The Aachen Memorandum

by Andrew Roberts

  Memories of 1996 could easily have been a disastrous choice of restaurant for a first date, even a post-coital one. Macanese food came second only to spaghetti for making Horatio look unattractive to women. He was as incompetent with chopsticks as he was insistent on using them. Worst of all, whenever he got excited, which was often, morsels of crispy duck or fried rice would flick out of his mouth. He also asked for all the leftovers to be packed into doggy-bags. He had no dog but he loved eating the food cold the next morning, while lying in the bath. Despising mineral water, he invariably ordered wine, beer and sake by the bucketful, which went down to apparently nil effect. Until he stood up.

  He liked to think he patronised Macanese restaurants because of what had happened to their people thirty years before, but Portugal’s Chinese had not suffered as the former British-Chinese had, so it was probably really primarily the cuisine. The Macanese-Chinese had all been awarded European passports by Lisbon, which meant that under Maastricht’s freedom of movement Article 101 many came to live in Hackney, Soho and Brent. In parts of Stepney the Macanese were now said to outnumber even the French Moroccans. Of course it was both racist and nationalist to keep any figures, so no one could ever know for sure how many had come over.

  ‘Table for two, sir? What name?’

  ‘Ellis.’ He’ d booked it in his mother’ s maiden name just in case.

  ‘Toking or non-toking, sir?’ He did not suppose Cleo would take pills at the table, but he again wanted to be on the safe side.

  ‘Toking, please.’

  ‘Breast-feeding or non breast-feeding?’

  ‘Definitely non,’ said Horatio, in a tone that a Sexism Tribunal might easily have construed as unacceptable. He was led to a table in a quiet corner of the second room. Just what he wanted. He took the seat with its back to the wall. That way he could keep his eye on anyone coming in. He was also near enough to the lavabos to try the same gambit as before should Tallboys suddenly turn up.

  When Cleo walked in five minutes later, with the stalking, confident pace of a jungle big cat, Horatio felt a gargantuan thrill of physical need. She seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room. She wore a neck-to-ankle, figure-hugging dark green silk Hong dress, slit to mid-thigh. As at the party, every single male in the room gazed across at her in admiration. The women stared in unfeigned jealousy. He stood up as she approached, breaking yet another provision of the Anti-Sexism Directive. She didn’t seem to mind.

  He stood on tiptoe to kiss her once on the lips. That kiss alone was almost enough to justify his decision to defy Tallboys’ threat. He also knew, logically, that he needed her information. Their kiss went directly against the advice contained in the recent Intimacy-Transmitted Disease Directive put out by the Commission after the ‘Killer Kissing Bug’ scare. Then he pulled out her chair for her and once they had sat down he poured out glasses of white wine and sake for them both.

  A waiter came over to ask, sotto voce, whether they could please obey the law with regard to the recent Sexism Directive 43/629, as he did not want the restaurant to get a reputation as sexist. Cleo surreptitiously slipped her P.I.D. card from her handbag and showed it to him at table height. One look and he bowed and withdrew.

  She was strong, fit and wholly at ease with her pulsating sexual allure. She looked at him coolly and levelly for a short while before asking him how he was. ‘Obsessed with you, you unbelievable beauty’, would have been the true answer, but he confined himself to saying, ‘Fine, considering I’m risking being blinded in order to be here tonight.’ He explained. She was sympathetic but hardly comforting.

  ‘I’d love to be able to tell you it’s all hot air, darling, but I can’t. He really is a brute.’ At least ‘darling’ made it somehow easier to bear. ‘Anyhow, your eyes aren’t piggy, they’re …’ She searched for the right word. ‘… idealistic. They’re what attracted me to you in the first place.’

  And then they talked. They quickly established from the will, a copy of which Cleo had obtained from P.I.D., and what Horatio’s mother had told him, that they were cousins. Catching and punishing her grandfather’s murderer had become an obsession. The way she talked about it, Horatio got the impression that Cleo was not thinking in terms of the traditional Europol progression of detection, arrest, trial, conviction and eventual imprisonment. She had a far more direct course of retribution in mind.

  She told him about being brought up as an orphan by the Admiral. He told her about growing up without a father. She had no idea, beyond a vague suspicion that it might somehow be political, why anyone should want to murder the old man. As they were the only beneficiaries of his will it couldn’t have been for the money. She also couldn’t say why Ratcliffe had so much, and Horatio was not about to tarnish her happy memories of him by saying so. He told her all about the conversation with Percival, though, and how Snell had wiped it. Without mentioning Marty, who was in quite enough trouble already, he told her about the destroyed furniture in the Rectory. This made her yet more furious. She had grown up there.

  For the rest of dinner they just talked like people who are falling in love, while he ate as carefully as possible. They had much in common. They were the same age, born within a week of one another. They both found it absurd that cheddar cheese could now only be obtained in Sicily. They laughed about their childhood membership of the Youth Anti-Alcohol & Nicotine League. They both thought that the traditional blue plastic awning around the Albert Memorial, under which they both remembered crawling as children and which had been there now for over half a century, should at last be removed.

  Prince Albert was a good role model for European cohesion, she thought, despite having been royal. She couldn’t talk in any detail about her job, of course, but there was nothing of the sea-green, incorruptible fanatic Marty had warned him about. The only thing sea-like about her were those extraordinary turquoise eyes. He dived into them, swam in them, wallowed in them.

  Paying the bill, Horatio spotted the time on the receipt: 01.35. They had been talking for five hours! All the other diners had left. The waiters were clearing up around them and stacking chairs on tables. He feared initiating the next stage – always assuming there would be one – and prayed she would take charge as decisively as she had on Friday night. He suggested nervously that they go on to a nightclub. The Ministry of Fear in Brixton, perhaps, or the Kulturkampf in Belgrave Square, where they could dance to some of the latest Hamburg hits? Much to his relief – at twenty kilos overweight and asthmatic, dancing was hardly his forte – she suggested, straight out and without any prompting, that they go back to his flat.

  Neither, once there, did she tease him with the ‘will-she-won’t-she’ games that so many women had played in the past, before invariably plumping for the ‘won’t’. Her superb, sleek self-assurance was far too great for that. After a genuine Russian vodka nightcap which she slipped from her handbag – the imported, Government variety, he noticed – she stood up, smoothed her open palms down her dress, over the magnificent contours of her breasts, hips and upper thighs, and said, in an almost matter-of-fact tone, ‘So, are we going next door?’

  ‘We are,’ Horatio croaked, entranced. He heaved himself to his feet and tottered off after her into the bedroom.

  Unlike him, Cleo had all the legal precursors organised. The dingles – or Pre-Penetration Permission Certificates, as they were officially called – were in her bag, already completed, timed and even date-stamped. They only required signatures to make the next stage legal. Horatio noticed that his handwriting looked distinctly shaky. Permission from the Health Commission was faxed back within minutes – she had a friend there, she explained. As he put the initialled counterfoils for her Harassment Protection (Liability Exemption P12 E) forms into his wallet, she bent down to his height. ‘And unlike last night, Horatio,’ she whispered between long, excruciating kisses, in that combination of purr an demand he found so intoxicating, ‘you will allow me to enjoy you as much as you are about to enjoy me.’

>   ‘It’s all right to do this if we’re cousins, isn’t it?’ She just looked at him and smiled.

  Horatio had only made love to six women in his life, three whom had required payment. He’d lost his virginity at nineteen. About to make a call from a pimp-sponsored vid-phone booth in St Pancras, one of the ads had caught his eye. She did not look too bad on the vid either, and the pro-tel was only two hundred yards away, in one of the local authority’s Toleration Zones. Any excitement, naughtiness or erotic content the occasion might have had was more than dissipated by the Health Commission nurse’s check-ups on him before, virtually during and after that singularly unfulfilling half-hour.

  His fourth foray had been an undiluted disaster, setting back his sexual confidence and development half a decade. Liz used to laugh at him at the most vital moments. Number five had been Leila; coitus had never been more comprehensively interrupted than at 03.00 on Monday 9 September 2043 when Special Branch smashed his flat door down and dragged them both off to Paddington Green anti-terrorist nick. They had been bugging the place, and had specially chosen the most embarrassing time to burst in.

  Leila’s successor only lasted a fortnight before she went off with some Hunky-Regular-Guy. She had said she wanted brainpower, but in the end she went for the pecs of a SportsChannel 19 fitness instructor. Horatio was therefore quite content for Cleo to take control. Which she did, expertly. For once in his life he would be making love to a woman who would not be constantly shooting surreptitious glances at the vid-phone clock, wondering when it would be over.

  Cleo was extrovert, experienced, inventive, a master of timing and – as he soon discovered – very, very uninhibited. It took all his self-control to hold himself back. He was terrified of her reaction if he failed. So he tried to concentrate on his grandmother’s moustache, his Atgas bill, his mortgage and the documentary he’d once seen on operations without anaesthetic in Somalia. He even wound up trying to debate the pros and cons of the Pope’s opposition to Turkey’s membership of the Union.

  It wasn’t working.

  He tried declining some of the more obscure German irregular verbs. He asked himself why there was no past tense of the Italian verb meaning ‘to itch’? The vision of Alex Tallboys’ thumbs moving closer and closer towards his unprotected eyeballs also helped take his mind off the wonderful thing that she was doing to him so expertly and, more amazingly, with every appearance of relish.

  The Sexual Equality Directive had been quite specific. Women were to be on top for at least fifty per cent of the time. On this, if nothing else, Cleo was clearly a conformist. Eyes closed, lips just slightly apart, breathing deep but regular, she was the personification of erotic womanhood. Most men only get to experience lovemaking like this once or twice in their lives, Horatio thought, so he must make every second count. There couldn’t be many more, so he must etch each one on to his memory so as to be able to give himself pleasure and pride until the day he died. Which might very well be quite soon if her husband found out.

  After another period of ecstasy, which actually lasted only a few minutes but seemed to him to take as long as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he warned her that he could stand it no longer. He called out ‘Cleo!’, thinking how appropriate it was that Clio should be the historian’s muse, and it was all over.

  A great tiredness suddenly descended, but he had read too many articles in Chic Alors! not to know that he could not just turn over and fall asleep, however much he might want to. This was the time for the T.L.C. part. Taking a packet of Marlboro nicotine cigarettes from her handbag – how on earth did she get hold of such things? What other smuggled goodies were in there? A Clint Eastwood video, perhaps, or a Sony Walkperson? – Cleo looked at him with a fully satisfied smile.

  ‘If I do go to prison for a terrible crime that I didn’t commit,’ he told her, truthfully, ‘I will at least now for ever know that I have experienced true perfection.’

  ‘Night-night, Horatio.’

  CHAPTER 15

  07.00 TUESDAY 4 MAY

  Horatio woke. The watch-phone bleeper said 07.00. He couldn’t remember setting it.

  Cleo wasn’t there.

  Rolling himself out of bed he saw her note on the floor in the middle of the room.

  ‘Had to go darling. Didn’t want to wake you. Last night was wonderful.

  Call me. All love C.

  P.S. Be v. v. careful, my phone is probably tapped and location-monitored now. Use scramble & talk quickly. 40 secs max each call. Use code if poss. Destroy this.’

  He slipped it into his jacket pocket and went next door to wash.

  As he was getting dressed the ‘Urgent’ bleeper on his desk modem went off in the next-door room. Ear-piercingly demanding, it got louder and louder. He waddled over half-naked to the modem, tapped in his password and read: ‘GET OUT NOW! S.W.A.T. TEAM ON ITS WAY! NOW! LEAVE!’

  For a split second he hesitated. Should he let them take him? No. He had not got the evidence he needed yet. It would mean a lifetime in prison. Always wondering …

  He grabbed his jacket and ran to the kitchen window. He tried to fling it open. It was stuck. Or locked.

  Where did he keep the key? He had no time for this.

  He shocked himself with his determination when he picked up the kitchen chair and threw it feet first straight through the window.

  Then he climbed up onto the sink and squeezed himself through the shattered glass, hoping he wouldn’t cut himself. Scrambling onto the fire escape, he was about to run down. Then he thought again. They’d be covering the back. So instead he climbed up and onto the roof.

  He could hear sirens. Sucking hard on his inhaler, Horatio forced himself over the two roofs adjoining his. The sirens were getting louder and louder, closer and closer. Then he heard a loud, violent, swooping sound. Looking back he saw a chopper, its nose tipped down so that only the rotating blades showed, heading straight towards him from Gloucester Road only about half a kilometre to the west. He grabbed the next fire escape down, trying to stay out of sight.

  Gasping badly by the time he got to the end of the fire escape, he was feeling dizzy. The steps ended. There was a drop to the bottom of about eight metres. Where was the bloody ladder?

  Nowhere.

  Lying underneath him was a large pile of cardboard boxes. He’d once read somewhere that stuntmen used boxes as the ideal stopping agent in jumps. But what if these were full of smuggled Japanese white goods or something? He’d break his back. Be paralysed.

  The din of the chopper and auto sirens on the other side of the house made his choice for him. He took another pull at his inhaler and held it tight in his fist. ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ He clenched his teeth. Closed his eyes. And jumped. The boxes were empty. The stuntmen were right.

  Picking himself up quickly he scampered off down the alleyway around the back of the Swallow Hotel, praying the chopper would not come over his side of the block until he was under the archway and out of sight. When five seconds later it did he was away. As he emerged safely onto the Director’s Court Road he could not help glancing the three hundred metres back down Director’s Court Gardens towards his front door.

  Five police petrol autos were parked at angles in the road. Armed men in navy blue flak jackets wearing heavy helmets and carrying N-series automatic weapons – one, he thought, held what looked like a bazooka – were taking up positions behind the autos.

  ‘Horatio Lestoq!’ came a voice from a loudhailer. The words were clearly audible even though he was hundreds of metres away. ‘This is Europol! You are surrounded! …’

  The chopper was hovering over the roof like a vast, furious hornet. Marksmen were leaning out of it. Horatio showed as much interest as might any busy man who was late for work, making his way through the crowd which was forming in the street to watch the excitement. After a few seconds he waddled off in the opposite direction towards the Old Brompton Road tram stop. Even in that short walk four more police autos zoomed past him towards Collingh
am Place.

  The tram journey allowed him to get his breath back and stop sweating quite so profusely. He changed trams in the Fulham Road and alighted at the corner of Walton Street and Ovington Square.

  The walk to Moore Street was nerve-wracking. He was now officially on the run. What if it had been on the news? What if Gemma had seen it and contacted Europol? He could now be done for resisting arrest. It would count badly against him when it got to court.

  Horatio was basting in anxiety as he made his way down Lennox Gardens. Everything was quiet. Was it too quiet for 08.55 on a Tuesday?

  Tuesday!

  Today was the thirtieth anniversary of Aachen, the day his third Times article was due to have appeared. Damn Weaning. Damn Percival. Damn Tallboys. Damn them all.

  Doubts descended like his depression used to before he started on Pluszac. Suddenly, overpoweringly, without warning. Should he have just ignored Percival’s note? Forgotten all about it? The Admiral would probably be alive today if he had. Horatio’s most serious worries would be reserved for his Atgas bill. Not for his life.

  He scanned the rooftops for snipers. Was the old boy selling frankfurters at the end of Clabon Mews in fact a policeperson ready to pounce? What about the lad cleaning the windows of the ivy-covered pub? (And since when had it changed its name? It had been called The Australian for centuries. Now it was The Austrian. The sign of the grinning ocker Aussie with corks dangling from his hat had been replaced by some jerk in lederhosen.)

  He had no alternative. He had to get back to Ibworth, and a private auto was the only way. Even if he had an auto, the satellite ‘eye-in-the-sky’ would have spotted his roof number in seconds. Public transport was out of the question. Gemma was his only hope. The logic was his sole comfort as he knocked on her door at 09.00.

  ‘Hi, Horatio, you’re prompt.’ Four quick pecks on the cheek. Perfectly natural. ‘Ah’ve just got a couple of things to do and then Ah’ll be right with you. Come on in.’ He was relieved to be able to get off the street. She disappeared next door, calling, ‘Go on into the drawing room and watch the cable if you like. Ah’ve almost finished packing. I think the news should be on soon.’ He walked in and came face to face with himself on the screen.