“Cathy, you need to come up with a publicity campaign. We’ll focus on these men’s key virtue: they’re people with close ties to the land, they were born there, just like their parents and their grandparents, and they invest everything they have, including their lives, in developing their region. They are what they are—a bit rough around the edges—so no transforming them to look like the candidates from the traditional parties. The voters need to believe that Roy Parker and his friends are transparent.
“Janet, find a team that can travel with us. This campaign takes priority.”
“Are they going to pay more than the other clients we already have?” asked Richard with a hint of sarcasm.
“Not a pound more. But you’ll agree with me that this is a challenge and I like challenges,” I replied with more confidence than I felt.
“Have you spoken to Mark Scott yet?” Richard wanted to know.
“No. But I’ll do it as soon as we finish this meeting.”
“And what happens to the work we’ve already got under way? My plane to Birmingham leaves in a couple of hours…and Janet will need to come with me,” Cathy reminded me.
“And you shall both go. We’re not going to neglect any of our clients. We will honor all the contracts we’ve signed. I’ll be the one who does most of the hard work, but I need your help. Oh, Maggie! Get the finance department to prepare a standard contract. I need it now. I’ll take it with me to see Mark so he can sign it.”
“This Roy Parker must be a very persuasive man,” said the secretary.
“He is, Maggie, but however persuasive Parker may be, in the end this is a good deal for the agency, and I couldn’t say no to that.”
Mark Scott had never heard of Roy Parker, so he called Denis Roth to ask him if he knew anything about this group of rural guys who wanted to take over their county halls. Denis had heard a little but didn’t know much either, and both he and Mark warned me not to sign any contracts until I had exact information about who Parker was. I tried to contain my impatience in front of them as I didn’t want them to think I had any special interest. In truth, even I was surprised by how much I had committed myself to Roy Parker.
I had to call him to tell him that I wasn’t able to go to his county that same day; I had to wait for the go-ahead from Scott and Roth.
“They can go to hell, I tell you. We don’t need them,” he told me angrily.
“I don’t agree, Roy. It would be an error to lose the agency. Be patient.”
“Patient! I thought you’d realized that patience is one of the many virtues I lack,” he replied.
“I’ll call you as soon as they give me the signed contract. They may even ask you to come back to London to sign it here. Mark Scott might want to meet you.”
“Don’t waste my time, Spencer. Our rivals already have the advantage.”
“We’ll catch them.”
Denis took a couple of days to give the go-ahead. His friends in Westminster had told him about Parker and his friends. Inoffensive people with no political training: they were going to need a lot of luck to win a single mayoralty. It didn’t matter to Denis’s friends whether the agency provided them with any services; they wouldn’t be able to compete with the Conservative or Labour party machinery anyway.
Mark told me all this when he gave me the contract, which was only lacking Roy Parker’s signature.
“Don’t waste time going yourself. Make him come to London. That way I can have a look at this guy. I like to know who we’re working for.”
—
Roy Parker complained when I asked him to come back to London. The only thing I could do to try to lift his bad mood was to meet him at the station.
To my surprise, he and Mark got along, but Denis couldn’t help looking at him with a certain disgust. Roy had arrived at the agency dressed in a way that seemed more suited to herding cattle. But he felt comfortable in his outfit, even despite the contrast between his checked button-down shirt, worn sweater, and thick-soled rubber boots and Mark’s Armani jacket and Denis’s tailor-made Savile Row suit.
“Well, we’ve already signed. Now I hope that Spencer will get straight to work. I think we can win at least a dozen mayoralties,” Roy declared.
During the following months I spent many hours on the old train that went to Roy’s home county. There was a lot of work to do, and Mark and Denis had made it clear that the agency’s priority was not “that bunch of bumpkins,” as Denis described them. I was everywhere at once. I didn’t want my assistant, Richard Craig, or Cathy telling Mark tales that I was spending more time on “that bunch of bumpkins” than I did on his friends in the Conservative or Labour parties.
Philip did a thorough job. He had presented me with a meticulous dossier, which included in-depth biographies of not just our candidates but also those standing against them. He didn’t tell me how he’d done it and I didn’t ask, but he had found out how much money was in the current accounts of not just Parker and his friends but also their opponents, and even whether they were unfaithful to their wives. I didn’t want him to give me any details, but I suspected that Philip, who was a hacker when all was said and done, was capable of finding out all kinds of confidential information. Eventually I could no longer control my curiosity.
“How on earth did you manage to find out so much about Roy’s opponents?”
“Well, you might not want to know. I…perhaps I’ve overstepped the mark.” Philip trembled as he spoke.
“What have you done?” I asked, worried. I couldn’t forget that Philip Sullivan had had problems with the law, even though he had eventually been cleared of any wrongdoing.
“I…you must see that I only want to do a good job, Thomas…It’s not easy to find out certain things,” he answered, stammering.
“Come on, Philip. I want to know. I hope you haven’t done something stupid.”
Philip fell apart. He seemed to be on the verge of tears, which immediately provoked a sense of revulsion in me. I have never been able to stand weak people, although I have used them. And in Philip’s case, his weakness had made him my faithful dog. Whatever he may have done, it was clear that he did it to curry favor with me.
“I’ve got a friend who’s a journalist.”
“The one who tried to hack the Bank of England’s IT system using your computer?” I asked.
“No, this is a different friend. He’s got problems and he’s out of work, but he’s a good investigator and I thought he could be useful to us.”
“What have you gotten us into? I warn you, I’m not going to take any crap from you.”
“Please, Thomas! I’ll introduce Neil Collins to you. He’s a good guy. You don’t need to worry.”
“So you have a little friend named Neil, and my guess is that this is who you’ve been giving the research money to.”
“You didn’t ask me…”
“I didn’t tell you to hire anybody!”
“I didn’t hire Neil. I’ve just been paying him for his work.”
“And what has this work consisted of?”
“Everything that’s in the dossier that I gave you about Roy Parker’s opponents. And, as you well know, there’s material there that could put an end to their campaigns.”
I had to make a decision: either fire Philip Sullivan or meet this Neil guy. I decided to take a risk and did the latter.
Neil was an unemployed journalist. Intelligent, brilliant, cultured, and also a drunk and a drug addict. It was difficult to believe that he could have compiled those dossiers: when he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol he was under the influence of cocaine.
He had worked for the Times and the Sunday Times and also at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He was a good investigator, able to find shit wherever it might be and on absolutely anybody, whoever they were. If someone had made a mistake, Neil would find out about it.
They had fired him from all his jobs, not only due to the alcohol and cocaine, but because he’d gone sniffing a
round the upper echelons and they had clipped his wings. He’d been down to his last penny when Philip called him, so he agreed to investigate the lives of Frank Wilson and Jimmy Doyle, the two politicians Roy wanted to beat at the ballot boxes.
Neil must have been around forty and he was a mess. In addition to the alcohol and drugs, he wasn’t exactly pleasant or nice. But I liked him. He struck me as someone you could trust. And from what Philip told me, the Internet didn’t have any secrets from Neil.
I told Philip that he shouldn’t tell the rest of the team anything about Neil’s existence or his background. Cathy and Richard would have run straight to Mark Scott and Denis Roth, and those two would have been more than capable of not just firing me but turning me in for bad practice too. Philip swore that he wouldn’t say a word. I told him that he should continue to be the one who dealt with Neil but that he shouldn’t tell or give me any compromising details.
“I’m giving you this job and it’s up to you how you do it. If anything goes wrong…”
“Yes, you want to be able to say that it was entirely down to me, that you trusted me and I betrayed that trust.”
“Smart guy. Oh, and I don’t want to see your friend Neil Collins again.”
—
Richard Craig didn’t seem to be worried that I was making Philip Sullivan my right-hand man. He seemed to enjoy directing the conventional campaigns. I let him do it. I needed him to do this part of the job so that I could focus on Parker, but I tried to make sure that he didn’t always have Cathy available to work with him. They made a good team and I knew that if I ever took my eye off the ball, they would ensure that Mark Scott and Denis Roth got rid of me. So, although Cathy put up resistance, I made her travel with me to Derbyshire, Parker’s home county, on a regular basis.
We gave the group of “bumpkins” a name—the Rural Party—and we established the key points of their campaign: defending the interests of the county by electing people committed to fostering the community’s well-being.
I found it hard to convince Roy that the group needed a female candidate.
“A party with no women is unacceptable.” I laid it out for him.
“The women of standing in the county are our wives. They have power, but within the house. You won’t find a single one who wants to leave her home to dedicate herself to becoming mayor.”
“Well, one of them will have to do it,” I replied.
It was Cathy who found a couple of possible candidates. One of them was a friend of Suzi, Roy’s wife. She was named Victoria and was a teacher at one of the local schools. She was in her forties and seemed bored with children, her husband, and rural life. Cathy convinced Suzi that she should persuade Victoria and they all had a surprise when she agreed right away.
The second candidate was named Alberta and she was the daughter of a shepherd in a small, remote village. This good woman accepted the proposal, knowing that this would be the only adventure in her life. Her mother was in poor health with heart problems, and as soon as she died Alberta would have to take on her mother’s role and help her father, which meant resigning herself to that inhospitable land forever.
Cathy designed a very bucolic poster: a stretch of green grass full of silhouettes of men and women. The slogan was simple and effective: WE KNOW OUR COMMUNITIES.
Roy thought it was great and Suzi loved it. In fact, Suzi felt genuine admiration for Cathy. They couldn’t have been more different. Suzi was simple, direct, and fought to control her wild ginger mane, which was never properly styled. She carried a few extra pounds, but was attractive. Cathy wore her elegant slenderness wrapped in designer suits. When Suzi appeared in her best outfit she always looked badly dressed beside Cathy, even if the latter was in jeans and a sweater.
“So, Thomas, tell me how we’re going to beat my opponents. I’m not worried about the Lib Dems; the liberals have never had a mayor here. But Frank Wilson is well known and his lot, the Conservatives, are in power in London. As for Jimmy Doyle…well, he’s not a bad candidate, but he doesn’t have the same charisma as the current Labour mayor, Robert, who’s been in office these last ten years.”
Yes, Jimmy Doyle and Frank Wilson had become a nightmare for me, but, thanks to Neil, Philip Sullivan had come to know all there was to know about them. Frank went to a discreet brothel twice a month. He’d taken care to visit one in another town, but he was methodical about his visits on the first and fifteenth of each month. The brothel was run by a widow who had three women working for her. They were good girls, Philip told us, married with children, and their husbands were out of work.
Apart from that, Frank Wilson was a good family man who attended church every Sunday. He had a shop that sold a bit of this and a bit of that, from ladies’ tights to bath salts and hats.
What Philip had found on Jimmy Doyle was that he had a number of debts. He liked to live beyond his means. Although he had inherited a hardware store from his parents, he didn’t know how to run it properly and was unable to adapt to the times. He had mortgaged his house and the store itself to keep it going, and though the bank was putting pressure on him, he still kept spending money he didn’t have. Furthermore, he had used money from a party account to cover one of the interest payments on his loans. As for his credit card, it was smoking; when he traveled outside the county he liked to go to good restaurants and surprise his wife with side trips and gifts.
Philip Sullivan and I met with Roy Parker to tell him his rivals’ weak spots.
“How the hell do you know that Frank visits a brothel? Have you hired detectives?” Roy asked Sullivan directly.
“There’s no need to hire a detective if you know where to look,” Philip Sullivan replied, proud of his achievements.
“Outrageous. Everything you’ve found is outrageous.” Roy seemed surprised.
“Let me remind you,” I intervened, “that you wanted to know everything about your opponents so as to beat them soundly. But I agree with you: Wilson and Doyle are two good men.”
“I don’t like the idea of sinking a man who doesn’t know how to swim,” Roy said in his usual grumpy tone, “but if it’s a case of my own survival…I’ll do it.” He avoided meeting our eyes.
“You’ve got the figures here: right now you don’t have enough support to become mayor. It looks like Frank Wilson and the Conservatives are likely to win this time,” I warned him.
“And what you’re proposing is to let the whole world know that Frank plays away from home.”
“No, I’m not proposing anything. You asked me to find out everything about them, and that’s what we’ve done.”
“The voters can’t trust a man who deceives his family. As for Jimmy Doyle, that’ll be easier; you can’t put a man in town hall who can’t even balance the books at his own business. Perhaps,” declared a smiling Sullivan, “he wants to be mayor to save himself so the bank won’t call in his debts.”
“Well, no one’s said you ought to use any weaknesses in your opponents as part of your campaign,” I added.
“You’re a swine, Thomas.”
Roy’s look told me that that was exactly what he thought of me. The insult didn’t bother me, but the fact that he had used it alongside my first name and in front of Philip did.
“Well, that’s why you hired me, Mr. Parker. Neither you nor your friends have any chance of winning a single mayoralty.”
“We’ll wipe the floor with them, Thomas, much as it pains me to destroy a man because he has trouble with the bank or likes to go to bed with other women.”
“You certainly don’t have any other weapons to beat them with.”
I was disconcerted by Roy’s attitude. He suddenly seemed to have scruples, and even a conscience. With time I became used to his changes of opinion. He was as likely to want to offer his opponents help in resolving their problems as he was to want to assassinate them once and for all.
“I hired you in order to win,” he reminded me.
“You hired me to try to win. We don?
??t trade in miracles,” I replied sharply.
“And what you’re proposing is that I should wipe out Frank and Jimmy…They’re my neighbors; our families have been friends since before we were born. I don’t like it, but we’ll do it. It’s what you advise.”
I got to my feet. I wasn’t prepared to fight against his bad conscience. It wasn’t my problem.
“I’m the one who has no interest in sinking your friends. It doesn’t make a difference to me who is mayor of this place. You asked us to find their weak spots. They have nothing more to hide than what we’ve already uncovered. Tell me what you want us to do, pay, and that’s what we’ll do.”
“Don’t get upset, Thomas. I wasn’t criticizing you. It’s just that I was wondering whether being in power is really worth it.”
Suzi arrived just in time to hear her husband’s last few words. She gave him a hard look and there was a hint of disdain in her eyes.
“Don’t you have the guts for it, Roy? Politics is one great big cesspit. You either need to be prepared to swim in it or you stay at home and stick to managing the family businesses. But if you do that don’t complain later, because I won’t listen to you. You’ve been telling me for years that you want a seat in Westminster. Do you think they’re going to give you one just because that’s what you want? You’ll have to earn it and to do that you can’t feel pity for your opponents. It’s them or you. You need a killer instinct to succeed in politics. If you don’t have one, get out now and don’t waste the family’s money.” Suzi said her piece without raising her voice, in a tone as icy as her gaze.
I thought that she should have been the one trying her luck in politics. She was a practical woman who didn’t waste time on sentimentality. Her loyalty was limited to her own. Outside her family was the rest of the world, and no one there was capable of moving her.