Fifty-First State (12 page)

‘All right, Jeremy?' Gott asked encouragingly. ‘Good holiday?'

‘Apart from the diarrhoea and a twelve-hour flight,' Jeremy told him, thinking Gott looked fit, well, healthily tanned and had a surprise in store for him.

‘Can you look in?' asked Gott. ‘I need you.'

‘I'm pretty tired,' said Jeremy. ‘And I've got to go to my sister's to pick up Finn.'

Gott was displeased. ‘Well, get the dog, have a shower and I'll see you in forty-five minutes.'

‘Right, boss,' said Jeremy gloomily.

It was midnight before Jeremy, showered and in his pyjamas, came downstairs from the top-floor flat, where he lived with Gott as his landlord. He entered with his intelligent dog, who knew better than to wag
his tail at Gott and pattered over the polished floor to lie down under the long windows overlooking the square. The long lace curtains hung still above his head. The leaves on the trees outside lay heavy with heat and traffic fumes.

Long, lean Jeremy moved as if drawn by a magnet to the table on which Gott had hospitably placed some packages of wrapped sandwiches. He began to eat. Gott silently placed a weak whisky and water beside him then went across the room to stand near the small grand piano he could not play. He said, ‘I want you to go to Yorkshire.'

‘What – is it, Rodon?' Jeremy asked. Rodon was Gott's car firm in the North West. The research team was headed by the awkward eccentric genius, Leslie Mundy, who was working on a system to re-power, internally, the Citycar, a short-range electric vehicle. He was a perfectionist. He would seldom let his work out of his hands because he always had further improvements in mind. Five years earlier Gott and Jeremy had gone to Rodon. Gott was desperate. Mundy and his research team had been at work for three years, and as yet not one car worker had come through the factory gates and not one spanner had been lifted on the empty factory floor. Costs were spiralling. On that occasion Gott had bullied Mundy into handing over the research and this had at last resulted in the Citycar going into production. Following this episode, either Gott and Jeremy, or Jeremy alone, paid regular unscheduled visits to Rodon.

The Citycar was now in use by people wanting to make short journeys – its range was only forty-five miles before it required re-powering. Early on it had become a national joke, being seen so often standing uselessly at the roadside because the owners had underestimated how long they would be on the road, because they had handed the keys to teenage children, or because it had been stolen and driven away. Mundy pointed out that he had predicted this when production began. Gott had been forced to set up another company, Citycar Rescue. There were enough people ready to pay the relatively large purchase price to use the low-maintenance, ecologically friendly runabout but it was a small market and Gott wanted to expand. Mundy was working on finding a safe way to re-power the vehicle in transit. That way, though it might still be slow – its maximum speed was 40mph and even that speed drained its power faster – it would be able to cover longer distances. Gott was beginning to suspect Mundy might have solved the problem, but was concealing the result.

‘Well – I was going to ask you to look in unexpectedly as usual and see what you can find out. It'll be Saturday morning. With any luck they won't be there.' Gott said. ‘But your main task is to go to a Pennine village, Kirkby Rodney, and see what you can find out about the early life of Alan Broderick Petherbridge. He lived there until he was twenty – away
a lot of the time at school and university, but that was his home. His father died when he was very young, so I suppose it would have been him and his mother.'

‘I've been to Kirkby Rodney. I used to climb round there before I took up an open-all-hours post with you.'

‘We all have to pay the rent,' Gott said unsympathetically as Jeremy demolished the last of the sandwiches. ‘That's why they call it work.' He handed him a copy of
Who's Who
open at the page containing Alan Petherbridge's entry. Jeremy scanned it. ‘Conventional enough. School, Oxford, Harvard Business, Barclays, Conservative Party research; wife – Annabel; address – Backhurst, Chapping, Gloucester.'

‘Go and see her, too, on the way back,' Gott said. ‘She's supposed to be potty but someone must know something.'

‘I'm not sure what you want.'

‘He'll be the Prime Minister soon. I'm concerned.'

‘What about?' asked Jeremy.

‘That's for you to find out,' Gott told him. He doesn't know, thought Jeremy. ‘Usual arrangement. Poppy Burroughs at the
Observer
will vouch for you, if necessary. You're researching for a feature she's writing about Petherbridge. Here's a printout of all the press stories about him.' He pushed a heavy file of paper across the table at Jeremy.

‘Right,' said Jeremy, who on two other occasions had gone ferreting for Gott, pretending to be a journalist and covered by Poppy Burroughs, whose parents owed Gott some unspecified, but presumably significant favour.

‘I'll need you back in a couple of days,' said Gott. ‘Things will start hotting up in early September.'

‘Right,' said Jeremy and left, with his dog at his heels.

Gott frowned, stood up and went to bed.

Chervil Cottage, Church Street, Kirkby Rodney, Yorkshire. August 26th, 2015

Jeremy walked wearily up the narrow stairs of the pretty cottage belonging to Mrs Debby Carshaw, who had taken him in for bed and breakfast when he arrived in Kirkby Rodney in the late afternoon. There had been no room at the local pub. Mrs Carshaw, a short, bright-eyed woman in her sixties, as broad as she was long, was the retired headmistress of the village school.

Jeremy had spent a frustrating late morning at the Rodon works near Preston. He had parked his car in an empty space near the building, a space with MUNDY painted on the concrete, ignored the cry of the security guard at this violation, raced into the lift, noted Mrs Jackie Mundy, secretary and guard dog to Leslie Mundy, at her desk in the outer office, charged past her and ran into Mundy's empty office. Mrs Mundy jumped up with a cry as he passed.

A high, screaming whine penetrated the room. Jeremy was reminded of his two-year-old nephew in the supermarket – of Leo lying on the floor by the checkout sobbing and screeching, snot and tears running down his face, yelling, ‘No – no—no – not going – toy – no – no – no.' The noise was much like that inhuman howl. Under the window a small steel engine, which Jeremy recognized as a replica of the Citycar engine, was running. Jeremy noted a black box suspended at the rear of the smooth-running engine. The unpleasant noise was coming from this.

Jeremy crossed the room quickly and whipped up the outer casing of the black box. By this time Jackie Mundy, dyed red hair flying and stilettos clacking, had launched herself into the room, run up to him and cried, ‘You can't look at that!'

The black casing held some kind of fuel cell, Jeremy concluded, and it looked possible that it was in some way feeding the Citycar battery. Which might mean that Leslie Mundy had managed to create a fuel cell which would boost the electric battery while the car was in motion, in which case you could rechristen the vehicle the goes-all-over-the-country car and Leslie Mundy would become a billionaire and so, for that matter, would Lord Gott and even, he, Jeremy, would do pretty well out of it. If Mundy could eliminate the noise, he thought.

Mrs Mundy somehow stilled the engine. Then she swiftly threw a large
metallic sheet over it and turned to Jeremy, pushing at his chest with both hands. ‘You're not allowed in here,' she said. ‘Mr Mundy isn't here. You're not allowed in here while he's out of the office.' She had tossed that sheet of anti-static, dust-repellent sheeting, as used in the space programme and operating theatres, over the engine with a practised hand, Jeremy noted. Presumably this was what she always did when her husband had to meet someone in his office.

‘I need all the research notes for that fuel cell, or whatever it is – what it is, how it operates on the motor, how it's mounted. The lot, Mrs Mundy – and now.' Jeremy held out his hand.

‘You can't have it. Them. They're in the safe. I don't know the combination,' she told him.

‘OK,' said Jeremy. ‘Where's Leslie?'

‘He's in Aberdeen, at the university. It's about that noise – getting rid of it.'

‘It's enough to make the driver kill all the passengers,' Jeremy agreed. ‘Still, Mrs M, you'd better tell Leslie, with all due respect, he's an arse-hole if he's cracked the problem and elected not to tell Lord Gott. To be honest, when Lord Gott hears this, he'll be furious. Can you blame him? R and D running at two hundred thousand pounds a year here – Lord Gott paying every penny of this without a fuss – and when there's a breakthrough it turns out he's the last to hear. Tell Leslie I sincerely hope he isn't thinking of selling this to anyone else.'

‘Oh, no,' she protested. ‘He'd never do that.'

Jeremy believed her. Leslie Mundy had faults, but he did not think him dishonest. Something struck him. ‘Where's the safe?' he demanded. She gave him a sulky look. ‘Mrs Mundy,' he said, ‘if Leslie's found a way of boosting the electricity without having to recharge a battery, the research is worth a fortune.'

‘Nobody knows,' she said.

‘He's got a team of five in that expensive lab – that's not nobody. I need to know where the safe is to put a guard on it. Has he taken the research to Aberdeen?'

Her look answered the question. ‘I'll kill him,' he said. ‘I know Lord Gott would want me to.' This cowed her.

Not wanting to lose this advantage, which he knew could only be temporary, he stalked out. From his mobile phone in the car park he rang Gott, who said, ‘That stupid fucker – I'll call him in Aberdeen and shut him up. I'll make him come straight back. In the meanwhile, get a local security firm in there pronto. Well done, boy. Now, speed up to Kirkby Rodney and get on with the rest of it.'

That evening, early, Jeremy went to the larger and better kept of the two local pubs and tried to start a conversation with the landlady, a heavily
made-up forty-year-old, who said she could remember nothing about people who had lived in the village when she was a child. She was busy – the pub was full of tourists, many of them walkers and climbers in heavy boots. But her eyes were hard and alert and Jeremy felt sure there was something she wasn't saying.

He decided not to approach the few local men sitting in a corner and instead headed off down the road, where tidy cottages, front doors with gleaming brass knockers, hanging baskets of flowers and ivy hinted at well-off retired people in residence. He went round the corner into a less prosperous small street, at the end of which was a second pub, set back from the street, with about a dozen motorbikes parked on the concrete outside. He braved the looks of the assembled bikers, bought himself a pint at the bar and went into a corner where two old men, one bald, one cloth-capped, were drinking at a beer-puddled table. He offered a drink to the old men – on closer examination they seemed to be in their fifties – and said he was a journalist, researching for an article on Alan Petherbridge.

‘Oh, aye,' said the bald man. ‘Him what'll be Prime Minister next time, if the Tories get in. I remember the family, don't you, Don?'

‘What?' said the other man.

‘Wallaces,' the bald man said loudly. ‘Wallaces of Foothunt House.'

‘Wallaces?' enquired Jeremy.

‘Wallaces,' confirmed the bald man. ‘The stepfather. That's two pints,' he reminded Jeremy. Jeremy had to push through the massed bikers at the bar. It took time to get served and as he pushed back with the drink someone nudged him, deliberately, he thought, and some of the beer slopped on to his trousers. He ignored this.

‘So,' he said, when he had put down the pints, ‘Alan Petherbridge had a stepfather, Mr Wallace? He doesn't mention him.'

‘What paper?' asked the bald man.

‘Paper?' asked Jeremy. ‘Oh – the
Observer.
'

‘That right?' said the man in the cap. He looked down at Finn. ‘Nice dog,' he remarked.

‘He is,' said Jeremy.

‘Doesn't seem like a London dog.'

‘He was born in the country – Gloucestershire,' Jeremy told him.

‘That right?' said the man. The words ‘down South' hovered in the air.

‘What did Mr Wallace do for a living?' Jeremy asked.

‘Not much,' said the man in the cloth cap. ‘I think he were retired. They never had much to do with the village. The boy, Alan, went to a public school.'

A silence fell. Jeremy, noticing both men's glasses were almost empty,
made his way back to the bar. Music started up, old punk rock. Jeremy, pushing through the leather elbows, was unhappy. A voice behind him said mockingly, ‘Excuse me, barman. I wonder if you would make me a cocktail?' Eventually, Jeremy was served and again had to force his way through to get back to the table. This was the last time, he thought. He was not going back to the bar again.

He set the glasses down. ‘Can you remember anything else about the Wallaces?'

The bald man said, ‘They kept themselves to themselves.'

The capped man said, ‘It were a while ago.'

‘Funny to think he'll be the Prime Minister,' said the first man.

‘I'd not vote for him,' said the second.

‘I'd not vote for any of them.'

‘Do you remember Mrs Wallace?' Jeremy asked hopelessly.

‘Poor woman. She died,' said the capped man.

‘Buried her up at St Martin's, didn't they?' said the bald man. ‘Near Jessie Comstock.'

‘Never – she's right over the other side. Mrs Wallace is by my auntie – Auntie Bee Watts.'

Jeremy gave up. He said goodnight to the two men and made his way through the throng in the pub, feeling eyes on his back. He returned to his lodgings. He had been brought up in a village himself and thought he was unlikely to find out very much about a family who had not lived in Kirkby Rodney for thirty years. There would be few who would remember and those who did might not be prepared to speak. He began to calculate how much Leslie Mundy's discovery might eventually be worth to him – Gott had given him some Rodon shares – and fell asleep.