Redlaw - 01

by James Lovegrove

  “Oops,” Slocock said. “Boat’s rolling a bit. Not got my sea legs.”

  Lambourne dismissed it with a wave of his cigar. “Accidents happen. It would take a lot to spoil my mood right now.”

  “Been a good evening, hasn’t it? We really appreciate your donation, Mr Lambourne, all the more so when it’s given with such good grace.”

  “Oh, that’s not why I’m smiling,” said Lambourne. “Couple of hundred thou—I sneeze that kind of sum into my handkerchief. No, I’m smiling because I’ve just inked a deal to supply almost every SRA in the land with cow’s blood. The PM gave it the go-ahead this morning. I’ve taken what is basically a waste product in the cattle slaughtering process and turned it into a marketable commodity. If that isn’t spinning straw into gold, I don’t know what is.”

  “Congratulations, Rumplestiltskin.” Slocock didn’t intend it to come out quite so sarcastic-sounding, but unfortunately it did. The coke often impaired his ability to gauge the tone of his remarks. He was conscious that he might have just upset a very generous benefactor. Cheques, until cashed, could always be taken back and torn up, couldn’t they? Fuck.

  In the event, Lambourne seemed amused rather than annoyed. “Well, now that you’ve found out my true fairy name, I can’t hold you to your promise to give me your first-born, can I?”

  Slocock laughed, perhaps too loudly, brittle with relief. “I don’t have or ever have any intention of having a first-born. Kids only slow you down. How can you hope to achieve anything with a couple of rug rats clinging to your ankles? It’s like trying to run a race with a ball and chain attached to both feet.”

  “A man after my own heart. It’s Slocock, isn’t it?”

  “Giles.” He wasn’t fond of his surname. It, too, was a bit of a ball and chain.

  “Heard good things about you, Giles. Your star’s on the rise. Research assistant for now, but a likely candidate for nomination soon. A young man who’s going places. You remind me of myself at your age. Of course, at your age I was a millionaire a dozen times over. I’d just sold my business selling on people’s cars for them at a commission. But that excepted, a close match. Forever looking ahead, sharp elbows, unwilling to rest, keen for power, for influence, for more.”

  “If you ask me, you’re still that same man,” said Slocock. “Just, you know, older.”

  Not exactly phrased with tact, for a compliment, but again Lambourne seemed not to mind. “Age is the one foe none of us can defeat.”

  “The vamps can.”

  “Well, yes, them of course—they’re the exceptions to the rule. But tell me, would you really buy immortality at the price of becoming a hideous, hunched, ratlike creature, living off blood, despised by all? Is that a reasonable exchange? What use is eternity if you can no longer enjoy the finer things in life? This cigar, for instance, or that stuff you still have clinging to your right nostril.”

  Slocock quickly rubbed his nose clean.

  “Nothing on earth would tempt me to become a vampire,” Lambourne went on. “I know there are some who’ve voluntarily got bitten. They want to live forever. But is it truly living? I’d prefer death myself over that kind of ghastly semi-existence. I like the sun, too. Couldn’t do without that. Useless owning a Caribbean island if you can’t bask in the sunshine. And then there’s always that lot to consider.”

  He gestured to a small speedboat that was passing to starboard. Its searchlight and markings identified it as a SHADE patrol vessel. It was scouring the lower reaches of the Thames for suspicious craft, with board-and-search orders that no captain, pilot or boat owner could legally refuse to comply with.

  “Those chaps can bring it all to an abrupt end,” Lambourne said, “which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?”

  “Frankly, they creep the hell out of me,” Slocock said.

  “Shadies?”

  “Sunless.”

  “I know; I was being obtuse. Funny how vampirism used to be so glamorous, once upon a time. You know, in the books and movies.”

  “An attractive lifestyle choice.”

  “Then the real thing came shambling into our lives, and now, not so attractive.”

  “Not that you mind, when you’re going to be making a buck out of them.”

  “Many, many bucks, I expect. God bless PFI. But what I’m getting at is, it’s the sheer unpleasantness of the vamps that makes anything possible where they’re concerned. The powers that shadies have, to take one example. Far in excess of any powers that have been granted to custodians of the peace in the past. Men and women permitted to openly carry guns on our streets and use them at their own discretion—no government could have pushed through a draconian piece of legislation like that were vampires not so subhuman, so damn repugnant. It makes me wonder what else our lawmakers might be prepared to do, just how far they’d be willing to go.”

  “Or, perhaps more to the point, how far the Great British public will be willing to let them go.”

  “Indeed. Indeed. Frightened, anxious, desperate for some kind of assurance that everything’s going to be all right, people will swallow any new policy, however extreme, if they think it’ll make them feel just that tiny bit safer in their beds at night.”

  “The Daily Mail reader mentality.”

  “There’s a reason why that rag is as popular as it is,” said Lambourne. “It mines a seam of middle-class paranoia, the dread of the comfortably-off that their prosperous existence could be upended at any moment, all their meagre privilege and material advantage snatched away. It exploits a flaw in the psyche of a particular stratum of society, very profitably. If one day I could perhaps tap into that same fear-fuelled market, I too could benefit.”

  “Cut me in for a slice of that action,” Slocock said.

  It had been a facetious comment, offhand, not intended to be taken seriously. He had no way of realising that it was to change the course of his life.

  “Maybe I will,” Lambourne said, eyeing the younger man speculatively, as though he were a racehorse he was about to lay a bet on or a share option he was about to buy. “Play your cards right... maybe I will.”

  A half-dozen phone calls followed in the next few months, Lambourne ringing “just for a friendly chitchat,” wanting to keep abreast of how Slocock was getting along career-wise. Then came an invitation to dine at the great man’s Surrey mansion in the company of industrialists, knighted financiers, multimillionaire entrepreneurs and a host of skinny, frosted, too-young wives. Then the two of them played a couple of rounds of golf together, Slocock losing on both occasions; even if he hadn’t been the lesser golfer, winning might have been ill-advised. Then came days out at Goodwood and Henley as a guest of Lambourne, in the best-placed private box at each event. Slowly, by degrees, Slocock found himself been drawn ever closer into the plutocrat’s orbit, and although it was an agreeable process—who could resist the extraordinary luxuries that were on offer?—there were times when he felt like a virgin being seduced by a wealthy suitor, and this rankled with him.

  A year after the cruiser dinner, Slocock won the nomination for the Chesham and Amersham seat, replacing the incumbent MP who had keeled over from a fatal heart attack while mowing the lawn one afternoon. (That, at any rate, was the official story. The man in fact died doing something not dissimilar from lawn mowing, but much more strenuous, with his nineteen-year-old mistress at a spa hotel in Gerrards Cross.) Slocock was touted as a fresh start, the photogenic face of young Conservatism, a bellwether of the way forward. The nouveau riche and the blue-rinsers all loved him, while the traditionalists grudgingly admitted that he looked the part and would serve the party’s purposes well. Lambourne himself put the idea about that Slocock, whom he had taken to referring to as his protégé, was right for the job. The rest was plain sailing.

  Subsequent scandals rocked the boat somewhat—revelations about Slocock’s partiality to class-A substances and class-A prostitutes. He weathered them, however, and the journalistic vitriol was noticeably more dilu
ted than it might normally have been. Lambourne swore blind that he had nothing to do with that, but Slocock didn’t entirely believe him. A quiet word in a newspaper proprietor’s ear was all it would have required. Equally, mightn’t his own Teflon charisma have been enough to deflect the tabloids’ ire? He liked to think so.

  It wasn’t until he was chosen to be Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs that Slocock realised he had, in almost imperceptible ways, been manipulated. Lambourne had been steering him into this position all along. By then, of course, it was too late to do anything about it. Slocock was too far in. He was Lambourne’s bitch, as he had been Parker-Hollingbury’s. This time, though, carrot and not stick was the tool of mastery.

  “You live beyond your means, Giles,” Lambourne told Slocock once during an awkward lunch at his Pall Mall club where Slocock was guardedly expressing his resentment that the CEO of Dependable Chemicals seemed to regard him as his proxy in Parliament and nothing more. “You’re in debt up to your ears, thanks to your various predilections, and you may not be aware of it but I have been helping to keep your creditors at bay.”

  “You have?”

  “Why do you think your bank’s been extending your overdraft limit time and time again? Out of the goodness of its heart? And the interest rate on your Visa card loan repayments is awfully generous, isn’t it?”

  Slocock could think of nothing to say as he digested this information.

  “I’m happy to continue bailing you out for the time being,” Lambourne continued, “but the day will come when that’s no longer desirable or possible. Being on the board of Dep Chem will save you. You’ll be able to stand on your own two feet financially then.”

  “While still being under your thumb.”

  “Take it or leave it. Either way, you aren’t there yet, and until you are, you do as I ask, you keep your objections to yourself, you behave. Any problem with that?”

  Plenty, Slocock thought, but “None” is what he said.

  10am, and it was time for the weekly visit from his dealer. Ronaldo Peake made house calls and offered the kind of personalised, user-friendly service that suited his time-poor but cash-rich client base. “I’m the Ocado of the drugs world,” he liked to say.

  He and Slocock did a couple of lines in the living room, as was customary after the money had been handed over, to celebrate the completion of the transaction. It irked Slocock that it was his charlie they were snorting, but that was how Peake operated. His terms. No concessions. Nothing for free.

  “Jesus, was last night a mess or what?” Peake said. “London’s a disaster zone this morning, like fucking Rwanda or something. What’re you lot going to do about it, eh? Can’t let things carry on like this.”

  “Wait and see,” said Slocock, using a moistened fingertip to mop up a few stray grains of powder from the tabletop and rub them onto his gums. “It’s all in hand.”

  “You need to get your skates on. My suppliers are getting well antsy. In the early days it was great. When the vampires came along, suddenly it was a damn sight easier shifting stuff into this country. Funds for customs and the coastguard got siphoned off to run SHADE instead.”

  “Priorities.”

  “Exactly. But now the bloodsuckers are kicking up a fuss, my guys overseas are flapping. They reckon England’s in trouble, serious shit like, and that’s going to screw the import and buying side of things no end.”

  “Hence your prices have gone up.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that, man, but, you know, market forces. Market fucking forces. Makes you think, though. We’re all, like, dependent on one another, aren’t we? You, me. Me, them. We’re all, like, feeding off each other in a way. Our relationships are parasitic. Vampiric. Yeah?”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Slocock said.

  “We’re all leeches. Maybe that’s why everyone hates the vamps so much. They’re us. They’re just us, man, people, with all the politeness and the smooth talk and the bullshit stripped away. They’re us as we are, not as we think we are or would like to be. They’re the fucking truth—the mirror we don’t wanna look in.”

  Peake helped himself to another line of the coke he’d just sold Slocock, using a rolled-up twenty from the wad Slocock had just paid him with.

  “Fuck yeah,” he said, inhaling hard. “No wonder so many people’d be happy to see them gone from the face of the earth. It’s like waking up one morning, you thought you were a man, you realise you’re actually a cockroach. So, like, let’s stamp out the reminder. Let’s smash that fucking mirror. That’s what it’s all about, underneath everything—the firebombing, Stokers, all that. Exterminating the roach us.”

  The logic of Peake’s cocaine philosophising had started to fade, along with the buzz, as a ministerial limousine ferried Slocock along the M4 into London.

  Traffic was abysmal. From Heston Services onwards the Lexus was stuck in a slow-crawling cavalcade of vehicles, moving in lockstep with the riffraff in their white vans, people carriers and National Express coaches. Slocock’s driver tutted and huffed and, etiquette be damned, joined in the occasional bouts of horn-tooting to express his frustration. Once the motorway became a flyover past Osterley, then at least there was the distraction of something to see while inching along, something exceptional and startling: the patches of the city where fires still smouldered and smoke still twisted upward in filmy strands.

  Peake had been right. Fucking Rwanda or something.

  From Hammersmith to Westminster—five miles as the crow flies—was another tortuous hour and a half’s driving, diversion after diversion threading the car through the dreary Sloane dormitories of Fulham and even across the river and back. Slocock arrived at Parliament with barely twenty minutes to spare before the all-important press conference began.

  The Central Lobby, where the Houses of Commons and Lords intersected, teemed with TV reporters doing live pieces to camera, setting the scene for the main event. Slocock was waylaid by a rather tasty bit of totty from Sky News, who asked him if there was anything he could tell the viewers about the content of the Prime Minister’s upcoming statement.

  He feigned ignorance. “Not a clue. Shadow Cabinet—we tend to be kept in the dark by the other side. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “But you must have some inkling what he’s going to say, Mr Slocock,” the reporter insisted. “Anything you’d care to share with us?”

  “There’s plenty I’d like to share with you, love,” Slocock said, with a caddish leer. “None of it suitable for broadcast.”

  Her smile said coy amusement. Her eyes said I’d slap you if I didn’t think it would cost me my job.

  Soon, it was time. Slocock settled down with a coffee at a table in the Pugin Room, where a TV had been set up, tuned to BBC News 24. He and an assortment of ministers, permanent private secretaries, personal assistants, aides and spin doctors watched as, onscreen, the PM entered the Grand Committee Room to a lightning storm of flashbulbs. Maurice Wax followed, and behind him strode the cocksure, leonine figure of Nathaniel Lambourne.

  “Isn’t that your sugar daddy, Giles?” some Labour wag quipped.

  Slocock flicked him a V.

  “Boyfriend, I heard,” someone else said, a wonky-chinned Lib Dem from the Midlands. “They meet in Soho for long candlelit dinners à deux.”

  There was widespread chuckling over that, which Slocock silenced by saying, “The next smartarse remark from any of you, I will seriously fuck that person up. You want to be eating meals through a straw for the next six weeks? Then make a joke. Go on. I dare you.”

  Nobody believed he would actually make good on this threat. At the same time, he was volatile enough that nobody was going to take the risk.

  “Now shut up, all of you, and let’s see this.”

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” said the Prime Minister, seated between Wax and Lambourne behind a long oakwood table. “I come before you today at a critical juncture in British history, when our nation faces a grave dilemma. We’re a
ll too aware of the regrettable events of the past forty-eight hours or so. There’s no need for me to rehearse them here. Nor is it for me to apportion blame. Responsibility lies on both sides and neither. There’s no right or wrong, as I see it. There’s one viewpoint and another, one culture clashing with another culture.

  “For nearly two decades now, we in Britain have attempted to handle the increasing influx of Sunless as best we can. We have allowed them to reside among us. We have, for their wellbeing and ours, assigned them clearly demarcated portions of our cities and towns. We have provided them, out of the kindness of our hearts, with refuge and sustenance, expecting nothing in return but that they remain put and do not trouble us. We have, I believe, been exemplary in devoting time and resources to them. Other countries have not been so charitable. Our generosity, in terms of both material goods and spirit, has been second to none.

  “I regret to say that the time for such boundless tolerance seems to be past. For the sake of the Sunless community, and of the people of this great nation, a change of approach is called for. The state of mutual antagonism that presently exists cannot be allowed to worsen any further. We must perforce take drastic steps. We must act in a manner which may seem to some unforgiving, even harsh, but which I assure you is not only necessary, but advantageous to all.

  “I’ll hand over now to the Secretary of State, Maurice Wax, who can give you further details. Maurice.”

  Wax asked for the lights to be dimmed. He moved to stand beside a digital projection screen, on which a map of the British Isles loomed into life, measled with red dots of various sizes.

  “These dots,” said Wax, “represent the locations of SRAs. The larger the dot, the greater the Sunless population. As you can see, the highest concentration of Sunless is down here in the south-east. It’s where most make landfall from the continent. They tend not to move north and west, but stay more or less where they arrive.