Full of Money

  ‘Oh, they’re so right,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘On A Week in Review. That woman and Rupe Bale.’

  ‘Right how?’

  ‘Spot on about the tastefulness and bold burn of the love scenes.’

  ‘I didn’t want to win Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award.’

  ‘You couldn’t – couldn’t ever. Vivid, vigorous, so very credible, never clumsy or gross, always meaningful and unrushed. Even the one-night stands. Especially the one-night stands.’

  ‘You read fast.’

  ‘Well, yes. Not unrushed. I was carried along.’

  They talked some more. Then he said: ‘Look, I’m afraid we have to move on. They want to close up.’

  ‘Oh, dear, yes. Rabbiting away like this, I lost track. I live not so very far from here. It’s a fine night.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  Getting straddled in her single bed had been excellent, and with no problems because, of course, only enough width for one body was called for – his. She, being on top of him, did not demand any of the latitude for herself. In this bed, Vagrain’s arse and back required a good mattress foundation, and that would almost do; possibly, plus a little extra on each side of him to give leverage and purchase spots on the sheet for her knees during busy and ultimately very effective thrusts and pullbacks.

  Now, though, afterwards, as they lay alongside each other, things became a little cramped. He’d have to remember that for when he wrote again about one-night stands. She put her head on his chest to save space. ‘I expect you wonder what I mean when I call their relationship “significant”,’ she said. ‘Probably you’d argue all relationships are significant. Your books are so good on relationships.’

  ‘The essence of much storytelling.’

  ‘Do you know the name Pellotte?’ she asked.

  ‘You said it’s your pal Dione’s name.’

  ‘And, naturally, her father’s.’

  ‘No, I’ve not come across it.’

  ‘He’s very big on Whitsun Festival.’

  ‘I have heard of the estate,’ he said.

  ‘Not always good things, I expect.’

  ‘Drug empire wars with another estate? A journalist murdered, trying to investigate things – found on a kiddies’ playground slide? Terrible.’

  ‘Temperate Park Acres – the other one. And so, this big, bloody, continuous tension affects their romance.’

  ‘In which sense?’

  ‘Dione equals Whitsun, Rupert, Temperate. The journalist might have been prying into that, or attempting to.’

  ‘Ah! Like Romeo and Juliet. Classic,’ Vagrain said. ‘I can see this is a real situation.’

  And, yes, God, it was potentially a brilliant topic for fiction. Classic, yet modernized and taken down a social level or two or ten. Another West Side Story, but sufficiently different not to seem like repro/copycat/pastiche. Dangerous, certainly. The journalist’s death probably proved it. Wouldn’t it be craven to let that deter him, though? In any case, he would be turning the set-up into a story, into fiction, not attempting to expose it in the press. He felt excited by the notion and wanted to sit up. But her head on his chest kept him flat.

  ‘Dione – scared in so many ways,’ she said.

  ‘Scared how?’ he said.

  ‘Scared for her father, to start with.’

  ‘For her father?’

  ‘Yes, for.’

  ‘Not of?’

  ‘For.’

  ‘But you said he has a powerful standing on one of the estates.’

  ‘He does. He does . . . for now.’

  ‘He’s in danger?’

  ‘Staffers in the firm might object to his daughter dating someone from Temperate – maybe even going to live with someone from Temperate, possibly marrying him. An ordinary girl on Whitsun might – would – get away with having a boyfriend on Temperate. Of course. I imagine it happens all the time. A Whitsun boy and Temperate Acres girl. There’s no great gulf fixed between the estates. Not everybody is part of the drugs strife. But Dione is not an ordinary Whitsun girl. Really, she couldn’t be less ordinary. She is Adrian Pellotte’s daughter. He is, to date, the undisputed Number One on Whitsun. And Dione’s behaviour and choices have a bearing on Daddy’s position and security. Her love affair insults him and all belonging to his firm – that’s how some of those members would regard it. This is the crux: all of them feel tainted, except possibly his chauffeur and odd-job man, Dean Feston. Result? Hatred and contempt of Pellotte for permitting it. Perhaps Tasker, the journalist, had sensed this, meant to make something of it. He’d know what ambitious, wild, envious, recriminating people work for these outfits.’

  The pile of adjectives delighted Vagrain. He loved the extremism of what she described. He could provide more adjectives: the extremism was dark, daft, sickening, credible. It would rightly guarantee a right-on page-turner, if he could write it right, but not a cheap right-on page-turner: there’d be a theme here, a message, insights, oodles of zeitgeist and social commentary. He would thoroughly research both estates, regardless of personal hazard, build a milieu. The point was, there couldn’t be an estates story without personal risk. If you wanted to write accurately about war, you had to be there, suffer what Karen might call ‘the perils’. His behaviour would not be stupidly irresponsible, but calculated, thorough, honest. He’d get the total picture, then develop it to, say, 100,000 words, something to be really reckoned with in hardback on bookshop shelves – at least as reckonable as Insignia.

  ‘You said Dione is scared in several ways,’ he said.

  ‘This woman.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The programme woman.’

  ‘Priscilla Sandine?’

  ‘Dione likes how she brought Rupert on in the show – sort of transformed him. He’d been having a bad time with the critics, was depressed. She restores him, resurrects his star factor.’

  ‘Well, yes, great.’

  ‘Great but also worrying. Something between those two, Abel? Was that how the magic worked? Dione’s half in favour, half ferociously jealous. Her father frets, too – half in favour, half ferociously suspicious. Half a dose of suspicion from Adrian Pellotte is a very nasty fraction.’

  Stupendous, epic, thrilling, Vagrain thought – this vast tangle of hope, contentment, pain and anxiety. It would take a real, unflinching novelist to show the intricacies of what she described, chart the passions, get convincingly to the resolution, whatever it might be. He felt brilliantly excited, stirred. He gently drew Karen’s head up on to the pillow alongside his.

  ‘What would you call it?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The book.’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘About all this.’

  ‘Who said I might do a book?’

  ‘You’re fascinated, aren’t you? But be careful. What would you call it – Daddy’s Girl?’ she asked.

  He eased her over on to her back. This way, too, only one body width had to be accommodated in the narrow bed.

  Eleven

  Tasker’s murder turned symbolic – meaning, of course, extra trouble. Fuck! Always this danger with any unsolved case, and above all a violent unsolved case. Yes, Esther thought, fuck! Thought only. She would have liked to at least mutter this, possibly shout/scream it, give it substance and clamour, but there were people about, people of an influential kind. They had chairs in front of her at the conference table, and their name was Insolence, or should have been.

  Naturally, she’d seen from near the start that Tasker’s death might take on a meaning beyond itself, might come to typify a general, poor state of things, especially if nobody had been nailed for it, or looked like getting nailed. Almost always, an arrest, followed by a charge/charges could restore tidiness, encouraged a belief in the inevitable, good victory of virtue and order. This was the supreme aim of policing – to prove the inevitable good victory of virtue and order. Or at least to encourage a belief in the inevi
table good victory of virtue and order, even if, in fact, a victory for virtue and order might not be inevitable or even fucking likely.

  To date, though, the Tasker investigation had produced nothing to bring comfort. The reverse. There’d been the couple of arrests, but no charges. Arrests without charges were deeply worse than no arrests. They made the police look panicky, desperate to get someone locked up and headlined, regardless – regardless of evidence fit for a court.

  So, the death became a symbol. Of what? The media would highlight it as another sign, yes, symbol of a national/international/universal, cosmic catastrophic decline. Obediently, the media’s readers, viewers, listeners would think the same. Causes of the catastrophic decline? A list:

  (1) Police failure.

  (2) Abject police failure.

  (3) Customary police failure.

  (4) Eternal police failure.

  (5) Bred-in-the-bone police failure.

  (6) Possible ​police ​dab-in-​the-hand​ connivance/​involvement/​corruption.

  (7) Ungovernable major city areas on account of (1)–(5), and maybe (6).

  (8) Gang wars unchecked by police in ungovernable city areas because of (1)–(5) and maybe (6).

  (9) Brutally effective gang resistance to scrutiny, exposure (by an investigative reporter).

  (10) Brutally effective gang terror ploys to deter scrutiny, exposure (the playground display).

  (11) Effective defeat of interrogation helped by (1)–(5) and maybe (6): (that is, arrests but no charges.)

  (12) All this had a wider significance, yes? That’s what symbolic meant. Assume the savage, unpunished crime and the incompetence or complicity of the police mirrored something national, international, universal, cosmic. Then, the gangsters and their cleverness and ruthlessness would triumph countrywide, and possibly worldwide, perhaps already had.

  Bad. But these people across the table stopped Esther from mouthing in some form – howling? Screaming? Yelling? A surely justified curse out of horror/disgust/fear/rage/helplessness at these 1–12 elements.

  Commander Bernard Chawse, one of Esther’s bosses, had called a meeting. When she arrived, somebody from the Mayor of London’s empire was with him and somebody from the Home Office. Esther would guess from a glance at how they were dressed, smiled, sat and radiated chicanery that they had important jobs on the spin, publicity or press relations side, though their posts were described by Chawse in introductions as, Executive Head of Projects (London Mayor’s office) and Deputy Administrator Major Future Enterprises (Home Office). Chawse said he couldn’t actually stay for the meeting himself, unfortunately – very unfortunately – on account of some other meeting he’d just been unfortunately asked to chair, because the Chief, who should have chaired it, had unfortunately been suddenly required to chair another meeting to do with security for a Royal visit, and therefore an irresistible priority, unfortunately. Perhaps. Chawse was known to hate discussions with Executive Heads of Projects and Deputy Administrators of Major Future Enterprises or similar, particularly if he foresaw recriminations. Esther had heard and believed that his quick climb up the ranks was mainly due to an unmatched flair for foreseeing recriminations and being required elsewhere as an irresistible priority.

  ‘I’m sure Chief Superintendent Davidson – Esther – will be able to deal with your queries, Veronica, Maldwyn,’ he said, leaving.

  Esther sat down opposite them.

  Veronica, the Deputy Administrator, spoke first. She had a voice rich in sales skills and power-talk. An obvious flair at alchemizing bullshit attended each word. She radiated a kind of logic, her kind. ‘Let me tell you how the thinking goes, will you, Esther? It’s long-term, but in such a scheme – admittedly only a “concept-for-development matter” at this stage – such thinking has to be long-term.’

  ‘Thinking as to what, please, Veronica?’ Esther asked. ‘Which, as it were, ballpark are we in?’ She felt that in a meeting with Executive Heads of Projects and Deputy Administrators of Major Future Enterprises or similar, she must get her jargon in first.

  ‘A splendid metaphor, if I may say,’ Veronica replied. ‘You intuit brilliantly! But I suppose intuition is a cardinal ability in a senior officer. Yes, we are, in fact, talking about sport, Esther – and, oh, very incidentally, yet truly importantly – how good to be on first name terms so soon! Maldwyn and I don’t always meet with such ready familiarity in our work.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ Maldwyn said.

  ‘What one could term the very acme of sport,’ Veronica said, ‘and in the widest sense.’

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ Esther said.

  ‘Sport as a virtually all-embracing term,’ Maldwyn said. ‘Its parameters extensive. Table tennis, sculling – you name it.’

  ‘These really are extensive parameters,’ Esther replied.

  Veronica said: ‘We would like you to think Olympics.’

  ‘Ah,’ Esther said.

  ‘As a prospect,’ Maldwyn said. ‘A prospect to be secured against the mighty efforts of other bidders.’

  ‘2012,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Distant, yet not so distant, believe me,’ Maldwyn said, ‘not when the many potential exigencies are taken into account.’

  ‘Maldwyn, it’s a fact, exigencies can be a living sod,’ Esther said.

  ‘But they can also be dealt with, triumphed over,’ Maldwyn said. ‘What would be our raison d’être otherwise?’

  ‘I see that,’ Esther said.

  Veronica said: ‘The Government and the Mayor’s office are minded to put London forward as possible hosts for the Olympics of 2012. As I’ve mentioned, the matter is only at “concept-for-development” status at this point. You may, in your necessarily down-to-earth fashion, Esther, ask what that bit of back-room gibberish means! Let me make it more or less intelligible, will you? A project idea starts as a general proposal, and proceeds – if it does proceed – to one, presentation of salient factors; then to two, concept; followed by three, concept for development state and finally, development. For the Olympics invitation to be at three indicates what is categorized as “substantial intent”. In other words, something with a high possibility of fruition. I believe the concept a good one, and its development into more than a concept possible and, indeed, probable. I think London is formidably qualified to succeed with its bid, and so does Maldwyn.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he murmured. ‘What Veronica meant about “in the widest sense”, you see. The Olympics. Could things actually be wider in the sporting world? Parameters – extensive.’

  ‘All right, that’s fourteen years ahead, you’ll argue, Esther – nearly a decade and a half. Yes, it is,’ Veronica said. ‘But the decision will be made in 2005 at the latest. Applications must go in a long while before. And the preparations for the application must begin an even longer while before. We have to start worrying about London’s “image” pretty soon in fact. At this stage general, basic, background aspects of the capital are what’s on our minds, Maldwyn’s and mine.’

  ‘London must be established from the outset in international eyes as an impeccable, capable, wholesome venue, its assets unquestionable, inveterate,’ Maldwyn said.

  ‘I think you see which way our thoughts are moving, Esther.’

  ‘We do not to any degree imply a reflection upon your work,’ Maldwyn said. ‘That would be quite outside our remit.’

  ‘Quite outside, quite outside,’Veronica replied. ‘Certainly, certainly.’ Veronica now brought a real businesslike crackle into her voice. ‘Esther, we speak law and order, of course. I know you’ll agree these are priorities.’

  ‘Well, they are ideals to which you have devoted your working life, so, obviously, you prize them,’ Maldwyn said. ‘A demonstrable track record.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ Veronica replied. ‘And, Esther, you will realize it is crucial that from the earliest possible date – such as, yes, now! – London’s reputation for peace on the streets is at least preserved and, if possible, enhanc
ed.’

  ‘A challenge,’ Maldwyn said, ‘but what are the Games about but challenge? In our small, admin-centred way we are mimicking the spirit of those Games – the Olympic spirit – in our efforts to secure the Games and that Olympic spirit for our capital city in 2012.’

  ‘You will wish me to come to the particular, Esther,’ Veronica said. ‘London is blessedly free from terrorist acts: a considerable plus. Other grounds for anxiety exist, though.’

  ‘Any modern capital city is likely to have social problem areas,’ Esther said.

  ‘Certainly, certainly, Esther,’ Veronica said.

  ‘It would be naive to gainsay this,’ Maldwyn said.

  ‘And we would not attempt to,’ Veronica said. ‘But we have to recognize such difficulties and attempt to counter them. For instance, there are two large estates hereabouts, very near the centre of the city, where criminality may appear embedded, intractable – may, to be precise, have gained at least an element of dominance.’

  ‘Or that is the perception,’ Maldwyn said. ‘And perceptions are, of course, so vital. It is perceptions that will decide whether London is a suitable venue.’

  ‘If the situation at Whitsun and Temperate is not remedied it will clearly harm London’s campaign,’ Veronica said.

  ‘Or the perception of that situation,’ Maldwyn said.

  ‘The murdered journalist, Gervaise Manciple Tasker, appears to have had some sort of interest in both estates, and his death can be seen as – is bound to be seen as – part of the prevailing tensions,’ Veronica said. ‘Does it not, we have to ask, incorporate these tensions in a single, terrifying symbol?’

  Fuck! Fuck off, both of you! But Esther actually said: ‘We are determined to resolve the Tasker case. The inquiry progresses.’

  ‘This is not inner city trouble,’ Maldwyn said, ‘rather what the sociologists, pinching from Frederic Thrasher, of course, call “interstitial” – meaning it affects areas occupying the interstices, that is, the districts between inner city and outlying suburbs.’

  Esther wondered which of them, if either, had any real power. Obviously, someone behind them did – someone in the Mayor’s office and/or the Home Office: the people who’d sent them. To get access to Chawse, even for a token few minutes, would require clout, their own or their bosses’, most likely the second.