The Aachen Memorandum

by Andrew Roberts

  Horatio turned over to bury his face in the pillow. It muffled a heartfelt ‘Oh shit!’ Quite apart from the gaffe itself, he now remembered Tallboys’ jealous stares across the room last night. He’d just managed to cuckold a double blue! Rugby and karate, he remembered, with a shudder.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ she continued. ‘You told me that you were surprised I hadn’t laughed at your name, and I said I was hardly in a position to, glorying in that of Cleopatra Tallboys.’ It all raced back. He nodded. He must have been well away last night to suffer this sort of memory lapse. Horatio put on his apology voice, the one he’d perfected at prep school. Fringe flopping over spanielly eyes. It never failed.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Of course he’s not that bad. For one thing, he’s certainly very’ – he racked his brains for something credible – ‘good-looking.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, with a flash of irritation, ‘I’d hardly be here if I loved or respected him, would I? It’s all right, we’ve separated. And as I’ve already said, you’re right about him. So who else was there last night?’

  Horatio felt like asking for her maiden name in case he accidentally slandered any other family member. Was that why she had gone home with him? To spite her husband? Or, after years of being married to a Neanderthal, had she wanted an Oxford don out of some kind of intellectual snobbery? Horatio had heard some of the Fellows boast about the phenomenon at High Table. ‘The Monroe/Miller Syndrome’ they called it. The beauty parades the brainbox around to impress her friends, hoping his cleverness might ooze into her through some kind of psychic osmosis. He’d always assumed his colleagues had been teasing him, or just fantasising, but perhaps not.

  ‘Who else was there? Now you’re sounding like a police … person. Well, there was Peter Riley, the red-headed guy. He was sent down from Magdalen at the end of my first year.’

  ‘Really? What for?’

  ‘He proposed the Loyal Toast during some boaty dinner.’

  ‘How absurd.’

  ‘Well, Oxford always was supposed to be the home of lost causes.’

  ‘No, not him. Them. How ludicrous for the college authorities to overreact like that. They ought just to have laughed it off. Sending him down is precisely how to make a Carlist for life out of him. Sometimes those dons can be pathetically conformist. The Mountbatten-Windsors probably left before Riley was even born. Now he’s probably toasting The King Over The Water every lunchtime.’

  She put out her hand to brush back some of his hair which he had made fall over his eyes when he was apologising. ‘We have to keep tabs on the Carlists at work. Once they were romantic, but with these riots and everything, they’re getting far more dangerous. Some of them are still rather sweet though.’

  The way she said ‘romantic’ made Horatio wish that she would say that about him one day. He again wondered why, despite all the macho Hunky Regulars at the party, this goddess had wound up going back with a hundred-and-ten kilo, one-metre-sixty-something, drunken old hack? He couldn’t even remember whether he had been particularly witty or charming last night, although he felt fairly confident he’d been both.

  The full-scale bombardment had receded somewhat, but there was still a sustained mortar and small-arms skirmish being fought in the no-man’s-land between his forehead and his right temple.

  ‘Any chance of some coffee?’ she asked. ‘Some real stuff?’ Horatio grinned. The blatant reference to black market Brazilian surely meant she was no nark.

  ‘You’re not sounding very police-ish,’ he teased.

  ‘I hope I wasn’t last night either.’ Once again that open, easy, natural reference to their love-making. It was so Twenty-First Century Cosmo Modern Womanish.

  ‘When you’re engaged in tracking down the enemies of the state, young man,’ she continued, in a passable Morningside schoolmarm accent, ‘your boss doesn’t much care if your lover’s coffee comes from the American Free Trading Area or some industrial processor in Hamburg.’

  ‘Lover’ made him blush. He blushed deeper when he got out of bed to waddle to the kitchen in search of a coffee cup free of pin mould. He hated her watching his generous buttocks as they disappeared down the corridor. They were like the jowls on a bloodhound. Tallboys’ were probably tight, pert and small as a man’s clenched fists.

  Or had she meant ‘lovers’ in the plural? Everything was so complicated already.

  ‘Mmm … this coffee’s really federal,’ she said appreciatively. That ludicrous slang again.

  Once safely back in bed he blurted out: ‘You’re really lovely, you know. Just sort of … you know, perfect.’ He felt an idiot the moment he’d said it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she smiled, looking down in embarrassment.

  ‘God that sounded spas – sorry, I mean pathetic – but you are.’

  ‘It didn’t and I’m not. I’m really not.’ She looked at him for just a fraction of a second. As if she meant what she said and was giving him a warning. A last chance.

  ‘“I always tend to talk crap when I’m nervous.” That’s a line from Martin Amis. The Rachel Papers.’ Another D.W.A.-S. Male writer.

  ‘Quotations from Amis père et fils! What a morning.’ The way she said it, it somehow didn’t sound too sarcastic. ‘Martin was made compulsory at my school at about the same time they “discouraged” Kingsley,’ she said. ‘Oh, and by the way, I think you’re lovely too.’

  At that sublime moment Horatio’s bedside vid-phone rang. He flicked it on, regretting it as soon as he had.

  ‘Hi Horrid, it’s Roddy. Hey! What have we here?!’ Horatio realised Roderick Weaning could see Cleo. He quickly switched off the vid link. Cleo seemed utterly unfazed by the fact that she’d been spotted in Horatio’s bed by a total stranger.

  ‘Whatever happened to privacy?’ complained Horatio.

  ‘I’m a newsperson. Don’t believe in it. More to the point, Horrid, whatever happened to your Aachen piece?’ Horatio turned around to Cleo and mouthed ‘The Boss’ to her.

  Roderick Weaning was one part joviality, two parts cynicism, one part pure aggression. Deputy editor of The Times, he was the man who paid the freelance Horatio’s mortgage. And knew it.

  ‘Look, Roddy, can I call you back? As you’ve seen I’m with someone at the moment. You gave me till Monday. I’ll file by noon.’

  ‘Sunday night it’s due in by. And we’re hyping it on the masthead, so it must be. Your first two pieces were really federal. They’ve set the scene very well, so we want something just as good this time. But that’s not why I called. I need you to come round. Now. I need to discuss something important.’ He put just enough emphasis on ‘important’ for it to sound simultaneously enticing and threatening.

  ‘Can’t we talk over the phone?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  Horatio looked at Cleo lying naked in his bed. How could he possibly leave her?

  ‘You’re a tough hack, Roddy.’

  ‘Northcliffe, Rothermere, Beaverbrook, Black, Weaning. That’s what they say. Be here by ten-thirty. Oh, and say goodbye to your friend from me!’ He clicked off with a laugh.

  ‘Sounds like my time’s up,’ said Cleo. Lying on her back now, her hands behind her head, she didn’t seem to notice that the sheet had fallen back to reveal her breasts. Horatio, as immature sexually as he was sophisticated intellectually, found it took all his self-control not to stare at them, salivate or even make a half-hearted attempt to grab. For once, he told himself, he must play it cool. He must try to act as though women like her who could model for the front cover of Chic Alors! were the regular occupants of his smelly old scratcher of a bed.

  Why did Weaning have to call on this of all days? When would he be in a position to be able to tell people like Roddy where they could go?

  He showered and dressed, took Cleo’s pager number and told her where the coffee was. She was the first girl he’d left in his flat since Leila, but he instinctively knew it was all right.

  An observer of their lingering goodbye
kiss might have been forgiven for assuming Horatio was about to cross the Arabian Empty Quarter on foot, rather than just take a tram to the eastern end of the Strand.

  The worst thing about being a semi-detached academic, thought Horatio as he made his way down Collingham Place, was having to be at the beck and call of nargs like Weaning in order to earn a living. Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, sounded grand, but it didn’t provide him with much more than a seat in college and occasional dining rights. Journalism was how he tried to earn what his bank manager kept telling him, less and less politely, wasn’t quite a living any more.

  The tram journey from his flat in Brittan Court – Earls Court before Whitehall had over-zealously interpreted the new Classlessness legislation – took half an hour. Horatio used the time to read his messages and the news off his pager. The usual stuff. Some junk-mail. An invitation to the Brasenose Gaudy. His mother wanting to know if he was coming down for the weekend. Why? Probably for a reconciliation with his stepbrother and stepsister. Marty was asking how he had done with Cleo, couched in his usual uncouth vernacular. An outraged rant from a reader about the first of his Times articles on the Aachen Referendum. Why, he wondered, do nutters always use italics, underlinings and multiple exclamation marks? A couple of bills, including a message from the Atlantic Gas people saying that as of 1 July his supply would be cut off and his ration reallocated owing to non-payment. He looked out of the tram window at the bright May morning. Summer was on its way, he shouldn’t need Atgas for a while now anyhow. He wondered for a moment whether his aversion to paying them had anything to do with his father’s death, but decided it was probably just poverty.

  He g-mailed his mother to ask who else would be down next Saturday, and decided to let Marty stew. He would tell that cow Penelope Aldritt ‘for the last bloody time’ not to give his private pager number to readers. They could write to his home modem if they had to.

  The news was more interesting. He preferred reading the splash headlines on other passengers’ tabloid newssheets rather than The Times stuff off his own pager, NAT RIOTS IN SHEFFIELD AND DONCASTER. Poor old North England Region. When was there last any good news from up there? SPACE AGENCY SLEAZE: TWELVE INDICTED, announced the European Eye, THATCHER ASSASSINATION: NEW EVIDENCE, cried The Mail. Yet more indications that it had not been the I.R.A. after all. This was getting to be the twenty-first-century equivalent of J.F.K.! He considered whether the market could take yet another book on the subject. He might be able to get a good advance for himself, but what would they say in college? Did he really care any longer?

  The Sun led with tenth MAY GROUP PLOT TO LASER ENTENTE BRIDGE. The other story in all the papers was about how the last of the Cornish trawlers had been arrested by Spanish Region frigates for fishing in the Irish Box. It finally spelt the end of the industry. The Indy, which liked to specialise in stories about the ex-Royals, carried the news that King William of New Zealand had finally been granted a visa to visit London over the coming week. U.S.E. AND A-P.E.Z. AGREE ON WILLY’S VISA, ran the headline. The long-running diplomatic row between the United States of Europe and the Asia-Pacific Economic Zone had at last been resolved. It would be the first Royal visit since the Family left in 2017, and all the papers carried speculative pieces about the warmth of the welcome he could expect from the people, if not from the authorities.

  Horatio briefly wondered whether the Commission decision to try to beat both the American Free Trading Area and The Asia-Pacific Economic Zone to Mars might be ruined by the amazing degree of corruption at the Euro-Space Agency, extraordinary even by Union standards.

  The story he followed up in The Times, though, once he found the relevant column in his pager, was the one about the Tenth of May Group. The paramilitary wing of the English Resistance Movement had been hitting what they termed ‘legitimate targets’ for over a quarter of a century now. It would be a major departure from their established modus operandi to attack a public utility like the Channel Bridge.

  How had they got their hands on a laser? That would be a significant advance on their usual terrorist acts. His hack’s nose told him that the story was pretty speculative. The Times’ lack of coverage seemed to confirm that. The E.R.M. had officially denied it, and Horatio suspected the story might have originated in the Information Commission’s dirty tricks department. He made a mental note to ask Marty, who always knew about such things.

  After about half an hour the tram pulled up outside the Times building in Fleet Street. It was rare for Weaning to request a face-to-face meeting. Horatio hoped it was nothing bad.

  CHAPTER 3

  10.25 SATURDAY 1 MAY

  The Times building in Printing House Square was a steel and glass cylindrical monstrosity rising high above the rest of Fleet Street. Totally out of sympathy with all the surrounding buildings it had won many prestigious architectural awards. Horatio loathed it with a passion he normally reserved for structures built in the third quarter of the last century, or the van der Rohe-style horror which the Berlin-Brussels Bureau had just commissioned for their new headquarters. He was looking forward to the eightieth anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death this summer, when he would hold his own private celebration.

  The electronic frisker on the door swallowed his I.D. card and returned it instantaneously. Then the security guards waved him through with their N-series, and after two minutes on the travelator he was there. Most employees of the daily paper were away for May Day, but some of those working on the Sunday were around. One of the advantages of having been sacked, he mused, was that he now knew precisely who were his real friends on the paper. And, more importantly, his real enemies.

  It was almost a year since the Works Council had held the poll. He later found out from a friend in Optic-Fibres how everyone had voted. As a manager Weaning had taken no direct part, but he had seemed keen enough to take Horatio off the payroll the moment the vote had gone against.

  Just as he was about to enter Weaning’s office, Horatio saw Penelope Aldritt, the cow who had spoken against him at the meeting. She was rearranging books. A few of her phrases still rankled. She had told the Works Council that he was ‘a suspected tobacco-abuser’, who ‘maintained surplus and antisocial weight levels despite every opportunity to work out’ and who was thus an increased pension and benefits risk and deserved ‘constructive redundancy’ in order to give him more time to ‘get in touch with the real him’.

  His supporters had decried her blatant stoutism, but the alternative forms of words suggested to the meeting were no better. He did not want to be called ‘generously-propotioned’, ‘over-nutritioned’ or ‘horizontally-challenged’, let alone ‘a person of size’. Neither did he have an ‘alternative body image’. He was just fat. He didn’t much mind, either, except that it led to his having such little success with women. Until now.

  One day, Aldritt, you fully paid-up, card-carrying bitch, he promised himself. One day …

  Fortunately her legs resembled those of a Shetland pony. They were shorter, fatter and hairier even than Horatio’s. That, once allied to a vast nose, rendered her satisfyingly unattractive. She was thirty-six, unmarried, and by all accounts getting desperate.

  ‘Hello, Ms Aldritt,’ he smiled as he passed behind her desk, putting special emphasis on the ‘Ms’. By the time she’d turned round he was already in Weaning’s glass office.

  ‘Hello, Horror.’ Weaning was also thirty-six but he looked fifty. Overweight, jowly and balding, he had never really got over the regionwide smoking ban. ‘Sorry to get you out of bed.’

  ‘Not ever half as sorry as I’ll be for the rest of my days for letting you.’

  ‘It’s important though. We’ve received a complaint from Commissioner Percival’s lawyers that you’ve been harassing him. He wants the Berlin-Brussels Bureau Media Liaison Unit to vet your next Aachen piece before publication. Of course we’ve said no, but the Ed wants to know what’s going on.’

  Horatio gave a brief outline of what he’d foun
d in the Federal Records Office the day before. He then played Weaning the pager tape of his conversation with Percival.

  ‘Have you contacted the Admiral?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, get on with it then. Do it now. Sounds like a great story. Make sure you record the conversation.’ Horatio raised his eyebrows at this slur on his professionalism. Did Weaning really think him such an amateur?

  ‘If I gave you my grandmother’s address would you send her a memo on how to suck eggs?’ Weaning acknowledged the rebuke.

  ‘Sorry. It just sounds very exciting.’ It was, but would Weaning stand by him if this all started to go wrong?

  ‘How worried are you about Percival?’

  ‘Very, of course. I’m hardly likely to want to anger the Commission Secretary just for the hell of it. But if it hangs together …’ Weaning smiled. Always a dangerous sign. ‘Anyway, we have great faith in you not to do anything that might get our licence revoked.’

  His look said just the opposite. It said: ‘Watch out if you want to keep this job which pays your mortgage, you podgy little egghead. The Editor told me to hire you even though I wanted a truly hardbitten news hack who’d done his time as a reporter on a local paper like me and not some smartarse academic like you who’s just swanned in from Oxbridge where the Editor went but I didn’t.’ Horatio had seen the look a thousand times. Pure, unadulterated chippiness, mixed with a (well-deserved) intellectual inferiority complex. A damn dangerous combination in a boss.

  Just as Horatio was about to leave the office, Weaning looked over Horatio’s shoulder through the glass partition.

  ‘By the way, do you know Gemma Reegan?’

  The name clanged a huge gong. Horatio frowned. Trying to remember anything that morning was not easy.

  ‘OK, be subtle. Take a look behind you at the woman talking to Penelope.’

  Yes, that was her. The other woman from last night. The Yank. Tall. Power shoulders. Long straight blonde hair. Never-ending legs.