The Lords' Day (retail)

  She had spent the last hour in bed going through the papers in her ministerial box. Normally she liked to finish off her boxes at night but she had been out late at an official dinner and her schedule had been kicked out of kilter. Now, reading by lamplight, she was getting a headache – oh, God, not one of those migraines, she prayed. And her husband was proving more than normally useless.

  ‘Colin, what do you call this?’ she demanded as she looked at the tray he had placed beside her on the bed.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he shouted back from the bathroom.

  ‘You run a hugely successful commercial law practice, yet somehow can’t even manage to boil an egg properly.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s raw.’

  ‘Like your humour, my darling.’

  ‘Colin, I’ve got a million things on today . . .’

  ‘And, as you say, I’ve got a law practice to run,’ he said, emerging from the bathroom fully groomed and suited. ‘So I’m off. Put the dishwasher on before you go, will you? And have a wonderful day, dear.’ He didn’t even glance at her as he left.

  She pushed aside the tray in exasperation and returned to the paper. It was a complex, closely argued brief about the legal implications of putting on trial Daud Gul. He was but one wretched man, yet he had managed to leave the combined legal minds of Whitehall twisting like wind chimes. It had been such a glorious coup when the British had hauled him out of his mountain hidey-hole along the Afghan-Pakistan border, like something out of an old black and white film with Cary Grant in the lead; half the American Army had been trying to find the bugger for ten years while a ten-man SAS team had done the job in little more than forty minutes. He was now settled, hopefully uncomfortably, in a cell on Diego Garcia. They’d snatched him because Daud Gul led one of the most notorious terrorist organisations in the region, responsible for untold numbers of outrages against Western interests in that part of the world. At least, that was his reputation. Yet as they had begun to build the detail of the case against him, large flakes kept falling off it. Sure, he hated the Americans and the British, the Russians too, come to that, any one of the many white-faced tribes that had set their imperious feet upon his land over the last two hundred years, but that wasn’t enough to convict him. Disliking Americans wasn’t of itself a crime, not since George Bush had left the White House. There was certainly much wickedness for which Daud Gul was blamed, yet acts that had been done in his name were not, perhaps, done by him, or so the lawyers were arguing. Put him on trial for most of the outrages of which he’d been accused and they’d have trouble finding a single scrap of incriminating paper to prove his involvement, and he’d left no fingerprints on the bombs – ‘it would be like charging Christ with responsibility for the Inquisition,’ one of her senior civil servants had said. Idiot. They were all the same, those lawyers, like a wicker fence with a broken back, flopping first one way, then the other, as the wind blew. Willcocks knew what they had to do, they had to hang Daud Gul out to dry, but how? They couldn’t simply lock him up and beat the crap out of him; Guantanamo had given those devices such a bad name, and handing him over to local warlords would be like throwing a side of beef to a pack of starving dogs. So there was no other option, they had to put him on trial, but how – and where? Those pathetic ridiculous lawyers had been shuffling back and forth about it for months.

  Then she cried out. It was a migraine. Her legs had turned to ice, her head was beginning to feel as though it was being operated on without anaesthetic. And it was the State Opening, all those television lights and military barking. She knew she’d never get through it. She’d faint or do something foolish, get all flushed up and show some feminine weakness, and they’d never allow her to forget it. She couldn’t let that happen. They’d barely miss her in the crowd, her private secretary could compose some suitable excuse. As the pain began to take hold of her, Tricia Willcocks made up her mind; she wouldn’t go, couldn’t go.

  It was a decision that was to save her life.

  7.50 a.m.

  The three cleaners had made their way to their changing room in the basement. It was a dingy affair, containing mean, narrow lockers and grimy plastic chairs, far inferior to the other changing rooms that were reserved for the housemaids – the female cleaners who were responsible for the chamber of the House of Lords. Tradition decreed that the male cleaners were confined to the public places such as the stairways and toilets, economics decreed that they need not even be British.

  Without a word the men moved to their lockers, opening them to reveal a dozen more cans of Coca-Cola. A vacuum cleaner was brought over and the top taken off; they bent over it, like witches around a cauldron, filling the inside of the cleaner with the cans, treating them with unusual respect, their eyes dashing nervously between each other. So intent were they on their task that they entirely failed to notice the young policeman who wandered in from his security beat.

  ‘Hello, there, having trouble?’

  The policeman was young, optimistic about life, even a little idealistic, with a wife and baby back home. He was one of those who had time for others, always keen to help, not that the cleaners had asked him for any.

  ‘My Lord, what’s this, then?’ he muttered in puzzlement as he leaned over the cleaner.

  He was still trying to do his duty, reach for his radio, struggling to cry out a warning, even after they had put a knife through his neck and blood was streaming from his throat.

  Two

  8.30 a.m.

  HARRY – OR HENRY MARMADUKE MALTRAVERS-JONES, which was the name on his passport – was, as that passport implied, more than the man who initially met the eye, although that in itself was impressive enough. He was in his early forties but looked younger, and fitter; a lean frame with broad shoulders hidden beneath a traditional Jermyn Street suit and an easy, measured stride that suggested something very purposeful about him. The effect was underlined by the eyes, which were exceptionally bright and moved slowly, like an animal studying its prey from a distance.

  Harry had money, too, handed down from a father whose own inheritance had been blown away by the misguidance and complacency of the grandfather. What hadn’t been lost in the Great Depression had been siphoned off by death duties, so Harry’s father had gone out and rebuilt the whole shooting match again from scratch, taking particular pleasure in doing unto others in the City what had been done to his own father. It had left him with an unreasoning fear of the gene pool, that his own father’s weaknesses might be handed down to his son. From his earliest days, therefore, Harry had been pushed – through an English prep school, followed by an international elysee in Switzerland and interspersed with any number of exotic escapades in the company of his father’s inter national business colleagues and occasional mistresses. Before the age of sixteen he had surfed at Malibu, sailed off Dubai, learned to scuba in Borneo and lost his virginity to a considerably older woman in Hong Kong – and owed it all to his father’s arrangements. Yet it was entirely through his own efforts that he got a place at Cambridge. But the day Harry ripped open his acceptance letter, his father announced he was stopping his allowance; Harry would stand on his own feet, or not at all. Brutal. It was the father’s own theory of natural selection. Lucky, then, that Harry had won himself a scholarship, and made up the rest by sneaking off to do double shifts at weekends at McDonald’s. He had bumped into Julia one brilliant summer’s day, on the riverbank, nearly sending her flying and catching her only in the nick of time. After that, she had rarely left his arms.

  Harry always made waves, wherever he went. It was in the nature of the beast. But he never knew when to pick his battles. Perhaps this was the reason he had gone into the Army – that, and the fact that Julia was an Army brat. Yet he had a habit of making his superiors uncomfortable. He would fight his commanding officers with as much tenacity as he set about the Iraqi Republican Guard, so they kept moving him on, while his talent kept moving him up. Life Guards, the Airborne Brigade, and
eventually the SAS where they turned Harry into one of the most effective killing machines anywhere in the Army. The consummate warrior. That was why they sent him behind the lines during the first Gulf War, into a conflict where radios didn’t work, rifles didn’t fire, resupply rendezvous were missed and patrols inevitably got lost. It came close to being a fiasco. Some men came out of the desert and wrote books about their experiences; Harry went straight to his CO and had another blazing row. After that, his days were numbered. He was farmed out to the Staff College at Camberley and eventually sentenced to a spell at the Ministry of Defence, but word had got round. Harry was his own man. In military language, that meant he was disloyal. Not one of us.

  Shortly after, Harry’s life had taken a decisive turn when his father died. His heart had stopped while he was riding a mistress forty years his junior. He’d been warned by his doctor that such distractions could lead to unwholesome consequences but, like Harry, he was his own man. ‘Who the hell wants to die with his boots and breeches on?’ he was alleged to have replied. And the father who had cast out Harry at eighteen without a penny left him the lot, a thoroughly immodest fortune that gave him an independence of action matching that of his mind. It made Harry totally unfit for further duty in the army, a conclusion shared by his superiors, so he quit and went into politics, became a Member of Parliament. At first Harry had flourished, made his mark, climbed through the ranks until he had made it all the way to the Home Office as Minister of State. He had become a man who in some observers’ eyes was most likely to succeed, yet because of that, in the eyes of others he was a threat, and the combination of mind and money proved to be a highly combustible mixture in the underachieving world of Westminster. He was a man who insisted on seeing the big picture in a system that rarely looked further than tomorrow’s headlines. Another brilliant career blighted by envy and the doubts of his superiors.

  So Harry had returned to the backbenches – it was never clear whether he had jumped or been pushed – and instead of being driven in a ministerial car he now walked – or, as this morning, ran. He ran to pump adrenalin through his befuddled mind and to put as much distance as possible between him and his blazing row with Melanie. They had sat for the best part of two hours in his old kitchen in Mayfair, hurling accusations at each other. She had planned it all, he claimed – the separation, the divorce, next would come the settlement, everything calculated, like a shopping list. And she retorted that it was just that harsh, uncompromising view of the world that had forced her away from him. She said she was heartbroken, had struggled to make things work yet had met in return only indifference and emotional cruelty. Already she was practising for the lawyers.

  Yet it was their discussion about the baby that had turned anger to outrage. Pregnancy was the one thing she hadn’t planned, joining the club just as she was about to become an independent operator. So they had sat and flung clichés at each other, about a woman’s right to choose, a father’s right to be consulted, a child’s right to life, her right to control her own body.

  ‘So many fucking rights, Mel, where does it all end? You’d think no one ever did any wrong in this world.’

  ‘Climb down from your pulpit, Harry. Save the moral righteousness for the press releases.’

  ‘What has that poor unborn child done to deserve this?’

  ‘We don’t get what we deserve in life, aren’t you always telling me that?’

  ‘Mel, I want the baby.’

  ‘What, you’ll apply for visiting rights?’

  ‘I’ll fight you.’

  ‘Don’t threaten me, Harry. You want a fight – I’ll give you one that’ll crawl over every front page in the country. Can you stand that?’

  Somewhere inside his head an alarm bell was ringing, warning him to back off. She wasn’t the Republican Guard; he needed her. ‘Please, Mel. Think about this. Even if you want the bloody divorce, let us have the baby.’

  ‘I didn’t think you believed in one-parent families,’ she mocked.

  ‘Don’t, Mel. Please.’

  ‘Too late, Harry.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ he whispered, meaning it, no matter how trite it sounded.

  ‘Will be by Friday afternoon,’ she spat back.

  Friday. Two days. What was so special about Friday?

  She realised she’d gone too far, and tried to dissemble. ‘That’s when you’ll be getting the lawyer’s papers.’

  But he knew she was covering up. Friday afternoon. Marie Stopes. The day after tomorrow. That was when she was having the abortion.

  ‘You want me to beg?’

  ‘I’d love you to beg, Harry. It would be the first time I’d ever seen it, might even make me believe in miracles. But it won’t do any good.’

  ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ he said, and they both knew that was true. How could he forgive her, when he hadn’t begun to forgive himself? And for the first time in his life, Harry had to run.

  8.43 a.m.

  Baroness Blessing arrived early at the entrance to the House of Lords, as was her habit for the State Opening. On a day such as this, some of the most senior peers were assigned specific places, but for the rest of the pack it was a matter of first come and first seated. The baroness was a diehard romantic and loved the lavish colours and costumes that the occasion provided, so for nearly ten years she had defied the onset of arthritis and increasing age to be the first in line. She was a forthright figure whose old hips made her rock to and fro like an old barn door and she smelled vaguely of horses, and she was deeply affronted when she discovered that she had been beaten to the post. Her resentment grew as she recognised the culprit. Ahead of her, leaning on his walking stick by the ornate fireplace near the entrance to the chamber, was Archie Wakefield.

  They went back a long and, at times, deeply wounding way. Theirs was a clash not only of parties but also of personalities. When she had been a tough-minded and notoriously sceptical Foreign Secretary, he had described her mind as being like a laundry basket, where the dirty linen took up so much more room than the fresh. He also claimed that her politics were easily understood once you had read Mein Kampf in the original. He, on the other hand, was an unrefined former sailor in the merchant marine who had come up through the ranks of the working class, in the days when there was still a working class, and had difficulty understanding why she took his gentle humour so seriously. None of his colleagues took him seriously; he was a token son of toil in a party that had long since forsaken its working-class roots, while she had progressed partly through her sharp intellect and finely whetted tongue in a party that didn’t understand women and had tried to bury her energies in responsibility. In making her Foreign Secretary they had hoped that she would travel but, as they soon discovered, she didn’t much care for abroad, or for foreigners.

  She was now seventy-three, he was a couple of years younger, and while she had developed a face like orange peel after spending too long in the sun, he had recently come to fat with a swollen, very pink face and was totally bald. It gave him the appearance of a baby in a bathing cap. She disliked self-indulgence and thoroughly detested Archie Wakefield; she thought of turning on her heel and tottering off, but that would only hand him the victory. She had never been known to duck a fight and this moment, with this man, was scarcely the excuse to start.

  ‘Morning, duchess,’ he greeted in an accent that fell one side of the Pennines or the other, she couldn’t be sure which. And she wasn’t a duchess, merely a common or garden variety of peer, like him.

  ‘I always thought royal sports too rich for your appetite, Archie.’

  ‘Try anything once. Twice, even, if there are no cameras about.’

  ‘Ah, I’d forgotten you were sensitive to cameras. What was her name, that diary secretary of yours who enjoyed being photographed so much? Sonya, wasn’t it?’ She remembered Sonya all too well, and the photographs – well, anyone in the country who was older than thirty did. The resulting scandal had required Archie to resign from th
e Cabinet but it had made him a household name, and since the headlines he created had smothered media interest in a financial crisis, it had seemed only fair that he should be kicked upstairs to the Lords.

  ‘You ever get tempted, duchess?’

  ‘Not by you.’

  ‘Thank God. For a moment I thought you were pursuing me. Being seen with you at this time in the morning is just a little more than my reputation can take.’

  ‘You’re welcome to leave. I won’t be hurt.’

  ‘Then I’ll stay.’

  ‘You are the most studiously offensive man I have ever met.’

  ‘You’re wrong there, duchess. Never studied it. Never studied much at all, as you well know. My type of people didn’t get the chance to go to posh universities like your lot.’

  ‘Oh, spare me the working-class chip on both shoulders.’

  ‘If I have, it’s given me a balanced outlook. Which is more than anyone’s ever said about you.’

  ‘Dammit, man, why have you come? You hate the Royal Family, you hate the House of Lords, you’re always mocking us. You’ve never been anything other than a professional complainer, so what the devil are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘Curiosity, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘Never done it before. Thought I’d try it, while I’ve the chance.’ And he turned his back on her, not intending to be rude, but to hide the sudden stab of pain that ran like quicksilver across his face.

  9.00 a.m.

  The first major deadline in the official schedule had been reached, and a cordon was thrown round the Palace of Westminster. The last of the concrete barriers were hauled into position across the approach roads, and all checkpoints were manned by a small army of police in bullet-proof vests, many of them armed with Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbines. In Wellington Barracks the Sovereign’s Escort was tacking up, while at the Palace of Westminster the first party of the Queen’s Bodyguard was assembling to prepare for her arrival.