The Final Cut

by Michael Dobbs

Her lips brushed at the creases.

  'But there was more. The frustration of knowing there was nothing I could do or say. Urquhart stood there accepting the plaudits of his acolytes and the rest of us were left like a crowd at a coronation.'

  'Didn't you try to say anything about Cyprus?'

  'And give him the chance to play his Churchill impersonations? Didn't you hear what he said in his speech last night? "Wherever an Englishman stands, there we shall stand also. Wherever an Englishman falls, there we shall be to raise him up . . ."' His fingers began to twist at the loose ends of her hair. 'I'm facing the most important battle of my life and

  I don't have a single ally. Except for you. Even Annita can't look me in the eye.'

  The rage was gone; the brutal man had become no more than a little boy lost.

  'There were so many who promised to walk with me. Now not one of them seems able to find their feet. All I have is the hope that I might be able to hold on to my own seat. Otherwise . . .' He deflated into his pillow.

  'There are plenty of people who will walk with you, ordinary people outside of Westminster. You're not alone.'

  'Truly?'

  'You know it's true.'

  'But I've no time. No party. No friends. No issue any more. Urquhart's like some malevolent magician, he's made them all vanish.'

  'Go over Urquhart's head. Stand up for fair play. Give people an excuse to march with you.'

  'Without a political machine it'd be a damn long march.'

  'That's a great idea.'

  'What is?'

  'A Long March. Instead of burying yourself in your constituency, take your cause to the people in the country. Walk with them. Talk with them. Show the world your strength.'

  He sat up. 'What would be the point?'

  'It's a means of showing how much support you have. A way to become a figure of real power and authority after the election, even if you don't yet have a party and a hundred parliamentary seats. Be a voice for all those who feel disillusioned and left out of the present system. A one-man revolution.'

  He curled up his legs, placing his chin on his knees while he considered. 'Great media possibilities. A march from - where, Manchester to London via Birmingham? - the country's three greatest cities with speaking stops and interviews on the way.'

  'Surrounded by supporters, real people, not ancient party hacks. Something fresh, a total contrast to all the other campaigns.'

  'Best way of beating the Government machine in my own constituency, by showing national support.' He was beginning to bounce on the mattress, inflated by enthusiasm, when suddenly the air began to escape.

  'Do we have time? It would need a big start. And would need to grow, momentum to keep it going.'

  'I'll provide the start. Give me three days and I'll deliver two thousand Greek Cypriots anywhere in the country, with posters in every high street and organizational support in every town. After that it's up to you and a lot of luck.'

  'If it fails, peters out, my political career will be ruined.'

  'If you don't try it, you're ruined anyway. What have you got to lose?'

  'Nothing, I suppose. Apart from you.'

  She pulled him towards her. 'Come and show me how it's done properly. Before we go out and do it to Francis Urquhart.'

  'If I'm to do all this walking, hadn't I better preserve my strength . . . ?'

  But already his protests were too late.

  'Come, Corder, it's a warm day. Into the garden.'

  Superintendent Corder of the Special Branch followed his Prime Minister through the Cabinet Room and down into the walled garden. Urquhart indicated a bench beneath the shade of a rowan tree and they sat down together. Tea was ordered.

  The privilege of such intimacy was not lightly bestowed, but Corder had earned the trust over many years of loyalty and unquestioning service. He was unmarried, had never displayed anything other than a mechanical sense of humour, a policeman with a university education but few apparent interests apart from his work of heading Urquhart's personal security team, passing up promotion in order to remain in that task. He was an extraordinarily self-contained individual whose first name was known to very few. Elizabeth, who had tried to interest him in opera, occasionally speculated that the Urquharts were his only friends. But they were of different worlds. Once while on a pheasant shoot in Northamptonshire Urquhart had winged a bird which had crashed from the sky to lie fluttering pathetically in front of them. Before anyone could move, Corder had drawn his revolver and finished the job, the 9 mm bullet at such close range spreading pieces of giblet for several feet in every direction. As Urquhart related later to his wife, not very sporting but damned effective.

  Corder had a small red file in his hand which he opened in his lap.

  'Probably not significant, but I'm not paid to take risks, Sir.' He spoke in a series of assaults, short, rapid bursts, rather like machine-gun fire. 'Over the last few days the local Greek Cypriot radio station in London has been spouting like a volcano, throwing all sorts of criticism in your direction. Getting really carried away. But the worst has come from this man.' He handed across the file. 'Evanghelos Passolides. About your age. Appears to own some sort of eating house in north London. We don't know much about him, apart from the fact that he appears to have connections with Mr Makepeace. And that he's said on live radio - the transcript's at the back of the file . . .' - in a monotone Corder began quoting from memory - 'that you deserve to have the skin ripped from your lying bones, various material parts of your anatomy thrown to dogs and the rest of you buried in a deep grave and forgotten about in the same manner he suggests you've forgotten about his brothers. He's the gentleman who . ..'

  'Yes, Corder, I know who this gentleman is,' Urquhart whispered, staring at the photograph in the file. 'And I haven't forgotten his brothers.'

  His mouth had run dry and he longed for the tea at his side, but he knew his hand would shake and betray him, so long as those eyes of long-festered malevolence were staring up at him. Abruptly he closed the file. So now he knew the name of the brother. Had seen him, practically on his doorstep, had felt his hate which refused to die. It was as though ghosts from all those years ago had chased him around the world.

  'Probably a harmless old crank,' Corder was saying, forgetting the age similarity with Urquhart, 'but he has threatened you, and what with you being out and about on the campaign trail we can't afford to take chances. What would you like me to do with him? Warn him off? Lock him away for a bit? Or forget about him? As it's election time and this is all very personal, I thought this one should be your call. Even parking tickets can get political at a time like this.'

  'Thank you, Corder,' Urquhart responded softly. A gentle breeze riffled through the honeysuckle and ran across the lawn, glancing off Urquhart's brow. He could feel prickles of sweat.

  'Trouble is, if we do nothing it could simply get worse. His threats. The bilge on the radio. Do you want me to have him shut up?'

  There were other voices, too, inside Urquhart's head, whispering, blowing at the mists of doubt, helping him to see more clearly and to decide.

  'No, Corder, not the man, don't touch him. No martyrs. But the station ...'

  'London Radio for Cyprus.'

  'It must surely have broken all sorts of codes. Race Relations Act, election law, any number of broadcasting regulations.'

  'I'll bet it's probably got illegal substances hidden on the premises, too. Could almost guarantee it.'

  'Yes, I suspect you could. Let's pull the plug on them, revoke their broadcasting licence. Silence their foul mouths. Then there would be no need to run the risk of turning Passolides into an object of public sympathy. What do you think?'

  'Just tell me when you want their lights to go out, and it's done.'

  'Excellent. Now, Corder, tell me about the old man's links with Mr Makepeace . ..'

  'And it turns out he's been rogering the daughter.'

  Tom hadn't wasted much time, Claire mused. Rebounding like
a badly sliced golf ball.

  'The thing that surprises me,' Urquhart was saying, 'is that you'd heard nothing about it. From the driver. Apparently they've been going at it like Caribbean cats in an alley.'

  Surprised her, too. The driver must have known, told Joh. Ah, but there it was. Joh hadn't told her. Wouldn't have told her. It wasn't his way.

  'We need to know more. Does he dress up as Robin Hood? Leap from piles of Hansard7. Nuggets like that are more precious than pieces of the cross’ Urquhart continued, 'in encouraging those lame mules in the press to rise up as one beast.'

  All this prying, probing for weaknesses. Not the best way, she was beginning to realize. Not Joh's way. He'd not been the first of the Carlsens she had known. Claire and his son, Benny, had been contemporaries at university, and had been considerably more. Their affair had begun at the start of the Trinity term in a punt moored beneath a conspiring willow on one of the headwaters of the Cherwell and had continued throughout a glorious summer of hedonism spent amongst the sand dunes and melon patches of Zakynthos, living in a state of self-centred lust. One evening they'd gone to watch the turtles clamber up the beach to their nesting sites; they'd taken a bottle and already had more than enough to drink. They'd met another, older man, on his own. Benny had suggested they share the drink and, later, had suggested they share her, too. And why not? Benny would've jumped at a similar chance. She'd obliged, on the warm sands of turtle beach, and after that it had never been the same between her and Benny. Up to that point they'd tried to share all their sexual experiences and appetites, but this one she hadn't afterwards wanted to share. It had been a mistake, an own goal, something which made her realize she might have the body of a woman but yet lacked judgement in its use. And judgement about Benny. She didn't want to talk about it. So he'd grown jealous, obsessive, tormented by the memory of her writhing pleasurably in the moonlight, and they had bickered all the way back to their separate and final years of study.

  Then, a lifetime later, she had met foh. She hadn't wanted to fall in love with him and had tried hard to prevent it but it had happened. And, when she had met Benny again after all those years and Joh had read the tormented expressions on their faces, he had known. He blamed no one and had understood when Benny decided to go and run the Stockholm office and rarely visited. He had never asked.

  How different Jon was to Francis Urquhart. Urquhart always searched for weaknesses to exploit, private pieces which would wither a man's reputation to the roots when exposed to the sun. For him, every man of stature was a threat to be cut down to the stump. She began to realize that for Urquhart there were no mountains, no glorious escarpments and swooping valleys, only a flat and desolate landscape upon which he alone cast a shadow.

  She'd learnt a valuable lesson today. She found Francis Urquhart hugely attractive. But she didn't very much like him.

  They'd discovered you couldn't organize a huge march in three days, but in five they had worked wonders. The novelty of the idea in a campaign which threatened to be squeezed of initiative by the party machines attracted several showy pieces in the press and on television, and fifty thousand leaflets were printed, their hurried and unambitious style carrying an appealing touch of sincerity. A small alternative advertising agency developed a logo for T-shirts emblazoned with the message 'F.U. Too'. He sighed when he saw it, but discouraged no one - if the event were small enough for him to control, he would already have failed. Only the route was firmly within his grasp - authorities permitting. The line of march was to begin in Albert Square beside the Town Hall in Manchester and finish in Trafalgar Square, something over two hundred miles in fourteen days with the bits in between being worked on almost as they marched. But march they did.

  There were considerably fewer than two thousand on that first Sunday morning and their politics were distinctly dappled - the great majority were Cypriots with their families but there were also environmentalists, militant vegetarians, a smattering from the anti-hunting lobby who came to present a petition and left, a woman who had been at university with Makepeace and now ran a free-love-and-alfalfa commune somewhere in Cumbria, and three candidates from the Bobby Charlton for President Party. There were also enough journalists and television cameras to make it worthwhile. They came to look, to crow, to write feature pieces dipped in condescension and cant. 'Making War With Makepeace,' the Telegraph wrote opposite a photograph of three members of the Manchester Akropolis weightlifting team persuading the candidate of the Sunshine Brotherhood to put his clothes back on. Others wrote of chaotic coalitions, of Makepeace and his coat of many colours. But they wrote. And others read. It gave Makepeace a chance.

  The Battle Bus, as it was known, was a specially designed coach armoured with kevlar and mortar-proof compartments which had been constructed as Urquhart's primary means of road transport for the campaign. Chauffeur-driven Daimlers were deemed too remote and untouchable for the ordinary voter - although had any ordinary voter managed to penetrate the cordon of security thrown around the Battle Bus at every stop and touched anything apart from the windscreen wiper, they would have activated an alarm system delivering almost as many Special Branch officers as decibels. In motion now, sliding through the night air on its way back to London, there was nothing to disturb the Prime Minister's peace but the whisper of air conditioning and the quiet murmurings from the front compartment of aides conducting a post-mortem on the day's campaigning.

  The campaign rally had been a success - no hint of hecklers getting into the hall, a good speech and, Urquhart had to admit, an even better video, although Elizabeth had been going on about resetting the music track. The evening had rather made up for the afternoon, an industrial visit to a factory which made agricultural equipment that included cattle prods. Some reptile from the press pond had discovered that the biggest single order for the electronic prods came not from an agricultural concern but from the National Police Headquarters in Zaire. Testicle ticklers. Urquhart had decided he'd test one on the cretin who arranged the visit.

  But that had been the Six O'clock News and now the main evening news pictures and the morning headlines would carry more sensible coverage. Not a bad day's work, he reflected as he rested, eyes closed, in the Tank Turret - the bus's fortified central compartment.

  There was a tugging at his sleeve. 'Sorry to disturb you, Prime Minister, there's a call from Downing Street. You'll need the scrambler.'

  A sense of anticipation rose through tired limbs as he picked up the phone. It was his private secretary.

  'Prime Minister, shall we scramble?'

  Urquhart pushed the red button. During the last campaign they'd discovered a car shadowing the route of the bus with sophisticated monitoring equipment, hoping to pick up the chatter of the mobile phones and fax machines. He'd been disappointed to discover that the eavesdroppers were from neither the Opposition nor the IRA, either of which would have doubled his majority, but simply freelancers from a regional press bureau. They'd pleaded guilty to some minor telegraphy offence and been fined £100, making several thousand by selling details of their enterprise to the Mirror. He held a sneaking admiration for their initiative, but it had left his civil servants as reluctant to break news as pass wind. To bother him on the campaign trail betokened a matter of some importance.

  He listened attentively for several minutes, saying little until the call had finished and he had switched off the phone.

  'Trouble?' Elizabeth enquired from her seat on the other side of the bus where she had been signing letters.

  'For someone.'

  'Who?'

  'That remains to be seen.' His eyes flashed and he drew back from his thoughts. 'There has been an announcement from Cyprus. It appears that our High Commissioner and their President Nicolaou are both alive, well, and being held hostage in the mountains.'

  'By whom?'

  He laughed, genuinely amused. 'By a bloody bishop.'

  'You've got to get them out.'

  Urquhart turned to examine Elizabeth
, who shared none of his humour.

  'It will be all right, Elizabeth.'

  'No it won't’ she replied. Her tone had edges of razor. 'Not necessarily.'

  In the subdued night lighting of the bus he could sense rather than see her distress; he moved to sit beside her.

  'Francis, you may never forgive me . . .' She was chewing on the soft flesh in her cheek.

  'I've never had anything to forgive you for,' he replied, taking her hand. 'Tell me what's worrying you.'

  'It's the Urquhart Library and the Endowment. I've been making plans . ..' He nodded.

  'Making arrangements for the funding.' 'I'm delighted.'

  'Francis, I did a deal with President Nures. If I could help him achieve a satisfactory arbitration decision for the Turkish side, he would ensure a consultancy payment made over to the Library fund.'

  'Do we have a fund?'

  'In Zurich.'

  'And did you - help achieve a satisfactory decision?'

  'I don't know. I had a talk with Watling but I've no idea if it helped. The point is, neither does Nures. I told him I'd fixed it and he's delighted.'