Fall From Grace (17 page)

‘Well I’m flattered by the invitation, Lady Eleanor,’ said Marius van Urk. ‘Even though more and more people are taking their news coverage from the net, it’s still been hard to get ourselves established as a leading news source.’

‘I’m not here to flatter anyone, Mr. Van Urk,’ said Eleanor. She’d rather taken to this fresh faced young man. He reminded her of some of the ones she’d met in her youth, ‘although that would be easy in your case.’

Marius felt himself blush. He’d never been hit on before by a ninety-year old filthy rich woman before. Like all good colonials Marius was drooling about sitting in this massive 200-room house in the old country with all its traditions and history and this woman from another world. Lady Eleanor was physically a little frail, she had a walking stick at her side, but she was immaculately turned out in a Chanel style two piece and her hair was perfectly set in the brushed back style of elderly ladies of a certain age. There were more lines across her face than a Manchester A to Z but her eyes looked like they could freeze hell.

‘Your accent is quite fascinating,’ said Eleanor. ‘Your name suggests you may be from Holland? Or perhaps the Flemish speaking part of Belgium? I have so many friends in Antwerp and Bruges.’

‘You’re way off, I’m afraid,’ laughed Marius. ‘My mother is English, from Nottingham, where my grandparents and the rest of my mother’s family live, but my father is South African which is where I was born and brought up. My mother moved out there when she married my father.’

Marius knew exactly what she meant. Since apartheid ended his family had lost their privileged access to the reins of society. But they were still rich. His father’s business was a vineyard in the Eastern Cape that had been raking in the cash since the end of apartheid had led to the world looking more favourably on importing South African goods. In the ‘old days’ it had just been Israel and a few fascist states that had comprehensively traded with South Africa. Now the whole world drank the country’s wine. But he would have to concede that wealth had not been re-distributed throughout the ‘new’ South Africa. Most blacks had stayed poor whilst some of their ‘comrades’ had got themselves very wealthy on the backs of the ‘cause’ they continued to profess to be fighting for. It sometimes left Marius to wonder what had really changed for the majority of his black compatriots. Unlike his Afrikaner father however, Marius had never been a fan of apartheid. He loved the spirit of what his country had become but the reality of it was what had made him leave for the UK. That and splitting up from his fiancée Yvette which had made him want to make a fresh start somewhere else.

Marius looked up at one of the pictures on the wall. It was of a slightly chubby man in the kind of shirt and tie that spoke so wildly of sixties Britain. ‘Who’s that, your Ladyship?’

‘It’s Ronald Kray,’ said Eleanor, who’d hidden her pictures of the Kray twins when the police had been there. ‘He was a great friend and a frequent visitor to my home here.’

‘Really? How so?’

‘Marius, people of my class have always got on famously with men from less savoury backgrounds. Look at my dear late friend and confidant Lord Boothby and his friendship with the Kray twins as an example. The aristocracy and the working classes have always held each other in mutual respect and each have always known their respective place in the order of things. It’s those dreadful middle classes who think they’re more important than they are.’

Marius thought it was almost laughable how the British titled classes had such an affinity with the criminal world. He’d heard it a lot from his mother’s side of the family and it sounded like this stupid old bitch was no different.

‘I’m a very angry woman at this time, Marius,’ Eleanor went on. ‘I am one of the 91 hereditary peers they let remain in our rightful place in the House of Lords but I know that our days are numbered thanks to the sell-out out to the Liberals by our so-called Conservative Prime Minister.’

‘Isn’t that part of what being a coalition is about, Lady Eleanor? The two parties involved have to compromise?’

‘Coalition?’ she scoffed. ‘Compromise? They say they want the Lords to be a fully elected chamber but the masses don’t use the democracy they’ve got let alone what this coalition is set to impose on them. My blood is boiling, Marius. We must save England and restore the libertarian values of our Anglo-Saxon culture. They’d rather give equal rights to homosexuals than lower my taxes, so-called human rights have replaced tradition and all our power as a nation is being lost to Brussels.’

‘So you feel betrayed by the Conservative party on Europe?’

‘Utterly betrayed, Marius!’ said Eleanor. ‘Utterly betrayed! It’s another example of the Liberals punching above their weight and holding the Prime Minister to political ransom. My family and the rest of my class built the empire Marius, but now this country is being lost to cultures that are alien to it. There are too many mosques and temples being built. There has to be a stop to it.’

‘I’m an immigrant to this country myself, Lady Eleanor.’

‘And people like you are more than welcome here, Marius,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s not people like you I’m talking about. I’m glad your paper contacted me because this could be my last ever chance to put my side across. People like me have been wronged against. We need justice, Marius. The white race in this country needs justice.’

‘That’s all very interesting, Lady Eleanor, but of course you invited us here to respond to the comments on our website made by Kathy Jenkins during her interview with me.’

‘And that’s what I’m coming to, Marius,’ said Eleanor. ‘I say again that people of my class are under attack from liberalism. The lies of Kathy Jenkins are part of that. Her father murdered her brother, Marius. Her father murdered her brother but she wants to put the blame on me because of something called class envy. Well she’s wrong, Marius. She’s wrong about it and she’s wrong about her claims. I saw what happened. Her father came rushing into the pool when he saw his son Peter and I in an embrace and in the struggle of pulling Peter off me he threw him against the side of the pool and he died. His father had killed him. He was tried. He was convicted. He was executed. If his daughter Kathy still can’t come to terms with that then I feel truly sorry for her. But she’s wrong, Marius. Her father murdered her brother and I was a witness to it.’

*

When Jake turned up on Paul’s doorstep out of the blue again, Paul had just got in from work and he was knackered. He hadn’t slept well since he found out the history of the watch his father had given him and was trying to work out how he could ask his father about it in his dying days. He needed to know who the woman was who gave it to him. That was the real mystery of it all as far as Paul could see. Whoever she was, where had she got it from?

Something about the way Jake looked at him filled Paul with all the lustful hunger that had always been so much a part of their relationship. And no matter how tired he was, just at that moment sex was all Paul wanted.

They didn’t need to say anything else. They just ripped each other’s clothes off and got down to the business of making love right there in the middle of Paul’s living room floor. Paul rode Jake like a horse, arching his back and keeping his hands gripped firmly on Jake’s firm, wide shoulders. It was raw. It was sensual. It didn’t matter about anything or anyone else except the pleasure they were giving each other. Jake was used to Paul having a lot of sexual energy but he was really going for it this time and Jake was happy to respond in kind.

‘That was just what I needed,’ said Paul when they’d finished. They leaned against the wall in a post-coital embrace. Paul grabbed one of the throw-over’s from his sofa and wrapped it round them. ‘And now we’re cosy.’

‘No,’ said Jake, his mind flooding with all the images that fuel his rage. ‘It was another day, another patrol, another reminder that we shouldn’t be there. I somehow got separated from the others. I was a sitting duck.’

‘They took me to some shack somewhere,’ said Jake. ‘They set me up for execution. There was a whole load of plastic sheeting on the floor ready to capture the blood. About ten of them held me. I was on my knees, they pulled me head back and had one of the biggest knives I’ve ever seen ready to do the job. They had a video camera set up. They were going to post the whole drama on the internet.’

‘God, I feel sick,’ said Paul.

‘I thought I was in my final moments,’ said Jake. ‘All I could think about was you. The memory of it still traps me inside my head, you know. Those shackles are still on. Those tight hands with the desire to kill me in every pore of every finger are still in position. The gentle whirling sound of the video camera as it prepared to make me a worldwide hit. I can still hear the voices that ripped through me like tiny daggers until I heard a different kind of voice. A voice that spoke a language I still didn’t understand but that I knew was friendly.’

‘And who the hell was that?’

‘We had a French group working under our command. They stormed the shack and luckily the first one they killed was the one who’d been holding the knife. You see, the Taliban had planned to grab one of the coalition soldiers for weeks. That’s why they took me straight to the little studio they’d set up. But it was only a mile from where the French had been on patrol and they received some intelligence on the location. I’ll never bad mouth France or the French ever again, not even in jest.’

Paul couldn’t get over the look in Jake’s eyes. They were full of pain. They’d witnessed his imminent death and his lucky escape. What was the country doing for these guys? The country sends them out and makes a big show of driving their dead bodies through villages where people turn out to show their respect. But what happens to men like Jake who come back alive but without everything in their soul that they’d taken out with them? Are they just left to deal with it on their own? Would those who publicly display their support for the dead look the other way when the living show their problems? Is it too uncomfortable for them? It’s easy to applaud dead bodies. Anybody can do that. Reaching out and helping the living was more difficult.

Paul stood up. ‘I’ll go and see what I’ve got. I haven’t done much shopping this week so we might have to send out for something.’

ELEVEN

It had quite made Sara’s day when she got to work that morning and a very cute PC called Kieran Quinn, who’d caught her eye a few days ago and who was manning the reception desk downstairs, had noticed that she’d had her hair trimmed the night before. The comment had made her blush. Either he’s into older women or he doesn’t realise how much older than him she is. But then she thought, so what? He’d look very nice inside her. It had been a while since she’d been taken down and dusted and three weeks without sex for a woman as physically inclined as Sara was like an eternity.