Whispers of betrayal

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?'

He had arrived with emotions like a tightly wound spring. He, too, needed the chance to unburden himself, but he wasn't going to get it, not today. Discussion of her finances reminded him how irrelevant he was to a huge part of her life. He was not a provider, merely an observer. In the circumstances her humour fell flat.

'Drink, Tom?' she asked, searching beneath the clutter for a corkscrew.

'Not right now. Only wanted to pop over to say… to make sure you got back safely. Busy back at the House,' he lied. 'See you later.'

Damn. The moment had gone, lost its varnish, been rubbed down to the bare wood.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Lunch at the members' table of Payne's club had been simple. Faggots. Little balls of god-knows-what covered in a dark gravy and washed down with a carafe of excellent club claret, followed by a large cognac to settle the stomach, and another just for the hell of it.

No, let's be honest, not just for the hell of it. Because he needed it. That morning he'd lost the sale he'd been working on for weeks, and his commission with it. The week before he'd told Charlie, the owner of the gallery in King Street, that the sale had been made, that it was only a matter of tidying up the paperwork. An excuse to get an advance on the commission. Now he'd have to go back and face Charlie. Fuck it. He damned the slick-haired little bastard from Kyoto who'd run out on the deal even more quickly than his granddad had scarpered out of Singapore. Couldn't trust the Nips. Not then. Not now. 'Not my fault, Charlie old chap, truly, but you know what these bloody heathens are like…' To console himself he had another cognac. Maybe something would turn up.

It did, even before he'd made it out of the club. In the cloakroom, while he was still struggling to get his arm into the sleeve of his raincoat. In the shape of Jamie Cairncross.

'Freddie, allow me to assist you.'

'Jamie! Ah, thanks

'Looking well, Freddie, good to see it. Thought you might've been ailing or something.' The slightest pause. 'Hadn't seen you around for a couple of weeks.'

'No, I'm…'

'Not seen you since our little game, in fact. Enjoyed it. Must do it again some time.'

'Sure…'

'Chance to get your own back.'

'Yeah.' Payne was still struggling with his coat. His companion's efforts to assist seemed to have achieved nothing but to entangle Payne still further, as though his hands had been tied behind his back, denying him any chance of escape.

'But in the meantime, my old mucker, there's the matter of that IOU of yours. Due yesterday.'

'Oh really? Shag my old nanny, really? Lost track of the date.'

'And eight thousand quid's a bit thick to go overdue. You know? Bad form.'

'Good God, Jamie, you don't think…?' With a savage effort Payne at last wrenched himself free from his companion's embrace and turned to face him. 'Look, tell you what. Let me give you lunch here this time next week. Take the afternoon off and we'll make a real go of it. Sort it out then. Double or nothing if you like.'

'No, no thanks, Freddie. Just the eight thousand'll do.'

'Grand, whatever you like. This time next week, then. Dashing just now, got a deal to do with a little Nip from Nagasaki or wherever. You know how they don't like to be kept waiting. So I'll see you next week?'

And he was outside, stumbling into the street, the afternoon rain sneaking its way into the soles of his hand-stitched shoes that were long overdue for repair.

Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, once bought a painting by one Samuel Scott that for many years hung in the inner hallway of Number Ten. The painting is dated 1755 and features a view of Horse Guards beyond the walled garden of Downing Street. It also features two men urinating up against the wall, although whether they are politicians, or simply members of the public expressing their point of view about politicians, is unclear.

The aspect featured in the painting remains largely unchanged to this day. The wall still stands around the garden, affording Downing Street a measure of security, although much less effective against modern forms of protest. In 1991 the IRA fired mortar bombs from the back of a lorry parked outside the Ministry of Defence. The bombs passed over Downing Street and fell into the garden, only narrowly failing to kill the Prime Minister, John Major, and a large number of his Cabinet. Walls, no matter how high, would not have been enough. Today, security in this area is afforded largely by vigilance – and dozens of security cameras covering every point of access.

The layers of protection overlap like the skin of a vast onion. Inside Downing Street the doormen oversee a large bank of screens linked to the closed-circuit cameras. The doormen are also responsible for monitoring the control panels of the alarm systems that are attached to the doors and windows throughout the building. Even the great black front door is nowadays made of blastproof metal and has detector systems around and even underneath it, designed to ensure that no one with hostile intent can pass undetected – unless, of course, he is carrying a Ministerial red box.

Outside, there is a cat's cradle of security services. Downing Street itself and the environs of the neighbouring Foreign Office are patrolled by armed policemen of the Diplomatic Protection Group, while Special Branch takes care of the personal security of the Prime Minister as he enters and leaves. Everything in front of the wrought-iron gates guarding Downing Street is the responsibility of the Metropolitan Police, while to the rear runs a claret-coloured road dividing the Government area from the lush acres of St James's Park, which is monitored by the Royal Parks Constabulary. If that were not enough, Bronwyn the cat can often be found keeping watch over the comings and goings in the street from her post on the air-conditioning duct beside the front door. DPG, SB, the Met, RPC, an entire menagerie. More than enough security, you would have thought. Or, perhaps, too much.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= General Karl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century military strategist, wrote the famed treatise entitled On War in which he described the quality of boldness as 'the noblest of virtues, the true steel which gives the weapon its edge and brilliancy'. It is a standard text at Sandhurst.

So when, towards evening, a water contractor's van began travelling slowly down the claret-coloured road, in full view of anyone who cared to look from any of a thousand windows overlooking the park, no one's suspicion was unduly roused. Not the DPG, the Parks Police, Special Branch, certainly not those monitoring the security screens within Downing Street over their mugs of tea. None of those whose balls were going to be hammered mercilessly into the ground the following day had any reason for misgiving. After all, a telephone call had been made to the Parks Police that afternoon, supported by an immediate fax of confirmation, explaining a slight loss of water pressure in the area and a requirement to investigate.

Which is where too much security can fall apart. For the claret-coloured road was frontier land, marking in somewhat uncertain fashion where the responsibilities of the Parks Police, the DPG and the Met rubbed up against and overlapped each other. The road itself was clearly the responsibility of the Parks Police – but who was supposed to be responsible for the manhole cover in the pavement alongside?

As a matter of course, a Vehicle Identification Mark verification was run on the van when it arrived, and in the normal course of events the VIM check should have revealed that the vehicle had been stolen a few days beforehand in North London. But the registration plates had been changed to duplicate those of a genuine and unstolen van. The computer said it was kosher.

In the back of the van had been the papers that provided the letterhead used on the fax. All the details of the letterhead were genuine, except for the contact telephone number, which had been altered after it had been scanned into Mary's computer. Not that anyone from the Parks Police checked. After all, they'd already had a telephone call and a piece of paper. Their backsides were covered. Until the morning.

So when the van arrived at the back of Downing Street and a small awning was erected around the manhole cover, no one raised the alarm. The scene was overlooked by no fewer than five security cameras, and one of the workmen went out of his way to chat with a duty policeman and show him a copy of the fax. He had a pronounced limp. Not the material from which top-line terrorists are carved.

Nothing was being hidden. All four workmen wore brilliantly luminescent yellow work jackets that would have been impossible to miss even at midnight, let alone at a time of day just before the street lamps were lit. Not exactly broad daylight, but neither was it the dead of night. And the rear doors of the van were wide open, revealing the usual paraphernalia of utility workmen. The Prime Minister was unlikely to be under undue threat from a flying shovel.

Thirty-one thousand kilometres of mains water pipes run beneath London, through which two thousand two hundred million litres of water flow every day. Relatively little of this was used in Downing Street since only four people actually lived there, the Chancellor and his wife in Number 11, and the Right Honourable and Mrs Jonathan Bendall in the next-door premises. On the night in question, as anyone who read a newspaper would know, the Walrus and wife were away in Washington DC while Mr and Mrs Bendall were attending a formal dinner and not likely to get back until almost midnight. Downing Street was practically empty, with only a handful of civil servants left manning the bunker. Their demands on the water supply were light, a few cups of tea, the occasional flushing loo.

No one even noticed the slight interruption of the water supply.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= They located the square-pin valve about three feet down, beneath a sheet of polystyrene that protected it from frost. McKenzie had done this all dozens of times before. In Kosovo one of the Sappers' many duties had been to reinvent the water supply. The others – Amadeus, Scully, Payne – also understood. They'd manned the Green Goddesses during the firemen's strikes. They knew water. Simple stuff.

A six-inch main ran directly from the valve in the direction of Downing Street. It was old, constructed of cast iron rather than modern blue polyethylene, but not as old as many in the area. This section of piping had been replaced in the early 1960s when Downing Street had been largely rebuilt after they'd discovered that the original developer, George Downing, had been a wholesale cheat – 'a perfidious rogue and a most ungrateful villain', as Pepys had described him. Not only had Downing cheated the axe during the Civil War by constantly changing loyalties, he had also cheated the taxpayers by building his famous street without proper foundations. The staircase sagged, the walls bowed and upper floors bent. So the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had moved out while the structural engineers moved in. Downing Street had been completely refurbished. Safe as houses.

It was as McKenzie was positioning himself above the valve to begin his work that he thought someone was shooting at him. A ringing sound, so sharp it made his heart shudder. But there was no impact, no pain, in the end nothing more than a rueful Scully. He'd dropped the heavy metal valve key from the back of the van and it had bounced angrily off the pavement, its complaints echoing back across Horse Guards. Scully scratched his broad chin in apology. None of the watchers seemed alarmed. McKenzie got back to work.

The valve key was retrieved and slipped into place, locating over the square-pin spindle of the valve. A couple of turns and the water would die, but it wasn't yet time. First they put a repair sleeve in position around the main, like a bandage to heal a wound, but for the moment it was left loose. Once the sleeve was in place they began to twist the valve key until the flow of water died. Then came the hole. Drilled to the size of a two-pound coin, through the cast-iron pipe and into the main. Normally with ten atmospheres of pressure behind it the pierced main would have sent a fountain of water gushing forty feet in the air, but with the valve turned off it did nothing more than dribble miserably.

It took only seconds to stuff the pellets – fifty of them – through the hole and into the main, a few seconds more to slide the sleeve over the wound and bind it tight. Then the valve was released. From the main they could hear the gentle hiss of water flowing once more under pressure. Mission complete. Downing Street was back on stream. It had been without water for little more than two minutes.

Within twenty minutes of arriving, the water van had left. Darkness had now fallen and the rattle of traffic along the claret-coloured road had subsided. A pelican called from the park as it settled down for the night.

Samuel Scott, reborn, would have recognized the scene instantly. In two and a half centuries, only the boldness with which protesters pissed up against the wall had changed.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= It was, by consensus throughout the country, an outrage.

The second person in the country to discover this outrage was none other than the Prime Minister himself. At 6.45 a.m., with the gentle sigh of a blade being inserted between his ribs, a large manila envelope had been pushed beneath his bedroom door. It was the draft of the speech he was due to make the following afternoon to bankers and industrialists in the City. An important speech, and a first draft. A draft heavy on rhetoric and utterly impenetrable to detailed financial analysis. So a good draft.

For a few moments Bendall tried to fight the intrusion, refusing to stir, allowing his weariness to wash over him, hoping for sleep. But he hadn't slept properly for months. Perils of the trade.

There was another reason why he resisted opening his eyes. How he hated this bedroom, stuck under the eaves of Downing Street with its low ceilings and floral overload. His wife had no eye for simplicity, no sense of order, so every corner was crammed with ideas plundered from different pages of the catalogue. Frills, flowers, frump, a cross between Laura Ashley and Peter Jones-on-the-run. Tentatively he prised open one eye. Directly above him, from the canopy above the kitsch four-poster bed, a large red rose stared at him like some hungry triffid. He groaned. Time to rise.

He was sitting in his dressing gown with his second cup of black coffee, two sugars, checking the draft, when the commotion occurred. His pen was poised above a proposed sound bite rendered, he had to admit, with considerable skill by his speechwriters. It was an appeal to the Dunkirk spirit, rousing national passions amongst tabloid editors and, by implication, suggesting that it was the City and its unpatriotic money men who were in large measure responsible for this latest crisis. But he hesitated. Hadn't he, when he was Leader of the Opposition, said something very rude about 'the sickening sight of a Prime Minister trying to embrace the Dunkirk spirit in the way a common drunk reaches for a lamppost'? He was debating the memory spans of most political journalists when his concentration was shattered by what appeared in the room before him.

In the doorway leading from the bathroom stood his wife. She was naked. Her navel was heaving. It was an awesome navel, a route map of the march of time, a detailed historical record of childbirth, surgery, charity teas and, ultimately, lack of resolution. It was also the colour of a stagnant pond. As was the rest of her.

She stood like some demented and melting Tele-tubby, her whole body streaming with garishly coloured rivulets, shampoo suds in her eyes, her hair hanging limply like the tattered rigging of a sinking ship. A tide of glistening green slime was spreading on the carpet around her feet. And she was screaming her head off.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'OK, let's get on with it. Before we start on the detail, let's get a feel for the mood of the Parliamentary Party. Chief Whip?' Bendall turned to Eddie Rankin, seated at the end of the Cabinet table. Bendall preferred formality at Cabinet, particularly emergency meetings such as this one. He'd hated all the Tom-Dick-and-Harriet first name nonsense favoured by his predecessor. Cabinet wasn't about bonding, it was about beating the system – and beating Ministers – into some sort of identifiable shape. Nothing personal, it was simply business. Use their Christian names instead of departmental titles and it gave them nothing to hide behind, made all defeats a personal slight. It started feuds, extended rancour, and there was no need to cause unnecessary personal antagonism, not when the farmyard of political life was already awash with enough of the necessary kind.

Rankin chewed his cheek. 'Well, Prime Minister, let me start by saying it's not all bad news. The attack was clearly aimed at you personally and it's done wonders for your own ratings. Nothing like it for getting the troops to rally round.'

Bendall raised an eyebrow and a wry smile, the first of the day. 'I shall begin to think you might have organized it yourself.'

'If I'd thought of it, I might have done. But there may be trouble ahead. The lads want to know why it was so easy to mess with the water supply of the most sensitive piece of real estate in the country. There are worries they may be targets, too. They're refusing to water their whisky. There's a danger of our majority getting swept away on a flood of neat alcohol.'

Rankin was an indispensable tool for the Prime Minister. He was calm, cool, with a gentle sense of humour that helped to defuse many difficult situations, but this was a no-win meeting, there were bound to be casualties along the way. Bendall was not to be deterred.

'Before we all find ourselves drinking in the Last Chance Saloon, perhaps we can catch the bastards concerned. What about it, Home Secretary?'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Noel Hope, the Home Secretary, had carried two great burdens throughout his political life. The first was the middle name bestowed upon him by his dull-witted parents.

His middle name was Osmond.

N.O. Hope.

An unfortunate label to be stuck with. One of God's little gifts to political rivals and graffiti artists. His majority was regularly three thousand less than it ought to be, simply because throughout every campaign the opposition were utterly merciless. They simply took the piss out of him.

Thanks, Dad.

The second burden was less apparent but struck still deeper. At Oxford, he and Jonathan Bendall had been contemporaries. The best and the brightest. And it was Hope who initially had shown the greater intellectual and sporting prowess. It was Hope who would gain both the better degree, and the football blue. But they also vied for something far more intimate, the presidency of the Union, and over the three years of head-to-head encounters in the debating chamber it was Bendall who, through rhetorical flair and a compelling meanness of wit, won every encounter. Every damned one.

Something was missing in Hope, those sinews of steel that drag a man through hardship and out the other side. It left him as Bendall's silent whipping boy, both of them knowing that he hadn't that necessary quality ever to take Bendall's place, other than by the most happy of accidents. So Hope's career in Cabinet had on the one hand been spent in dread of once more being turned on by Bendall, and on the other in silent prayer that the bus with the Prime Minister's name on it might be waiting just around the next corner.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'First, Prime Minister, let me start by offering a measure of reassurance,' Hope began, sounding considerably more confident than he felt. His briefing on this was absurdly thin. 'Forensics at Aldermaston have already established that the substance used in the attack was nothing worse than food dye. Not in the least harmful. I'm sure your wife will make a complete and rapid recovery. Prime Minister.'

So much he knew. It wasn't the food dye that had sent her off to hospital under sedation, although the shock had been unpleasant enough. No, what had pushed his wife to the very edge was the fact that, as she stood in the middle of their bedroom, wobbling, screaming and completely vulnerable, the door had burst open and in had charged McGivens, a personal protection officer, brandishing a Glock 9mm and pointing it in her direction. This had sent her into hysterics.

This was to prove unwise, for as her screaming redoubled a second and yet a third protection officer burst upon the scene, at which point Mrs Bendall had taken the only sensible course of action available to her and fainted. It was rumoured that McGivens, too, had required treatment for shock.

'Food dye? That reassures you? Then how easily you are comforted, Home Secretary. They could have put any damned thing into the system. Why, even a truth serum. Think of it. The consequences could have been devastating.'

Bendall smiled, performing, fighting woes with wit, and around the table they all responded dutifully, very British, until he sliced through the humour.

'It could have been anything! The most monstrous substance known to man. Typhus. Anthrax. You talk of reassurance and God knows I've tried, Home Secretary. I've looked at it every way I can, but I'm damned if I can find a single shred of reassurance in any of this. My wife could be dead. I could be dead. The whole of our system of government paralysed.'

Hope now knew he was on trial. 'I believe we are all very conscious of the potential seriousness of what has happened, Prime Minister. I think I speak for all your friends around this table in expressing our relief and joy that it did not turn out to be more serious.'

His friends around this table? Bendall had few true friends, and none in this room. His leadership qualities had been based not on intimacy but in no small part on his campaigning abilities, constructed around a richly decorated voice that expressed things, even nothing, with exceptional eloquence. His phrases were well seasoned, capable of turning the dullest of statements into a worthwhile sound bite. But the words were merely tools, and while they were being employed the eyes remained expressionless. It was said that the closer you got to Bendall, the less you understood him, although, it had to be admitted, such things were never said very loudly, and not while you still had ambition.

Hope cleared his throat. 'Sadly, there is little the food dye can tell us about the perpetrators since it is readily obtainable and won't be easy to trace. What we do know is that the action was carried out in little more than twenty minutes last evening by four men using a stolen water contractor's van. It seems they temporarily interrupted the water supply and introduced the dye into the system.'

'Slowly,' Bendall instructed, holding his hand up like a traffic policeman. 'Pass that by me once more. A van was parked right outside Downing Street? Poisoning the water? And no one checked?'

'Indeed they did, Prime Minister,' Hope responded forcefully, making the best of his meagre defences. 'A vehicle identification check was carried out by a member of the Diplomatic Protection Group.' Then, somewhat less positively: 'However, although the van was stolen, it was apparently using false plates. The computer in Swansea gave it a clean bill of health.'

'Ah, so it was the computer's fault. Now I understand.' His expression was so stiff it might have been chiselled. The eyes were arctic.

Hope retreated to his second line of defence. 'A telephone call was made to the Parks Police to say that there was a pressure problem, the water mains would have to be checked. Confirmation was faxed through. While the work was being undertaken, a Parks Police constable engaged one of the men in conversation

'Conversation, good. Never let it be said that the British bobby lacks courtesy. Didn't anyone think to offer them a cup of tea or a guided tour?'

Hope cleared his throat once more. This was just like Oxford. He could feel the heat rising beneath his collar, his head dropped and his eyes danced around his briefing paper like a condemned man invited to inspect the noose. He needed an escape route. He didn't like what he was going to do next, but the ditches along the road to survival are filled with one's friends.

'Sadly, the Royal Parks Constabulary is not the responsibility of the Home Office.' A brief shuffle of papers. 'It falls under the auspices of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.'

It was as though Hercule Poirot had turned round in the sitting room and pointed an accusing finger at his own maiden aunt. All eyes swivelled upon the hapless Secretary of State for Culture, a sensitive individual whose idea of mayhem amounted to nothing more than raising entrance fees for museums and attending an occasional meeting of the Arts Council. He was way out of his depth, and looked as if he might drown beneath the ripples on the brown baize tablecloth. The Home Secretary sat back in his seat, the mark of Judas on his moist brow.

'Ah, this is a cultural matter. I should have guessed.' Bendall's tone suggested for all the world that he might be chiding himself for being so pedestrian. 'And what light can you shine upon us?'

'Very little, I'm afraid,' the Culture Secretary stuttered. 'I… I was at the theatre last night.' His office hadn't even realized he was in the frame until two hours ago.

'But your policemen, at least, were on duty. Even chatted to them while they were playing games with my plumbing. So what did they look like?'

'It was dark. They all wore hats,' the Culture Secretary offered, barely above a whisper.

'It was dark. They all – wore hats,' Bendall repeated doggedly, in case the gods had missed this admission while they were drawing up the Bill of Execution, but he didn't bother to pursue either the point or the man. It would be like burning the wings off a beetle, enjoyable only if you were an extreme sadist or exceptionally bored. Instead, he turned once more to Hope. 'Let's try the surveillance cameras. I assume you're willing to take responsibility for those, Home Secretary. Some of them, at least?'

Hope undertook an instant diversionary tactic. 'Colleagues may remember, Prime Minister, that security expenditure has been cut in three successive Budgets. Maintenance and upgrading of these systems are woefully behind what I would have desired and, indeed, recommended in my Budget submissions.' It wasn't a particularly adept attempt to shuffle off the blame elsewhere, but dancing on coals is never elegant. Across the table, the Chancellor bristled in indignation.

'We are having the images computer-enhanced,' Hope continued, 'but…' – he drew himself in – 'as the Culture Secretary said, it was getting dark. The police are not optimistic'

'Somebody – I think it was George Bernard Shaw – once wrote that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world. Yet your security forces appear to have achieved it, Home Secretary. I congratulate you.'

'Actually, it was Oscar Wilde

Silence. The silence that prevails in the moments before the trapdoor falls. Faces turned in sorrow towards Hope, the man who had chosen to contradict Bendall in his present mood. A small slip, perhaps, but when you are standing above a trapdoor… Then suddenly Bendall laughed. 'You're probably right. Bloody Wilde. You're probably right. And I don't mind being told I'm wrong. Why, as Prime Minister I shall fight to your death for your right to say so.'

And everyone around the table joined in the humour, even those more practised observers who had noticed Bendall's deliberate twisting of the aphorism, and with it, Hope's neck.

Hope. His lifelong colleague and rival. A man so desperately removed from reality that he had chosen this of all moments to try and score a debating point. Just like Oxford. Like a dog eating its own vomit. But soon the feast would be over. The time had come to elevate Hope to that great Cabinet table in the sky. Another Banquo. Another eternal enemy. Another risk. Bendall felt the collar of Macbeth weigh heavily on him and getting tighter all the time. There would come a point, there always came a point, where his Administration could no longer be presented as a vine in need of pruning but would be seen as a gangrenous carcass with no prospect of revival. It happened to them all, Thatcher, Major, Blair. In the long run they were all victims, it was only a matter of time. But how much time? Oh, if only he had a little oracle to guide him, yet all he had was focus groups. So he would go on cutting and slashing in order to save himself, because in the end that's what all Prime Ministers did. Sacrifice others in order to save themselves. He had no alternative – and, as he would explain patiently to the political editors, in this case no choice. The public demanded a Home Secretary who was constructed of altogether sterner stuff, one who was more capable of kicking hell out of the European Court, and even a few illegal immigrants, if he could get away with it. Someone skilled in the black arts of propaganda and punishment.

Someone just like young Earwig.