by David Laws
“Phew, look at all that detail. Nothing if not thorough.”
“Look carefully at the other names.”
McIntosh looked, then stabbed a finger. “Her!” he said.
Harry looked. Marianne Corbishley, Ministry of Defence clerical officer, code name Apfelbaum, apple tree. “Anyone else?”
“Well, of course, he’s no surprise. Dr Leonard Gifford. The star of the network. The man who was going to bring down capitalism.”
“How could you be so wet? Where do I find this Gifford?”
“St Jude’s, senior lecturer, history. But you won’t get anything out of him. Code name Mandelbaum, almond tree. Slippery bastard.”
“You said it.”
Toby was silent for a while, then said, “I didn’t do anything for them, you know, didn’t make a move. To be frank, no opportunity. King of the balance sheets. What use was I to them?”
Harry tasted the last of his coffee and found it increasingly difficult to sustain his anger with Toby. Old friendships would out. The man’s regrets, his apology, his readiness to help all conspired to soften Harry’s accusative frame of mind. Once again, he was reminded of his father’s attitudes, true friendship being one of life’s great treasures and forgiveness a necessity. Never condemn; search instead for understanding. Did his father really say that? Harry wasn’t sure.
He hauled himself upright in his chair. “OK, let’s go back to this Corbishley woman,” he said. “What can you tell me about her?”
“She was one of us.”
“Really? At Leipzig?”
Toby nodded. “The year before you. Stuck-up bitch. Always knew everything. Clever-clogs and a braggart. I don’t mind sticking one to her.”
Harry looked quizzical. “What did she do to you?” When there was no reply, he chuckled. “Sounds a touch personal to me.”
Toby looked away.
Harry said, “You tried it on with her? Got the bum’s rush?”
“Too hoity-toity for the likes of me. A snob. Stand-offish. Got Big Daddy to warn me off.”
Harry chuckled. “And what’s he like?”
“Slick bastard. Some kind of legal eagle. Lots of attitude.”
“Fearsome?”
“Bulky figure in a pinstripe. Jet-black hair, receding hairline, used to getting his own way.”
“And…?”
“Said I should stay away from his precious daughter, otherwise I’d find myself in the dock subject to all manner of legal restrictions. Injunctions for stalking and harassment and all sorts. I was an unfit person to know saintly Marianne.”
Harry nodded and wrote the address carefully in his notebook, vowing to be especially careful of aggressive lawyers. His recent taste of the libel courts had taught him that.
Chapter 8
26 days to go
It was a cheap motel. Basic facilities, soulless, impersonal but safe. Stefan was settled, fed and happy with his iPad in the small bedroom, and Erika felt relaxed for the first time in days. The three of them were headed for London so Harry could chase down this Corbishley woman. He was confident, he’d told her, that he had enough material to convince his former colleagues at The Globe to agree to his scheme.
She nodded distractedly while watching the news on a tiny TV in their room, and at its conclusion sat up and asked him about Exit Day. “When is it? And will they throw us out… I mean, people like me, from Europe?”
“Not if I can help it!” Harry managed a reassuring smile. “Highly unlikely.” The formal date, he told her, was 29th March, but the real question was: would the Prime Minister then sign the country in or out? Or half in and half out in the name of a transition period? Or, due to the anarchy of the weeks leading up to it, would the deadline be missed altogether, plunging the country into a form of no man’s land?
But by this time Erika had lost interest. For her, the trip to London was tolerable just so long as Harry didn’t lose focus on her. She was counting on his protection, but she was also determined to keep him focused on her needs. In the past she’d been happy to feed him morsels of her broken childhood, a story that had kept him constantly attentive – clearly the best way to keep him hooked. He thought he was collecting valuable material for some post-Stasi non-fiction epic. She smiled to herself, amused at the situation. Harry was an inveterate story-seeker and she had a spider’s web of exotic relatives to mine and embellish. Her stories seemed to trip off her tongue, and he had such a hunger for the detail. She’d watched him vacuum up every word and it was an enormous relief to realise she didn’t have to pretend to be a heroine. He wanted the dirt. Fine! So she told him she was an unofficial informer at the sports club and at her gym, and not all of that was a tall story. Few people could refuse to be an IM. Few would later emerge from the East smelling sweet.
Harry had been working at his book project for as long as she could remember. It even had a title, she remembered, After the Fall, and it kept him intrigued. It also kept him off other more dangerous ground, but sometimes the memories she retrieved for him came with such a painful intensity she felt herself perilously close to the brink. She realised then she had been speaking these thoughts aloud, and when he asked her again to describe her relationship with old Sepp Schilling she could feel herself back in that dingy little farmhouse room, could see the shape of the man sitting poker-faced in that straight-backed wooden armchair, and still felt herself raw with incredulity and hurt that a father figure, even a stepfather, could be so callous towards his daughter. He’d even threatened to lease her out to his drinking buddies. She might have been young, but Erika already knew what that meant.
“Everybody hated me,” she said. “My mother, father, brother – all did their best to make my life a misery. I was the odd one out, foisted on them from someplace else. They did their damnedest to belittle me, to cut me out of every treat, every nice thing. The boy, my stepbrother, he went on all the trips, the school outings, had the uniform, the footballs, the skates, the nice shoes. I had home-made clogs. Rough ones made by the old man. I didn’t get shoes like the rest of them…”
Harry looked up from his notes. “Can I include this in the book? Is that OK?”
“If you want,” she said. There was a sullen set to her mouth. “I don’t mind shaming the bastards – but mind! No clues to where I am now, not even a mention of England. I don’t want to be found.”
Harry nodded, a shade perplexed. Then he asked, after a pause, “But they must have fed you and looked after you…”
“I got the scrag end of every meal. Potato soup with a few carrots floating in it. The boy got second helpings; so did the old man. They made no attempt to hide their contempt – wouldn’t look at me, ignored me, like I didn’t exist. When the old man did say anything about me it was to call me ‘that little sewer rat foisted upon us, haven’t we enough troubles, we can’t support a useless mouth…’”
“Why a useless mouth? You were a schoolgirl.”
“And after school, shall I tell you my routine? Collect the eggs, clean out the chickens, see to the farm dogs, the horses, the stables, clean the old man’s boots…”
Harry put down his pencil and shook his head. “I can hardly believe anyone could be treated like this, still less a child.”
She nodded. “Looking back on it,” she said, “I can hardly believe it myself.”
“Any more?”
“Scrub down the quarry tiles in the kitchen, help with the laundry and stoke the old boiler. And one day…” Erika felt herself near to tears. “When I cleared out the ashes they must have been too hot because they fell out of the bottom of the bucket and went all over the living-room floor.” She shook her head. The aftermath of this particular domestic disaster was still a powerful memory. Then she sat up and almost spat. “With parents like that, and those Stasi bastards, I was trapped from an early age, don’t you see? Never had a chance. Never a fai
r crack at life. Me, a mere young girl. Damn that old man! And damn the Stasi!”
“The Stasi?” Harry queried.
“My horrible brother was one.”
Harry’s eyebrows shot up. Was there no end to this woman’s misfortunes? “That’s just incredible,” he murmured, scribbling down the last of his notes. He looked at her with the expression of enormous sympathy she knew so well. Then he glanced suddenly at the clock and exclaimed, “Tomorrow!”
It was then she knew the spell was broken.
“Must call in at the office,” he said, “but I’m not exactly their golden boy of the month.” He grabbed his phone and, a little shamefacedly, began scrolling down the numbers. “Need to set something up,” he added. “Calling up the one good contact I’ve still got left.”
Barnie Lufkin’s workaday coalface was Westminster – the corridors of the House of Commons, its tearoom and the Thames terrace. That’s where the lobby correspondents did their listening and probing, but Lufkin’s real base was the bar of Pimlico’s Paradise Club. Plenty of politicos there too, waiting to be mined and cultivated. Just at the moment when Harry Topp rang, however, he’d been sitting on a bar stool brooding over his intro for that night’s political commentary. After their short conversation he pocketed his phone and stared at the five shiny steel beer pumps and their garish labels and improbable names, and then at his own morose reflection in the mirror just below the expansive selection of spirits and optics, at the photos of old London on an adjoining wall and at the chalkboard announcing tonight’s menu delicacy, a Swiss-style saveloy salad, and wondered how best to sweeten the sour nature of his boss, Heffernan, the unremittingly antagonistic news editor at The Globe.
You couldn’t really be surprised at the man’s coolness towards Harry, he reflected. When Harry had been on the staff he had not only landed the paper with a lost libel suit; he put all his rivals on notice with an outright declaration of ambition. “I’ll give myself three years max to make it to the top,” he’d said out loud. And the day he was promoted to take over from Heffernan for the late-night shift, he’d banged the back of the big man’s chair, demanding, “Move over, I want to get started right away.” That, and the kerfuffle over Harry’s insistence on twenty-four-point bylines, did not go down at all well.
“You know what I think about him,” was Heffernan’s immediate response when Lufkin made the call the next morning.
“Yes, but it’d be in our own interest to listen to what he’s got to say. Sounds as if he’s got something worthwhile. Don’t blank him out.”
Heffernan brushed that aside. “What’s your line tonight?”
“Anxiety on all sides of the political divide. Keyed up for the next big announcement from Brussels.”
A loud and derisive snort. “Is that the best you can do?”
Chapter 9
Monday 4th March 2019; 25 days to go
Harry’s departure from The Globe was still an open wound. His fist clenched involuntarily at every recurring memory of his humiliation two years before. He’d loudly proclaimed he’d rather dine out on a diet of raw swede and live grubs than revisit the shiny black palace in the Docklands, after he’d been barred at the front desk by the gateman who told him, “You don’t work here any more.”
Strange it was, then, how circumstance changed his resolve. Swishing upwards in the lift once again, past flashing images of the Thames far below, was now a necessary move in his quest to take forward the Blue List story. Maybe even his way back into the mainstream – a comeback, perhaps?
He surely had enough material – the list plus Toby’s confirmation and inside information – to get a proper deal out of the paper. He wanted their co-operation to take the story forward, to lay out the exposé in irrefutable stages, and to give himself a place back in the journalistic sun.
Still, walking into that computer room was a bitter moment, impossible not to relive his day of disgrace when they’d taken him off the payroll without even a semblance of a farewell. It had been a great fall: from Assistant Editor (Investigations) to Mr Nobody in a blink of the editor’s eye. None of the traditional printers’ banging-out ceremony for him, the crashing of metal objects on desks and floors. Instead, just a lonely walk in silence down the back stairs, followed next day by the barred gate.
Heffernan was still the news editor, one wary eye on Harry and the other on the big TV screen above the news desk, a hand still clutching a phone and not sounding as if he expected to be overly interested in whatever goodies Harry might be offering. “And what can we do for you?”
“Got a big one for you.”
“Oh, and what might that be?”
Harry looked around the faces seated at the long line of desks. Banks of phones, computer screens, notepads, papers, coffee cups, kettles, half-eaten cheese sandwiches and packets of choccy biscuits – the usual news-desk detritus. Curiosity stirred, ears tuned to what he might say. Eager to pick up a tip of their own, perhaps, ever a den of story thieves.
Harry pointed to the TV. “Don’t know why you bother with that thing,” he said. “Always twenty-four hours behind the print. Whatever would they do without the agencies and the newspapers to plunder? Never knowingly broken a story in their lives.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Heffernan. He’d heard the rant before. “But they’re doing OK today, right?”
All eyes went back to the screen: coppers with shields, coppers with horses, and a huge crowd outside the French Embassy in London.
“Something’s going to kick off there very shortly,” said Heffernan. He looked down and sighed. “So, your little pot of gold is…?”
Harry pointed to one of the glass-fronted side offices into which interested faces could only stare. “A quiet word,” he said.
Reluctant to be dragged away from the screen, telephones and his eager acolytes, Heffernan shuffled to an empty office. On the way they passed another glass cubicle, inside which the editor could be seen in his trademark red waistcoat and pink tie. His thumbs were tucked high in his breast pockets and he wore the sort of smile that said, Don’t bring that man anywhere near me.
Once inside, Harry did the talking, did his best to drag Heffernan’s attention away from yet another TV screen. This time stones were being thrown from the crowd. Thousands were laying siege to the embassy in a simmering protest against the Brexit talks in Brussels that had hit a very French kind of snag.
“Look,” the news editor interrupted before Harry had finished his pitch, “you’re wasting our time. Can’t you see?” He pointed at the screen. “It’s all about Brexit now. Nobody cares any more about spies. They’re yesterday’s fare.”
“What?” protested Harry, incredulous. “Not when one is a member of the Government? The Home Secretary, no less?”
“You’re never going to make that one stick,” Heffernan said. “For a start, the proprietor loves Tresham. Won’t have a word said against him.”
“He will if Tresham’s exposed.”
“You’d need cast-iron evidence. You of all people should know that. Absolutely rock solid. And before you think of going across the river with this…” Here Heffernan glanced to the window in the direction of the opposition tower block on the other side of the Thames. “Just remember, they’ll be stuck with the same legal problem as the rest of us.”
Harry drew in a breath to speak, but Heffernan cut him off. “That list of yours won’t do it. They’d kill you in court and politicians stick together, you know that. Didn’t your tussle with Musgrave teach you anything?”
The Musgrave case – would he ever live it down? It stuck in everyone’s throat. Harry had gone after Sir Maxwell Musgrave-Taylor MP, known locally as the £5,000-a-day taxicab for hire. Musgrave boasted he could get you a meeting with any Government minister you wanted. Harry had him brokering a secret deal to get the regional railway company out of a loss-making franchise without having to s
hell out millions in penalties. Hearsay evidence, however, didn’t cut it in court and The Globe went down for half a million in damages.
“Look, take my advice,” Heffernan said. “If you want in again, find a new wrinkle on Brexit.” Then he pointed at Harry’s list, lying open on the table. “But this – this spy stuff – nobody’s going to risk going off at half-cock again. Another possible libel case? Another five hundred grand or more? Forget it! Nobody will touch it – or you! Surely you realise that? Face it, Harry, you’ve got a half-million price tag hanging round your neck.”
Chapter 10
Tuesday 5th March 2019; 24 days to go
Harry was sitting in front of Scobie’s fifty-two-inch TV screen watching all the gloomy stuff coming out of Brussels, his mind only half focused on the fiasco of the Brexit talks, the other half still cast down by his rejection at The Globe. The attitude of his former colleagues in London had been a blow. How could they be so blind? He sighed. Now he had just one unresolved question to consider: carry on, or give up?
He, Erika and Stefan had been back at Blackthorpe Grange for some hours. She had performed another of her many about-turns. She’d done the shops in Cambridge, suffered an all-too-brief stop in the capital, and was soon fed up with living out of a car and a suitcase. Her son had complained about “being shunted about”, and what the boy wanted was Erika’s gospel.
Harry shifted his position in Scobie’s glossy leather armchair and indulged in a bout of self-doubt and depression. Where had he gone wrong? Up to now his life had been about scandals – uncovering them, exposing dodgy companies, money-launderers, tax avoiders, outfits that bent safety regulations, pharmaceutical profiteers and people who set out to cheat and overcharge the NHS. He’d been on a constant lookout for the offbeat story and scorned the easy ones that fell out of the office diary and into a lazy lap.
His greatest fear in life was failure. Of his time on this earth passing without ever achieving anything of significance. Of being a nothing, a nobody, an also-ran. He needed the drive of ambition to make his mark. A trite line from some snippet of homespun philosophy came to him; about the many hard knocks that life delivered and what counted was how you bounced back. Where did that come from? Were these really the words of his father, who had died in Harry’s infancy, well before conscious memory? These little homilies, he knew, were from the lips of his widowed mother, who had imbibed and repeated and, Harry suspected, embellished the originals. She’d venerated Harry’s father into near sainthood, and Harry had consciously, or perhaps subconsciously, been trying to live up to the man’s hero status ever since. So, his inner voice urged him, get up off your backside and fight!