Whispers of Betrayal

by Michael Dobbs

  He’s laughing but she’s not joining in. Something’s troubling her.

  ‘What’s up, Elizabeth?’

  ‘No, nothing. Nothing except … You can be such a black-and-white person at times, yet the world is so full of grey. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t particularly want to do. Like the lying and cheating, even worse things. How do you live with that?’

  He has caught her solemn mood, digs into a former life. ‘Do you remember when it all turned nasty in Ghana? First there was the coup, then a counter-coup. CNN had a field day. Ministers being strapped to oil barrels on the beach and machine-gunned, left for the crabs. That was when I was Foreign Minister and I gave the order for all our diplomats to get out. But our ambassador telephoned. He spoke to me personally. Asked for permission to stay on in post. There were too many British aid workers around the place, he argued, he didn’t want to desert them. He wanted to stay.’

  Then a silence. Goodfellowe’s memories seem to be weighing him down.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I agreed. I could hear the gunfire in the background even as we were speaking, but … I agreed. He stayed. He got most of the aid workers out, saved dozens of lives. And a week later they strung up his body from a lamppost. We both knew the risks, it goes with the job. He knew the risk was of dying, I knew the risk was of having to live with his death. Sure, sometimes you have to lie, to cheat, even to sacrifice a man’s life. Occasions when almost anything can be justified.’

  ‘So what makes it right, or wrong?’

  ‘What makes a deed good or bad, I suppose, depends not so much on the deed itself, but on your motivation for doing it.’

  ‘Even sleeping with the devil?’

  ‘What, Bendall? If I climb into bed with him, it’s only because there’s no other way. Doesn’t make me a slut.’

  She remains very silent, seems troubled. He wonders if he’s disappointed her, let himself down. She can be so difficult to read.

  ‘Not wrong am I? Gone too far?’

  She buries her head in her pillow. ‘No, my love. I don’t think you have. Not if you don’t.’

  She doesn’t want him to see the tears that have gathered at the corners of her eyes. He thinks this conversation is all about him. Poor, blind fool. It’s not about him, it’s about her. And about wine and the restaurant and ghosts from her past, and not relying ever again on any one man, even a man like Goodfellowe. And not entirely trusting herself, which is why she can’t bring herself to place her trust in him, even though she loves him, which makes it all so much more complicated. Bloody men.

  He lies on top of her, content, oblivious. He doesn’t realize his world is on the brink of falling to pieces.

  London lay prostrate and in confusion. Like a man kicked in the groin or a woman who has lost her handbag, for a while the world no longer made sense. An entire city had been left gasping, disorientated, yet the causes of despair for some are viewed by others as opportunities, and Earwick was nothing if not an opportunist. The failure of the phones had played havoc with his diary for the day, causing all sorts of duties to be rearranged or cancelled. It soon became clear that a hole had appeared in his diary some time after three in the afternoon. Gaps in the schedule of a Secretary of State are as rare and as richly prized as pearls, and he resisted all the entreaties of his private secretary to spend the rest of the afternoon going through his backlog of correspondence and preparing for his five-o’clock meeting with his security advisers. Earwick looked out of his window in Queen Anne’s Gate and found not fog but brilliant sunshine. He braced his shoulders and issued a decree that he would spend an hour at home, studying papers without disruption. And without his private secretary.

  A red box was hurriedly stuffed with appropriate briefing material and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs quit his office promptly at three. But not before he had sat down at his desk and sent a personal e-mail.

  Brett Eatwell, the new-ish and straight-ish editor of the Sun, didn’t envy the lot of politicians. Why should he? He pulled a salary three times that of the Prime Minister, plus bonuses and an unlimited expense account, he could call his staff bitches and bastards without being threatened with a law suit, and his private life was never, but never, going to be the stuff of gossip in any newspaper column. He occupied that position of respect which ensured that when he changed his mind and stood his views on their head, it wasn’t called a U-turn or a retreat but simply a matter of editorial independence.

  At this precise moment he was engaged in a particularly delicate exercise of editorial independence. Eatwell sat in his office in Wapping, sleeves rolled up and pondering the future of the Government. Up to this point he had been a reasonably consistent supporter. Bendall was a greaseball, of course, but a little grease was always necessary to oil the wheels of the presses. Better a Prime Minister up your bum than on your back. Indeed, so assiduous had the Prime Minister been that on the news desk they usually referred to him as Bendover. When he had called Eatwell to congratulate him on his birthday, the editor had played the phone call over the newsroom intercom, accompanied by extravagant and exceedingly childish hand gestures that he had first practised at public school.

  But Jonathan Bendall was beginning to be a pain. He had brought London grinding to a halt, which on the day in question had made Eatwell’s proprietor late for his lunch. Now he had cut off all the bloody telephones. Politicians needed to be lucky, and Bendall’s luck was beginning to look as though it had spent the night on a park bench. Perhaps it was time to drop him. Eatwell was contemplating a choice of headlines which varied from ‘Kicked In The Bendalls!’ to ‘Telef***ed!’ when he became aware of the cartoon platinum blonde on his screen. She was an icon developed by his software department to guide him through the electronic maze of his computer system, and at this point she was opening and closing her legs. This told him that he had received an e-mail message.

  Eatwell was not normally an excitable man. It was not his custom to become agitated, rather it was his pleasure to agitate others, and particularly his reporters, until they had squeezed the last traces of life from a story. But this little one was going to see him through to his dotage.

  The first anyone else knew of this was when they heard a scream coming from his office that made his secretary think he’d been setting light to his farts again – another habit from public school. She rushed in, concerned, only to be told she was a knickerless little scrubber. She was unable to obtain any further sense from him and so she summoned the news editor.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Mickey was always stylish. Today’s style appeared to be a dress that was one size too small and heels that were more like traffic hazards than shoes. Goodfellowe, by contrast, had arrived sporting a charcoal grey suit he had bought with a little of the proceeds from the bequest of his constituent. His first new suit in a couple of years. He paused at the entrance to his office to allow her to admire it.

  ‘Got a funeral?’ she enquired, without raising her eyes from her work.

  Suddenly Goodfellowe realized how little he had seen of his secretary in recent days, and how much he missed her. She brought a sense of irreverence to everything, never allowing him to take matters – particularly himself – too seriously. It was the type of loyalty he needed right now. Goodfellowe had spent a sleepless night wrestling with self-doubt. His life had changed so much in recent weeks – haggling with Prime Ministers and Chief Whips, scooped up in the struggle to save the nation. If power corrupts, proximity to power distracts, and much of the fun seemed to have been squeezed out of his life.

  Most distracting of all was the dilemma he faced about Elizabeth and Sam. Was it to be Paris? Or Florence? It was a silly and spurious debate, he knew, for a Ministerial salary would sort everything out for him, but somehow he felt he was losing control, becoming beholden once more. He didn’t want Jonathan Bendall to sort out his life for him, he wanted to be able to do that for himself. Yet the two women he l
oved most in the world were pulling him in opposite directions. He owed Sam everything, but surely there should be room in his life for ambition. And for Elizabeth. Somehow the two women he loved seemed to be drifting into different camps and he didn’t want to decide, couldn’t decide. Paris or Florence.

  Obstacles, nothing but bloody obstacles. As he walked towards his desk, a metal wastepaper bin blocked his path, as there always seemed to be something in his path. It was time to change that. Or change the bin, at least. He gave a small hop, drew his leg back and let fly. The bin hurtled the full length of his office and hit the wall with a satisfying clatter.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Needed the practice. Haven’t kicked anything in ages. Or anyone, come to that.’

  ‘Like that, is it? Sounds like woman trouble. Or money.’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Sam? Or Elizabeth?’

  ‘Both.’

  Mickey studied Goodfellowe as though measuring him for a straitjacket, then rose from her desk and walked over to the battered bin. She rescued it, examined it for signs of fatal bruising, then walked back across the office in order to place it upright in front of him.

  ‘Go ahead, be my guest.’

  This time he sent it flying into the door.

  ‘Why does everything come down to money?’ he demanded, feeling better for his exertions.

  ‘Sex or money. Everything comes down to sex or money,’ she corrected, before returning to her work, sucking the end of a pencil with which she had been drafting a reply in the margin of a letter. It was from a constituent, Mrs Godsell. Mrs Godsell was complaining about the warble fly. She often wrote to complain, and would write again if she hadn’t got a reply within a week. There was always something that concerned her – one week the disappearing habitat of the long-eared bat, the next the destruction of the ozone layer from the methane of French cattle which, according to her, was particularly pernicious. Opinionated and impatient, was our Mrs Godsell. Yet at every election she was the first in line to volunteer to stick stamps and lick envelopes in one of the Marshwood committee rooms, so Mickey always took care to ensure she got a rapid and personalized response. Some day she might even let Goodfellowe see one.

  She looked up, distracted. ‘It’s the reason Justin and I split up,’ she mused.

  ‘What, sex?’

  ‘No, idiot. That was great. You think I’d get myself engaged to a choirboy? It was the money.’

  ‘I thought he had plenty of it.’ Goodfellowe stepped forward tentatively, knowing he was on marshy emotional ground. It was the first time in more than a year that Mickey had disinterred the remains of her former fiancé. ‘Didn’t he do something in the City?’

  ‘A market maker. With a tan, a jacuzzi and a tight butt. And a mother who lived north of Manchester. Or was it Middlesbrough? Anyway, it was enough she hated travelling. Yes, plenty of money, too. And very sensible about it, he was. That was the problem. I remember he wanted to buy me a very sensible and tasteful engagement ring, while I … you see, I wanted something really huge and vulgar. Hell, if I’m going to wear it, I want people to know about it. Until my arm aches.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Aren’t you?’

  She smiled sweetly.

  ‘Maybe you should consider counselling,’ he ventured.

  ‘On the grounds that I’m grasping? Or on the grounds that even though I’m grasping I’ve still somehow ended up working for you?’

  Goodfellowe pressed on. ‘So why did you break up with him?’

  ‘Oh, hell …’ As the memories revived, her careful marginal notes grew into absentminded doodles. Mrs Godsell became covered in extravagant bundles of flowers. ‘Because I wasn’t ready for him. He was a really nice boy, thought I was perfect. But you know me, I still felt in need of a second opinion. Several of them, in fact. The wedding ceremony would have turned into a fiasco. I wouldn’t have got the odd one or two standing up to object, I’d have got a full-scale Mexican wave. It wasn’t going to work, would have hurt him even more if I’d stayed.’

  ‘No regrets, then?’

  ‘None at the time, I was too young. But now …?’ Suddenly the point of the pencil snapped, sending a fragment of lead spitting across the desk like a missile headed for Serbia. ‘I suppose I’ve changed. Dunno if it’s maturity, but it’s certainly older. Nowadays when I go into a hotel on the arm of a forty-year-old man, the receptionists don’t snigger anymore. That hurts.’

  His face creased. She had this extraordinary ability to raise him from the deepest of despairs.

  ‘It’s serious, Goodfellowe. I may have to dip into my face-lift fund sooner than I expected.’

  ‘A stitch in time …’

  ‘Saves a lot of tears. And a lot of money.’

  She returned her attention to Mrs Godsell while he retrieved the battered remains of the waste bin and placed it distractedly on top of his desk like a hunting trophy. ‘I wonder if you’re right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Captain Beaky being in it for the money?’

  ‘I said that?’

  ‘It’s a thought, at least. Possibly an inspired one. You really can be quite brilliant at times.’

  She was beginning to lose track of this one. ‘What thought?’ she asked, enunciating both words carefully as though addressing a foreigner.

  ‘That Beaky or whatever he’s called might be in it for the money.’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘Good question. The water companies lost a small fortune as a result of the attack on Bendall’s bathroom. Someone loses, someone gains. The money didn’t simply get flushed away. I’ve got this funny feeling that telephone shares are being murdered, too, right this minute.’

  ‘Beaky’s in it just for the money?’

  ‘You really think so? You could be right. In which case, maybe we should do some digging. You know, you were right not to get married. You’re far too good for Justin. There are brains buried somewhere inside that delectable body of yours.’

  ‘You’re patronizing me, which is always a sign you’re up to something. Where’s all this leading?’

  ‘It’s simply that I think you’re right. That it’s worth trying to find out if anyone has made a killing on the shares.’

  ‘Isn’t that sort of share-dealing information confidential? You’d need someone in the City for that.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we would.’ A slight pause, like a missed heartbeat. ‘What did you say Justin does?’

  She sat bolt upright. ‘Goodfellowe, you devious bastard. You can go jump in the Thames along with your bloody shares. I am not going to meet up with Justin. Hear me? Not. Nor am I going to telephone him, smile at him, beg him for favours, use him, fondle him for old time’s sake or … or anything else. Absolutely not. Understand? Get that into your scheming head. No Way.’

  ‘Sure, Mickey.’

  A pencil came spinning through the air. Goodfellowe ducked.

  She found him in a watering hole nicknamed the Essex in Exile in one of those little alleyways off Bow Lane, barely a stone’s throw with a good shoulder from his office. It was the usual Thursday-night crush, young blood and brash money sandwiched between the uncertainty of short-term employment contracts or no employment contracts at all. On the ground floor the drinkers were sweating in spite of the air conditioning, while in the basement, where the toilets had been turned into a makeshift coke hole, the young customers were way beyond discomfort. The bar itself was soulless, all brushed stainless steel and blue glass; the waitresses appeared to be constructed of much the same unforgiving materials. They’d probably squeeze more from the customers after the bar had closed than ever they did serving drinks and designer sandwiches, it was that type of bar. Everything was for sale here.

  He was leaning on a bar stool, his tie loosened, his Italian jacket sagging.

  ‘Hi, J.’

  A startled glance. A pause. Then: ‘Shit.’ Uttered more in resignation than hostility.

  �
��If you don’t want me here you can throw me out.’

  ‘Get my own back, you mean?’

  She ignored it. ‘You still making markets?’

  ‘You still shagging in shifts?’

  She couldn’t ignore that, and flushed.

  He ran his hand through his thick highlighted hair. ‘Sorry. Shit. Hell. Shit. Have a drink. Old time’s sake.’

  ‘On one condition,’ she instructed, sensing he was beginning to lose the battle with that part of him which wanted to pour the entire contents of the ice bucket over her. ‘That you let me ask you a favour. For old time’s sake.’

  ‘You’ve got bigger balls than an elephant, know that? Shit!’ he offered yet one more time. He had never been very good at expressing his feelings – well, you rarely needed to, driving a Porsche. Already she knew she had been right, it would never have lasted. Still it hurt.

  ‘Deal?’

  ‘Southern Comfort with ice and orange,’ he snapped at the girl behind the bar before returning his attentions to Mickey. ‘You still drink that shit?’ She could see in his eyes that he’d already had too much. Perhaps it was a good thing, his resistance was low.

  ‘I want to ask you a favour, J. About shares.’

  ‘What shares?’

  ‘I want to know if anyone made a killing out of the water fiasco the other day.’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘But you could find out.’

  ‘Naughty, naughty. Chinese walls, and all that.’

  She glanced extravagantly around the bar before touching an immaculately manicured nail to his third shirt button. ‘I see only glass walls, J. No Chinese walls here.’

  He stared at her, trying to look ferocious, but couldn’t hold it. ‘You sure know how to pick your time and place. But then you always did.’ Another swig to wash away the memories. ‘There’s only a handful of guys making a market in water shares, ’n’ it’s a small old world. One of them’s that fat twister in the corner over there auditioning for the part of village drunk. Hey, Rosenstein,’ he called out, waving to attract the attention of a man who was draped over the end of the bar. ‘Rosie, come ’ere.’