‘Are you going to charge her, Sergeant?’
‘Depends. Haven’t got her side of the story yet, she’s having trouble explaining herself. And we’re running a check through Clubs & Vice and through the Immigration Service to see if they’ve a handle on Miss Pan … Chou-you. That her real name?’
‘Zsha-yu,’ Goodfellowe pronounced phonetically. ‘I think so.’
‘Know the young lady well, do you, sir?’
‘Not really.’
‘I see.’
‘I doubt very much whether you do, Sergeant,’ Goodfellowe responded, more than aware of what was swirling through the policeman’s excessively stimulated mind. ‘I think perhaps I’d better see her now.’
All this time Jya-Yu had been sitting in a detention room. Less than ninety minutes beforehand she had been a carefree, bright-eyed eighteen-year-old looking forward to a night out with friends. Now she was rigid with terror, sitting on a plastic mattress on a concrete bunk in a cell whose painted brick walls were covered in crude graffiti and scratchings which seemed like the claw marks of animals. The room had been designed so that prisoners could do no harm to themselves, yet Jya-Yu, simply by sitting here, felt more harmed and in more pain than at any time in her short life. The scuffle, her arrest, the ride with head bowed in the back of a police wagon to a basement car park, with policemen and women shouting at her (or so it seemed), thrown amidst all the dregs that collected in a busy Charge Room. And then the strip search, the violation, to her the most profound humiliation of her life, almost as Madame Tang had described it to her, as though the Kuomintang army had marched right up Charing Cross Road and started to lay waste. When she was led from the cell and into an interview room to discover at last a familiar face, the emotions she had kept caged within at last escaped her control. She stood to attention, hands by her side, head bowed, and began to sob inconsolably. Instinctively Goodfellowe crossed to her and placed his arms defensively around her, trying to bury the tears in his embrace. The constable smirked.
‘Ah, could we be left alone to talk, Constable?’ Goodfellowe enquired when at last Jya-Yu had regained her composure.
‘’Fraid not, sir.’
‘But I thought …’
‘Not a privileged conversation, sir, not unless you’re a solicitor.’
The first battle lost. And so they had talked and Jya-Yu, calmer now and with better control of her English, had tried to explain, and the arresting constable, nose no longer weeping, had come in and recorded a formal interview during which he had displayed a plastic bag containing two twists of silver paper.
‘Are these yours, miss?’ the policeman had enquired, still slightly nasal.
She had nodded.
‘For the record, the prisoner has indicated that the silver packets belong to her. And what is the off-white powder inside them?’
She looked at Goodfellowe, her eyes flushed with confusion and torment, then sat with her head held low and would say no more.
‘Miss Pan Jya-Yu, it seems to me probable that this powder is a controlled substance, cocaine I would guess. Have you got anything to say?’ The constable sounded a little bored and began to make patterns on the table top with the rings left by his plastic coffee cup. ‘OK. For the benefit of the record, the prisoner refuses to answer. And you do understand, don’t you, that your refusal to say anything can be used against you in court?’
‘Yes. I do,’ she whispered.
They were taken back to the Charge Room, now in a state of controlled bedlam, where an inspector appeared. They had run Jya-Yu’s name through their records but had found no sordid past, no vice conviction, she was not an illegal, her presence in the country was entirely in order.
‘And you have no witness for the soliciting charge,’ Goodfellowe intervened.
‘But we do have a suspicious substance, sir. And the constable’s bloody nose.’
‘That was accident,’ Jya-Yu protested, but the inspector ignored her, continuing to address Goodfellowe.
‘I’m not going to charge the lady at the present time but we’ll release her on bail to return at a time when our lab analysis of the substance is completed. Probably in about six weeks’ time. When we know what it is, then we’ll know what to do.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘If you’ll let me offer you a word of advice, I should concentrate on running the country, sir. Tears and trouble. That’s all a gentleman like you will get from becoming tied up in a case like this. People have such suspicious minds.’
Corsa was feeling out of sorts. He hated receptions, even in Downing Street. Three hundred people crushed into a couple of steaming drawing rooms where they sipped cheap wine – Spanish this month, Sainsbury’s had a special – and waited for one of the Prime Minister’s funny little speeches. Corsa was used to making dramatic entrances, demanding the attention of all present, not shuffling along in an anonymous line, like his father. In a crowd his lack of physical stature made him feel claustrophobic, insignificant. He hated cheap wine, held disdain for casual acquaintance and had no high regard even for the Prime Minister. How could one take a man seriously whose eyebrows resembled two ferrets locked in coitus?
He turned to take out his frustrations on the Minister for Overseas Development, a man of giggles and girth who wore his suit as though beneath its immense folds it hid a chest of drawers with all the drawers open. ‘Bunny’ Burrowes was also notoriously Catholic and unmarried. And, this evening, he was a target that had moved out into the open. The Herald had recently launched a campaign exposing the high infant-mortality levels in Angola caused by an epidemic of flu believed to have been introduced by European nuns. As his features editor had pointed out to Corsa, the death rates in Angola were no higher than in Iraq or Mongolia but, as Corsa had in turn pointed out to the features editor, there was little public sympathy to be generated by Arabs or Orientals ‘and black babies have such enormous eyes. So appealing.’ Anyway, neither Iraq nor Mongolia had a Royal visit planned for three months’ time. So the Herald in traditional campaigning mood had promised to build them a hospital. Much fanfare, still more moral outrage, and all by Royal appointment. Great publicity. Sadly for the plans and promises, however, the Herald’s campaign had found its readers in a profound state of compassion fatigue. Both heart strings and purse strings remained steadfastly unplucked, and the Herald’s appeal was a quarter of a million short – money which Corsa had neither mood nor means to find from his own resources. So, privately and with great politeness, they had asked the Foreign Office whose officials, still more politely, had said no. Yet here, giggling in the middle of the Green Drawing Room, was the Minister in all his voluminous flesh. Corsa felt a challenge coming on.
‘My dear Minister, what a pleasure.’
Burrowes scowled at the interruption. Unlike some of his colleagues he did not welcome over-familiarity with the press, being neither photogenic nor particularly prudent in his private life. He replied with no more than a nod of his heavily jowled head and was about to pick up his interrupted conversation about costume with the country’s leading male ice skater when, with only perfunctory apologies, Corsa took his arm and led him off to a quieter corner.
‘Not your bloody hospital, Freddy,’ Burrowes started, objecting to the heavy hand upon his sleeve. ‘I’ve seen the papers. It won’t wash. We don’t have the money.’
‘Of course you have the money, Bunny. It’s simply a matter of priorities. But of course I understand your difficulties.’
‘Good,’ responded the Minister, his eyes dancing back to the skater and making to leave, but Corsa kept a firm grip on his sleeve.
‘I merely wanted to make sure that you had been fully briefed on the opportunities.’
‘What opportunities?’
‘The opportunity to get some richly deserved credit. For the Government. For the Foreign Office aid programme. And, when it comes down to it, for you.’
The Minister pulled distractedly at each of his pudgy fingers i
n turn as though checking that the press man hadn’t stolen any in the crush.
‘Think of the free publicity,’ Corsa continued. ‘The hospital building is all prefabricated. We could load it onto an RAF transport and fly it in together. You and me. Accompanied by a handirpicked selection of reporters and television cameramen, of course. Imagine the reception. The crowds on the runway. Laughing children, weeping doctors, dancing mothers, and as many effusive local dignitaries as their Mercedes can shuttle in. The lot. And you and the Cardinal being greeted like saviours – which is precisely what this hospital project is all about.’
‘The Cardinal?’ enquired the Minister.
‘Yes. I’ve had a word with his office,’ Corsa lied impetuously. ‘They say in principle he’d be delighted to help. Thinks it’s an excellent idea. Sort of absolution for the nuns. We Catholic boys should stick together, Bunny.’
Burrowes’ fingers began dancing across the folds of his damp chin. Even on a good day he was no longer what he could regard as young, and his contemplation of indiscretions both past and proposed had begun to produce in him a growing attachment to his religious roots, and particularly to the understanding and forgiveness those roots might provide. Yes, if the Cardinal was considering giving his personal approval …
‘And the Herald would keep the campaign going. Reports on the children saved, the disasters averted and the good deeds done. Your good deeds, Bunny. Right through the summer.’
Burrowes’ jowls wobbled in growing anticipation. Public duty and personal piety all wrapped up in one endless photo opportunity, right through the summer – and the next reshuffle. The Minister’s eyes grew moist.
‘It’s only a drop in the ocean so far as your budget is concerned but it’s in a damned good cause. Your cause. An excellent cause, don’t you think?’ Corsa continued, and the Minister found himself nodding in agreement. He’d get stick from his officials when he went back to the office, but he could squeeze it out of the disaster fund and pray that Bangladesh wouldn’t disappear beneath flood water again this year. A gentlemen’s agreement forged for God’s work. After all, that was a Minister’s job, to decide. ‘For the greater good,’ he burbled enthusiastically. ‘And sod the civil servants.’
At last Corsa allowed the Minister to return to his ice skater. Two hundred and fifty thousand. Not a bad return on ten minutes’ work and a glass of Sainsbury’s Rioja. It was fine sport and the fool hadn’t even realized, had been so pathetically grateful. How he despised them, the politicians, the would-be rulers with their airs and arrogances, strutting around this tiny world of Westminster like peacocks with their flight feathers plucked.
He found himself wandering away from the general crush, stepping around the White Drawing Room in search of more convivial distraction. He examined a Constable landscape of storm clouds and sodden fields, not one of the painter’s best. Corsa had better in his own boardroom, although in private he preferred more modern works, the sort of things in which it looked as though reality had been taken apart and put back in an entirely different order. Rather like his accounts. On a table by the window stood four china dolls, porcelain figures of former Prime Ministers – Gladstone, Wellington, Disraeli and Palmerston, giants of the Victorian age but all with private lives and peccadilloes which would in the modern era have brought them low long before their time. ‘Publish and be damned!’ Wellington had challenged his mistress when confronted with her all-too-explicit diaries. Nowadays she would, and he would too. Be damned, that is. Cut down to size quicker than a forest of mahogany.
‘The only good politician …?’ a voice beside him suggested.
Corsa turned to find another guest, an elegant woman in her early forties, smiling at him mischievously.
‘I’m sure we all retain a considerable regard for them. In their proper place,’ he offered cautiously, unable to resist the conditional. He knew her, he thought, but couldn’t place her.
‘That proper place being swinging from a lamp-post by their testicles, according to some of your editorials.’ She held out her hand. ‘Diane Burston. I don’t think we’ve met.’
‘We have, in a way,’ Corsa returned, at last recognizing her. ‘You’ve graced the business pages of my newspapers on many an occasion.’
Diane Burston was a phenomenon. A woman who had risen to the highest ranks of the oil industry on merit and on the basis of her extraordinary financial skills. It wasn’t enough any more simply to be a good oil man, not in an industry forced to spend so much of its effort trying to climb out of the holes which a previous generation of eager executives and ill-controlled prospectors had dug for it. Rusting oil platforms, misplaced oil terminals, sinking oil tankers, oceans of oil pollution; suddenly the oil companies had become about as popular as anthrax. And in the game of damage limitation a handsome feminine face coupled with an astute financial mind had proved to be powerful assets.
‘Grace is scarcely a word which springs to mind when I think of some of your coverage,’ she continued, still smiling but with lips which had taken on the suppleness of etched glass. The eyes were like diamond drilling bits. She seemed surrounded by an air of exceptional intensity and turbulence, a battlefield, not a territory to be entered by those of uncertain spirit. ‘Your City Editor on the Herald is one of the most prejudiced and poorly informed commentators I’ve ever encountered.’
‘Surely an exaggeration.’ He was smiling, as he did habitually, with expensively burnished teeth and lips that were a fraction too thick. But the smile never reached his eyes. They remained restless, in constant search of advantage. Di Burston offered none.
‘What else can you expect from a man with his background?’ she continued.
‘You. mean the BBC?’ Corsa offered, curious as to where this was leading.
‘Before that. Before the BBC.’
Corsa’s puzzlement increased. He had no idea where his City Editor’s origins lay. The man was simply another of the phalanx of young, aggressive journalists brought in over the last three years to replace the older, perhaps more experienced but endlessly more expensive journalists he’d inherited from his father. ‘You’re telling me you didn’t know that until eight years ago he was a publicity director for Greenpeace?’ There was an edge of advantage in her voice. First blood to the girls.
Corsa, unsure of his next line, turned to examine the view from the window. She was inspecting him, and under pressure he became uncomfortably aware of the genetic Corsa tendency for the waist to spread and the hair to retreat. Early stages, in his case, only a couple of pounds and a few strands, but enough to remind himself every time he looked in the mirror that there was so much more still to do, and so little time to do it.
She came to join him, her voice dropping until it had reached a conspiratorial, almost seductive register. ‘You call yourself an entrepreneur, a man of free enterprise, yet you throw open your pages to every bunch of tree huggers who can plaster together a press release. Eco-warriors, New Age nonentities, the menopausal middle-class. Anyone who would rather crawl than drive, or choke on coal dust rather than live within a thousand miles of a nuclear power station. They shout, and you give them a front page. The bigger their lie, the better your coverage. It’s a war out there. Seems to me you’ve chosen the wrong side.’
She had drawn near to him now, in the lee of the heavy sash window, close enough that he could smell her. She was playing with him. He didn’t object.
‘The public has a right to hear both sides,’ he offered, grasping at a cliché.
‘And businesses like yours and mine have a right to make a living. Do you really think we can all survive by selling air cake and nut burgers?’
‘So what are you suggesting should happen?’
‘In my case, what I’ve already decided is going to happen. As from next month I’m pulling all my advertising from your newspapers.’ She allowed the news to sink in. ‘You know, Mr Corsa, I spend tens of millions of pounds every year on building my company’s image. And all I get for
it is hate mail – thanks to you and your limp organs.’
‘You’re taking this very personally,’ he replied, his manhood under attack.
‘But of course I am,’ she breathed softly. ‘Just as I took it personally when your City Editor attacked my pay and pension package, even though it’s still considerably less than yours. Touch of double standards, do you think?’
Corsa made a mental note to find a new City Editor. The present incumbent was proving all too tiresome. His staff were there to serve their proprietor and paymaster, not to provide an excuse for giving him a public thrashing. He stood in silence, gazing out from the first-floor window across the broad expanse of Horse Guards. The bell above the arch chimed the hour.
‘What do you think that would be worth?’ she enquired, indicating the great gravelled parade ground which was used once a year to Troop the Colour and for the remainder as a car park for civil servants. ‘Move all the bureaucrats and retired admirals out and sell it for development?’
‘That’s outrageous.’
She shrugged. ‘Look at it another way. That’s about sixty million pounds.’
Slowly Corsa began to laugh, genuinely and almost with affection. He’d lost every single round of this contest with his elegant new opponent, and somehow he didn’t seem to mind. Something was stirring inside, the germ of an idea which unwittingly she had planted and which, although as yet dimly seen, might yet reshape his world. Or at least rebuild his cliff.
‘Ms Burston, you leave me breathless. And defenceless. I surrender! But before you put both me and the advertising budget to the sword, do you think we might discuss this further? Over dinner?’
‘Are you after my body or my business?’
‘Both if I can. Business, if I have to choose.’
‘I didn’t think newspapers encouraged adultery amongst public figures.’
‘One of the few advantages of my lonely job is that, in this dog-eat-dog world, there is a degree of solidarity enjoyed between newspaper proprietors which ensures that our private lives remain, by and large, just that. Private. A sort of mutual nonaggression pact.’