The Maggie Murders (30 page)

Part 4

1990

“The most unkindest cut of all”

‘Julius Caesar’ -Shakespeare

Only a couple of digits had
changed that January and yet the world was changing greatly. The Cold War which
had divided the continent was about to end and the fear of nuclear apocalypse
was about to be lifted. The Tiananmen Square Massacre in China might have
delayed the pace of reform in Asia, but both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan would be credited with helping to raise the Iron Curtain which had
divided Europe.

Yet Mrs Thatcher’s chance of
being a major player in that new Europe was diminishing with every passing
month.  A decade ago both major parties had been led by their avowedly
Euro-sceptic wings; the Labour Party had even pledged to withdraw Britain from
the European Union. By the end of the 80s, a more Euro friendly Labour Party
had emerged from a bitter civil war and by re-positioning itself at the centre
ground of politics it had suddenly made itself electable.

It was now the turn of the
Conservative Party to be torn apart by internal wrangling over Britain’s
relationship with the European Union. The increasingly autocratic leadership
style of the longest serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century was
another bone of contention. With opposition rising on the streets to a new Poll
Tax, the idea of toppling an increasingly dictatorial leader closer to home
than Eastern Europe was becoming increasingly thinkable for many Tories.

****

The cityscape looked like a
battlefield. Never had Trafalgar Square been better named thought Sobers as he
stared helplessly at the unfolding anarchy which was turning the centre of the
capital into a scene more usually associated with Beirut or Belfast, than the
tourist hotspot it normally was. Brixton in the riots had never been this bad.

Lines of police in full riot gear
had prevented him from going down many of the streets and no-one had believed
that a tall black man in smart casuals was in fact a local vicar. He cursed
himself for not wearing his clericals, but then they’d probably have had him up
for impersonating a priest. At times he felt that this was something which was
not so far from the truth. His decision to prefer ‘civvies’ to his dog-collar
had been made in an attempt to reach out to those in his parish who were put
off by shows of authority; it had also been an effort to try to win over the
younger generation by abandoning the more fuddy-duddy image of the Church. And
yet there were times when he felt the full regalia might have been useful.

Palls of smoke hung over central London
and broken glass from smashed display windows lay strewn over pavements once
packed with camera clicking tourists. Burnt out cars and buses marked the path
of the rioters and sirens pierced the air. Normally busy shops stood empty;
their fronts smashed in and their contents either in the hands of the mob, or
lying on the pavements outside. Some scattered Hermes scarves and Mulberry bags
added a dash of colour to the usually drab London pavements.

He flinched as a mob of masked
people ran past him on the other side before being halted by a wall of riot
shields and raised batons.

‘Which side are you on?’ had
become one of the chants of the day, as rioters hurled bricks and debris from
looted shops at the thin blue lines of unarmed police trying to halt their
frenzied and lawless advance.

Having already seen one young
recruit being treated for a head wound in the back of an ambulance, Sobers
could well imagine the terrified answers of the police in that line. They’d be
looking out for themselves and their own. He could remember the fear he’d
experienced when standing in a similar line at the so called Battle of Lewisham
in the Queen’s Jubilee year. It was the first time he’d ever been issued with a
riot shield and though the weight of it gave the semblance of some protection,
it had seemed much less hefty when the National Front had been raining down
bricks and petrol bombs on him and his colleagues.

The one call he’d dreaded hearing
was ‘Man down!’; the shout that meant an officer had been knocked to the ground.
Yet on hearing it every policeman in the vicinity would have tried to have gone
to the aid of their injured colleague, whatever the cost to their own safety
might be. You never abandoned your own.

 Though never having been
involved in policing the Brixton Riots, he’d seen the wanton destruction the
rioters had caused to their long suffering local community. His poor mother had
been terrified and his niece hadn’t slept for months afterwards. He sympathised
with the grievances which were the cause for that riot, but felt that it was
the thugs and the bullies who had become the voices for the locals and not
those who were trying to explore other ways of bettering themselves.

In his view the ones who were
rioting against society were the ones making a grim parody of the very society
they seemingly opposed. Their greed in looting the West End’s shops and their
brazen defiance of social norms was just another part of the Me, Me, Me mantra
of the 1980s. In attacking police and shop assistants, they weren’t attacking
the wealthy or privileged, but young people like themselves who had decided to
try and make something of their lives.

They might have claimed they were
protesting against Maggie’s new Poll Tax, yet this wasn’t a revolution – it was
shopping with violence.

He could never recall the country
being so bitterly divided before; so much for a bright new decade!

****

K is for Kismet

It’s another word for Fate or
Destiny. It derives from the Arabic word for division, as in apportioning our
lot in life. Those people who think that the last words of our greatest ever
naval hero sound a bit gay, prefer to think he said ‘Kismet Hardy’, rather than
‘Kiss me, Hardy’ before dying at Trafalgar.

Frankly, I think it’s a lot of
nonsense. Nelson was having it off with one of the great beauties of the age,
whilst packing his wife off to Exmouth in order to have more guilt free sex
with Emma Hamilton in London. He was in no danger of being mistaken for a
queer!

 And no one minded his
extra-marital relations! Well, at least not when he was beating the French
left, right and centre. He even got away with having a ménage `a trois with
Emma Hamilton and her husband in Naples and they still put up a bloody great
statue of him overlooking the entire capital! Even the Brontës disguised their
Irish origins by naming themselves after one of the many titles and honours
heaped upon him, meaning generations of over conscientious school girls have
had to agonise over whether to add an umlaut when writing essays on ‘Jane Eyre’
and ‘Wuthering Heights’!

A lifestyle like that and the
prudes still get aerated about cleaning up his last words! When you’ve destiny
on your side, it doesn’t matter how you behave; you’re untouchable.

Perhaps you should have read
the tea leaves before taking on Maggie, Sir Anthony? You might have had the
temerity to challenge the Iron Lady, but you certainly didn’t possess the
Nelson Touch.

And now you’ve been deselected
by your own constituency party! That’s what I call being hoist by your own
petard. Stabbed in the back by your own supporters; well that’s the price of
treachery.

And all those revelations in
the tabloids about your decades long affair with a West Indian jazz singer,
what a naughty boy you are! And all that guff about your wife condoning it,
well that’s the old fashioned Tories for you. Keep all the dirty laundry in the
closet and hope it never has to be washed in public. With Fate on your side,
you might have ridden your luck, beaten Maggie to the leadership and no-one
would have found your dirty little secret, as it is you’ve just become a
footnote in the history books. Even Lady Nelson and Sir William Hamilton will
be better remembered than you!

Imagine if we’d not only
knifed Maggie in the back, but then gone on to choose a leader who was having an
affair! The country would never have forgiven us.

Well at least the media have
got bored with my little affair. There’s the odd bit from time to time about
the bungled investigation into the Baker killing, with some of the trendier
left-wing titles trying to connect it to the release of the Guildford Four. One
of the in-depth pieces in the Sundays must have put our Chief Constable’s nose
out of joint, as he was certainly looking more than a little camera shy when he
was being door stopped on the news the other night.

But the news is now mostly
full of all these doom mongers whinging on about the state of the economy!
Don’t they remember what this country was like before Maggie? The rubbish was
piling up in the streets, the dead weren’t being buried and power cuts had
become the norm! Without her three terms in office, our destiny would have been
among the third world economies.

 But we’ve been here before
and no leader with the size of her majority is ever going to be in any trouble.
She can easily ride this storm out. Sir Anthony’s fate should be a lesson
learnt by all those Wets whinging on about Britain’s relationship with the
bloody EEC. Who needs Europe anyway? The only thing it ever gave me was
Chlamydia!

****

Jez walked out of the meeting
wondering what he might have to give up first: Chez Jez, the car or the
company? Pushing his way through an early evening crowd of revellers dressed as
ghosts and witches, he turned onto the High Street in search of a bar where he
could have a proper drink.

It was supposed to be a simple
case of a little re-financing in order to gain more investment for the
expansion of JAC Games and yet it now seemed more like a case of Game Over. 
Perhaps he should have spent more time overseeing the development of their
software, rather than playing doctors and nurses with Mags? Rising inflation,
coupled with an increase in interest rates had left his finances in very poor
health.

Whilst he’d been worrying over
how to break the news to his father and helping Mags avoid the tabloids, it
seemed his credit rating had been falling faster than his sales figures. Whilst
rival companies were still enjoying the good times, sales of ‘Superpower!’ had
been diminishing as rapidly as the Soviet Union. The money they had ploughed
into developing and advertising ‘Superpower 2 – The End of the World’ looked
now to have been wasted. He’d already had to close their retail outlet and lay
off the shop staff, whilst Luke and Stu had agreed to a cut in their hours. In
all honesty, he should have fired one of his software designers and yet he just
couldn’t decide which one to sack.

The growth of the console market
hadn’t helped either. The days when the Spectrum, Commodore and BBC Micro had
ruled the Home Gaming market were under threat from a new generation of console
games from Japan and America. His old Atari now appeared antique when set
against the new Game Boy and he was beginning to wish he’d listened more to
Luke’s grumbles about working on products which had a built in obsolescence.

Maybe that pipe dream he’d talked
about with Mags might come to fruition after all? They might have to scale it
back from Australia or Hawaii, yet from what he knew of her improved finances,
they’d easily have enough to set up a surf shop in Cornwall. He could run the
business, whilst maybe she could look after the bar he planned to open next
door. A quick peek at her accounts had revealed she was a millionaire several
times over. At least her inheritance had been invested wisely in bricks and
mortar, not in nebulous lines of credit and intellectual property agreements.

Yet he wasn’t as keen on becoming
her kept lover.  He’d need a few shreds of dignity left to fend off both the
inevitable jibes from his father, as well as his mum’s disapproval over
marrying an older woman. Although they hadn’t got around to even discussing
marriage. He knew she’d need a suitable period to grieve and of course they
still had to keep a low profile whilst the police enquiries wound down. Or
until the real killer was caught – though that was probably being too
optimistic.

And yet things were beginning to
bother him. She still hadn’t set a date for him to move in with her, whilst he
still had an expensive mortgage on the apartment to pay and his cash flow situation
would certainly improve if he could sell it, even if it would fetch less than
he’d paid for it. Wasn’t it about time she started to give him a little more
insight into that future they’d planned together? Losing his business was one
thing and risking a breach with his family another, but there was now another
niggling doubt which was now making him feel very young and very vulnerable.

Being interviewed by that pretty
journalist about the murders had not been a good idea; it had raised questions
which he thought had lain dormant. He would normally have run a mile from such
people, but she had been very persuasive. Though a part of him wondered if it
had been her cute face and hot body which had made him agree to meet her in a
bar. Given that Mags had insisted on a decent period of mourning, he’d half a
mind to see if their meeting might provide him with some physical solace which
he had been missing sorely.

Debbie Rowe might have agreed to
change his name in any finished article, but she certainly hadn’t been open to
his charms. Given that she’d been dressed in biker boots and a leather jacket,
he presumed she must have been a dyke; straight women found him irresistible.
Unfortunately, he had not been so good at resisting her questions. It wasn’t so
much that he found himself opening up to her, more that he found her persistent
questions about the exact nature of his relationship with Maggie digging away
at feelings he had wanted to stop interrogating.