Heaven's Light

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘Not that far. There’s a bid on the table. The MoD have formed a committee, as you might imagine.’

  ‘Who’s represented?’

  Ellis was surprised at the depth of Tully’s interest. ‘Defence Lands,’ he said slowly. ‘Legal advisers. Someone from the Navy Staff Secretariat. The Chief of Fleet Support. All the usual suspects.’ He frowned. ‘Plus some guys from Askew’s up the road.’

  ‘Askew’s are involved?’

  ‘Very much so. This is a complex negotiation. Getting the figures right matters more than anything. So it pays to have the best.’

  ‘Pays whom?’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Who’s us?’

  At last Ellis sensed an opening, a tiny crack in Tully’s carefully maintained defences. The man, after all, cared. And cared deeply.

  ‘The nation,’ Ellis said lightly. ‘Who else?’

  Tully reached for his orange juice, refusing to be drawn. At length, he enquired about the schedule for the negotiations. Was there a deadline? A pressing need to get the dockyard off the Navy’s hands?

  ‘Not officially, no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that we’re bound by ministry rules. There are hoops we have to jump through. Due diligence is one of them. You can’t hurry these things.’

  ‘Unless the politicians bend the rules.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So there is a deadline?’

  ‘Of course there is. There’s an election in sight. And we’re talking big money.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’

  Tully was staring out of the window. In profile, his face tilted up, he looked like a man facing a strong wind.

  ‘Zhu’s extremely sharp,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll know that already. He doesn’t pay big money. Not if he can help it.’

  ‘Then perhaps he can’t help it.’

  The beginnings of a smile briefly creased the pale skin around Tully’s eyes. ‘That I doubt. Especially if he’s the sole bidder.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘He did. In the local paper. Yesterday.’ He paused. ‘I’ve watched him, been with him. I like the man, don’t get me wrong, but he’ll eat you alive, I guarantee it. That’s the way these guys are made. I’ve been out there, in the service. I’ve seen it first hand. It’s bred into them. It comes with their mother’s milk. There are thousands of Zhus in Hong Kong, in Singapore. Form all the committees you like, you’ll never lay a finger on people like Zhu.’

  ‘You make him sound like a gangster.’

  ‘Not at all. He’s just very good at what he does. It’s all down to excellence. If you don’t win, you’re nowhere, you’re history. It’s as simple as that.’

  Not quite knowing why, Ellis had produced a pen. Part of him wanted to register the usual objections, to talk about the burdens of democracy, the handicap of having to play by a certain set of civil-service rules. Another part of him simply agreed.

  ‘You’re right,’ he conceded eventually. ‘But does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it bloody matters.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re dealing with a national asset. This is a working dockyard, for God’s sake, not some ancient monument. We’re talking about live skills, key facilities, all the stuff the Navy needs to keep going. You can’t just flog it off to some foreigner. Just because he’s got the money. Just because he might help you get elected again.’

  ‘Maybe he hasn’t got the money.’

  ‘He’s got loads of money.’

  ‘Then maybe he doesn’t need to spend it.’

  Tully looked startled. ‘What?’ he growled. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’ve said nothing. I’m just suggesting the situation might be less clear cut than it seems. You’re right about the other bidders. There aren’t any. Zhu’s got a clear run. And you’re right about Zhu, too. He’s bloody sharp. He won’t part with a penny unless he has to.’

  ‘So what are you telling me? Exactly?’

  Ellis was toying with his pen, capping and uncapping it. The conversation had gone further than he’d intended but he sensed that this was the only way to get Tully onside. There had to be a degree of trust, an agreement on shared objectives. And that, God help us, meant a glimpse or two of the truth.

  ‘This is in confidence,’ he said carefully. ‘Zhu wants to buy the dockyard, and he wants us to put up most of the money.’

  ‘How does he figure that?’

  ‘Because he thinks it’s a liability. Not an asset at all.’

  ‘Then he’s crazy.’

  ‘Sadly not.’ Ellis gave Tully a bleak smile. ‘Liability’s our word, not his. The politicians are using it all the time. Things we have to shed. Items the state has to get rid of. You may have noticed.’

  There was a long silence. Tully was staring out of the window again but nothing could mask his anger. He emptied his glass.

  ‘So will he get it? The dockyard?’

  ‘Yes, I think he will.’

  ‘And what will he do with it, once it’s his?’

  Ellis reached for the remains of his lager. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  *

  Lolly was still in bed when she heard the phone begin to ring. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling, wondering whether anyone else was in. She’d been up most of the night trying to write a letter to Jess, trying to wrestle her feelings onto paper, but none of it had made any sense. Waking up at noon, she’d started the letter afresh in her head, hitting the same bumps in the road, the same blind bends. Maybe a letter wasn’t such a great idea. Face to face she’d probably manage it much better.

  The phone was still ringing. She got out of bed, wrapping the eiderdown around her. Her bedroom door was already open, the standing invitation to Jessie, and she slipped onto the landing and down the stairs in time to lift the phone before the trilling stopped.

  The voice at the other end belonged to a man. He asked for Jessie. Alert at once, Lolly said Jessie was out. She’d be back whenever. In the meantime, Lolly would be glad to take a message. There was a long silence.

  Then the voice returned. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’m thinking of coming back.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just tell her that.’

  ‘Shall I say a date?’

  ‘No, but it’ll be pretty soon, though.’ There was a silence. ‘Tell her something else, too.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Tell her she was right to keep hassling. This place is shit.’ The phone went dead and Lolly found herself sitting on the bottom stair, hugging her knees. Haagen, she thought, Haagen fucking Schreck. Even the name had come to obsess her, a big fat cloud that shadowed the relationship that she and Jessie had now sustained for nearly eight months. Together they’d managed to stay clean, stay healthy. Together they’d travelled further than any of the dickheads at Merrist House. By settling down and getting herself a permanent address she’d even impressed the social workers back in Guildford. With luck, they might even let her look after her daughter again.

  After a while, she went upstairs. She’d found the letters in a box under Jessie’s bed. With them had been a brown glass jar, crusted with candle wax. On the side of the jar, partly peeled off, was a picture of a canal. She’d no idea exactly how but she was sure that the jar had been a keepsake from Jessie’s days with Haagen. It was exactly the kind of rubbish the silly cow would hang onto. Emotionally, she never let go of anything.

  Lolly pushed open the door of Jessie’s bedroom and slipped in. The duvet on the bed was thrown back. On the pillow was a half-completed pencil sketch of the view from the window. Lolly got down on her knees and felt under the bed for the box. The jar was still inside. She lifted it out. It was cheap and nasty, the glass rim already chipped. She held it in her hand, remembering the voice on the telephone, then she hurled it at the wall. The broken
glass showered onto the bed and Lolly grinned, looking down at it, before running upstairs to her own room and slamming the door.

  Minutes later, dressed, she was back in the hall, hunting for Jessie’s mum’s address in the phone book.

  Charlie Epple was due at the cable TV headquarters for a two o’clock meeting. The studios were ten miles inland, off the old London trunk road, and, at the top of Portsdown Hill, with half an hour in hand, he pulled his sleek new Calibra onto one of the car parks that looked out over the city.

  The view from the hill had always fascinated him, the tricks that height and distance played with the grid of endless streets, the big council tower blocks and the tangle of distant cranes that hung over the warships in the dockyard. Up here, where the wind always seemed to blow, you could half close your eyes and play God with the city below, demolishing the gasworks that disfigured the Hilsea industrial estate, realigning the sweep of motorway that funnelled traffic across the upper harbour, expanding the roll-on, roll-off berths in the commercial docks choked with cross-Channel ferries. It was a fun thing to do, ridiculously easy, and he sauntered back across the car park, his hands deep in his pockets, wondering whether Pompey First might bring the fantasy alive.

  The last few days he’d done nothing but explore the implications of founding a brand new political party, all too aware that the difference between success and failure would lie in the small print. To his surprise, the business of fielding candidates in the city’s thirteen wards was remarkably simple. A phone call to the council’s electoral officer had produced a thick envelope stuffed full of nomination forms. They came in two versions: signature of one testified that the candidate either lived or worked within the electoral borough; completion of the other required eight seconders to support the candidate’s nomination. Neither of these hurdles was especially daunting and, with five months to go before the local elections, it shouldn’t be impossible to find the right individuals to put themselves forward. Within each ward there were three council seats. That made a total of thirty-nine candidates, local men and women committed enough to their own city to turn the political system on its head and break the stranglehold of the three major parties.

  Charlie kicked a stone and watched it tumble down the hillside. He’d seen Barnaby only this morning, dropping off some stuff he’d got together with a local graphics student. Barnaby had given him coffee, shown him the draft constitution, together with the bones of the manifesto that he and Kate were knocking into shape. The latter had a beautiful simplicity: here was a message addressed to no one but the inhabitants of a specific city. Nothing had been blurred by the interests of Westminster or Whitehall. Nothing had been fudged to accommodate some national interest group. Just Pompey, First, Last and Always. Charlie played with the phrase, trying to imagine it on billboards beside the city’s major roads, and when he got back to the car, he made a note of it, scribbling the line on the back of his electricity bill.

  The sight of the bill brought a smile to his face. Behind him, across the rolling countryside on the other side of the hill, a line of pylons carried electricity to the city. Already, in conversation with Barnaby, he’d explored the logic of Pompey First. What if they cleaned up at the May elections? What if they’d identified a real appetite for putting the city’s interests first? What if that hunger extended as far as a bid for genuine independence?

  Charlie wound down his window. Pompey’s only power station had been demolished years ago. Every household in the city was dependent on the national grid. Given some form of independence, who’d guarantee that the lights stayed on? Charlie folded the bill into his pocket, blissfully happy, knowing that questions like these were the stuff of the best adventures, infinitely more challenging than campaigns for aftershave or ice lollies. Pompey First, he thought, midwife to Europe’s youngest city-state.

  The cable TV headquarters comprised one half of a modern, system-built office block on an industrial estate outside the suburb of Waterlooville. The tiny reception area was criss-crossed by busy young men on mobile phones, and a line of framed faces on the wall beamed down at prospective customers. Each belonged to a salesman of the month, and while Charlie waited to meet the PR manager, he listened to the swirl of conversation around him. This kind of language was all too familiar: it came straight from America, and over the last couple of years it had swamped the companies he was used to dealing with in London. These people were dedicated to the aggressive sell, everything up-front, everything in your face, and they fired their bullets with total conviction, immensely proud of the product. Hitching onto the cable was a steal. It gave you options, choice. Something for Mum. Something for Dad. Loads of stuff for the kids. Charlie grinned. If fourteen quid a month bought you lifestyle, science, sport, music and kids’ cartoons, why not Pompey First as well?

  The woman who ran the PR operation invited him upstairs. Her name was Nicky. She was neat and businesslike, with bobbed blonde hair and a lovely mouth. She had a desk and a spare chair in a big open-plan office, and there was room beside her computer for a teddy bear dressed in Pompey colours. While Charlie explained the excitement of launching a brand new political party, she made notes on a pad at her elbow. When he had finished, she offered him a polite smile.

  ‘I’m not quite with you,’ she said. ‘Where do we fit in all this?’

  Charlie was looking at a map on the wall. At the bottom was the city of Portsmouth. Across the island, and inland to the north, colour-coded pins recorded the advance of the fibreoptic cable that carried the company’s thirty-two channels. Charlie had seen maps like this before in some of the other cable franchises. In national terms, the industry had been a big disappointment but he’d heard rumours that the Pompey operation was the exception to the rule. ‘How many homes are we talking here?’

  ‘Serviceable? Seventy-four thousand.’

  ‘And how many have signed up?’

  ‘Eighteen thousand.’

  Charlie nodded. The rumours had been spot on. Eighteen thousand homes was a penetration rate of nearly 25 per cent, way above the national average. He looked at the map again, trying to calculate how many of the customers lived within the city itself. Inland, where the monied folk tended to settle, the take-up rate would be low. The cable people hated admitting it, but signing on for Sky and the Disney package was still emphatically down-market.

  ‘Do you look at the demographics?’ Charlie asked. ‘Area by area?’

  Nicky smiled. She was bright. She’d seen the question coming. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’re right. Cold calling on the council estates is a doddle. Ask any of the blokes.’

  Charlie thought briefly of the faces on the wall downstairs. No wonder the salesmen of the month looked so cheerful. In Paulsgrove or Portsea, you could sell anything that kept the kids off the street.

  Nicky fetched coffee from a nearby machine. Her earlier bemusement seemed to have gone. She was looking at the wall map again. ‘Where have you drawn the line?’ she asked. ‘Where does Pompey First begin and end?’

  ‘Existing city boundaries. All thirteen wards are up for grabs in May.’ He sensed an ally in this undeclared war. ‘You think that’s sensible?’

  ‘I think it’s perfect. More to the point, it’s what the punters think too. Did you see the MORI poll in ninety-three?’

  Charlie hadn’t. Nicky explained that the city council had commissioned an opinion poll as part of its submission for something called unitary status. Under the current arrangements, the city was administered jointly from the Civic Centre and from County Council Headquarters, twenty-five miles away in Winchester. The division of responsibilities was confusing and inefficient, and the local officers naturally wanted to be masters in their own house. Charlie had heard a little of this before from colleagues in the Strategy Unit, and knew that the city had won its case. The MORI poll, though, was a mystery.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It was a questionnaire. People were given various options. Did they want Pompey t
o amalgamate with Fareham and Gosport? With Havant? With East Hampshire? Did they want to stick with the current arrangement? Or would they prefer to go it alone?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Forty-seven per cent said go it alone.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Draw the line at the city boundaries.’ She smiled again. ‘Just like Pompey First.’

  Charlie reached for a pen. This was a killer figure, rock-solid evidence that Pompey First would hit a nerve city-wide. In marketing terms, 47 per cent was the jackpot.

  ‘Do you want the rest of it?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Absolutely. You know it’s the densest-populated city in the country outside London? You measure these things by the hectare. Up country, in Hampshire, we’ve got four people per hectare. You know the figure for Pompey?’

  Charlie’s pen was poised.

  ‘Twenty?’ he guessed. ‘Thirty?’

  ‘Forty-five. It’s written on my heart. It’s one of the reasons the board give us so much rope. Pompey’s perfect for cable. Tightly packed housing. The right demographics. Strong local feel. You know the employment profile? How many people in work find jobs within the city?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Eighty-six per cent. That’s unheard of. And it’s the same for shopping, too. Ninety per cent of householders never leave the city. It’s all here for them.’

  Charlie’s pen raced across the pad. Better and better, he thought. He looked up. ‘How come you know all this stuff?’

  ‘I used to work for the council. And it’s handy for this job, too. As you might imagine.’

  Charlie frowned. Nicky Bannister wasn’t a name he’d come across during his sessions with the Strategy Unit.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘PR stuff, organizing mainly. I was on board for the whole of ’ninety-four. All the major celebrations.’

  ‘D-Day? Tour de France?’

  ‘Yes, all that.’ She looked at the teddy bear. ‘I was Nicky Elliott then. I remarried last year.’

  Charlie sat back. Nicky Elliott was a minor legend amongst certain council officers. Almost single-handed, she’d held the ring while various heavyweights from Whitehall and Washington fought tooth and nail over the arrangements for the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings. Portsmouth, for one wet June weekend, had become the focus of the world’s attention, and Charlie remembered his own amazement, coming home to find the city thick with foreign heads of state.