The Ghost

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are.’

  ‘Here we are.’ We stood awkwardly, a few feet apart. ‘I didn’t realise you were back working in Number Ten,’ I said.

  ‘I was only on attachment to Adam. The king is dead,’ she said, and suddenly her voice cracked. I put my arms around her, and patted her back, as if she were a child that had fallen over. I felt the wetness of her cheek against mine. When she pulled back, she opened her briefcase and took out a handkerchief. ‘Sorry,’ she said. She blew her nose and stamped her high-heeled foot in self-reproach. ‘I keep thinking I’m over it, and then I realise I’m not. You look terrible,’ she added. ‘In fact, you look—’

  ‘Like a ghost?’ I said. ‘Thanks. I’ve heard it before.’

  She checked herself in the mirror of her powder compact and carried out some swift repairs. She was apprehensive, I realised. She needed someone to accompany her; even I would do.

  ‘Right,’ she said, shutting it with a click. ‘Let’s go.’

  We walked up Whitehall, through the crowds of spring tourists.

  ‘So, were you invited in the end?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I wasn’t. Actually, I’m rather surprised that you were.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not so odd,’ she said, with an attempt at carelessness. ‘She’s won, hasn’t she? She’s the national icon. The grieving widow. Our very own Jackie Kennedy. She won’t mind having me around. I’m hardly a threat; just a trophy in the victory parade.’ We crossed the road. ‘Charles the First stepped out of that window to be executed,’ she said, pointing. ‘You’d have thought someone would have realised the association, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Poor staffwork,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t have happened when you were in charge.’

  I knew it was a mistake to have come the moment we stepped inside. Amelia had to open her briefcase for the security men. My keys set off the metal detector and I had to be searched. It’s come to something, I thought, standing with my hands up, having my groin felt, when you can’t even go to a drinks party without being frisked. In the great open space of the Banqueting House, we were confronted by a roar of conversation and a wall of turned backs. I’d made it a rule never to attend the launch parties of my own books, and now I remembered why. A ghostwriter is about as welcome as the groom’s unacknowledged love child at a society wedding. I didn’t know a soul.

  Deftly, I seized a couple of flutes of champagne from a passing waiter and presented one to Amelia.

  ‘I can’t see Ruth,’ I said.

  ‘She’ll be in the thick of it, I expect. Your health,’ she said.

  We clinked glasses. Champagne: even more pointless than white wine, in my opinion. But there didn’t seem to be anything else.

  ‘It’s Ruth, actually, who is the one element missing from your book, if I had to make a criticism.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I wanted to put in more about her, but she wouldn’t have it.’

  ‘Well, it’s a pity.’ Drink seemed to embolden the normally cautious Mrs Bly. Or perhaps it was just that we had a bond now. After all, we were survivors – survivors of the Langs. At any rate, she leaned in close to me, giving me a familiar lungful of her scent. ‘I adored Adam, and I think he had similar feelings for me. But I wasn’t under any illusions: he’d never have left her. He told me that during that last drive to the airport. They were a complete team. He knew perfectly well he’d have been nothing without her. He made that absolutely clear to me. He owed her. She was the one who really understood power. She was the one who originally had the contacts in the party. In fact, she was the one who was supposed to go into parliament, did you know that? Not him at all. That isn’t in your book.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Adam told me about it once. It isn’t widely known – at least I’ve never seen it written up anywhere. But apparently his seat was originally all lined up for her, only at the last minute she stood aside and let him have it.’

  I thought of my conversation with Rycart.

  ‘The Member for Michigan,’ I murmured.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The sitting MP was a man called Giffen. He was so pro-American, he was known as the Member for Michigan.’ Something moved uneasily inside my mind. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said. ‘Before Adam was killed – why were you so determined to keep that manuscript under lock and key?’

  ‘I told you: security.’

  ‘But there was nothing in it. I know that better than anyone. I’ve read every tedious word a dozen times.’

  Amelia glanced around. We were still on the fringe of the party. Nobody was paying us any attention.

  ‘Between you and me,’ she said quietly, ‘we weren’t the ones who were concerned. Apparently, it was the Americans. I was told they passed the word to MI5 that there might be something early on in the manuscript that was a potential threat to national security.’

  ‘How did they know that?’

  ‘Who’s to say? All I can tell you is that immediately after Mike died, they requested we take special care to ensure the book wasn’t circulated until they’d had a chance to clear it.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  I thought again of my meeting with Rycart. What was it he claimed McAra had said to him on the telephone, just before he died? ‘The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography – it’s all there in the beginning.’

  Did that mean their conversation had been bugged?

  I sensed that something important had just changed – that some part of my solar system had tilted in its orbit – but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was. I needed to get away to somewhere quiet, to take my time and think things through. But already I was aware that the acoustics of the party had changed. The roar of talk was dwindling. People were shushing one another. A man bellowed pompously, ‘Be quiet!’ and I turned around. At the side of the room, opposite the big windows, not very far from where we were standing, Ruth Lang was waiting patiently on a platform, holding a microphone.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much. And good evening.’ She paused, and a great stillness spread across three hundred people. She took a breath. There was a catch in her throat. ‘I miss Adam all the time. But never more than tonight. Not just because we’re meeting to launch his wonderful book, and he should be here to share the joy of his life story with us, but because he was so brilliant at making speeches, and I’m so terrible.’

  I was surprised at how professionally she delivered the last line, how she built the emotional tension and then punctured it. There was a release of laughter. She seemed much more confident in public than I remembered her, as if Lang’s absence had given her room to grow.

  ‘Therefore,’ she continued, ‘you’ll be relieved to hear I’m not going to make a speech. I’d just like to thank a few people. I’d like to thank Marty Rhinehart and John Maddox for not only being marvellous publishers, but also for being great friends. I’d like to thank Sidney Kroll for his wit, and his wise counsel. And in case this sounds as though the only people involved in the memoirs of a British prime minister are Americans, I’d also like to thank in particular, and especially, Mike McAra, who tragically also can’t be with us. Mike: you are in our thoughts.’

  The great hall rang with a rumble of ‘hear hear’.

  ‘And now,’ said Ruth, ‘may I propose a toast to the one we really need to thank?’ She raised her glass of macrobiotic orange juice, or whatever it was. ‘To the memory of a great man and a great patriot, a great father and a wonderful husband – to Adam Lang!’

  ‘To Adam Lang!’ we all boomed in unison, and then we clapped, and went on clapping, redoubling the volume, while Ruth nodded graciously to all corners of the hall, including ours, at which point she saw me and blinked, then recovered, smiled, and hoisted her glass to me in salute.

  She left the platform quickly.

  ‘The merry widow,’ hissed Amelia. ‘Death becomes her, don’t you think? She’s blossoming
by the day.’

  ‘I have a feeling she’s coming over,’ I said.

  ‘Shit,’ said Amelia, draining her glass. ‘In that case I’m getting out of here. Would you like me to take you to dinner?’

  ‘Amelia Bly, are you asking me on a date?’

  ‘I’ll meet you outside in ten minutes. Freddy!’ she called. ‘Nice to see you.’

  Even as she moved away to talk to someone else, the crowd before me seemed to part, and Ruth emerged, looking very different from the last time I had seen her: glossy-haired, smooth-skinned, slimmed by grief, and designer-clad in something black and silky. Sid Kroll was just behind her.

  ‘Hello, you,’ she said.

  She took my hands in hers and mwah-mwahed me, not kissing me but brushing her thick helmet of hair briefly against each of my cheeks.

  ‘Hello, Ruth. Hello, Sid.’

  I nodded to him. He winked.

  ‘I was told you couldn’t stand these kinds of parties,’ she said, still holding on to my hands, and fixing me with her glittering dark eyes, ‘or else I would have invited you. Did you get my note?’

  ‘I did. Thanks.’

  ‘But you didn’t call me!’

  ‘I didn’t know if you were just being polite.’

  ‘Being polite!’ She briefly shook my hands in reproach. ‘Since when was I ever polite? You must come and see me.’

  And then she did that thing that important people always do to me at parties: she glanced over my shoulder. And I saw, almost immediately and quite unmistakably in her gaze, a flash of alarm, which was followed at once by a barely perceptible shake of her head. I detached my hands and turned around and saw Paul Emmett. He was no more than five feet away.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I believe we’ve met.’

  I swung back to Ruth. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Ah …’

  ‘Paul was my tutor,’ she said calmly, ‘when I was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard. You and I must talk.’

  ‘Ah …’

  I backed away from them all. I knocked into a man who shielded his drink and told me cheerfully to watch out. Ruth was saying something earnestly, and so was Kroll, but there was a buzzing in my ears and I couldn’t hear them. I saw Amelia staring at me and I waved my hands feebly, and then I fled from the hall, across the lobby and out into the hollow, imperial grandeur of Whitehall.

  *

  It was obvious the moment I got outside that another bomb had gone off. I could hear the sirens in the distance, and a pillar of smoke was already dwarfing Nelson’s Column, rising from somewhere behind the National Gallery. I set off at a loping run towards Trafalgar Square, and barged in front of an outraged couple to seize their taxi. Avenues of escape were being closed off all over central London, as if by a spreading forest fire. We turned into a one-way street, only to find the police sealing the far end with yellow tape. The driver flung the cab into reverse, jerking me forward and on to the edge of my seat, and that was how I stayed throughout the rest of the journey, clinging to the handle beside the door, as we twisted and dodged through the back routes north. When we reached my flat I paid him double the fare.

  ‘The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography – it’s all there in the beginning.’

  I grabbed my copy of the finished book, took it over to my desk, and started flicking through the opening chapters. I ran my finger swiftly down the centre of the pages, sweeping my eyes over all the made-up feelings and half-true memories. My professional prose, typeset and bound, had rendered the roughness of a human life as smooth as a plastered wall.

  Nothing.

  I threw it away in disgust. What a worthless piece of junk it was: what a soulless commercial exercise. I was glad Lang wasn’t around to read it. I actually preferred the original: for the first time I recognised something honest at least in its plodding earnestness. I opened a drawer and grabbed McAra’s original manuscript, tattered from use and in places barely legible beneath my crossings-out and over-writings. ‘Chapter One. Langs are Scottish folk originally, and proud of it …’ I remembered the deathless beginning I had cut so ruthlessly in Martha’s Vineyard. But then, come to think of it, every single one of McAra’s chapter beginnings had been particularly dreadful. I hadn’t left one unaltered. I searched through the loose pages, the bulky manuscript fanning open and twisting in my clumsy hands like a living thing.

  ‘Chapter Two. Wife and child in tow, I decided to settle in a small town where we could live away from the hurly-burly of London life …’ ‘Chapter Three. Ruth saw the possibility that I might become party leader long before I did …’ ‘Chapter Four. Studying the failures of my predecessors I resolved to be different …’ ‘Chapter Five. In retrospect, our general election victory seems inevitable but at the time …’ ‘Chapter Six. Seventy-six separate agencies oversaw social security …’ ‘Chapter Seven. Was ever a land so haunted by history as Northern Ireland …?’ ‘Chapter Eight. Recruited from all walks of life, I was proud of our candidates in the European elections …’ ‘Chapter Nine. As a rule, nations pursue self-interest in their foreign policy …’ ‘Chapter Ten. A major problem facing the new government …’ ‘Chapter Eleven. CIA assessments of the terrorist threat …’ ‘Chapter Twelve. Agent reports from Afghanistan …’ ‘Chapter Thirteen. In deciding to launch an attack on civilian areas, I knew …’ ‘Chapter Fourteen. America needs allies who are prepared …’ ‘Chapter Fifteen. By the time of the annual party conference, demands for my resignation …’ ‘Chapter Sixteen. Professor Paul Emmett of Harvard University has written of the importance …’

  I took all sixteen chapter openings and laid them out across the desk in sequence.

  ‘The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography – it’s all there in the beginning.’

  The beginning or the beginnings?

  I was never any good at puzzles. But when I went through the pages and circled the first word of each chapter, even I couldn’t help but see it – the sentence that McAra, fearful for his safety, had embedded in the manuscript, like a message from the grave: ‘Langs Wife Ruth Studying In Seventy-six Was Recruited As A CIA Agent In America By Professor Paul Emmett of Harvard University.’

  Seventeen

  * * *

  A ghost must expect no glory.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  I LEFT MY flat that night, never to return. Since then a month has passed. As far as I know, I haven’t been missed. There were times, especially in the first week, sitting alone in my scruffy hotel room – I’ve stayed in four by now – when I was sure I had gone mad. I ought to ring Rick, I told myself, and get the name of his shrink. I was suffering from delusions. But then, about three weeks ago, after a hard day’s writing, just as I was falling asleep, I heard on the midnight news that the former Foreign Secretary, Richard Rycart, had been killed in a car accident in New York City, along with his driver. It was only the fourth headline, I’m afraid. There’s nothing more ex than an ex-politician. Rycart would not have been pleased.

  I knew after that there was no going back.

  Although I’ve done nothing but write and think about what happened, I still can’t tell you precisely how McAra uncovered the truth. I presume it must have started back in the archives, when he came across Operation Tempest. He was already disillusioned with Lang’s years in power, unable to understand why something that had started with such high promise had ended in such a bloody mess. When, in his dogged way, researching the Cambridge years, he stumbled on those photographs, it must have seemed like the key to the mystery: certainly, if Rycart had heard rumours of Emmett’s CIA links, it’s reasonable to assume that McAra must have done so, too.

  But McAra knew other things as well. He would have known that Ruth was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes on the internet to discover that Emmett was teaching her specialist subject on the campus in the mid-seventies. He also knew better than anyone t
hat Lang rarely made a decision without consulting his wife. Adam was the brilliant political salesman, Ruth the strategist. If you had to pick which of them would have had the brains, the nerve and the ruthlessness to be an ideological recruit, there could only be one choice. McAra can’t have known for sure, but I believe he’d put together enough of the picture to blurt out his suspicions to Lang during that heated argument on the night before he went off to confront Emmett.

  I try to imagine what Lang must have felt when he heard the accusation. Dismissive, I’m sure; furious, also. But a day or two afterwards, when a body was washed up, and he went to the morgue to identify McAra – what did he think then?

  Most days I have listened to the tape of my final conversation with Lang. The key to everything is there, I’m sure, but always the whole story remains just tantalisingly out of reach. Our voices are thin, but recognisable. In the background is the rumble of the jet’s engines.

  ME: Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?

  LANG: Mike made certain wild accusations. I could hardly ignore them.

  ME: May I ask what kind of accusations?

  LANG: I’d prefer not to repeat them.

  ME: Were they to do with the CIA?

  LANG: But surely you already know, if you’ve been to see Paul Emmett?

  [A pause, lasting 75 seconds]

  LANG: I want you to understand that everything I did, both as party leader and as prime minister – everything – I did out of conviction, because I believed it was right.

  ME: [Inaudible]

  LANG: Emmett claims you showed him some photographs. Is that true? May I see?

  And then there is nothing for a while but engine sound, as he studies them, and I spool forwards to the part where he lingers over the girls at the picnic on the river bank. He sounds inexpressibly sad.

  ‘I remember her. And her. She wrote to me once, when I was prime minister. Ruth was not pleased. Oh God, Ruth—’