Whispers of betrayal

FOURTEEN

The phone seemed to baffle them. Everything else at the meeting of COBRA that followed on the heels of Payne's arrest had gone well. No more prevarication and indecision, the Army was coming and Bendall felt back in control.

But they couldn't explain the mobile phone. It had been in Payne's possession when they arrested him and, in spite of an exhaustive search of his home and workplace that had left both in disarray, there was as yet no other substantive evidence. It was a pay-as-you-go model, bought across the counter for cash along with fifty pounds' worth of call vouchers. No contract, no credit-card slip, nothing to trace, and both Payne's distraught wife and furious work colleagues confirmed that he had taken to carrying it with him at all times. Charlie at the gallery, with his empire strangled in the blue-and-white bunting of crime scene tape, had made several lurid suggestions as to what might be done with the phone, but the police decided that this would not help their investigation. They needed Freddie Payne intact, at least for the time being.

The curious thing about the phone was that it had never been used. No call had been made from it, neither had any been received. Yet it was switched on and fully charged even when they arrested him.

No one had an explanation, but it did nothing to diminish the fresh sense of enthusiasm that permeated the COBRA meeting. One suspect had been arrested, the level of security raised significantly, there was a new impetus and a triumphal press conference to come – at which Bendall would choose his words carefully, of course, while Jumpers would stir it up behind the scenes. And if the media chose to speculate that Freddie Payne and his associates were involved in bombs and blackmail and extortion, that would be nothing less than the prerogative of a free and imaginative press. Dipwick was yesterday's news. Everyone seemed content.

Except for Tom Goodfellowe.

As the meeting of COBRA broke up and the Prime Minister looked beyond the throng of officials and acolytes that surrounded him, the brow of Goodfellowe stood out like a fly struggling in thick custard.

'Problems, Tom?'

'No. No problems. Not really. Just… thoughts.'

'Share them. Walk with me.'

So Goodfellowe had accompanied Bendall on the short walk back to Downing Street. Their path took them through Cockpit Passage which connected the Cabinet Office to Number Ten, where their footsteps echoed back from ancient brickwork of the old Tudor palace that had once stood on this spot. Beyond the mullioned window lay the remnants of King Harry's old tennis courts, while in the dark vestibule that brought them back into Number Ten they were greeted by the unsmiling bust of Oliver Cromwell, who had chopped off the head of one of Henry's inheritors, the ill-fated Charles. Westminster had always been a place of swings and roundabouts. And scaffolds.

'It's the phone,' Goodfellowe began as a private secretary produced an electronic swipe card to allow them back into the Prime Ministerial lair. 'I've been trying to figure out why it was never used.'

'And?'

'It was all powered up. So I think it must have been used. Probably frequently, and certainly regularly. To keep in contact.'

'But no calls were ever logged

'Because the calls were never answered. Perhaps only three or four rings, then cancelled. No record, no trace.'

'Why?'

'Security. A safety signal. To tell whoever was at the other end that everything was OK.'

'But it's not OK, is it? Not for Freddie Payne.'

'That may not be such good news, either.'

'You trying to spoil my day?'

'If the phone was used as I think, then the others knew within a couple of hours that Payne had been arrested.'

'Damn.'

'Even if Payne begins to sing like the proverbial canary and leads us straight back to the aviary, we'll find-'

'Nothing but a pile of guano.'

'Precisely.'

'They made arrangements.'

'They're still one step ahead of us.'

They had reached the main staircase of Number Ten with its winding banister and collection of portraits of previous Prime Ministers that stretched back to the time of Robert Walpole, regarded as the first modern Prime Minister. He'd been condemned for corruption and kicked out of office. Most of his successors had been kicked out of office, too, over nearly three centuries. None of them ever seemed to know when their time was up. 'Events, dear boy, events' always got them in the end. The thought encouraged Goodfellowe to make a mental note, a promise to himself, that if he ever got to stand where Bendall was standing, he would do things differently. He would instruct Sam to tell him when that moment to leave the scene had come. Goodfellowe would go timely into the night, not stay and haunt the place like a vampire. Yes, that's what he'd do. If he ever got the chance.

'But I don't understand, Tom. Why on earth didn't you suggest this to COBRA?'

'Because if I'm right-'

'Which I suspect you are.'

'Then some of those at COBRA would be saying He hesitated.

'Come on, Tom, cough.'

'Well, they'd be saying that we shouldn't have pulled him in so quickly. That we should've had him followed. As they suggested.'

'That I made a complete bollocks of it?'

Goodfellowe chose not to contradict.

From his position on the first step of the staircase, Bendall studied his helper. 'You use your honesty a bit like a flame thrower at times, Tom. It's one of your most attractive faults.'

Goodfellowe merely shrugged.

'Doesn't matter. We're ready for the bastards.' Bendall was bounding up the stairs now, taking them two at a time, shouting over his shoulder. 'By tomorrow the country will understand that we live in a world that's still bloody dangerous. Full of evil people trying to take advantage of us. That we've got to be prepared.'

'Somehow I think that's precisely the point Beaky has been trying to put across,' Goodfellowe muttered – but not loud enough for the disappearing Bendall to hear.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Swinging his dead left leg, Scully kicked the blossom that had blown from the cherry trees in Battersea Park and been left piled high by the swirling wind. It scattered around him like unseasonal snowflakes.

'What the bloody hell went wrong, Colonel?'

'No idea, Skulls.'

'They on to us?'

'On to Freddie, that's for sure.'

'Shite.'

Scully bent to rub his leg. The others slowed, wishing neither to stop nor to leave him behind, knowing that either would embarrass him. His leg was getting worse. It was one of those days when wherever they looked they could see nothing but obstacles. Even the heavens joined in, clouds scudding overhead like pebbles being skimmed across grey water. The group fell into silence for several minutes.

'It was Freddie. Must've been Freddie, something he did,' Mary eventually insisted, wrapping her coat more firmly around her in the fading light. 'It had to be Freddie's fault, or they would've picked us all up.'

'Picked me up, at least,' Amadeus corrected. He had ensured that none of them knew how to contact the others, save for himself. A cut-off system, designed for disaster, for moments like this. 'Look, if they come knocking on my door, don't any of you hang around. You each do what you think is necessary. You know I won't talk.'

'Seems Freddie hasn't either,' Mary added with almost reluctant respect.

The rain had arrived. They scrambled for shelter in the lee of a refreshment kiosk that had already closed for the day. Scully brought up the rear.

'Poor Freddie. One soldier down,' McKenzie reflected.

'And another Home Secretary down,' Amadeus insisted. 'By any measure we're still well ahead. Oh, and revenge is sweet! Dipwick was the one who started all this. Now he's gone.'

'And Bendall has taken over,' Mary reminded him.

'Put himself right in the firing line.'

'This is getting very personal, Peter.'

'Yeah. Ain't it just.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Battersea Power Station stands on the south bank of the River Thames less than two miles upstream from the Houses of Parliament. Its brooding presence dominates that part of London, its stark, almost brutal industrial architecture exciting passion and prejudice in equal degrees. Like it, loathe it, the one thing you cannot possibly do is ignore it. To some it is like an immense alien spaceship that has come to earth and died, its four huge white brick chimneys reaching out desperately towards the stars; to others it provides all too earthly evidence that Man has completely lost his sense of proportion. Yet for all its aesthetic aggression, the power station has been more victim than aggressor. Since it opened in 1934 it has been the target of repeated attack – first by Goering's Luftwaffe, then by subsidence into the underlying London clay, more devastatingly by environmentalists who claimed that the half-million tons of coal it burned every year were polluting the air from Essex all the way to the Urals. Finally it came under attack by developers who ripped out its soul along with every ounce of scrap machinery in their attempts to turn it into a theme park.

Yet ugliness on such a massive scale also entices. To the surprise of many tourists and astonishment of most Englishmen, the power station was embraced by the heritage lobby. It had, after all, been designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott who also gave the nation its beloved red telephone boxes. The building was listed as an architectural treasure, Grade Two, which meant it must be preserved. But for what? In Florida the site would probably have been sold at immense profit to the Disney Corporation, in Barcelona or Berlin perhaps they might have commissioned some young artist to wrap it in cellophane, while in Paris they would have scratched their heads and wondered who on earth allowed the bloody thing to be built in the first place. But in London they simply held their breaths and grew red in the face. No one would decide, and the forty-acre site was turned into a battleground on which warfare raged between conservationists, developers, planners and local pressure groups. The result was twenty years of deadlock and depredation that had left it roofless, gutted, its immense and filthy red-brick walls surmounting a bare industrial wasteland, home for nothing but memories.

Apart, that is, from the occasional film crew who used this brutal backcloth for any number of productions, McKellen's Richard III being by far the most memorable.

Thus far.

The most recent aspiring producer and location manager to turn up at the site were named Donnie and Mike. They were a little vague about the project they had in mind. They were also, in the opinion of Sammy McManus, the site supervisor, a rather odd couple, heavily into sunglasses and hats. They also both had thick designer stubble which served to hide the contours of their faces, but over the years he had grown used to the odd couples who floated around the film industry.

Sammy had enjoyed taking them around the site. It got lonely here on his own when the wind was blowing, with nothing to distract him but a garden of straggling geraniums, Oprah Winfrey and a small library of well-thumbed books centred around Shakespeare and Trollope (both Anthony and Joanna). Anyway, Oprah was putting on weight again.

So they had walked and smoked and talked about Charlton Athletic, about Sammy's forthcoming holiday, and the local residents' groups who couldn't make up their minds whether they wanted the site to be a wonderland or a wasteland, and McKellen's awesome pyrotechnics that had brought half of the fire crews in London rushing to the scene to extinguish a five-hundred-year-old fire.

'So, Sammy, what's with all the scaffolding around the chimneys?'

'We're just checking their stability. Routine structural check. Normally we do it with infrared scanners but the local planners want to have a look-see for themselves. If one of those bastards fell down it'd sound like Krakatoa. Won't put you off, will it?'

'Depends. How long's it going to be like that?'

'Couple of weeks, maybe. No more.'

'I think that should be fine, don't you, Mike?'

'Sure. Sure, Donnie. I think that'll be just fine.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Success is its own deceiver. And, for a few days, Bendall found success knocking at his door. Londoners' characteristic spirit of defiance in the face of adversity came forth and greeted the changes they saw around them with understanding and a measure of reluctant acquiescence.

It was the little things that some found most aggravating, like the disappearance of waste bins from many public places, and particularly from those corners near major Government buildings where the bins hadn't been swept away in the earlier campaigns against the IRA. So London grew a little grubbier, and also a little slower. Many of the major routes through the City of London had been blocked to control access during that same IRA bombing campaign, and now that experience was translated to the City of Westminster. Parliament Square ground to a complete halt as plastic barriers filled with sand were manoeuvred into position. When the Square reopened, traffic could pass the House of Commons only by means of a single file and two separate chicanes. No would-be terrorist was going to make a quick getaway from this part of London, and in the circumstances it seemed a relatively minor inconvenience that no one else was going to make a quick getaway either. Londoners took it in their behobbled stride.

Indeed, there were some distinct advantages. The very obvious presence of armed policemen at major traffic intersections ensured an unusual degree of etiquette from motorists. Yellow boxes remained unblocked, no one ran a traffic light, even cyclists dug deep into their memory banks for ancient recollections of the Highway Code. Rush hour traffic actually moved. And if a few Londoners were disturbed by the presence of the Armoured Personnel Carriers tucked away behind Admiralty Arch, less than ten seconds from Trafalgar Square, they were in a minority. Most treated them as nothing more than a tourist attraction.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= The next contact, when it came, consisted of another brief telephone call to the editor of the Telegraph. The security services who were monitoring the call timed it at less than twenty-two seconds and traced it to a little-used callbox in rural Hertfordshire. Inevitably the callbox was deserted by the time the local constabulary had arrived, and forensics produced nothing beyond the suggestion that it had been used sometime in the last four days for the purposes of unprotected sex and the rolling of a joint. Even the voice analysis told them nothing they didn't already know, that the caller was probably in his forties and reasonably well educated – the conversation was too fragmentary to get a reliable regional trace, although it did suggest that he was under a measurable degree of strain.

'This is tomorrow's headline.'

'Good evening, Beaky. Is it OK to call you Beaky?'

'Call me what you bloody well like so long as you shut up and listen.'

'Sorry.'

'This thing hasn't finished yet.'

'There's more?'

'Within the week.'

'What are we talking about here? More disruption in the streets, or are we talking more personal attacks like Earwick?'

'Oh, no, we're aiming higher than that. Much higher.'

Then the line had gone dead.

Higher? Higher than what? Than the streets? Than Earwick? What the hell did it mean? Were they going to disrupt air traffic, for God's sake? Or had they set their sights higher than the Home Secretary? But who was there, apart from the Prime Minister? Or – no, surely not her…

It was extraordinary misfortune that such questions should have been hanging in the air when, later that night, a mud-spattered Range Rover had been sighted driving well above the speed limit and heading along the B976, the lonely road west of Aberdeen that hugs the River Dee in the general direction of Balmoral. It was further cruel luck that the Vehicle Identification Mark check that was called for by a police constable at Glen Tanar showed that the vehicle belonged to a certain Colonel Charles Julius Anthony Forsdyke. Retired. Formerly of the Grenadier Guards, and one-time Commanding Officer of none other than Freddie Payne.

This was an unhappy coincidence for the Colonel, for the police check also showed that he appeared on two further lists. The first, which ran into tens of thousands, had been prepared by the Ministry of Defence and covered all known former military associates of Payne's. Forsdyke figured on this list, inevitably and also prominently. The greater difficulty was that he also appeared on a second, much shorter, list that had been cobbled together in a hurry by Special Branch. This contained the names of anyone with a connection to the armed forces who was also suspected of being a critic of the Government. Not that there was any suspicion about Forsdyke. His views of the Government were unambiguous and had been delivered at a charity dinner less than two weeks previously within earshot of a Minister of State from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Forsdyke had used the occasion to refer to the Prime Minister as 'Jonathan Bugger-All' and to the Government as 'containing more shits than a convenience in Calcutta'.

Perhaps Forsdyke had had too much to drink, or perhaps the Minister of State had too little sense of humour for the occasion, but in any event it meant that the Colonel's name was on both lists. While inclusion on either rendered you a suspect, inclusion on both classified you as a major security risk.

Now this major security risk was heading for Balmoral.

Had he got a little further along the B976 he would, perhaps, have been dealt with by officers of the Royal Protection Squad, but the VIM check had been called in by a local panda car, and once the computers had declared that Forsdyke was in every respect a prime suspect, the response had been instantaneous.

Stop. Detain, if necessary. Detain if unsure. Take no chances, not on this one, laddie. On pain of banishment to one of the outer isles, do not let him pass within a million miles of Balmoral.

Reinforcements were already on their way when Forsdyke's Range Rover was pulled over by the patrol car.

'Evening, sir. I see we're in a wee bit of a hurry.'

'Good. So you'll not be detaining me any longer.'

'What, late for dinner with the Queen, are we?'

'Matter of fact, I am.'

'May I trouble you for your licence?'

'No.'

'Why is that then?'

'Because I haven't got it.'

'I see.'

'I very much doubt if you do. Look, I really am in a hurry, so why don't you jump on that little radio thingy of yours and-'

'Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?'

'I bloody well would.'

'Step out of the car.'

'Haven't you got something more important to do?'

'Like what?'

'Like suggesting to your parents they might get married?'

'Step out of the car. Please.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm placing you under arrest.'

'Don't be a little squit. On what charge?'

'Fer being a shite. And fer tekin' the piss out of the polis.'

It wasn't entirely the constable's fault. It was the problem with using raw data, the type that finds its way onto computer lists hurriedly thrown together by the security services. In many respects raw data resembles raw sewage. It's all fine after it's been treated, but until then…

It was only later, much later, after they had hemmed him in with their panda cars, their blue lights turning the countryside into a scene from Independence Day, and carted him off to the cells at Aberdeen, that they discovered the awful truth. He was late for dinner with Her Majesty.

They had arrested the Queen's second cousin.