Whispers of Betrayal (11 page)

It was as McKenzie was positioning himself above the valve to begin his work that he thought someone was shooting at him. A ringing sound, so sharp it made his heart shudder. But there was no impact, no pain, in the end nothing more than a rueful Scully. He’d dropped the heavy metal valve key from the back of the van and it had bounced angrily off the pavement, its complaints echoing back across Horse Guards. Scully scratched his broad chin in apology. None of the watchers seemed alarmed. McKenzie got back to work.

The valve key was retrieved and slipped into place, locating over the square-pin spindle of the valve. A couple of turns and the water would die, but it wasn’t yet time. First they put a repair sleeve in position around the main, like a bandage to heal a wound, but for the moment it was left loose. Once the sleeve was in place they began to twist the valve key until the flow of water died. Then came the hole. Drilled to the size of a two-pound coin, through the cast-iron pipe and into the main. Normally with ten atmospheres of pressure behind it the pierced main would have sent a fountain of water gushing forty feet in the air, but with the valve turned off it did nothing more than dribble miserably.

It took only seconds to stuff the pellets – fifty of them – through the hole and into the main, a few seconds more to slide the sleeve over the wound and bind it tight. Then the valve was released. From the main they could hear the gentle hiss of water flowing once more under pressure. Mission complete. Downing Street was back on stream. It had been without water for little more than two minutes.

Within twenty minutes of arriving, the water van had left. Darkness had now fallen and the rattle of traffic along the claret-coloured road had subsided. A pelican called from the park as it settled down for the night.

Samuel Scott, reborn, would have recognized the scene instantly. In two and a half centuries, only the boldness with which protesters pissed up against the wall had changed.

It was, by consensus throughout the country, an outrage.

The second person in the country to discover this outrage was none other than the Prime Minister himself. At 6.45 a.m., with the gentle sigh of a blade being inserted between his ribs, a large manila envelope had been pushed beneath his bedroom door. It was the draft of the speech he was due to make the following afternoon to bankers and industrialists in the City. An important speech, and a first draft. A draft heavy on rhetoric and utterly impenetrable to detailed financial analysis. So a good draft.

For a few moments Bendall tried to fight the intrusion, refusing
to stir, allowing his weariness to wash over him, hoping for sleep. But he hadn’t slept properly for months. Perils of the trade.

There was another reason why he resisted opening his eyes. How he hated this bedroom, stuck under the eaves of Downing Street with its low ceilings and floral overload. His wife had no eye for simplicity, no sense of order, so every corner was crammed with ideas plundered from different pages of the catalogue. Frills, flowers, frump, a cross between Laura Ashley and Peter Jones-on-the-run. Tentatively he prised open one eye. Directly above him, from the canopy above the kitsch four-poster bed, a large red rose stared at him like some hungry triffid. He groaned. Time to rise.

He was sitting in his dressing gown with his second cup of black coffee, two sugars, checking the draft, when the commotion occurred. His pen was poised above a proposed sound bite rendered, he had to admit, with considerable skill by his speechwriters. It was an appeal to the Dunkirk spirit, rousing national passions amongst tabloid editors and, by implication, suggesting that it was the City and its unpatriotic money men who were in large measure responsible for this latest crisis. But he hesitated. Hadn’t he, when he was Leader of the Opposition, said something very rude about ‘the sickening sight of a Prime Minister trying to embrace the Dunkirk spirit in the way a common drunk reaches for a lamppost’? He was debating the memory spans of most political journalists when his concentration was shattered by what appeared in the room before him.

In the doorway leading from the bathroom stood his wife. She was naked. Her navel was heaving. It was an awesome navel, a route map of the march of time, a detailed historical record of childbirth, surgery, charity teas and, ultimately, lack of resolution. It was also the colour of a stagnant pond. As was the rest of her.

She stood like some demented and melting Teletubby, her whole body streaming with garishly coloured rivulets, shampoo suds in her eyes, her hair hanging limply like the tattered rigging of a sinking ship. A tide of glistening green slime was spreading on the carpet around her feet.

And she was screaming her head off.

‘OK, let’s get on with it. Before we start on the detail, let’s get a feel for the mood of the Parliamentary Party. Chief Whip?’ Bendall turned to Eddie Rankin, seated at the end of the Cabinet table. Bendall preferred formality at Cabinet, particularly emergency meetings such as this one. He’d hated all the Tom-Dick-and-Harriet first name nonsense favoured by his predecessor. Cabinet wasn’t about bonding, it was about beating the system – and beating Ministers – into some sort of identifiable shape. Nothing personal, it was simply business. Use their Christian names instead of departmental titles and it gave them nothing to hide behind, made all defeats a personal slight. It started feuds, extended rancour, and there was no need to cause unnecessary personal antagonism, not when the farmyard of political life was already awash with enough of the necessary kind.

Rankin chewed his cheek. ‘Well, Prime Minister, let me start by saying it’s not all bad news. The attack was clearly aimed at you personally and it’s done wonders for your own ratings. Nothing like it for getting the troops to rally round.’

Bendall raised an eyebrow and a wry smile, the first of the day. ‘I shall begin to think you might have organized it yourself.’

‘If I’d thought of it, I might have done. But there may be trouble ahead. The lads want to know why it was so easy to mess with the water supply of the most sensitive piece of real estate in the country. There are worries they may be targets, too. They’re refusing to water their whisky. There’s a danger of our majority getting swept away on a flood of neat alcohol.’

Rankin was an indispensable tool for the Prime Minister. He was calm, cool, with a gentle sense of humour that helped to defuse many difficult situations, but this was a no-win meeting, there were bound to be casualties along the way. Bendall was not to be deterred.

‘Before we all find ourselves drinking in the Last Chance Saloon, perhaps we can catch the bastards concerned. What about it, Home Secretary?’

Noel Hope, the Home Secretary, had carried two great burdens throughout his political life. The first was the middle name bestowed
upon him by his dull-witted parents.

His middle name was Osmond.

N.O. Hope.

An unfortunate label to be stuck with. One of God’s little gifts to political rivals and graffiti artists. His majority was regularly three thousand less than it ought to be, simply because throughout every campaign the opposition were utterly merciless. They simply took the piss out of him.

Thanks, Dad.

The second burden was less apparent but struck still deeper. At Oxford, he and Jonathan Bendall had been contemporaries. The best and the brightest. And it was Hope who initially had shown the greater intellectual and sporting prowess. It was Hope who would gain both the better degree, and the football blue. But they also vied for something far more intimate, the presidency of the Union, and over the three years of head-to-head encounters in the debating chamber it was Bendall who, through rhetorical flair and a compelling meanness of wit, won every encounter. Every damned one.

Something was missing in Hope, those sinews of steel that drag a man through hardship and out the other side. It left him as Bendall’s silent whipping boy, both of them knowing that he hadn’t that necessary quality ever to take Bendall’s place, other than by the most happy of accidents. So Hope’s career in Cabinet had on the one hand been spent in dread of once more being turned on by Bendall, and on the other in silent prayer that the bus with the Prime Minister’s name on it might be waiting just around the next corner.

‘First, Prime Minister, let me start by offering a measure of reassurance,’ Hope began, sounding considerably more confident than he felt. His briefing on this was absurdly thin. ‘Forensics at Aldermaston have already established that the substance used in the attack was nothing worse than food dye. Not in the least harmful. I’m sure your wife will make a complete and rapid recovery, Prime Minister.’

So much he knew. It wasn’t the food dye that had sent her off to
hospital under sedation, although the shock had been unpleasant enough. No, what had pushed his wife to the very edge was the fact that, as she stood in the middle of their bedroom, wobbling, screaming and completely vulnerable, the door had burst open and in had charged McGivens, a personal protection officer, brandishing a Glock 9mm and pointing it in her direction. This had sent her into hysterics.

This was to prove unwise, for as her screaming redoubled a second and yet a third protection officer burst upon the scene, at which point Mrs Bendall had taken the only sensible course of action available to her and fainted. It was rumoured that McGivens, too, had required treatment for shock.

‘Food dye? That reassures you? Then how easily you are comforted, Home Secretary. They could have put any damned thing into the system. Why, even a truth serum. Think of it. The consequences could have been devastating.’

Bendall smiled, performing, fighting woes with wit, and around the table they all responded dutifully, very British, until he sliced through the humour.

‘It could have been anything! The most monstrous substance known to man. Typhus. Anthrax. You talk of reassurance and God knows I’ve tried, Home Secretary. I’ve looked at it every way I can, but I’m damned if I can find a single shred of reassurance in any of this. My wife could be dead.
I
could be dead. The whole of our system of government paralysed.’

Hope now knew he was on trial. ‘I believe we are all very conscious of the potential seriousness of what has happened, Prime Minister. I think I speak for all your friends around this table in expressing our relief and joy that it did not turn out to be more serious.’

His friends around this table? Bendall had few true friends, and none in this room. His leadership qualities had been based not on intimacy but in no small part on his campaigning abilities, constructed around a richly decorated voice that expressed things, even nothing, with exceptional eloquence. His phrases were well seasoned, capable of turning the dullest of statements into a worthwhile sound bite. But the words were merely tools, and while they were being employed the eyes remained expressionless. It was said
that the closer you got to Bendall, the less you understood him, although, it had to be admitted, such things were never said very loudly, and not while you still had ambition.

Hope cleared his throat. ‘Sadly, there is little the food dye can tell us about the perpetrators since it is readily obtainable and won’t be easy to trace. What we do know is that the action was carried out in little more than twenty minutes last evening by four men using a stolen water contractor’s van. It seems they temporarily interrupted the water supply and introduced the dye into the system.’

‘Slowly,’ Bendall instructed, holding his hand up like a traffic policeman. ‘Pass that by me once more. A van was parked right outside Downing Street? Poisoning the water? And no one checked?’

‘Indeed they did, Prime Minister,’ Hope responded forcefully, making the best of his meagre defences. ‘A vehicle identification check was carried out by a member of the Diplomatic Protection Group.’ Then, somewhat less positively: ‘However, although the van was stolen, it was apparently using false plates. The computer in Swansea gave it a clean bill of health.’

‘Ah, so it was the computer’s fault. Now I understand.’ His expression was so stiff it might have been chiselled. The eyes were arctic.

Hope retreated to his second line of defence. ‘A telephone call was made to the Parks Police to say that there was a pressure problem, the water mains would have to be checked. Confirmation was faxed through. While the work was being undertaken, a Parks Police constable engaged one of the men in conversation …’

‘Conversation, good. Never let it be said that the British bobby lacks courtesy. Didn’t anyone think to offer them a cup of tea or a guided tour?’

Hope cleared his throat once more. This was just like Oxford. He could feel the heat rising beneath his collar, his head dropped and his eyes danced around his briefing paper like a condemned man invited to inspect the noose. He needed an escape route. He didn’t like what he was going to do next, but the ditches along the road to survival are filled with one’s friends.

‘Sadly, the Royal Parks Constabulary is not the responsibility of the Home Office.’ A brief shuffle of papers. ‘It falls under the auspices of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.’

It was as though Hercule Poirot had turned round in the sitting room and pointed an accusing finger at his own maiden aunt. All eyes swivelled upon the hapless Secretary of State for Culture, a sensitive individual whose idea of mayhem amounted to nothing more than raising entrance fees for museums and attending an occasional meeting of the Arts Council. He was way out of his depth, and looked as if he might drown beneath the ripples on the brown baize tablecloth. The Home Secretary sat back in his seat, the mark of Judas on his moist brow.