“You know what,” Sergei moaned. “A whore.”
“Ah, but my dear boy, that is the whole point of the matter. You are my little whore.”
I hate you, thought Sergei, twitching against his lover’s fingers.
He was on the point of orgasm when, without warning, Sir Edward Manning released him.
“All right,” he said, to Sergei’s surprise. “If it makes you happy. Next time we’ll do it at mine.”
It does make me happy. Very happy indeed.
“Really?”
“Really.” Sir Edward blew him a kiss. “Don’t forget to turn the lights out when you leave.”
Later that morning, rested and showered and smelling of Floris aftershave, Sir Edward Manning sat at his desk rereading his new boss’s file.
Alexia De Vere (née Parker), MP North Oxfordshire. Born April 8, 1954. Married 1982 Lord Edward, Stanley, Ridgemont De Vere. (Title renounced 1986.) 2 children, Roxanne Emily (1983), Michael Edward Ridgemont (1985). 6 years Trade and Industry. 2009–present, Junior Minister for Prisons.
There was little in the new home secretary’s file to excite interest. But that was exactly what interested Sir Edward Manning. By the time somebody arrived in his office (like all senior civil servants, Sir Edward Manning considered the Home Office to be his fiefdom. Ministers came and went, but Sir Edward and his staff remained permanent fixtures. It was they who actually ran the country), they usually had an MI5 file as thick as the Koran and a lot more salacious. Sir Edward had served under five home secretaries, Labour and Conservative, and all five had had more rattling skeletons in their closets than in the average London plague pit. Nothing had ever been proven against any of them, of course. It was Sir Edward Manning’s job to see that it wasn’t, one of the few areas in which his interests and those of his political masters were aligned. In Westminster’s version of Snakes and Ladders, only the snakes got to the top, men and women who sloughed off scandal effortlessly like eels in a sea of oil.
Alexia De Vere was different. Her file was so thin it was practically a pamphlet. Up until last year, when her sentencing reform bill had made headlines in all the wrong ways, Mrs. De Vere had been as good as invisible. There was nothing at all in her records prior to her brief stint as a Liberal MP’s secretary as a young woman. Since then, an uneventful few years in local politics had been followed by a spectacularly good marriage to a wealthy British lord and a free pass into the uppermost echelons of the social and political establishment. There were two children, one of them a dud. (Roxanne De Vere’s rumored suicide attempt over a broken love affair was the only hint of color in an otherwise storybook-perfect family life.) A modestly successful political career had no doubt been boosted by Mrs. De Vere’s personal friendship with Henry Whitman, the new prime minister. (Something else that bothered Sir Edward Manning. What on earth did the nearly sixty-year-old Mrs. De Vere have in common with the young, newly married head of the party? There must be a connection, but Sir Edward was damned if he could see it.)
But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate why Alexia De Vere had been plucked from the lowly Prisons Ministry and appointed to the position of home secretary.
Where are the dead bodies, the enemies she’s seen off along the way as she shimmied so silently up the greasy pole?
Where are the land mines, the tangled web of unexploded bombs for me to dodge and weave my way through?
Alexia De Vere’s file was not interesting for what it contained, but for what it omitted.
She’s keeping secrets from me. But I’ll find her out. If I’m going to protect this office and our work, I need to know who she is, and what the hell she’s doing here.
“Good morning, Edward. You’re in early.”
A lesser man would have jumped. Sir Edward Manning merely closed the file calmly, slipped it into his desk drawer, and composed his hawklike features into a smile.
“Not at all, Home Secretary. It’s almost eight o’clock.”
He had told his new boss to call him Edward and to dispense with the title, but he found it irritated him every time she did so. Perhaps it was the grating, pseudo-upper-class accent. Or perhaps it was simply because Alexia De Vere was a woman. Sir Edward Manning had worked for women before, but never by choice. Discreet about his own sexuality, the truth was he found women quietly repulsive.
“I wish you’d call me Alexia.”
“I know you do, Home Secretary. If I may say so, you look a little tired.”
Alexia caught a glimpse of her reflection in the office window and winced. He wasn’t kidding. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, her skin dry, and every line on her face was etched visibly deeper than it had been a week ago. They say high office ages you. Maybe it’s starting already.
“I had a difficult night last night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Somebody showed up at my house. A man. He wanted to talk to me, but by the time I got down to the gatehouse he’d gone.”
Sir Edward frowned. “You don’t know who it was?”
“Not for sure, no. But I have my suspicions.” Alexia filled him in briefly on the Sanjay Patel case, and the threats she’d received afterward. “We did get some footage of him on tape, although the quality’s awful.” Pulling a silver disc out of her briefcase, she handed it over.
“Excellent. I’ll send this directly to the Met. We’re scheduled for a review of your security arrangements anyway this Friday at three. Can it wait until then?”
“Of course,” Alexia said brusquely. “The whole thing’s a distraction anyway. I’m not worried. Now let’s get to work.”
He heard voices in his head.
Some were voices that he recognized, voices from the past.
His best friend.
His wife. Ex-wife.
His daughter.
His daughter’s voice always calmed him, made him smile. But never for long. Because then there was the voice.
Sometimes he thought it was the voice of the Lord, full of righteous anger. At other times it sounded more like the devil: distorted, sinister, inhuman. All he knew for sure was that it was the voice of fear. It told him terrible things, and it demanded terrible things from him. It was a voice that must be satisfied, must be obeyed. But how could he obey if he couldn’t even get to see her?
Alexia De Vere was untouchable.
“Did you say something, dear?”
Mrs. Marjorie Davies eyed her latest paying guest suspiciously. During her twenty-five years running a bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds, Mrs. Davies had seen all sorts of oddballs come through her door. There was the couple from Baja California, who’d brought crystals down to breakfast every morning and arranged them in a circle around their sausages and beans, “for positive energy.” Then there were the French queers who’d refused to pay the bill because they’d found a spider in the bath, not to mention the born-again Christians from Canada who’d ordered and eaten four full cream teas (each!) in a single sitting. But this latest chap was more than just eccentric. He was downright strange, talking to himself and wandering around the house at God knows what time of night, spouting religious claptrap. This morning he’d come down to breakfast in a stained T-shirt, and he clearly hadn’t shaved. Mrs. Davies wondered, belatedly, whether he might actually be dangerous.
“I’m sorry,” the man mumbled. “I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.”
Definitely a nutter. Mrs. Davies held up her teapot like a weapon.
“More Earl Grey?”
“No, thank you. Just the bill, please. I’ll be checking out after breakfast.”
Good riddance.
Mrs. Davies had noticed the Didcot-to-London railway timetable wedged under the toast rack and had hoped as much.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said on autopilot. “Have you enjoyed your stay in Oxfordshire?”
The man frowned, as if he didn’t understand the question. “I need to see Alexia De Vere.”
“I beg you
r pardon?”
“I said I need to see the home secretary!” He banged his fist on the table. “She’s expecting me. We’re old friends.”
Marjorie Davies backed away. The man returned to his breakfast, and she rushed out to reception, quickly printing out his bill. His suitcase was already in the hallway, a good sign. As soon as he finished eating, she returned to the table.
“I think it’s best if you leave now. We take Visa or MasterCard.”
She was surprised by the firmness in her own voice. But she wasn’t about to spend another minute in the company of a card-carrying lunatic. Certainly not in her own home.
The man seemed unfazed. He signed the bill, took his suitcase, and left without another word.
After he’d gone, Mrs. Davies looked at the signature on the credit card, half wondering whether she’d hear the name again on the news one day, linked to some awful crime or some plot against the government.
Mr. William. J. Hamlin.
Hamlin.
She would have to remember that.
Chapter Eleven
Prison life suited Billy Hamlin.
It was a bizarre thing to say, but it was true. The regularity, the routine, the camaraderie with the other inmates all suited Billy’s easygoing, follow-along character to a T once he got used to it.
The first year was the toughest. Having been transferred to a facility closer to his father, Billy was devastated when Jeff Hamlin died suddenly of a heart attack just three months into his sentence. Billy tried to tell himself that it wasn’t the stress of his arrest and trial that had destroyed his father’s health, but deep down he knew the truth. Guilt gnawed at him like a dog with a bone.
Meanwhile, Leslie Lose, Billy’s lawyer, would leave messages from time to time about an appeal. But as the weeks passed, then the months, and finally the years, with no date set, Billy resigned himself to the fact that he would serve his full sentence.
Twenty years was too painful to contemplate. Even fifteen with good behavior was a bitter pill. Billy Hamlin decided to focus on the one positive he had left in his life: Toni Gilletti.
When I get out, Toni will be waiting for me.
It was a sweet, addictive fantasy, and Billy Hamlin clung to it like a life raft.
When I get out of here, Billy told himself in his cold, lonely bunk each night, I’m gonna make love to Toni every night, five times a night. I’m gonna make up for lost time.
He fell asleep dreaming of Toni’s soft, sensual teenage body and woke up with the smell of her skin in his nostrils, the soft caress of her silken blond hair on his chest. As the years rolled by and he heard nothing from Toni whatsoever—no letters, no visits, no calls—he made up a series of stories to explain her absence.
Her father was keeping her from him.
She was traveling, somewhere remote—trekking in the Andes maybe—trying to put him out of her mind until they could be together again.
She was working, quietly saving money for the house they were going to buy together when Billy got out.
As the fantasies grew more ludicrous, even to himself, Billy stopped talking about Toni with his fellow inmates. Instead he compartmentalized her, packing her away in a mental box to be opened joyously in secret, once the lights were out and he was alone. Sustained by these romantic dreams, by day Billy determined to get the most out of prison life, enrolling in science and mechanics classes and working long hours on the prison farm, which he enjoyed. In normal circumstances child killers were considered the lowest of the low in jail, ostracized and often physically assaulted by fellow inmates. But there was something about Billy’s kind, relentlessly cheerful nature that the other men all warmed to.
The bottom line was that no one believed Billy Hamlin had murdered Nicholas Handemeyer. His trial had been a travesty.
The day Billy walked out of East Jersey State Prison, after fifteen years inside, nobody was waiting to greet him. His father was dead and he had no other close family. There were a few people he knew from back home, acquaintances he could call. But he realized with a pang of fear that all of his real friends were behind him, on the other side of the penitentiary’s huge, locked steel gates. Billy Hamlin wasn’t ready to face the outside world, not on his own.
So he did the only thing he could.
He went looking for Toni Gilletti.
Billy’s first stop was Toni’s parents’ mansion in New Jersey. He’d never been there before, but he’d long since memorized the address, and he’d seen pictures of the place in a fancy Dream Homes magazine.
The maid who opened the door was kind. Her brother Tyrone had spent eight years in jail for petty theft, and she knew what a long stretch inside could do to a man’s soul. But she told Billy he had a wasted journey.
“Old Man Gilletti sold this place eight years ago. My people, the Carters, been here since then.”
Billy bit back his disappointment.
“Do you know where the Gillettis moved to?”
“I don’t. Back to New York City, I think. But Walter Gilletti lost a lotta money when his business went broke. There were debts, to partners, to the bank. That’s why he sold up here. They was in real trouble.”
Billy remembered Walter Gilletti as the arrogant, bullying, cock-of-the-walk figure who’d been so dismissive toward his father at the trial. Toni’s dad was not a man who would have coped well with such a huge reversal of fortune.
With a little research and a few calls to some of Walter’s ex-employees, Billy found the Gillettis’ new home, a clean but modest apartment in a midrent part of Brooklyn. When he got there it looked as if he’d had another wasted journey. An ancient, wizened crone in a dirty velour leisure suit answered the door.
“What the hell do you want?”
It was only when her mean eyes narrowed and she rasped, “Billy Hamlin? Are you out already?” that Billy placed her as Toni’s mother.
“Sandra?”
“Mrs. Gilletti to you, boy.”
Jesus Christ, thought Billy. She’s aged thirty years. More.
“I—I was looking for Toni,” he stammered. For some reason, the old woman made him nervous.
“You and the rest of the world.” Sandra Gilletti cackled grotesquely. Billy recognized the rattle of emphysema in her chest. He hoped the old adage wasn’t true, about all girls eventually turning into their mothers. “Toni’s gone, kiddo. And she ain’t coming back.”
For a hideous moment Billy thought she meant that Toni was dead. In fact, Sandra Gilletti explained, her daughter had taken off shortly after the trial, informing both her parents coolly that she wanted nothing more to do with them and that she was starting a new life.
“Just like that,” the old woman wheezed. “After twenty years of love and affection, she just ups and leaves, and Walter and I never hear a peep from her again.”
Billy cast his mind back to his one, magical summer with Toni and the long conversations they had had about her parents. Love and affection had not been words he had ever associated with the Gillettis. He remembered feeling sorry for Toni, and grateful for his own, warm relationship with his father.
Mrs. Gilletti went on. “Of course, Walter lost everything. You probably know that. Died of a stroke just months after we moved in here. Left me without a penny, the tightfisted son of a bitch.”
Billy looked past her into the clean, comfortable apartment. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but he would have killed to have a place like that to come home to.
“You seem to be doing all right to me, Mrs. Gilletti.”
Sandra Gilletti’s upper lip curled. “That’s because you have low standards. Probably why you fell for our Toni in the first place. She never came back for the funeral, you know. Never even sent flowers. Heartless bitch.”
Billy left the apartment feeling deeply depressed. In prison, at least he’d had his fantasy, his little box of dreams to keep him going. Now even that was disintegrating, rained on and destroyed like everything else in his life.
A
nd not just his life. The Gillettis had clearly lost everything too. It was as if everyone connected with that awful summer in Kennebunkport had been cursed. Billy might have been the one sent to jail, but everyone had been punished. Everyone had suffered in their own way. Billy tried not to think of the Handemeyer family, and their never-ending grief. Had they been torn apart by this too? He wondered what had happened to them after the trial. Had his imprisonment given Senator Handemeyer the closure he craved? Somehow Billy doubted it.
For the next few months Billy searched tirelessly for Toni Gilletti, but it was like trying to catch a ghost with a butterfly net. He even spent a thousand dollars of the small amount of money his father had left him on a private detective, but it was to no avail. Toni’s poisonous old witch of a mother was right.
She was gone. And she was never coming back.
It wasn’t until a few months later that Billy Hamlin recognized the emotion building up inside him for what it was: relief. He had let go of the dream, let go of his parachute, and discovered to his astonishment that he hadn’t plummeted to his doom after all. In fact, he felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
Walking out of jail had not made Billy Hamlin a free man. But giving up on Toni Gilletti had. At last he could begin to build himself a life.
He’d qualified as mechanic in jail, and spent the last of Jeff Hamlin’s money buying a stake in a run-down body shop in Queens, in partnership with an old buddy from high school, Milo Bates. Milo had followed Billy’s trial on TV and had always felt bad about what had happened to him. Still living in the Hamlins’ old neighborhood, Milo was now married to a sweet local girl named Betsy and the two of them had three kids. The Bates family took Billy Hamlin under their wing, and it was their friendship more than anything that helped turn Billy’s life around.
It was Betsy Bates who introduced Billy to Sally Duffield, the woman who was to become his wife. Billy and Sally hit it off immediately. Sally was a redhead with incredible ice-blue eyes and skin like an old-fashioned porcelain doll. She had a small waist, large breasts, and a full-throated, infectious laugh that could fill a room. She was kind and maternal and had a steady job as a legal secretary. Billy wasn’t in love with her but he liked her a lot, and he wanted children. So did she. There didn’t seem any reason to wait.
Sidney Sheldon's the Tides of Memory Page 8