The House

by Tom Watson

  ‘Just fucking google it.’ Owen raises his eyebrows at her and she hunches her shoulders. ‘I’m sick of people telling me something can’t be true when the evidence is sitting right in front of them.’

  ‘Elsie, let me fill Owen in on those details,’ Christine says soothingly. ‘You tell the story. Tell Owen what your brother wanted from the government.’

  Owen sees the muscles in her jaw work as she gathers herself. ‘He needed start-up money to recruit specialist programmers and rent the remote capacity, and asked for a one per cent share of the fees the NHS charges to corporate clients to store and protect the data. He reckoned the system could be up and running in a year and his old professor backed him on that.’

  ‘And what did he hear?’ Christine prompts her.

  Elsie reaches over the table and opens one of the brown files and rifles through it. Owen catches Christine’s eye and points at his watch. Just wait, she mouths at him. Five minutes.

  Elsie gets the letter out of the file.

  ‘Here.’

  Owen reads.

  Dear Dr Collins,

  Many thanks for your submission of the twenty-ninth of last month and the supporting documentation. This is an excellent initiative and we are delighted to have the opportunity to work with you. We will be discussing your proposals in detail over the coming weeks in the department and following up with the project sponsors. Should you have any questions about this process, please contact my advisor on the following number.

  Owen is surprised. The letter is signed by the Secretary of State himself, and that means that they weren’t just interested, they were very, very eager. They would have run the idea through their own digital teams and got a thumbs-up too before sending this. Dr Victor Collins was no crank in a shed.

  Elsie waits for him to finish reading, look up. Her expression is of intense focus, rage just held back.

  ‘For a week he was on the phone to NHS and government people all day, every day. Then everything stopped. No more calls. No one at the department would speak to him. A fortnight after he started getting the silent treatment, some guy turns up at my parents’ house offering to buy the company and all the work Victor had done so far for three-quarters of a million quid. He turned them down. Then the threats started.’

  ‘What sort of threats?’ Owen asks.

  A bus passes outside, making the windows rattle slightly. It startles her and her eyes flick round the room. She doesn’t want to tell him this bit. Owen’s been in politics long enough to see when people are picking their words very carefully.

  ‘Victor was a genius. I mean a real genius. Technically I’m one too, but he always left me in the dust. But he had problems. Didn’t fit in at university, drank. Some drugs.’ She adds something Owen can’t hear.

  ‘What was that, Elsie?’ he asks.

  ‘I said, he was committed!’ she snaps. Then the story comes in a flood, like she’s ripping off the plaster. ‘He tried to kill himself – had a breakdown. While he was doing his PhD. But he’d got better. Got his doctorate working from home back north. Mum and Dad looked after him, his company was doing really well and he was healthy! But this sleazeball said he either had to sell the company and all the intellectual property to him, or the whole story of Victor’s breakdown would be shared with any future investors. He wouldn’t get funding for anything in the future. Start-up stopped dead.’

  ‘Did he sell, then?’ Owen speaks gently and feels himself being scanned for signs of scepticism.

  ‘Yes. He had to.’ She is calmer now she’s got that out. She strokes the edge of the table, following the patterns of the fake grain with her close-cut nails. ‘Two months later he got in contact with his Cambridge professor and was told the whole idea had been rated “unviable” by the new owners and shut down. He couldn’t take that. He walked out of the house and we didn’t hear from him again. The police found his car near Marsden Grotto.’

  ‘It’s on the coast,’ Christine says, giving Elsie a moment. ‘The police found his body on the beach.’

  Elsie’s fingers are starting to scratch at the patterns in the wood. ‘I’m just glad they found him. Not any of the kids and families who play there. Like Victor and me used to. Can’t believe the idiot didn’t think of that. But then, I can’t believe he gave up either.’

  She pulls over another file and yanks out a business card. ‘This is the guy who made the offer and the threats.’

  ‘Can I take this?’ Owen asks.

  She nods. Waves her hand across the table. ‘All this is for you.’

  He glances at the card – he doesn’t recognise the name or the company – and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Spell it out for me then, Elsie. What are we saying?’

  She starts organising the folders into piles. ‘These are copies of what I’ve found. Some of it is from the internet. Lots of stuff about what happens to the NHS data, or what can happen when it’s repackaged or sold. Look, it’s pretty simple. The companies who are buying the data now, some of them anyway, don’t want the digital keys that take them to one little stack of goodies. They want the whole store. Full and free access to the vault. Victor came along with his idea and someone told these bastards they were about to get their supplies cut off. They couldn’t have that. They used his medical records to blackmail him about his past then buried his work. So they could keep selling and reselling the data. They as good as murdered him.’

  She thrusts the stack of folders towards him and Owen gets to his feet. ‘That clear enough for you?’

  Her expression is hostile. She walks past him and opens the door to the hall; he notices her hands are shaking. Nerves perhaps, or exhaustion. She won’t look at him.

  ‘Yes, that’s clear,’ he replies and gets up. ‘Thank you for speaking to me.’

  Christine picks up the folders, afraid he won’t, and he notices her mouthing at Elsie now. Well done, and I’ll call you.

  He hails a cab on his phone and this time Christine is hurrying to keep up with him. Two minutes, the app says.

  ‘Owen?’

  ‘I’m going back to work.’

  ‘But what do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ He turns on her. ‘I think if there was a shred of proof of any of this Elsie would be talking to a lawyer, not you. I’ll bet my last fiver those threats were made to Victor only and that the company have denied them. I bet somewhere in there is a detailed analysis of why his idea would never have worked. I bet his last breakdown involved him telling people that men from the government were after him. I will bet my fucking life on the fact there is a lawyer’s letter in there telling Elsie to keep her mouth shut or be sued for slander, and a dozen from the Department of Health regretting the fact the scheme proved impractical and top computer experts pointing out “issues” with his methodology. Am I close?’

  Christine’s expression tells him everything he needs to know.

  ‘That woman is ill! And you’ve sucked me into this conspiracy bollocks! Christine, it’s a good story but there’s nothing to back it up.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘That’s why you haven’t gone to the leadership with it. You’re using me as a stalking horse. Bloody hell, Chris.’

  He waves at the approaching car. Checks the number plates match.

  ‘Owen!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If there’s nothing there, then why are they scared? Why are they scared enough to set the Chronicle on you? Why are they so nervous about answering a simple bloody question about a data security consultation? If they are golden and this is just bollocks, why are they scared? If it was a bad idea, why did they buy the company?’

  He gets into the car and closes the door, but he doesn’t have an answer for her.

  That evening his neighbour knocks on his door. A cardboard box on the welcome mat with JUST READ THEM, OWEN written on it in black sharpie.

  ‘Your girlfriend dropped them round,’ his neighbour says. Young man in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt but
a professional haircut. ‘It’s my week working from home.’

  ‘She’s my ex-fiancée actually.’

  The man’s face twists with a series of uncomfortably British expressions of sympathy and confusion.

  ‘Ah. Not a bomb in there, is it?’

  Define bomb. Christine is blowing up Owen’s career with it. He bends down and picks up the box. It’s heavy. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No worries.’

  Owen closes the door with his foot and sets the box on the worktop, then glances at the business card on the work surface next to it. The company it names was sold to a company with a different name just before Christmas, a month after Victor Collins’s suicide. The name on the card leads to a Linked-In profile showing a white guy in a suit and tie with a cherubic face, but the page is full of dead ends – a list of companies with one-page websites filled with boilerplate copy about investment in innovation. Another ghost. Owen wonders if this man even exists. The photo is probably culled from the biography of some failed real-estate broker. There is something sub-prime about the image. Damn, Christine is beginning to infect him with her conspiracy thinking.

  Owen opens the carton. The files are neatly arranged: phone records, bank records as well as thick folders of correspondence and research. The Cambridge University letter of support, a draft contract of appointment. He pulls out the bank records and checks. There it is in black and white: one payment of £350,000, then another three weeks later of £400,000. So whatever else Victor imagined or invented, the money was real.

  Chapter 16

  Chloe Lefiami arrives in the Central Lobby at three minutes to nine. Ian goes to fetch her.

  While Phil waits for her to be shown up, he glances at the side Cabinet where he keeps a bottle of a decent blended whisky for long evenings at the House. He tries to wake up hopeful, but more often than not when it reaches this creeping quiet at the end of the day, all one can really say is that you got through another twenty-four hours.

  The MP from the constituency neighbouring Phil’s popped in during the afternoon, twirling his iPhone between his stubby pink fingers, to tell him the Secretary of State’s people were briefing against Phil ‘in a sowing-the-seeds’ sort of way. Those loyal to Number 10 were still hanging back, waiting to see who emerged victorious. Phil thought this Secretary of State was a paranoid apparatchik when he arrived in the job eighteen months ago. Seems he was right.

  ‘They are nervous about the second-wave PPE failures that are bound to come out in the inquiry. The current Secretary of State can’t lay that one at his hallowed predecessor’s door, and they are afraid the “mistakes were made” line has worn pretty thin,’ his informant tells him.

  Phil thinks of Toby Dale’s threat to make him the sin-eater for the whole department. That would be perfect for the Secretary of State. They might not want to do it today after the toxic glow of his fuck-up at the despatch box was replaced by the golden halo of five thousand Twitter likes on his speech to that student. But it might work tomorrow or the next day. He is on thin ice. And this investigation is like hearing another crack and groan as the waters shift below him. It’s reminding them all about his past. Damn it, it should remind them what he did for them too!

  Phil returns to another of his briefing documents fat with boasts of the PPE now available to the NHS. All well and good, but Phil is still haunted by the portraits of the doctors and nurses who died in those first weeks. Applauding them wasn’t enough. A monument isn’t enough. Someone has to stand up and say sorry. We were panicked, in denial, scrambling. We tried, but in a Cabinet taught by the last election that just claiming success was as good as achieving something, we thought optimism and an upbeat attitude would carry us through. We’re doing better now. Forgive us. How can we move on from giving stuttering, evasive answers without owning up to our faults?

  Phil rubs the bridge of his nose, then realises it is the same gesture Owen always made when he was thinking.

  A knock at the door, and Ian shows Chloe Lefiami in without waiting for an answer. She looks around with frank curiosity: the high windows, panelling, gruesomely patterned green and cream carpet. They bow, with the light smile the British still wear when they catch themselves avoiding shaking hands. Phil decides against the whisky. This is a formal meeting and should be treated as such.

  Ian fetches water bottles and puts them on the coffee table and they settle. Chloe and Phil are opposite each other in the firmly stuffed armchairs with Ian on the sofa against the side wall between them like an umpire. His iPhone on the coffee table and recording. Lefiami notices it, but makes no comment, then wipes down her bottle and opens it. Avoids the glass.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ she says.

  ‘I’m happy to help you in any way I can, Ms Lefiami,’ he replies.

  Her lips twitch into a tiny smile: a ‘we both know that’s not true’ smile.

  They talk for a while about the shared house, the 2008 conference. Lefiami seems well informed. She’s obviously spoken to Owen, Christine and Georgina. Her questions are calm, concentrating on the factual. No gotchas yet.

  ‘Jay believed Owen McKenna resented his success, Minister, his advantages – is that right?’

  The question surprises him. Phil frowns. Takes a moment, peers into the undergrowth of his memory. ‘Yes, I heard him say that. I thought he was talking rubbish and said so.’

  ‘Did you resent him?’

  ‘No.’ Phil is firm. ‘We met at Oxford, after all. And I enjoyed my job at the time, in spite of my growing frustrations with the party. I had no reason to resent Jay.’

  ‘Wasn’t easy for you to get to Oxford, though, was it?’ she says without looking up.

  Phil bristles. ‘Straight up the M40 or the train from Paddington. Not that hard.’

  Now she looks at him. ‘I think you know that’s not what I meant, Minister.’

  He passes his hand over his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t feel tired.

  ‘Ms Lefiami, I was very lucky and my life could easily have been very different, but I’m not ashamed of my background. I didn’t resent Jay, or the support he had from his family, his school. I thought he was weaker for it. As a candidate for political office and as a man. He had, of course, to deal with plenty of casual racism.’ He holds out his hand as if Lefiami is about to jump in, though she shows no sign of doing so. ‘And that’s terrible. But I think that it meant he never bothered to think about the societal advantages he did have. That irritated me occasionally, but we were young men living in a house together at a very high-pressure moment in our lives. We were bound to irritate each other. I didn’t resent him, or even give it much thought. And this was before we all got used to becoming intersectional thinkers. Jay arrived in London looking and sounding like a future star, but when things went wrong he fell apart.’

  She doesn’t nod, continuing to take her notes, and one of her braids falls over her shoulder. She flicks it back into place. Phil clears his throat.

  ‘Is it worth saying, Ms Lefiami, out loud, that I never plotted to do damage to Jay’s career? Never slandered him? When the opportunity arose I tried to give him the best advice I could. We were friends. But I was beginning to break with my party at that period and that consumed most of my thoughts. For better or worse, I was distracted.’

  She writes for a few seconds on her legal pad.

  ‘Always worth saying that aloud, Minister. Thank you. I would like to move on and ask you about the leak of the draft minutes of the meeting between the Treasury team and the PSGWU team in early 2009. Am I right in saying things had been improving for Jay? Over Christmas? He was being spoken of as a candidate again, wasn’t he? Then came the leak story.’

  ‘And the wrath of Kieron Hyde,’ Phil says. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘I have his version of events on record.’ Ms Lefiami would make an excellent politician.

  ‘Kieron Hyde was a bully. He represented all that I thought was worst on the Labour left.’

/>   ‘Did you know him well?’ Lefiami asks, her tone pleasant, as if they are making small talk before some charity dinner in the City. When such things happened.

  Phil shakes his head. ‘No, I occasionally saw the ripples coming out of his office. I didn’t like his people, other than Georgina. And of course Georgina talked about him. Obviously, she didn’t feel the way about him I did. She always spoke about him warmly, but I can’t say I was convinced. And it was him, without a doubt, who really destroyed Jay’s immediate prospects in the party. Hyde’s reasons may have been sound, or perhaps Jay was just his victim of the week. But it was him who delivered the killing blow that spring.’

  Her pen moves smoothly across the page. She is his personal recording angel.

  ‘Now, the minutes that were leaked to Charlotte Cook. You know her quite well, I think?’

  ‘Yes.’ Phil straightens in his seat. ‘I do. Everyone in politics does, on both sides of the House. She was an established political reporter even then.’

  ‘But you knew her better than the others by the beginning of 2009, didn’t you, Minister?’

  Phil feels his stomach churn with the misery and betrayal of that time.

  ‘I don’t know what you are insinuating, Ms Lefiami … ’

  ‘I’m not insinuating anything, I’m asking a question.’

  Maybe Ian was right. This might have been a mistake. ‘I didn’t leak those minutes. Jay did. Jay did it and it destroyed him.’

  Chapter 17

  Tuesday 24 February 2009

  Phil lets himself in to the house and the first thing he hears is Jay. Jay shouting. He shoves the door closed behind him and follows the voice to the kitchen.

  Georgina is backed up against the door and for a foul, frightening moment Phil thinks Jay is shouting at her. But no, he is on the phone.

  ‘Maybe Owen leaked it just to make himself look like a saviour then!’ Jay spins round as he hears Phil come in. His face is flushed and he has his phone-free hand in a fist pressing against his temples. ‘I didn’t give Charlotte Cook shit. Fine, I think Kieron and all his team are a bunch of wankers—’ Georgina leans against the door and covers her face with her hands, ‘but I didn’t leak. Ask her! Ask her if it was me!’