Not that seeing the Tory ship-of-state sinking was a painful spectacle for Rodney Aronson. He’d voted Labour—or at worst Liberal Democrat—ever since casting his first ballot. To think that Labour might benefit from the current climate of political unrest was extremely gratifying to him. So under other circumstances, Rodney would have enjoyed the daily spectacle of press conferences, outraged telephone calls, demands for a special election, and dire predictions of the outcome of local elections due to be held within weeks. But under these circumstances, with Luxford at the helm where he would probably remain indefinitely, occluding Rodney’s own rise to the top, Rodney chafed. He told himself his discomfort grew from the fact that he was the superior newsman. But the real truth was that he was jealous.
He’d been at The Source since he was sixteen years old, he’d worked his way from a factotum to his present position of Deputy Editor—second in command, mind you—on sheer strength of will, strength of character, and strength of talent. He was owed the top job, and everyone knew it. Including Luxford, which was why the editor was watching him now, reading his mind like the fox he was, and waiting for him to reply. You don’t have the instincts of a killer, he’d been told. Yes. Right. Well, everyone would see the truth soon enough.
“Something on your mind, Rod?” Luxford repeated before dropping his gaze again to his correspondence.
Your job, Rodney thought. But what he said was, “This rent boy business. I think it’s time to back off.”
“Why?”
“It’s getting old. We’ve been leading with the story since Friday. Yesterday and today were nothing more than a rehash of Sunday and Monday’s developments. I know Mitch Corsico is on the trail of something more, but until he’s got it, I think we need to take a break.”
Luxford set letter number six to one side and pulled at his overlong—and trademark—sideburns in what Rodney knew was a spurious demonstration of editor-considers-subordinate’s-opinion. He picked up envelope number seven and inserted the letter opener beneath its flap. He held that pose while he replied.
“The Government has placed itself in this position. The Prime Minister gave us his Recommitment to Basic British Values as part of the party manifesto, didn’t he? Just two years ago, wasn’t it? We’re merely exploring what the Recommitment to Basic British Values apparently means to the Tories. Mum and Dad Greengrocer along with Uncle Shoemaker and Granddad Pensioner all thought it meant a return to decency and ‘God Save the Queen’ in the cinema after films. Our Tory MPs seem to think otherwise.”
“Right,” Rodney said. “But do we want to look like we’re trying to bring down the Government with an endless exposé of what one half-witted MP does with his dick on his own free time? Hell, we’ve plenty of other grist to use against the Tories. So why don’t we—”
“Developing a moral conscience at the eleventh hour?” Luxford raised a sardonic eyebrow and went back to his letter, slitting open the envelope and slipping out the folded paper inside. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Rod.”
Rodney felt his face grow hot. “I’m only saying that if we’re going to aim the heavy artillery at the Government, we might want to start thinking about directing fire at something more substantial than the off-hours bonking of Members of Parliament. Papers have been doing that for years, and where has it got us? The berks are still in power.”
“I dare say our readers feel their interests are being served. What did you tell me the most recent circulation figures were?” It was Luxford’s usual ploy. He never asked that sort of question without knowing the answer. As if to emphasise this, he gave his attention back to the letter in his hand.
“I’m not saying we ought to ignore the extra-marital bonking that’s going on. I know it’s our bread and butter. But if we just spin the story so it looks like the Government…” Rodney realised that Luxford wasn’t listening. Instead, he was frowning at the letter he held. He pulled at his sideburns, but this time the act and the consideration accompanying the act were both genuine. Rodney was certain of it. He said with rising hope that he was careful to expunge from his voice, “Something wrong, Den?”
The hand that held the letter screwed it into his palm. “Balls,” Luxford said. He threw the letter into the rubbish with the others. He reached for the next one and slit it open. “What utter bullshit,” he said. “The great unthinking populace speaks.” He read the next letter and then said to Rodney, “That’s where we differ. You apparently view our readers as educable, Rod. While I view them as they are. Our nation’s great unwashed and greater unread. To be spoon-fed their opinions like lukewarm porridge.” Luxford pushed his chair away from the conference table. “Is there anything else this evening? Because if there isn’t, I’ve a dozen phone calls to return and a family to get home to.”
There’s your job, Rodney thought once again. There’s what I’m owed for twenty-two years of loyalty to this miserable rag. But what he said was, “No, Den. There’s nothing else. At the moment, that is.”
He dropped his Cadbury wrapper among the editor’s discarded letters and headed for the door. Luxford said, “Rod,” as Rodney pulled the door open. And when he’d turned to Luxford, “You’ve got chocolate in your beard.”
Luxford was smiling as Rodney left him.
But the smile faded instantly once the other man was gone. Dennis Luxford swung his chair to the wastepaper basket. He pulled out the letter. He uncrinkled it against the surface of the conference table and read it again. It was composed of a one-word salutation and a single sentence, and it had nothing to do with rent boys, automobiles, or Sinclair Larnsey, MP:
Luxford—
Use page one to acknowledge your firstborn child, and Charlotte will be freed.
Luxford stared at the message with a heartbeat thumping light and fast in his ears. He swiftly assessed a handful of possible senders, but they were so unlikely that the only conclusion he could reach was a simple one: The letter had to be a bluff. Still, he was careful to sort through the remaining rubbish in such a way so as not to disturb the order in which he’d thrown away the day’s post. He rescued the letter’s accompanying envelope and studied it. A partial postmark made a three-quarter moon next to the first class stamp. It was faded, but legible enough for Luxford to see that the letter had been posted in London.
Luxford leaned back in his chair. He read the first eight words again. Use page one to acknowledge your firstborn child. Charlotte, he thought.
For the past ten years, he had allowed himself to reflect upon Charlotte only once a month, a quarter of an hour’s admission of paternity that he’d managed to keep secret from everyone in his world, Charlotte’s mother included. The rest of the time he forced the girl’s existence to diminish in his memory. He’d never spoken to a soul about her. Some days he managed to forget altogether that he was the father of more than one child.
He scooped up both the letter and its envelope and carried them to the window where he looked down at Farrington Street and listened to the muted noise of traffic.
Someone, he knew, someone quite close by, someone in Fleet Street or perhaps in Wapping or as far away as that soaring glass tower on the Isle of Dogs, was waiting for him to make a wrong move. Someone out there—well-versed in how a story completely unrelated to current events gained momentum in the press and whetted the public’s appetite for a very conspicuous fall from grace—anticipated his inadvertently laying a trail in reaction to this letter and, through laying that trail, forging a link between himself and Charlotte’s mother. When he’d done that, the press would pounce. One paper would uncover the story. The rest would follow. And both he and Charlotte’s mother would pay for their mistake. Her punishment would be a pillory followed by a quick descent from political power. His would be a more personal loss.
He was sardonically amused to note how he was being hoist with his own petard. If the Government had not been facing even more certain damage should the truth about Charlotte be known, Luxford would have assumed the le
tter had been sent from Number Ten Downing Street in a gesture of how-does-it-feel-to-be-on-the-receiving-end-for-once. But the Government had as much interest in keeping the truth about Charlotte buried as had Luxford himself. And if the Government was not involved in the letter and its obliquely minatory message, then it stood to reason that another sort of enemy was.
And there were scores of them. From every walk of life. Eager. Waiting. Hoping that he would betray himself.
Dennis Luxford had been playing the game of investigative one-upmanship too long to make a false move. He hadn’t turned the tide of The Source’s declining circulation by being oblivious of the methods used by journalists to reach the truth. So he decided that he would toss out the letter and forget about it and thus give his enemies sod all to work with. If he received another, he’d toss out that one as well.
He balled up the letter a second time and turned from the window to throw it with the others. But in doing so, he caught sight of the correspondence his secretary had already opened and stacked. He considered the possibility of yet another letter, not marked this time for his eyes only, but sent unmarked so that anyone could open it, or sent to Mitch Corsico, or to one of the other reporters who were currently on the scent of sexual corruption. This letter wouldn’t be phrased so obscurely. Names would be mentioned, dates and places would be manufactured, and what had started as a thirteen-word bluff would become a full-blown hue and cry for the truth.
He could prevent that. All it would take was a single phone call and an answer to the only questions possible at this point: Have you told someone, Eve? Anyone? At any time? In the last ten years? About us? Have you told?
If she hadn’t, the letter was nothing but an attempt to rattle him, and easily dismissable at that. If she had, she needed to know that both of them were about to come under a full-blown siege.
2
HAVING PREPARED HER AUDIENCE, Deborah St. James lined up three large black-and-white photographs on one of the worktables in her husband’s laboratory. She adjusted the fluorescent lights and stood back to wait the judgement of her husband and of his workmate, Lady Helen Clyde. She’d been experimenting with this new series of photographs for four months now, and while she was fairly pleased with the results, she was also feeling more and more these days the pressure to make a real financial contribution to their household. She wanted this contribution to be a regular one, not one restricted to the sporadic assignments she had so far been able to glean from beating on the doors of advertising agencies, talent agencies, magazines, wire services, and publishers. In the last few years since completing her training, Deborah had begun to feel as if she were spending most of her waking hours lugging her portfolio from one end of London to the other, when all along what she wanted was to be successful shooting her photographs as pure art. From Stieglitz to Mapplethorpe, other people had done it. Why not she?
Deborah pressed her palms together and waited for either her husband or Helen Clyde to speak. They’d been in the midst of evaluating the transcript of a forensic deposition Simon had given a fortnight ago on water-gel explosives, and they had intended to go on from there to an analysis of tool marks made on the metal surround of a doorknob in an attempt to establish a case for the defence in an upcoming murder trial. But they’d been willing enough to take a break. They’d been going at it since nine that morning with only a pause for lunch and a second for dinner, and from what Deborah could see now at half past nine in the evening, Helen, at least, was ready to call it a day.
Simon was bent over the photograph of a National Front skinhead. Helen was studying a West Indian girl who stood with an enormous Union Jack curled through her hands. Both the skinhead and the girl were positioned in front of a portable backdrop that Deborah had devised from large triangles of solidly painted canvas.
When neither Simon nor Helen spoke, she said, “You see, I want the pictures to be personality specific. I don’t want to objectify the subject in my old way. I control the background—that’s the canvas I was working on in the garden last February, do you remember, Simon?—but the personality is specific to the individual picture. The subject can’t hide. He—or she, of course—can’t falsify himself because the film speed’s too slow and the subject can’t sustain artifice for as long as it takes to get the proper exposure. So. What d’you think?”
She told herself that it didn’t matter what either of them thought. She was on to something with this new approach, and she meant to keep with it. But it would help to have someone’s independent verification that the work was as good as she believed it was. Even if that someone was her own husband, the person least likely to find fault with her efforts.
He moved away from the skinhead, skirted Helen who was still studying the West Indian flag holder, and went to the third picture, a Rastafarian in an impressively beaded shawl that covered his hole-dotted T-shirt. He said, “Where did you take these, Deborah?”
She said, “Covent Garden. Near the theatre museum. I’d like to do St. Botolph’s Church next. The homeless. You know.” She watched Helen move to another picture. She kept herself from gnawing at her thumbnail as she waited.
Helen finally looked up. “I think they’re wonderful.”
“Do you? Do you really? I mean, do you think…You see, they’re rather different, aren’t they? What I wanted…I mean…I’m using a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch Polaroid, and I’ve left in the sprocket marks as well as the marks from the chemicals on the prints because I want them to sort of announce that they’re pictures. They’re the artificial reality while the subjects themselves are the truth. At least…Well, that’s what I’d like to think…” Deborah reached for her hair and shoved its copper-coloured mass away from her face. Words left her in a muddle. They always had. She sighed. “That’s what I’m trying…”
Her husband put his arm round her shoulders and soundly kissed the side of her head. “A fine job,” he said. “How many have you taken?”
“Oh dozens. Hundreds. Well, perhaps not hundreds, but a great many. I’ve only just started making these oversize prints. What I’m really hoping is that they’ll be good enough to show…in a gallery, I mean. Like art. Because, well, they are art after all and…” Her voice drifted off as her eyes caught movement at the edge of her vision. She turned to the door of the lab to see that her father—a long-time member of one or another of the St. James family’s households—had come quietly to the top of the Cheyne Row house.
“Mr. St. James,” Joseph Cotter said, adhering to his history of never once using Simon’s Christian name. The length of their marriage aside, he had never been able to adjust fully to the fact that his daughter had married her father’s youthful employer. “You’ve visitors. I’ve put them in the study.”
“Visitors?” Deborah asked. “I didn’t hear…did the doorbell ring, Dad?”
“Don’t need the doorbell, these visitors, do they?” Cotter replied. He entered the lab and frowned down at Deborah’s photographs. “Nasty bloke, this,” he said in reference to the National Front ruffian. And to Deborah’s husband, “It’s David. Along with some mate of ’is, done up in fancy braces and flashy shoes.”
“David?” Deborah asked. “David St. James? Here? In London?”
“Here in the ’ouse,” Cotter pointed out. “And looking ’is usual worse for wear. Where that bloke buys ’is clothes is a mystery to me. Oxfam, I think. You want coffee all round? They both look like they could do with a cup.”
Deborah was already heading down the stairs calling, “David? David?” as her husband said, “Coffee, yes. And knowing my brother, you’d better bring along the rest of that chocolate cake.” He said to Helen, “Let’s put the rest of this on hold till tomorrow. Will you be off, then?”
“Let me say hello to David first.” Helen switched off the fluorescent lights and trailed St. James to the stairs, which he took with a slow care necessitated by his braced left leg. Cotter followed them.
The door to the study was open. Within the room, D
eborah was saying, “What are you doing here, David? Why didn’t you phone? Nothing’s wrong with Sylvie or the children, I hope?”
David was brushing his sister-in-law’s cheek with a kiss, saying, “Fine. They’re fine, Deb. Everyone’s fine. I’m in town for a conference on Euro-trade. Dennis tracked me down there. Ah. Here’s Simon. Dennis Luxford, my brother Simon. My sister-in-law. And Helen Clyde. Helen, how are you? It’s been years, hasn’t it?”
“Last Boxing Day,” Helen replied. “At your parents’ house. But there was such a crush that you’re forgiven for not remembering.”
“No doubt I spent most of the afternoon grazing at the buffet table anyway.” David slapped both hands against his paunch, the one feature he possessed that distinguished him from his younger brother. Otherwise he and St. James were, like all the St. James siblings, remarkably similar in appearance, sharing the same curling black hair, the same height, the same sharp angularity of features, and the same eye colour that could never decide between grey or blue. He was indeed dressed as Cotter had described him: oddly. From his Birkenstock sandals and argyll socks to his tweed jacket and his polo shirt, David was eclecticism personified, the sartorial despair of his family. He was a genius in business, having increased the profits of the family’s shipping company fourfold since their father’s retirement. But one would never guess it to behold him.
“I need your help.” David chose one of the two leather armchairs near the fireplace. With the assurance of a man who commands a legion of employees, he directed everyone else to sit. “Rather more to the point, Dennis needs your help. That’s why we’ve come.”
“What sort of help?” St. James observed the man who had come with his brother. He was standing more or less out of the direct light, near the wall on which Deborah regularly hung a changing display of her photographs. Luxford, St. James saw, was extremely fit-looking, a middle-aged man of relatively modest stature whose natty blue blazer, silk tie, and fawn trousers suggested a beau but whose face wore an expression of mild distrust that at the moment appeared to be mixing with a fair amount of incredulity. St. James knew the source of the latter, although he never saw it without a momentary sinking of his spirits. Dennis Luxford wanted help in some matter or another, but he didn’t expect he’d be able to receive it from someone who was obviously crippled. St. James wanted to say, “It’s just the leg, Mr. Luxford. My intellect continues to function as always.” Instead, he waited for the other man to speak while Helen and Deborah made places for themselves on the sofa and the ottoman.