The Queen's Cipher (49 page)

It is only when Hamlet understood the full scale of the deception in the Danish court that he could fulfil his destiny. Before his sword fight with Laertes, the prince defied augury, saying fatalistically, ‘If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’

As death’s icy fingers reached out for Hamlet, the Botox lady began to sob and grabbed her tour guide’s hand.

The sound of drums, trumpets and tramping feet heralded the triumphant entry of Fortinbras, Denmark’s new ruler by right of conquest. This ceremonial ending was often cut out of the four hour play robbing the audience of its important last lines. ‘Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage,’ the Norwegian king commanded. ‘For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally.’ The Danish crown normally descended from father to son but, on this occasion, the Danish parliament had decided otherwise.

At its very end Hamlet became a play about a deserving prince who had been robbed of his royal birthright. Without the ghost’s intervention, might not Hamlet, like Bacon, have settled for less – the ‘kingdom of the mind’ perhaps? The lights came on and elderly bodies rose stiffly from their seats to put an end to this speculation.

6 JULY 2014

He switched off the bedside light and closed his eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come.
New
Atlantis
had taken little more than an hour to read but its intriguing content would not let him rest, dancing around in his subconscious, demanding a reaction. Written in the sixteen twenties, this slight novella offered a utopian vision of the future. But it was also a passport to a truly amazing mind.

A shipwrecked crew land on the island of Bensalem somewhere west of Peru and are welcomed by its inhabitants who live in peace and harmony under the benign guidance of Christian scientists belonging to a research college called Salomon’s House where nature is observed, experiments carried out, and knowledge used for the betterment of society. Welcome to the New World, a land of religious and intellectual freedom where man had conquered the evil in his nature. The author of this hopeful fiction, Sir Francis Bacon, had played a leading role in the creation of the British colonies in North America, particularly in Virginia and Newfoundland, and had high hopes for what might be achieved there. Pipe dreams, a cynic would say.

But what was truly astounding about
New Atlantis
was the writer’s clairvoyance. In running through his mythical island’s scientific achievements he foresaw manned flight, cars, submarines, television and the cinema. Bensalem had ‘instruments which generate heat only by motion’ (the dynamo) and various ways of ‘producing light’ (electricity). It had ‘sound houses’ in which ‘we represent small sounds as great and deep’ (amplification) and ways of giving back ‘the voice louder than it came’ (the loudspeaker). There were ‘means to convey sound in trunks and pipes, in strange lines, and distances’ (telephone wires) and ‘engines for multiplying the winds’ (aerodynamics). They possessed ‘mechanically made silks, linens and tissues’ (rayon and nylon) and ‘glass of divers kinds, among them some metals vitrificated’ (plastics). Scientists prolonged life by using ice baths and made ‘observations otherwise unseen in the blood and urine’ (the microscope). The people of Bensalem could ‘imitate birds’ and had ‘a degree of flying.’ The island was full of ‘carriages without horses’ while anchored to its shores were ‘ships without sails’ and, for those who voyaged in these futuristic boats, the promise of ‘scarlet oranges’ as ‘an assured remedy for sickness at sea.’

All of these prophecies had come true, save one. A house in which smells and tastes could be multiplied and distributed had yet to be invented. Will we soon be transmitting smells, Freddie thought idly, as he began to drift off to sleep. Perhaps it had happened already. He’d read a newspaper story about a pricey laptop computer that was emitting a smell similar to cat urine.

He awoke again with a start. What was Bacon’s final prediction, the one he put in his will. He got out of bed and powered up his own sweet-smelling laptop. ‘For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.’ This tormented, largely misunderstood genius had also forecast that he would be better appreciated in the future and, to some extent, he had been right. Bacon was praised and imitated in his own century, idolized in the eighteenth century, and then roundly debunked by later ages who pilloried him as a corrupt politician, a second-rate writer and a scientific quack. Had there ever been a more divisive figure in history?  Loved and hated, admired and despised in almost equal measure with the bad press more or less coinciding with when Bacon was first championed as the concealed author of Shakespeare’s plays.

This blackguarding of a man’s reputation seemed manifestly unfair and, in the small hours of the morning, the timorous Freddie reached a solemn conclusion. Time to forget about college politics, Cleaver’s intriguing and the mysterious bone breaking burglar. Natural justice demanded it. He would write that book with Strachan after all. He was seeing the actor on Tuesday. After much heart-searching he was ready to commit to the project.

And to hell with the consequences!

7 JULY 2014

She gasped as he entered her, raising her hips from the bed to improve her partner’s trajectory. Across the street in an unlit empty room, a camera began to click. The woman’s infidelity recorded at five frames per second to be pinned to a report commissioned by her suspicious husband.

Standing in the shadows, the private detective wondered, not for the first time, why unfaithful wives seldom drew their bedroom curtains. Watching the playback on his Nikon D200 he was impressed with the picture quality. The 18mm to 135mm zoom lens combined with the edge-to-edge sharpness of the image sensor to create extraordinary high-resolution photos of the amorous couple. The woman possessed a hint of heft around her thighs, sufficient to take her lover’s weight as he moved above her. The detective replayed their union frame by frame, noticing the fluent urgency of their actions but without the slightest sense of desire.

He glanced at his watch and yawned. It would soon be dawn. Ronan O’Rourke, owner of Woodstock Enterprises, Private Investigators and Risk Management Consultants, stood up to go. O’Rourke wasn’t his only name. He sometimes called himself Sean Brennan, another long dead IRA man, but his real name was Michael Kelly and he was bored with his job.

A cool wind was blowing as he left the stakeout. Kestrels swooped in the thermals between the high-rise flats. Advertising handouts and sweet wrappers danced along the street, resting and twirling on the breeze, but he hardly noticed their aerial ballet. He had switched off. His only emotion was one of relief on finding his Mazda MX-5 where he left it. Car theft was at an all-time high in Birmingham.

An hour later, Kelly was exercising his leg muscles on a cross-trainer in his home gymnasium. Sweat dripped from his hair as he donned earphones and switched on the 3D surround sound system.  The music was dark and ominous. Above the earthy rumblings of the tubas and contrabass clarinet came the hammered strings of a cimbalom and the thrilling bass voice of John Tomlinson, perfect as the man-bull, torn by his dual nature. Kelly pounded away on the machine, eyes closed; enraptured by Harrison Birtwistle’s blood-soaked opera about a monster imprisoned in a labyrinth and fed on human sacrifices.

The critics had been divided when
The Minotaur
was first performed at Covent Garden, some finding it too Wagnerian for their taste, but he had no such qualms. It was a hugely powerful and exciting work. He loved its emotional overload: the heights and depths of passion that could be achieved when singers and musicians combined effectively.

His nights at the opera, and there had been many, had taught him something else too, self-evident in retrospect; that musical drama was a morally neutral way of exploring the hidden recesses of the soul. Every great opera had a fatalistic attitude towards good and evil, treating them merely as different turnings. The Minotaur was a viable operatic figure precisely because his human feelings clashed with his instinct for destruction. He was at war with himself. Kelly could understand this.

Once the beating kettledrums had signified the slaughter of the Minotaur, Kelly switched off the machine. After showering, he slipped on a bathrobe and made a strong cup of black coffee before tackling the pile of paperwork waiting for him in his study. There was no thought of bed. He could go days without sleeping.

A letter from an insurance company topped his in-tray. The firm had commissioned surveillance of a disability claimant and wanted to see the shots he’d taken of the allegedly crippled man ten-pin bowling at his leisure centre. A report and final invoice were due on Jessica Braithwaite, the pert fifteen-year-old who had shacked up with a black saxophone player in Camden Town. Kelly had visited Delroy in the cellar bar where he played, told him he’d been a naughty boy, broken a couple of bones in his fingering hand to drive the message home and, hey presto, before you could say Sidney Bechet, young Jessica was back in Leamington Spa studying for her CGSE’s.

He emptied the remaining contents of the tray onto his desk. Piles of paper to be waded through, case after case, each following a similar pattern of spying and urgent resolution. They were the tea leaves in which he could read the haphazard story of a fifty-year-old man with a popping knee who made a living out of chasing missing children, philandering spouses and insurance fraudsters.

And that was it. The last report typed out and placed in an addressed envelope. Kelly sighed with relief. The job had taught him patience if nothing else. But patience was for saints; cunning was the devil’s quality. And without cunning he wouldn’t be here now.

His eyes strayed to the old newspaper cuttings pinned to the wall. Curling and brown with age; they chronicled the exploits of an IRA terrorist who had enjoyed legendary status in the bad lands of Northern Ireland. He couldn’t resist reading about his former glories. In those days his code-name was ‘The Engineer’, the motorcycling bomb-maker who had planted incendiary devices all over Ulster before crossing the Irish Sea to make even more daring raids on the City and London Docklands. In those days urban guerrilla warfare was a sexy subject. ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ was Fleet Street’s motto and he had done his best to keep the tabloids happy. He particularly liked The Sun editorial denouncing him as ‘a cold-blooded, remorseless psychopath.’      

He had quit at the right time but, sweet mother of Jesus, how he missed the adrenalin rush that went with bomb making. He knew almost everything there was to know about explosives: how to grind potassium nitrate, carbon and sulphur into a fine black powder; whether tin or aluminium made a better bomb casing and what the burning rate was for a solid propellant. He also knew how to wire up his devices and was brave enough to deliver them to target. He had tinkered with his bomb designs, seeking incremental improvements – ‘more bang for the buck’ – in what was a fast developing technology. His mind was disciplined and logical. Terrorism, he believed, was all about hijacking public attention by wreaking unexpected havoc and for many years this policy worked in Northern Ireland. Then the politics went sour.

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was the natural watershed. With Sinn Fein’s politicians scenting power and the Provisional Army ready for a ceasefire he had offered his services to an aggressive splinter group that refused to sell out to the British, but a series of botched Real IRA jobs had culminated in the Ballymena bombing. Although far from squeamish about the taking of human life, Kelly had always tried to attack infrastructure rather than people; judging the destruction of buildings and power supplies to be a better propaganda tool than mangled bodies. Of course, there was often collateral damage. No military operation, however well planned and executed, was risk free, particularly in crowded towns and cities, and he knew his bombs had killed and maimed civilians. But nothing he had done before prepared him for what happened in Ballymena. That had been the turning point in his life.

The date was etched in his memory. August 8th 1998. He remembered standing on a hillside outside the town in a cold fury watching the carnage through a pair of field glasses. Something had gone badly wrong. Murdering so many Saturday shoppers made no sense whatever. The bomb he had left in the motorcycle pannier was supposed to serve a symbolic purpose, not to take lives. What had happened to the advance warning? The police had cordoned off the wrong part of town, shepherding people towards the blast instead of away from it. Something wasn’t right. He kick started his bike. It was time to cut and run.

Years later, he came to realise how lucky he had been. A British double-agent had infiltrated the Real IRA hit team and had phoned in the bomb’s whereabouts, only he had been fed wrong information by a suspicious colleague who was more interested in unmasking him than in causing civilian casualties. The agent had been executed on the spot and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British government had procrastinated ever since to conceal the knowledge that they were given advanced warning of the Ballymena bombing and had done nothing to stop it. Only last year the Northern Ireland Secretary had rejected calls for a public inquiry on the grounds that the ongoing investigation into the bombing was better handled by the police ombudsman. Who was she trying to kid? It was, Kelly thought, a typical British cover up.

Swivelling athletically in his chair he pressed keys in the desk’s lighting console to illuminate the back wall. A huge blow up loomed out of the darkness. It was of a frightened boy’s face as he tried to lift a heavy iron girder out of a bomb crater. This picture had haunted Kelly ever since he came to England. It appeared in newspapers and magazines, followed him on the side of buses and even turned up in the National Portrait Gallery where it was hung as ‘an eloquent testimony to the crowning obscenity of waging war on innocent civilians.’ Not that he had much time for such intellectual abstractions. Even so, the photograph had had an effect on Kelly, forcing him to deal with a new emotion: not so much guilt, he didn’t think he was capable of that, more a kind of moral obligation. He had watched the boy grow up to become an Oxford don and had helped him on a couple of occasions.