Whispers of betrayal

EIGHT

During her relatively short life Mary Wetherell had been forced to surmount many obstacles. Her father, the lack of education, her dismissal from the Army and, more recently, her marriage. A story that was not the stuff of heroism, simply of survival. She'd always followed an uncomplicated code in dealing with these circumstances. Never look back. Fight the next war, not the last.

Of the many names on her long list of confrontations, Colonel Abel Gittings was in no way the most significant. OK, so he had screwed up her career and with it her life-plan, he had humiliated her and been at least partly responsible for the vulnerability that pushed her into a disastrous marriage. If she thought about it, he'd been the cause of much of the misery in her recent life. Yet she tried not to think about it. She'd been able, by and large, to put him behind her. Exmoor was a long way from Blandford, and in her world of fractured emotions she'd decided not to waste any more time on Gittings. Out of sight, out of mind.

Trouble was, she was no longer in Exmoor. She was in London. She had spent much of the last few days on reconnaissance in and around Whitehall. And in the very middle of Whitehall stood the vast milk-white Portland stone edifice of the Ministry of Defence, within which was located a Planning Staff and on which, on secondment, was Gittings.

She hadn't wanted it to happen, had tried to ignore it. She didn't even like to think of his name, usually referring to him only as the 'Black Bastard', but his proximity had begun to prey upon her mind. Memories – and pain – began to seep back. The worm began to turn once more. Up to that point she'd had a job in hand and she would allow nothing to distract her from that, but now it was over. She and the others had dumped the gear and the bikes at various points around Soho, out of sight of any CCTV cameras, and wandered into the day, unrecognized and untouched. They'd agreed to meet later for dinner at the Army amp; Navy Club, and in the meantime went their own ways – Amadeus to the sauna, Payne to his club, McKenzie to God-knows-where. They all found their own separate ways of dealing with their anxiety and dispersing the adrenaline.

Wherever her clothes touched her skin, Mary found herself damp with that strange mixture of fear and exhilaration she so missed from her days in the Army. It was no use going back to that claustrophobic room in the boarding house with its nagging phone, anything but that. The day was bright and inviting, with a cooling breeze, so she took a river boat – one of the few modes of transport still functioning in central London – to Kew Gardens, where she sat and ate apples with her back against the bole of a giant cedar and listened to the sound of its branches whispering to the breeze. For a while it was as though she had been transported to a different planet, far from the shadows of her life, and by late afternoon she felt thoroughly refreshed. On the return journey she stood in the prow of the boat, the wind on her cheeks and tugging at her hair. She imagined she hadn't a care in the world.

Then the boat drew in to dock at Charing Cross. Alongside the Ministry of Defence. And Gittings.

He was like a rash across her body, creeping up on her, and the more she thought about it, the more her skin crawled. Without any clear idea of what she was doing, she found herself loitering opposite one of the two main entrances to the Ministry, waiting.

Scratching. Burning.

Like a moth around a flame.

She watched as in growing numbers the MOD staff scattered down the steps beneath the towering limestone columns and headed off into what remained of the day. No idle bantering tonight, no suggestions of a casual drink in the Duke of Clarence or the club. This evening every man, woman and transvestite in the place had only one purpose, that of getting back home. The battle ahead was guaranteed to be a nightmare.

Somehow it had all become very personal for Mary. Bendall was their target, but she had never met him. Yet she had met Gittings, had felt his hands all over her, molesting, abusing her, and suddenly she wanted to make sure he suffered, too, and to suffer more, much more, than most. If she could screw up the whole of central London, how much easier must it be to screw up just one wretched and unsuspecting excuse for a man?

She wanted to hurt him. Compensation for some of the hurt he had caused her. Retribution. How she would find her revenge she was not yet certain, but the lure of his presence nearby became irresistible. She couldn't draw herself away. She waited, and watched, for nearly two hours as staff descended the steps and went on their way.

The Black Bastard was not among them.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Yet he was there. She knew he was there, she could feel it.

The following morning she telephoned the Ministry of Defence and asked for Colonel Abel Gittings. The switchboard put her through to an extension where a woman answered the phone. Mary asked for Gittings once again, and in turn was asked who was calling. He was there all right. She rang off.

That afternoon she loitered beside a bus stop in Parliament Street from where she could see the other, south-facing entrance to the MoD.

So many things might have happened to alter what took place next. He might have worked late, been lost in the crowd, or even been away on a course, but Creation is full of those unplanned and seemingly insignificant turning points that nudge a life from its path and send it hurtling down an embankment.

There he was, striding from the entrance. A touch greyer, in a civilian pin-striped suit, a briefcase rather than a swagger stick swinging from his grip, but unmistakably Gittings. The sight of him inflamed her. She didn't understand what she was doing; she only knew that it was right. Like a moth singeing its wings.

He set off at parade pace. Mary followed.

Every part of her relationship with him had been the cause of disaster for her, yet still she was drawn. It seemed so easy. He appeared to be enjoying the exercise and at times she was forced to scamper to keep pace. He didn't look back. Mary was able to pursue him all the way to Pimlico, a brisk twenty minutes, to a stucco-fronted building on St George's Square that had been converted into small apartments and pieds-a-terre, ideal for men like Gittings who worked in town and only saw their wives at weekends. He didn't always sleep there. Over the next few evenings Mary found herself watching from across the square, and following. She rejected any suggestion of obsession, telling herself that it was more fun than either idleness or television soaps, particularly when her pursuit led her across the river to a small terraced house in Clapham where he spent two of the next three nights in the company of a considerably younger and ridiculously unsuitable woman.

Like any moth, Mary thought she had found the gates of Heaven.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Bendall was examining his belly in the bath. Last time he'd looked there'd been some sort of muscle tone, a pressure beneath the skin that spoke of vigour rather than institutional dining and the third Scotch. Now the belly button had disappeared, had become nothing more than a void, an interstellar wormhole into which many of his manly dreams had been dragged and disappeared. It spoke not so much of fleeting youth but youth that had already disappeared around the corner and scarpered.

He had arrived back at Downing Street, overheated with humiliation, and had brushed aside all the entreaties of his private secretaries in his dash for the bathroom. He needed to cool down, hide. But he couldn't hide from his belly. It told him that the image he had so carefully crafted, the appeal of freshness and vitality that had swept him to power, was way past its sell-by date. Trade Descriptions time.

He would have to move on. Run on his record rather than his sex appeal. Unless, of course, he could reinvigorate the rumours about him and Kristen Svensson, but for that they would need to meet, and smile. Which brought him back to his morning. Fuck it. Then the telephone rang.

'I said I wasn't to be disturbed.'

'Except in emergencies, Prime Minister. You said except in emergencies,' the private secretary insisted. He had a slight lisp, which already made the conversation ridiculous.

'So where's the fire?'

'Beneath the Bundeskanzler. He's on the phone personally. I believe the translation runs roughly along the lines of "Wherever are you, old chap, and don't you know how much I had to set aside to accommodate your photocall?" Although nowhere near so polite.'

'What the devil…?'

'Remember, Prime Minister, there's a European Council meeting in a couple of weeks. Difficult agenda. He wants a huge rebate for Germany and I believe is now in the process of reminding you that you owe him. It was my judgement that the longer we kept him waiting, the larger would be the bill. I know you're in the bath but…'

'So was Dr Crippen's wife.'

'Indeed, Prime Minister.'

So Bendall had wallowed. In further humiliation. In impotence. In waters that were proving increasingly turbid. And tepid.

When, at last, he had dragged himself out and was standing dripping on the bath mat, the phone had rung yet again. There were no harsh words on this occasion. He had simply listened intently for several minutes with nothing more than the odd grunt of acknowledgement until the bath mat was soaked and he had begun to shiver.

Then: 'Why does it always start in my bloody bathroom?'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'We are still gathering information. From the CCTVs. Eyewitnesses. Early days yet, but I am hopeful.' He doesn't sound it. The Evening Standard is already running a front page with a simple banner headline. 'HOPELESS!'

'What makes you so?'

'So what, Prime Minister?'

'Hopeful.'

The Home Secretary clears his throat, a sound of a chainsaw engine that refuses to fire, and heads for his brief. 'As a result of the…' – he searches for the appropriate words. He is considering something like 'earlier outrage' or 'initial incident' when the Prime Minister helps him out.

'First fiasco. As a result of the first fiasco. What?'

Hope clears his throat more forcefully, it still doesn't fire, and embarks once again upon a voyage that he already knows will lead him into dangerously uncharted waters.

'As a result, we identified all the likely targets amongst the environmentalists. Those we considered both capable and sufficiently motivated. There are, I must admit frankly, a disarming number, but we have many of them under observation.' He gazes around the Cabinet Room. Less crowded than usual. The Cabinet has been summoned into emergency session at less than three hours' notice and several of its members are out of London. The Foreign Secretary is still in Brussels, waiting for the arrival of the Prime Minister and the Surf Summit. 'As a result we will be able to eliminate a large number of them from our enquiries. The net closes in.'

'You can eliminate the whole damned lot.'

'I beg your pardon, Prime Minister?'

'Eliminate the damned lot. Your net's so full of holes it couldn't catch a fart.'

The metaphor is senseless, of course, and deliberately crude. The Cabinet Secretary stops taking notes and busies herself studying Bendall's reflection in Gladstone's silver inkwell. It makes him seem as if he has but one enormously distended eye. A Cyclops. Across the table the Home Secretary's back goes stiff. The sweat is gathering beneath the forelock.

'I understand you've been caused grievous embarrassment, Prime Minister, but nevertheless…'

'You understand less than a bull who's lost his bollocks!'

Bendall's palm smacks down on the table. The Cabinet Secretary's pen wobbles indecisively once more. Hope has no idea what to say, so remains silent. Awesomely pale. And no one else volunteers to help him out.

Now Bendall's voice is lower. But not softer. There is no other sound in the room apart from the ticking of the clock on the mantle. They all strain to hear, like sentries listening for the click of a safety catch in the night.

'They are not environmentalists.'

'But…'

'You have been wasting our time, Home Secretary. The people behind these outrages are not environmentalists, they are former Army officers. Can you advise us how many of them might be involved?'

Hope's lower jaw drops, but he does not speak. Indeed, he is incapable of speech.

'Ten? A hundred, maybe?' Bendall presses.

Hope scans his briefing document like a shipwrecked sailor scans the horizon.

'Maybe take an informed guess, even? How many, who they are?'

A strangled whisper. 'I have no information, Prime Minister.'

'No clue. That about sums it up, doesn't it? We've got a load of renegade boot shiners rampaging all over bloody London. And you don't have a clue.'

'I… I scarcely know what to say.'

Bendall stretches back in his chair, as though to maximize the distance between himself and his hapless colleague. 'There is nothing to say, Home Secretary. I think the Cabinet will understand if you wish to leave the room. While you write your letter of resignation.'

'What… now?'

Hope feels his chair pulling back from beneath him; it seems to have a mind of its own. He can't move a muscle, yet finds himself being swept towards the door.

He is almost there. His hand is on the polished brass door knob. He steadies himself, turns. All eyes are on him. Even the clock seems to have stopped ticking.

'How do you know? How do you know it's military? Not environmental?' An edge of stubbornness. After all, he's got a right to know. He's the one who's drowning.

It is a moment that reveals the animal instincts of the Prime Minister. The instincts that require an animal to gorge upon a carcass without moderation, just in case tomorrow there are no carcasses left.

'That's privileged information. And you no longer have the privilege.'

It is also calculated. For no one else is likely to ask the same question and risk the same late. No one else needs to know about the other telephone call that came while he stood examining his sagging belly in the bathroom mirror. A call taken by the Downing Street switchboard in the basement by the Tudor tennis court, from a public phone box out of sight of any cameras. A call in a voice disguised so heavily that although the computers had captured every syllable it would be a work of genius to decipher anything other than that it was male, reasonably educated and probably verging on middle age – although the caller was willing to admit to all that anyway by identifying himself as the author of a letter sent earlier to Downing Street. A letter that in the last two hours has been rescued from the compost section of the Garden Room. A letter that Special Branch's initial conclusion indicates has been written in some form of code or deliberate jumble to disguise the identity of the writer.

A writer who demands an apology, and a change to Government policy.

Bendall decides he'll go halfway. The bastards'll get a change, all right.

Enough of No-Hopers. Now they are going to get what they bloody well deserve.

Earwick.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'Beryl says to notify you that there's going to be an extraordinary meeting of the Executive.' Marshwood's part-time constituency secretary sounded unusually formal. To appoint a new treasurer. But she says it's a formality. No need for you to come.' A formality meant only one thing. Beryl was planning to appoint her candidate without any argument or opposition. Wanted one of her own, not another Trevor.

'I'd like to attend. When is it?'

'This Wednesday evening.'

Goodfellowe groaned. All but impossible. There was bound to be a vote. Beryl knew it. Deliberate.

'I'll be there.'

'Oh,' the secretary responded, surprised. This wasn't what she'd been led to expect. 'I'll tell Miss Hailstone you're coming then, shall I?'

Thank Beryl for me. And tell her I'll be there.'

Bloody Beryl.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= They found themselves together in the old ground-floor toilet just outside the Cabinet Room. The Chief Whip was relieving himself, a most necessary undertaking after a meeting such as that, when the Prime Minister walked in.

'So what do you think, Eddie?' the Prime Minister growled as he stepped alongside Rankin.

'As a man or as a politician?'

Bendall turned and stared, inspected Rankin up and down, as though he could scarcely believe what he was hearing, or seeing. Enough to disturb any man when he's urinating.

What I think, Jonathan, is that you should make sure the media are properly briefed. Before Noel gets out there and muddies the water, and starts giving the impression he walked away as a matter of principle, or even stormed out in passion. There's a limit to what we'll be able to say about a security matter. Don't want to give him a head start.' God, how he was looking forward to washing his hands after this one.

'Good advice, Eddie. Yes, very sound.' The words were fulsome, yet Bendall seemed utterly unmoved.

'Do you want me to warn the press secretary, then? Get him moving?'

'I'd rather you didn't disturb him right now. He's over at the lobby. Explaining why No-Hope had to go. How I was forced to part with the services of a lifelong friend. We go back such a long way together, you know.'

'He's briefing the press already?'

'Has been ever since Cabinet began.'

'You knew…?'

'As you said, Eddie, didn't want to give Noel a head start.'

Rankin looked down, trying to hide his ragged emotions. It seemed to him that he had shrunk and somehow felt less of a man. Sometimes he hated this job.

'Something had to give, Eddie. There's got to be more than just sitting around waiting for the next humiliation.'

'You sound worried.'

'Be a fool not to be. It's all very well getting Noel to carry the can, but how long before they come knocking on my door? After all, it was my bathroom, my bloody summit. In this job you either control events or you run before them, and at the moment…' – a slight pause, an uncharacteristic insight into insecurity – 'I don't control even my own bath tap. Don't care for that, Eddie, don't care for that one bit. So it can't be just the one, you know, not just Noel. Others'll have to go. Destiny calls, and for some sooner than others. We need new blood. New ideas.' Bendall flushed the urinal, as though dispensing with a great misfortune. 'Got any ideas?'

Rankin began soaping his hands. 'You will already have decided who's going to replace Noel.'

'Earwig. I was thinking young Earwig.'

Rankin paused, and picked up the soap once more, as though he had discovered an unusually stubborn stain. 'Then…' He hesitated. The most difficult part of his job. Get it wrong, offer a few impossible names, and he'd go down with them. 'Not one of us,' they'd explain, as they flushed him away alongside the rest. 'I think you should go for a balance. Youth. Plus experience.'

'What sort of experience?'

Rankin made a dash for the towel to give himself a further moment for consideration. He didn't fully understand his own logic. Was he about to say this because he thought it right? Or because he thought they deserved each other?

'Goodfellowe.'

'What? A Burke and Hare job? Rob the graveyard?'

'He was one of the best. Once. And he wants back in.'

'So do Maggie Thatcher and Joseph Stalin.'

'But – and remember this – Tom was the only one in the entire country to question whether it was environmentalists behind the attacks.'

'Made a bloody fool of himself in the process.'

'No, Jonathan, you made a bloody fool of him. There's a difference, you know.'

'S'pose there is.' He sounded as if he'd been offered a compliment. 'Suppose he was right, too. Just got his timing wrong.' Bendall inspected his hair in the mirror, redistributing the sparse fringe around the brow. 'Man of Conscience. Hmm, could be a useful reinforcement, add a little principle to proceedings. At least until the next round of spending cuts.'

'Call him in. Talk with him. Make up your own mind.' Get out from underneath this absurd suggestion. Shove it back into Bendall's lap.

The Prime Minister was already heading for the door. 'Right. Call him in. Let's have a drink.'

Rankin noticed that Bendall hadn't washed his hands. Come to think of it, he never washed his hands. 'When?' Rankin called after him.

'Wednesday evening.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= Elizabeth was distracted. She was not at her best when she was distracted.

She was the sort of woman who fought hard to ensure her life ran along a path she controlled and was, so far as was possible, emotionally risk-free. For all her beauty and wit, there was a deep well of insecurity that even those closest to her had trouble fathoming. To most people she was an object of envy – she had beauty, charm, her independence, a delightful wisteria-covered Kensington mews house, and the restaurant. Oh, and Goodfellowe, although few people regarded him as the most obvious of her attributes. Politicians were two a penny around beautiful women.

Yet to see the glittering exterior was not to understand Elizabeth. Not even Elizabeth entirely understood Elizabeth, or, if she did, there were dark corners she preferred to avoid. So her wit and acid humour had been developed to help her survive, to cover up vulnerability. To keep people out, not to involve them. Her relationships had been plentiful, her love-making passionate and often unpredictable. On the prow of a cruise ship, for example, with a complete stranger, as she had leaned forward over the rail to embrace the star-filled Caribbean sky, also on the bonnet of a boyfriend's brand new Ferrari as it was parked outside The Belvedere in Holland Park. She'd forgotten to take off her shoes, made an awful mess of the coachwork. Orgasms in heels can do that for a girl. And for a Ferrari.

He didn't complain. She knew he'd keep that car until the wheels fell off, would never part with his memories of her, or the dent in the bonnet. He'd never abandon her, not like that bloody boy when she was fourteen.

Yet for all her experience and experiences, she still found it so difficult to share. She kept men hungry, like Penelope at her loom, fed their desires but not their souls, and in the end it always told. The one man she had been determined to trust, her husband, had grown frustrated and eventually had gone. Not entirely anyone's fault. Circumstance. She'd been five months pregnant, there had been a car crash in which he'd been driving. She lost the baby, and her ability to have more babies, and along with it for a while had died something inside her that allowed her to trust and to share with men.

Until she had met Goodfellowe. He was wounded, too. Both damaged goods. Something they could share.

She loved Goodfellowe, but he was a man and so carried with him a little of the baggage of every man she had ever known. She wanted to love him more, and perhaps one day she might, but in the meantime she could find solace in her restaurant, something to which she could commit herself completely. It was a relationship she could control.

Or so she had thought. But these were difficult times, times of cash-flow problems and cancellations.

Salvation was at hand, of course, in the form of twenty-two crates of the finest Tsarist vintages, for which she had signed a contract in both English and Russian, lodging copies with the customs, taxation and foreign trade authorities in Odessa, and had then transferred the US dollar equivalent of almost seventy thousand pounds into an account at the People's Bank of Odessa in the name of Vladimir Houdoliy, frozen until such time as a certificate of export for the specified goods had been presented.

Vladimir Houdoliy had become a man of great significance in her life. Perhaps too significant, for ever since the money had left her account and found its way to Odessa, it seemed to have disappeared into a hole in the ground.

Now there was no answer from Vladimir's phone, no matter how many times she rang.

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'Come in, come in… er, Tom.' Bendall seemed to be struggling for the name. 'Whisky?'

Without waiting for a reply the Prime Minister nodded to Eddie Rankin, who busied himself at the small drinks cabinet. Goodfellowe had intended to decline, had he been given an option. He was way behind on his diet this week. Had been all month.

They were in Bendall's study on the first floor of Downing Street with three large sash windows that offered a fine view of the silver birch in the garden and the park beyond. The windows had a faint green tinge, on account of the inch-thick glass that was blastproof and tested on the Royal Engineers' proving range at Chatham, a legacy of the IRA mortar attack that had left the garden and most of the windows looking like a bad day on the Somme. Not that the reinforced windows offered complete protection. They were so heavy they had to be opened and closed with huge winding handles, and were now far more robust than the ancient brick walls into which they were bolted. In the event of another explosion, they'd probably fall into the room in one huge piece, reducing everyone inside to specimens on a microscope slide. Not so much immunity, simply a different path to immortality.

Goodfellowe hadn't been in this inner sanctum before. It had the unmistakable feel of a boy's den – cracked leather chairs and sofas, yards of bookshelves, disrupted piles of papers on floor and desks, the lingering smell of beeswax and alcohol. At the far end of the room, much to Goodfellowe's astonishment, stood a Sixties jukebox, switched on and ready to go, and on the wall above it a huge oil painting by some modernist that had been borrowed from the Tate.

'So,' Bendall began after they had seated themselves, examining his cufflink as though he had nothing better to do. 'You were bloody rude at Question Time the other day.'

'Was I, Prime Minister? If so, it was unintentional. Anyway, you were far bloody ruder.'

Suddenly Goodfellowe had won all of the Prime Minister's attention. 'True. But that's what I'm paid for.'

'Ah, I'd wondered about that.'

Bendall considered this backbencher, this strange creature who appeared to be in neither awe nor fear. 'You know, when I first got into Cabinet, they said that you were the one to look out for. The man who would most likely make it. Here, in Downing Street. Perhaps even beat me to it.'

'Then they got it wrong. Whoever "they" were.'

'God, I thought you were going to come out with something crass. Like "the best man won".'

'I long ago stopped thinking of myself as even a good man, let alone the best man.' It neatly ducked the matter of his opinion of Bendall.

'But you got it right, didn't you? At Question Time. You knew they weren't eco-freaks. How? How did you know that?'

Goodfellowe gently swirled the whisky around his tumbler, savouring the hints of peat. Lots of peat, and seaweed. From one of the islands.

'You don't want to know, Jonathan.'

'I certainly do.'

'Believe me, you don't.'

'I insist. Dammit, this is a matter of national security. I could have you dragged to the Tower and tortured for such information.'

Goodfellowe sighed. An image of Sam and Darren appeared before his eyes, their faces earnest, their arguments giving no quarter.

'Very well, if I must. I knew they couldn't be environmentalists because… well, because these guys were making fun of you. Mocking you. And it's a time-hardened fact that environmentalists have no sense of humour.'

Rankin, from his sentry post by the black-and-white marble fireplace, quietly choked.

'Just instinct?' Bendall pressed.

'And experience.'

There followed a long silence while Bendall looked out of the window, for all the world as though he'd suddenly become fascinated by the branches of the silver birch. As the silence lengthened, Goodfellowe came to the conclusion that he'd blown it. He began chastising himself. Dammit, couldn't he simply be pleasant to the bastard for just a few minutes?

Bendall turned back towards him, the eyes cool, not trying to impress. 'You don't bother with the niceties, do you, Tom? Still, I shouldn't worry 'bout that. I'm never short of a few arse-lickers, am I, Eddie? But instinct and experience? They're about as rare in these parts as a whore's charity. I need them. Maybe I need you.'

Goodfellowe gave no reply, contenting himself with a large slug of whisky to calm the tautness that had grown inside.

'Let me put my cards on the table, Tom. There's a reshuffle coming up. If you want, you'll be part of it.'

The slightest pause, then, slowly: 'I want.'

'But first I'd like your help and ideas on these attacks. We know they're former soldiers, but that doesn't help us much. Something like forty thousand've left the armed forces in the last five years, it's still like searching for a bedbug in a brothel. And no knowing what they'll do next. So we've raised the level of security, called together COBRA' – he offered the acronym of the national security committee that held its meetings in the Cabinet Office briefing room – 'and I want you on it as my special adviser.'

'He'll have to sign the Official Secrets Act,' Rankin advised.

'Not necessary, already done it,' Goodfellowe contradicted. 'When I was Foreign Office Minister. The obligations of the Official Secrets Act last until you die. Sometimes longer, I'm told.'

Suddenly Bendall was on his feet, with Goodfellowe struggling to follow.

'Don't cross me, Tom. Don't get like all the rest. Stay with me, and you'll find me a good friend. Hell, you might even make it here after all. When they finally get me.'

– =OO=OOO=OO-= 'That was a little bit of history.'

'At last, I'm a footnote.'

'Maybe more than a footnote, Tom. A whole chapter even. Perhaps the entire bloody book.'

'What bloody book?'

Goodfellowe and the Chief Whip were in Parliament Street, walking briskly, a little breathless, floating on adrenaline.

'Try Lear. Like the mad king, handing on his empire.'

'What the hell's that supposed to mean, Eddie? Stop being so bloody opaque. You sound like a prison letter trying to wriggle its way past the censors.'

'I'm a Chief Whip, for God's sake. You're not supposed to understand me, just do as I say.'

They paused at a pedestrian crossing.

'Try being human for a change. Give me a clue.'

'Should've worked it out for yourself already. About Jonathan.'

The electronic man turned green in their favour. Goodfellowe wondered how long it would be before traffic lights were accused of being sexist.

'What about Jonathan?'

'He's not long for this world, some might say. Not me, you understand. But then I'm only a loyal Chief Whip. No opinions of my own.'

'Hell, I've only just got there. And you're saying the party's practically over?'

'Not yet. But soon, maybe.'

'You bursting my balloon already?'

'No, quite the opposite. Imagine. You in Cabinet a year or so. Mr Clean. Mr Fresh. Mr Not Responsible For All This Lousy Mess. Unlike all the others. It could be you sending out invitations to your own party.'

'You mean

'Yes. As Prime Minister. Let's face it, more ridiculous things have happened.'

They had come to an abrupt halt in the entrance to New Palace Yard. A taxi hooted impatiently.

'My own party? It'll never happen. Beryl will get to me first and tread on every balloon in sight.'

'Beryl?'

'My constituency chair-monster. I'm supposed to be at an Executive meeting right now. They're appointing a new treasurer. While they're at it I think she's also organizing my lynching party.'

'Don't worry about Beryl. I'll give her a call. Can't be too specific, not yet, but I'll give her some prattle about you being the Prime Minister's right-hand man and his gratitude to her for sparing you this evening. Mutter about greater things to come. She'll be wringing out her knickers by the time I've finished with her.'

'I doubt it. You haven't seen her knickers. Only a guy rope short of a Millennium Dome.'

'You've forgotten, haven't you, Tom?'

'Forgotten what?'

A duty policeman nodded in recognition as they passed into the Palace precincts.

'Power's what it's all about. An aphrodisiac. Use it. Enjoy it!'