Dead in the Water (46 page)

There is an unearthly quality to the dreadful stillness as dignitaries, administrators, domestic staff, police and military stand gathered in the drive in front of the building as dust falls on them from the sky. Nobody speaks. It seems for a moment as if nobody even breathes before a rasping creaking groan is heard as a wooden beam falls away from the house followed by two thuds in quick succession as it and then a bed fall to the ground from one of the VIP guest bedrooms.

Early June

77

On the Monday after the Chequers bombing a man in considerable distress was found wandering in woods near Slough. Although there were no cuts or bruises on his body; and he appeared not to have been attacked, he didn’t know his own name, and he had no identification on him. Presuming that he had been given a drug to erase his short term memory, the police held him under observation in a hospital secure unit. It was not until the Wednesday, when Rachel Boyd presented herself at a police station in Oxford to make a claim about being abducted by the Green terrorist group,
Angels of Light
, that the man was identified as Jeremy Peters.

Rachel Boyd’s statement was passed on to a senior member of the anti-terrorist squad, and was taken very seriously; but she could provide no evidence to corroborate her story. The little device she claimed to be the ‘bug’ used to record conversations with her father was nothing more than a watch battery.

Jeremy Peters’ long term memory returned within a week; but he had no recollection of being kidnapped or mugged. And in spite of the best efforts of a skilled hypnotherapist, the last thing he could remember was visiting a jazz club in Soho with an Irishman named Redmond whom he’d met on a flight from Sao Paulo to Heathrow. When the passenger list was checked, however, it was found that the only Irishmen on that flight were four pop stars travelling first class on their way to a gig at Wembley Stadium. None of them were named Redmond, and none of them had ever bought tickets for a Test Match.

Sara Davis would have loved to have run Rachel’s Venezuela story. The hand-held rain forest footage was very sexy. But it had to be shelved and eventually dropped. Every news bulletin was being extended to cover the outrage at Chequers. That’s the problem with working in news: priorities change very quickly.

And although the start of the mini-Summit was delayed; it still went ahead – at a secret location. As Angela Walker so proudly declared, terrorists may disrupt, but they cannot prevent the workings of democracy.

At the end of the Summit an upbeat statement was issued, the highly productive benefits of great minds meeting and working in partnership. If some cynics found the statement rather vague and non-specific, they were soon confounded when, less than a week later, a resolution was passed at the United Nations condemning the Venezuelan government for actively colluding in the growing anarchy. And America, having exhausted all other possibilities, as the American president so magnanimously acknowledged to Mark Boyd, did the right thing and agreed not only to support the establishment of a UN peacekeeping force, but also to include in it a large U.S. contingent.

It was, of course, in everyone’s interests for Venezuela to be stabilised and for the rain forest to be protected. But proper protection comes at a price. The policing of the Amazonas reserves had hitherto been half-hearted at best. So the Peacekeepers, and the new economic advisers to the government who accompanied them, were charged with ensuring that sufficient oil revenues must be forthcoming to fund the establishment of the independent Amazonas Protection Force. It was agreed that where oil extraction had already started, it would be controlled and regulated with a system of official permits.

As the
Angels of Light
faded from public consciousness, the Chequers bombing their last atrocity, the Walker government’s response to the crisis came to be regarded as a triumph of moderation. Whether the
Angels
were
provocateurs
or genuine extremists, the government had not allowed itself to be provoked. The police may have over-reacted a little on occasions but when faced with such a serious threat to public order they could not be blamed for people’s lack of common sense. And in a most unexpected way, Mark Boyd’s downfall proved rather convenient for the government. It enabled them to use his arrest as an excuse, if one were needed, to distance themselves both from him personally and from even the faintest taints of extremism.

Most of the people arrested in those weeks early May were released without charge – but not Allan Hunter. The ‘AA’ van which attended Mark Boyd’s breakdown was eventually found, burnt out, at the bottom of a disused gravel pit near Chinnor. It didn’t take long for a forensic team to ascertain that this had been Allan Hunter’s van, the one so conveniently ‘stolen’ from outside his house.

At the end of three weeks in custody, held under anti terrorist legislation, Mark Boyd was released. He anticipated a queue of reporters scrabbling to get an inside story, imagined that his release would be greeted by a frenzy of photographers and camera teams. But nobody seemed to have been informed of the date of his release. It was as if the police just got bored of asking him the same questions and decided on a whim to let him go. Even Stephen, who had himself been released from detention only two days before, was not there to greet him when Mark walked out of the gates of Belmarsh Prison. The road was empty. Only a man just released from prison would walk out in such torrential rain.