

Now there are five.

Amadeus, the leader.

Scully, the loyal disciple.

McKenzie, the man of principle, who is drinking in a pub in Victoria with others he’s met earlier that evening at a lecture sponsored by Amnesty. For him it’s the principle of the thing, coupled with the adventure.

Then there is Payne, a man of confusion. A man who knows fear all too well. He is also drinking, heavily, in his club on St James’s. Indeed, Freddie Payne is drunk. He has been gambling heavily, at backgammon. Losing. He hasn’t the funds with him to pay his debts, in fact he doesn’t have the money anywhere, so he leaves an IOU. Payment within two weeks. Such things are acceptable, amongst gentlemen, so long as the debt is honoured. For Freddie Payne, life always seems to be a matter of honour. And a burden.

Mary Wetherell is at home. Or what passes as home. A room in a desperately undistinguished boarding house behind Shepherd’s Bush. She sits in the dark, listening to the thunder of traffic past her window, hoping it will drown out the ringing of her mobile phone. The display informs her that the caller is her husband. She doesn’t answer.

He rings twice more that evening, until she switches the phone off. Only then does she let go of her tears.

FIVE

‘Welcome home, darling.’ No sooner had he said it than Goodfellowe realized his good humour was probably a terrible idea. Elizabeth was looking at him as if he were a rabbit in her vegetable patch. He could feel the stems of the roses he was carrying beginning to buckle in his hand.

‘Not your fault, poppet,’ she muttered before disappearing into her little office at the rear of the restaurant. He pursued her.

‘What’s not my fault?’

She picked up a large sheaf of papers from amongst the clutter that covered her desk, then threw it back down again in disgust. ‘I’ve just had a cancellation. Ten for tonight. We might as well rename this place the Marie Celeste.’ Her maximum cover was only fifty; the missing ten would take a hefty bite out of her week’s work.

‘Can’t you start charging a cancellation fee?’

‘And make sure they never book in the first place?’ Clearly she wasn’t in the mood for masculine logic. This wasn’t to be a problem-solving session, she simply wanted an audience, someone to share with, and perhaps to shout at.

‘Then this,’ she continued, throwing a letter at him from the very top of the pile. From a Mr Sandman of Shepherd’s Bush Green. ‘The lease is up for renewal and the bastards want to shove the rent up another fifty per cent. In the middle of a bloody recession!’

It hadn’t been the triumphant return from Odessa she had expected. The rent rise would cost her sixty thousand, practically the entire profit she would make on the wine. She was back to square one.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she offered in remorse, at last catching sight of the roses. She placed her arms around him and held him tight.

‘Yeah, me too.’ He had missed her more than he could have thought, a feeling made all the more intense by the difficulty in telephoning. He had come to The Kremlin intending to tell her so, with roses to show her that she was the most important thing in his life and that he couldn’t imagine living without her, but it was the wrong time. The bloody landlord had got there first.

‘It’s just that we’re coming up to the end of the financial year and business always goes quiet around then. Cash flow’s going to be tough. And my house is the guarantee for the overdraft.’

‘Surely you’re not suggesting that the restaurant might …’ He didn’t want to complete the thought; even so, it stuck there like cold goose fat. ‘What will you do?’

‘Maybe I’ll pull in some of the hotel concierges for a free dinner. See if they’ll push some of the tourist trade our way. If not, I’ll have to let one of the chefs go.’ Or maybe sell off all the wine at auction. She needed the money up front.

She began sorting through the bottles in the wine rack beside her desk, feeling better now that she had indulged her outburst. ‘It’s either that or marry a rich peer,’ she joked. She held a bottle up to inspect the label. ‘Fancy being my bit on the side?’

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