It had also been while he was slogging away at the Records Office’s labyrinthine libraries of files, microfilms, CD-ROMs and EuroNet computer logs that Horatio had discovered the clues that led to his twin successes – the historic revelations which had made him the toast of Oxford’s senior common rooms. As he settled himself in front of the computer terminal on the first floor and began ordering up documents, Horatio indulged himself with the memories of the two great sleuthing triumphs which had brought him his thirty minutes of global fame three years ago.
From a will at Somerset House, Horatio had tracked down a diary in Vienna, from an entry in which he later found a lost property ticket dated November 1919 and stamped ‘Reading Railway Station’. From that clue he discovered in an attic in the French-Algerian quarter of Stratford-upon-Avon the original manuscript of Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Far from being stolen, as Lawrence had believed, the manuscript had been conscientiously handed in to the lost property office by an absent-minded old lady who had been sitting next to him before he changed trains. The attendant there had kept it, but had been unable to sell it privately. Fifteen years later his home was blitzed in the Second Nationalist War. The surviving effects had gone to a sister in Warwickshire, from whose grandson’s loft Horatio had triumphantly extracted the long-lost typescript.
Horatio’s second, even greater, coup came a year later when he worked out from a clue in John Stuart Mill’s papers that the housemaid had not after all burnt the first draft of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, as literary tradition had always supposed. In fact Mill, for purely ideological reasons, had attempted to suppress this magisterial denunciation of liberal democracy, and had secretly deposited it in a strongbox in a Dublin bank. From where Horatio – ‘Demon Document Detective’ as The Mail had by now dubbed him – retrieved it under the glare of all the major global cable networks’ camera lights.
Mill had thought Carlyle incapable of the effort of rewriting the tome, but, as the first draft was to show, the final version was actually far better than the original. Mill’s reputation suffered further when Horatio went on to prove that, after Mill had sacked the maid, she had died in penury protesting her innocence. Even The Sun had covered the story, albeit under the headline, EGGHEAD’S CLEANING OPERATIVE SHAME.
It had been a risk. What a fool he’d have looked if the strongbox had not contained the manuscript! Sometimes even now he woke up in the night sweating from the recurring nightmare that he was opening the box only to find it contained waste paper.
What had happened since those heady days, Horatio wondered, to turn the Demon Document Detective into such a disappointed, sad and boozy hack? Instead of making headlines in the world press, as he had at twenty-six, he was just churning out background pieces to fundamentally dull occasions like the thirtieth anniversary of the Aachen Referendum. The relevant papers had all been released back in 2040 under the Twenty-Five-Year Rule.
The Referendum had been crucial constitutionally, of course, but there was nothing new to say about it today. Here he was, thrust along by poverty and Weaning, wandering down yet another blind alley in his career.
It was only towards the end of this all-too-typical bout of self-pity that Horatio, still at the terminal, noticed Alex Tallboys sitting at Table 4, Desk E about fifty metres away. Quite apart from an initial feeling of irritation at his having lost his favourite desk, close to the queue for the files when they were produced, Horatio experienced a sharp pang of panic. Tallboys was nearly two metres tall, a cruel, brutish slab of muscle. He had never missed an opportunity to embarrass or humiliate Horatio. What could he be researching here?
Just as he turned to go downstairs and beg a day’s grace from Weaning, Tallboys looked up and smiled at him. At least his eyes narrowed and the ends of his lips elongated momentarily. He then looked back down and carried on reading. It was something of a revelation to Horatio that the savage was capable either of smiling or reading. His Oxford place had been solely the result of social affirmative action, after all. Horatio found a desk as far away as possible – 26Y –
‘Sorry love, all yours have already been called up,’ said Kylie-Terèse from behind the counter when, half an hour later, he had gone over to complain to her about their delivery.
‘What, exactly the same ones?’ he expostulated. The odds against that must be a thousand to one.
‘Yeah, an’ they’ve used override by the looks of things.’ She looked genuinely sympathetic. The system by which Commission officials could jump the queue for documents was as unpopular with F.R.O. employees as it was with researchers.
The perfect adjective for Kylie-Terèse, thought Horatio, was ‘blowsy’. He had once given her tea in the cafeteria downstairs, listening sympathetically to her complaints about her unfaithful hairdresser boyfriend, all told in her Estuary-Grunge accent.
‘How about the others?’
‘Nope. Two’ve been reclassified under the Fifty, one’s missing altogether and three are out to another reader.’
‘Who?’
‘I can’t say who. You know that.’
Almost on a whim Horatio asked: ‘It isn’t 4E by any chance?’
She looked at her screen for a second, smiled and answered quietly, nodding over towards the oblivious Tallboys. ‘It would be quite improper for me to confirm that that dishy-looking hunk over at 4E seems to have overridden all your requests this morning. And from the looks of things, only about two minutes after you made ’em an’ all.’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘Nuffink on those. Got any others? I can do ’em by hand if you like.’
‘You heroine,’ said Horatio, slipping a ten-euro note across the counter. He rather hoped she’d tuck it into her bra like in the movies, but no.
‘Could we do it without filling in the slips? I’d prefer him not to be able to check what I’d seen.’ Before she could refuse he handed her his pencil and was calling out file numbers.
‘FO 373/10742 and 743, PREM 18/4011, HO 384/44280, T 444/56432. That ought to be enough.’
She looked up at him.
‘I’ll bring ’em to you in the microfilm room. So, anyway, what’s up between you two then?’
‘No idea, but it can’t just be bad luck.’
‘Well, all I can say from where I’m standing’ – she giggled, sneaking another look at Tallboys – ‘is that if it’s over a woman, you’re only in with a chance if she prefers brains to brawn. And not many of us girls do!’ From anyone else that would have been hurtful, but somehow not from her.
‘How’s the horny hairdresser?’
‘Dumped him. Can you believe it’ – she giggled again but didn’t even lower her voice – ‘he was gay!’ It was Horatio’s turn to be conspiratorial. She must have known that using that word in public could get her the sack under the new Anti-Sexism Directive. Not for the first time he wondered why the cockney working class – as they used to be called before Classlessness – were so much more robust in ignoring the new legislation and Designated Vocab than anyone else.
He wandered back to his desk, collected his pad and pencils, checked the infra-red was in his jacket pocket and made quite a scene of leaving. He looked suitably dejected, waving to Tallboys with a brief open hand movement, like he’d seen motorists give when passing in narrow lanes.
Once out of sight, instead of going downstairs to the exit, Horatio made his way to the microfilm room on the second floor. He chose a seat behind the door and waited. Tallboys had purposefully stymied his research by using the override facility. Out of spite because he’d hated him at university a decade ago. What a jerk.
The bundle of papers, files and printed documents which Kylie-Terèse brought up ten minutes later was about thirty centimetres high. He soon realised they were distinctly second-rate. Horatio had naturally ordered up the most important and interesting files first, but those were all with Tallboys. Nevertheless, as a veteran researcher, he knew that even
the most dull dross could yield up gold. He’d discovered the clue to his Carlyle coup in the twelfth and last volume of household accounts kept by Mill’s butler’s wife. Three and a half hours passed and Horatio found nothing. He had worked through the lunch hour in case Tallboys went to the cafeteria. He was bored, hungry, despondent and feeling more than usually sorry for himself.
Despite attempts by archivists to get him to use microfilms or facsimiles of documents in his research, Horatio always insisted on working with the originals. Anything else, he used to tell archivists, was like being asked to make do with photocopies of one’s love letters. They would nod at that line, little realising that Horatio’s own archive of love letters consisted of one illiterate postcard from Helsinki sent by a spotty exchange student he’d once tried to interfere with at a teenage pyjama party. Fellow hacks found Horatio’s demand for original documents highly idiosyncratic, especially as the texts of most official memoranda were available at home on EuroNet at the press of a button. But he was adamant.
So when, through a mixture of tiredness, absent-minded fantasising about Leila, and a wholly typical bout of malcoordination, Horatio knocked his penultimate file onto the floor, the slip of paper which flew out was an original. In order to replace it he had to turn to leaf 248 of T 444/56432, a tremendously tedious Treasury file relating to the Referendum’s financing.
As he did so, something written on it caught his eye.
CHAPTER 7
13.20 FRIDAY 30 APRIL
The note was signed G.R.P., which Horatio knew to be the initials of Gregory Percival who back in 2015 had been Special Advisor to the then British Foreign Secretary, James Mackintosh. Now Commission Secretary, he was the most powerful Civil Servant in the entire regional government and a major power in Brussels as well. At fifty-six, Percival had passed compulsory retirement age, but his position seemed impregnable because he was known to have the ear of the Wilhelmstrasse and was widely believed to be a big noise in the Berlin-Brussels Bureau as well.
Horatio had already interviewed him for the first two of his Times articles. Despite Percival’s eminence it had been relatively easy for him to get in touch as they had often met at All Souls, where Percival was an emeritus Fellow.
Tall, smooth, impeccably dressed, ‘a fine all-round sportsperson in his day, still a keen yachtsperson’ (The Economist), and speaking with one of those deep, authoritative voices to which people naturally listened, Percival was everything Horatio knew he could never be. He personified the Eurostablishment at its most confident and distinguished. He had also been helpful and charming to the point that even Horatio, who was instinctively suspicious of all Commission officials, had to confess himself impressed.
The note was merely a slip from Percival’s official notepad. Dated 5/5/15, it informed his opposite number at the Treasury of Brussels’ approval of the disbursement of seven million euros to help offset some unspecified incidental costs of the Referendum. They’d left it pretty late, thought Horatio, with the poll only having taken place the previous day. They probably wouldn’t have been quite so keen to cough up had the result gone the other way!
As he reached for his infra-red from his jacket pocket, Horatio was suddenly flung forward in his chair by a sharp blow to his back.
‘Hello old cock!’ It was Tallboys, who obviously interpreted it as a friendly slap. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Fine, fine, Alex.’ Horatio forced a smile. ‘No ribs broken. How about you?’
‘Pretty fit. Mustn’t grumble.’ God, how he hated this hail-fellow-well-met mateyness. Let alone the old-fashioned Home Counties banter. Next he’d be talking about wizardprangs and jolly-good-shows. What did the dreadful oaf want? Tallboys took a look at Horatio’s pad.
‘Still sleuthing away then?’
‘One does one’s best.’
‘Found anything sexy?’
‘No, after three hours’ work, absolutely bugger all. Look at my notes.’ Tallboys had been anyhow. He gesticulated towards a blank pad of paper with only five lines under ‘Aachen Referendum, 4/5/15’ written in a shorthand he felt sure Tallboys wouldn’t know. ‘I think everything to be said about Aachen came out five years ago with the Twenty-Five Year Rule. I haven’t been able to dig up anything new today.’ He resisted the temptation to add, ‘especially as some tosser has called up all the files I requested’.
‘Bad luck old thing. Must be a bind. Still, tomorrow’s another day and everything.’
Horatio was surprised at Tallboys’ quoting from a Hollywood film. Rather daring for him. It was probably unintentional.
‘Not for me, it isn’t. I’ve got to file by Sunday and this place closes for May Day.’
‘Rotten luck. I enjoyed parts one and two, though they must have rustled some dovecotes amongst the Powers That Be.’ Horatio shrugged. He couldn’t decide which irritated him more about Tallboys’ conversation – the clichés or the mixed metaphors.
‘To slightly change the subject,’ said Tallboys – Horatio decided on split infinitives – ‘are you going along to Frobisher’s party tonight?’
Horatio nodded. ‘Yes. Are you?’
‘Suppose so. The wife wants to, though I don’t really click with all those art-tart friends of his. Anyhow, see you there. Keep up the old scribbling!’ Then another slap on the back, hardly any less violent than the first.
Once he had gone Horatio wondered why he had failed to summon up the courage to ask Tallboys why he was screwing up his research. Was it to protect Kylie-Terèse? No, he admitted to himself, that consideration hadn’t figured in the equation at all. It was just his old funk.
Standing by the small window in the corner of the room, Horatio watched and waited until he saw Tallboys walk outside and get into an auto. It was a light blue grade 4 electric. At least the creep hadn’t got the seniority at P.I.D. to rate a decent one. Marty drove a green grade 3 petrol.
With Tallboys safely away, Horatio took out his infra-red again and returned to Percival’s note, which he had managed to cover with his pad during the interview. Squinting through the machine he could just make out what had been written on the same pad of paper immediately before the note to the Treasury, from the slight indentation the pen had made on the paper below. It was a method he often used, indeed which he had almost pioneered. He’d employed it three years ago to catch out the late Lord Hurd, by reading a doodle which was later destroyed but the minute impression of which had remained on the page underneath.
This was written directly over the Treasury message, but Horatio could still just make out the words. Undated, unsigned and handwritten, it read simply:
S/S, Do Not Panic. S-W.C dealt w by F.E. & me this a.m. Also S.W. Dodson squared – 2m. Ratcliffe tougher, but took 5. S. OK. B.B.B. to pay. I’ll arrange. N.R.N, if OK. Repeat: Don’t Panic. Destroy this.
No point in going through Mackintosh’s papers for the original then, thought Horatio.
This note was worth pursuing. Was it the repeated admonition not to panic, the hieroglyphics, or the word ‘squared’? Or was it the initials of the Berlin-Brussels Bureau? Back in Aachen days the Bureau had been the praetorian guard of the Euro-federalist movement, and today it was still believed to be a power behind the Commission. Housed in Norman Foster’s New Reichstag building in Berlin and also in the Mies van der Rohe in Brussels, it was a visceral force in the Eurocratic leviathan. Since regional powers over Commission expenditure had been curtailed in the two decades after Aachen, few had seriously challenged, or even really questioned, the role of this highly secretive organisation.
All Horatio knew for certain was that he wanted to know more.
His first call was on Who’s Who for 2015. This yielded three Dodsons: the Director-General of the Child Maintenance Agency, a neurosurgeon, and the arms and munitions supplier to the V.A.T. Inspectorate. None looked promising.
Ratcliffes seemed almost as unforthcoming. Horatio remembered a Ratcliffe as a founding member of Chris Patten’s Conservative & Christian
Democrat Alliance, but it turned out that he had died in 2012. There were five in the 2015 edition. The Chief Prosecutor for the Environmental Health Agency, a retired admiral, the Chairman of the British Beef Council – Horatio felt rueful about that one, he’d loved British beef – and a High Court judge. Finally there was a Cambridge don Horatio had never heard of called Dr Jeremiah Ratcliffe, who listed Shakespeare the Euro-Poet and European Scenes from Dickens amongst his publications.
The judge was worth looking into. If the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, as it had been called before the Aachen Treaty transferred foreign policy-making to Brussels, had ‘squared’ a judge it could be a major news story. Perhaps the admiral was worth a glance too, although he’d already retired by the time of Aachen. That was clearly when the note was written, as it directly preceded the 5 May 2015 note on Percival’s pad. For the first time in three years Horatio felt that after all that sifting there might at last be a nugget somewhere at the bottom of his sieve.
In the library on the floor above he again consulted all the books on the Referendum which he had used for the first two of his Times articles. Neither a Dodson nor a Ratcliffe appeared in any of the indexes. Then he sat down to read the Introduction of the Report of the Chief Scrutineer. That was a historic document in itself, the last report to be laid before the British Parliament prior to it dissolving itself. On the basis of that Report, half a millennium of representative parliamentary government had been wound up in an afternoon.
In the penultimate paragraph Mr Speaker Bercow had written: ‘I should like to place on record my warmest thanks to all those Regional Commissioners, national and local government officials, regional scrutineers, computer and electronic experts and others who helped make the Referendum run so smoothly. In particular I should like to thank …’ There followed five pages of names in small print. Bercow was clearly painstaking. Horatio spotted Ratcliffe, Admiral Sir Michael, towards the top. He’d been Chief Scrutineer for the South-West Region. It took longer to find Dodson, Jacob. Eventually Horatio spotted him in the Computer and Secretarial section, also for the South-West Region. One of Bercow’s appendices was a facsimile of Ratcliffe’s Report, signed and dated 5 May, which stated that the Referendum in the South-West Region had been conducted ‘fairly, freely and in full accordance with all the regulations’.
The Aachen Memorandum Page 5