The Touch of Innocents (14 page)

‘I think, at this stage, not. I believe we have the
prima facie
evidence to charge you but I am not convinced, not
yet
convinced, that it would serve any useful purpose. To be honest I am more concerned with the welfare of Benjamin and also your own state of mind. I am sure that neither can be served by you staying on in Weschester longer than your doctors require.’

‘What are you saying precisely?’

‘You are in grave danger of abusing our hospitality. Go home, Miss Dean. I’m telling you to go home.’

Not until much later in the day did Izzy begin to wonder how, all of a sudden, the inspector seemed to know one hell of a lot about her plans to extend her stay.

She was considerably more circumspect with Barry Brine, editor of the
Wessex Chronicle
, when, eventually and after some considerable delay, she was invited into his office to share yet more machine-manufactured beverage. She couldn’t get further than describing it as beverage; its identity as tea, coffee or oxtail soup remained heavily disguised beneath its frothy and swirling suds. To everyone’s relief, including his own, after walking around the town for some considerable time Benjy had fallen fast asleep.

Brine gave her the physical impression of being foreshortened, as though a vast hammer had hit him from above and compressed all his features until it seemed as though he would burst at the seams. The top of his bald head was flat and square-edged, the neck thick, waist heavy, with legs simply not long enough to do justice to his top-heavy body. Perhaps, she hoped for the sake of her own endeavours, he had spent his life remorselessly bulldozing his way through locked doors and closed minds. Alternatively, banging his head against a brick wall. She would soon discover which.

She did not mention her fears about Devereux or his daughter, she stuck instead to the possible case of mistaken identity at the hospital and mortuary. Unlike the police inspector, Brine made copious notes with one of a series of coloured pens he kept in his shirt pocket.

‘Have you raised this matter with the hospital?’ he enquired, stretching the vowels in traditional West Country manner as though he were eating them for lunch.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And what did they suggest?’

‘Sedatives and a course of psychiatry.’

He arched an eyebrow but, before he could explain whether it implied scepticism of his visitor or her doctors, they were interrupted. He had not shut the door, a steady stream of disturbances was likely and, perhaps, on the editor’s part, wanted. A young man, late twenties with the rain-softened brogue of a southern Irishman, required urgent decisions about photographs. The editor excused himself and disappeared. He was gone many minutes and, when he returned in the company of the young man, was apologetic.

‘I’m very sorry, Miss Dean, but sadly we have deadlines approaching. And, as much as I would like to, I fear there is little we can do.’

It was the brick wall.

‘Couldn’t you simply ask? Make a few enquiries? All I want to do is to establish the facts.’

‘I’m afraid that missing children are not really our diet.’

‘Please …’

‘You see – I hate to admit as much to another journalist, but I have to be up-front about it – people don’t buy our paper for news and scoops. They buy it for the classified advertising, the news about the sales and what’s on at the cinema and who’s got arrested or died. Strictly hatches, matches and despatches, that’s us. We’ve no call for investigative journalism here.’ He threw his hands wide. ‘Look around my office. Does it look like a hotbed of intrigue and insight?’

He slumped back into his chair, shirt buttons straining, shirt tail adrift. As he replaced the pen in his pocket he left a smear of fresh ink on the polyester. She could see what he meant.

‘Your story touches me, more than I can say. I’ve got kids, four of ’em, I know what you must be feeling.’

She had been waiting for that one. She wanted very much to scream.

‘I wish with all my heart I could help you, this gives me a real and deep sense of personal failure – it is not for us. I hope you will understand.’

And already she was being ushered to the door and a secretary was weaving her between the desks of the cluttered newsroom towards the far exit. Before the door closed on her she turned for one final look. Behind the protective glass walls of his office, the editor was hiding his real and deep sense of personal failure by recounting a joke which caused the whole of his heavy frame to wobble like a jelly.

That evening, as she travelled back to Bowminster on the bus, she clung to Benjy with all her might, burying her head in his hair, pretending to sleep. She wanted no one to see the tears.

‘Did you see her? Practically falling out of her dress. Cut up to her knickers and down to her navel. Tart!’

The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Richard Flood, as usually happened when he’d had one malt and mineral water too many, havered and gyrated between relaxation and aggression. What with reshuffles and rising unemployment and being bloodied at by-elections in Scotland it had proved a difficult parliamentary session, though underway scarcely a month, and everyone had grasped at the approach of Christmas with acute relish. And Christmas, it was commonly agreed, was getting earlier every year. The two other men nodded in understanding.

‘I found her, you know, years ago,’ the Prime Minister continued, ‘when she was … what? Opposition spokesmistress for Misery or Moral Decay or some such crap. In her little office at the House of
Commons overlooking Speaker’s Court, with a parliamentary researcher half her age. Can’t imagine what he was researching but she certainly wasn’t providing very effective Opposition!’

The laughter was coarse. Devereux wondered what Flood, who at the time could have been no more than a junior Government spokesman himself, had been doing wandering late at night around the none-too-accessible corridors where Shadow Ministers had their miserably cramped quarters, and in particular inviting himself into the office of a woman whose widely discussed parliamentary reputation had been established as much on her back as on her feet. He tried to fashion an innocent interpretation for his colleague’s motives, and failed.

‘She was a remarkable sight tonight, I must admit,’ offered the American Ambassador. ‘Crimson dress, that eyeshadow. The pile of extraordinary yellow hair.’

‘A parrot,’ Devereux riposted. ‘You know, in the Green Room, against the backdrop of that marvellous Japanese wallcovering you have, all that lush foliage and bamboo? She reminded me overwhelmingly of a parrot.’

‘A bird of paradise, in her day,’ Flood mumbled.

‘Antique, you know,’ the Ambassador added, a trifle vaguely. ‘The wallcovering, I mean. Not the parrot.’

The locker-room laughter erupted once again. They were sitting in the private quarters of the Ambassador’s residence, Winfield House, an elegant mansion set in the heart of London’s Regent’s Park. Half an hour earlier they had watched a fox slinking through the grounds in search of a duck dinner, but that had been a couple of stiff whiskies ago. And the Prime Minister had already exhausted himself after
battling against the flood tide of Embassy hospitality that had flowed freely through the reception rooms downstairs. He was relaxed, amongst friends, vulnerable; it was a good time for the Ambassador to strike.

‘So what do you think? You guys going to be able to help us on the Duster, Prime Minister?’

‘The man never sleeps!’ the head of government responded in a tone of mild rebuke, seeking inspiration in his glass. ‘It’s … looking good.’

‘But not certain,’ Devereux interjected flatly.

‘I thought you’d made a lot of progress on your last trip to Washington, Paul. We’ve given a damn sight more than makes strict commercial sense. We’ve guaranteed you a massive chunk of the design and manufacturing spin-offs, you’ve got the funding arrangements you want, the specs have been adapted to suit you. Hell, we even twisted the arms of the Saudi navy to order a new destroyer from one of your yards. Sure is difficult to see what more you can expect from us to make it a good financial proposition.’

The Prime Minister looked to Devereux. Flood had been elevated by his colleagues for his capacity to listen and his willingness to heed their point of view, but what had been seen as a source of strength at a time of prosperity was increasingly regarded as indecisiveness as the pendulum swung back towards recession and retribution. The Prime Minister convinced himself he was standing firm; to others, including his colleagues, it appeared increasingly the stance of a rabbit before the headlamps. In any event he felt too relaxed to throw his mind around the Ambassador’s questions; he was happy to leave it to his colleague.

‘It’s not just a financial proposition,’ Devereux
began. ‘You have to understand the political problems it causes, too.’

The Ambassador arched a thick greying eyebrow.

‘We’ve had a difficult period,’ Devereux continued. ‘Jobless figures rising, miserable by-elections, media whining all the time. It could be said –
will
be said – that the country needs a multi-billion-dollar fighter project slightly less than a Government-sponsored arse-kicking contest.’

‘You’re not going to let a little whingeing deflect you, surely?’

‘Of course not,’ snapped the Prime Minister heatedly.

‘Of course not,’ Devereux repeated with considerably more control. ‘We can ignore the whingeing, but we can’t ignore the political realities.’

The ambassadorial eyebrow sank to form a frown.

‘You scarcely need to be Director of the CIA to know we’re not in the greatest shape,’ Devereux continued. ‘The reshuffle was not only desirable but absolutely necessary. The PM had been let down badly by some of his colleagues,’ he added, sensing that the moment was right to bind rather than expose his leader’s wounds. ‘The Government needed a new start, a freshened image. That’s as important as the financial considerations.’

The Prime Minister’s pink eyes betrayed a wrinkle of uncertainty, unsure where he was being led, but the Ambassador harboured no such doubts. He poured more whisky – Devereux declined, holding his hand firmly over his glass – before picking up the thread which Devereux was dangling.

‘What did you have in mind, Paul?’

‘If we join in developing a new generation of fighter aircraft …’ – the Ambassador noted, as was intended, the conditional – ‘it will be in response to
our view about Britain’s role in the world – Britain’s significant, some would say leading, role.’

‘Sure,’ the Ambassador nodded.

‘But not certain,’ Devereux continued, his tone cool, precise, in total control of his argument. ‘And without that leading role the Duster’s nothing but an expensive irrelevance.’

The American pushed his glass to one side. He had started this game, knew he would need a clear head to finish it.

Devereux leaned forward in his chair, head erect, the body language emphasizing that this was no mere post-prandial provocation.

‘There is a view being spawned within your State Department that Japan and Germany should be invited to become new members of the UN Security Council. That means someone else making way. A sacrificial lamb. Britain.’

There was a long silence. The Ambassador would offer no denial. It is commonly held that diplomats are sent abroad to lie for their country, but on this occasion the transparent lie could serve no purpose.

‘The lion is not yet toothless, Ambassador. There’s not a hope in hell of the British Government accepting that. We’d be torn apart by our own supporters, and rightly so. The President can’t have both the Duster and our Security Council seat.’

‘You’re making direct linkage between the two issues?’

‘Political logic demands it. There’s little point in Britain being a supersonic whipping boy.’

‘I’m not aware the President has come to any conclusion on the Security Council. It’s just a kite being flown by some of his advisers.’

‘Precisely,’ Devereux said, smiling thinly. ‘We’re not even asking him to change his mind.’

‘Fair point,’ the American conceded. ‘I’ll pass on the strength of your feelings. I can’t promise anything, you know. But my suspicion is the President is likely to find your argument … persuasive.’

‘We’re very proud of our world role,’ the Prime Minister contributed, a touch pathetically.

‘Which is why we must insist on American backing in our dispute with Cyprus.’ Devereux was at it again. ‘We must hold on to the facilities at our base in Akrotiri. Without it we can’t maintain any strategic position in the Middle East. Couldn’t help you sort out the fuzzy-wuzzies.’

‘You are remorseless,’ the Ambassador exclaimed in jocular protest. ‘You know we can’t get involved in that. We’re neutral, Paul.’

‘Bollocks, Mr Ambassador.’

The Prime Minister started at Devereux’s belligerence, spilt his drink and began pouring himself another. He still did not speak, had no inkling of what to say, precious little idea of what was being said. His colleague’s assault continued.

‘When you start being neutral between your allies and some upstart little nationalist who has fiddled his way to power and is intent on abrogating all his treaty obligations, then it makes one wonder what value America places on alliance and friendship.’