by Gordon Burn
Clarence – the slightly antique name was matched by a personal manner of impeccable restraint and an old-fashioned, maître-d’-like sense of deference – had first turned up in the context of the McCann story shortly before they travelled to Rome at the end of May for their St Peter’s Square audience with the new Pope, Benedict XVI. He shepherded the McCanns into their place in the receiving line and in front of the cameras and fielded questions at the press conference which followed courtesy of the British Ambassador to the Holy See. For viewers, it was disconcerting to have him back on their screens as a participant in a story rather than in his accustomed role of non-aligned reporter. (This was mixed with the sense of guilt they felt at not having noticed he had gone missing in the first place.) After leaving the BBC he had taken the job of director of the Media Monitoring Unit at Number 10.
To many people Clarence Mitchell was the reporter most closely associated with the television coverage of the West murders in Gloucester in 1991. It was Mitchell who reported the developing story of the apparently respectable married couple who had been charged with murdering their daughter and burying her body under the patio in the back garden. And, after Rose West had been found guilty of murdering Heather and twelve other girls and young women (Fred West had hanged himself in prison before he could be tried), it was Clarence Mitchell who stood outside the house in Cromwell Street in Gloucester where bodies had been discovered buried in pits in the garden and under the cellar and described how the Wests had tortured and sexually abused their children over a period of many years.
So, for those with memories of this earlier Clarence Mitchell, it was strange to see him cast in the role of spokesman and media representative (‘spin doctor’ was a phrase that was soon used) for a couple who a few days earlier had been declared arguidos or official suspects by the Portuguese police investigating the disappearance of their daughter.
In his new incarnation – and Mitchell chose to demonstrate his belief in the McCanns’ total innocence in a persuasive way: he resigned his government post to become their official mouthpiece soon after they returned from Portugal, his salary taken care of by a Cheshire businessman, Brian Kennedy (no relation to Kate McCann’s uncle of the same name), who had made his money in double-glazing and was now also the owner of Sale Sharks rugby club – facing the cameras with the McCanns usually now standing mutely alongside him, Clarence assumed the air of a man holding his funeral director’s black silk hat considerately behind his back, a little scuffed and showing signs of wear (dandruff dusting the brim, perspiration stains dunning the pleated, satinised lining), mourning a professional future that was now well behind him, as well as the child who vanished into folklore and common fame in the family-friendly foreign resort.
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The law as it stands puts no obligation on vendors to disclose a property’s history. A Yorkshire couple discovered this when they attempted to sue the people who had sold them a house that had been the scene of a particularly horrific murder. Alan and Susan Sykes found out about the history of the house in Stillwell Drive, in Sandal, a suburb of Wakefield, while watching a documentary about a man who killed his adopted daughter. The programme was about Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University, who murdered the little girl, Nilanthie, in 1985. The couple the Sykes had bought the house from in 2000 had decided to move two years after buying it after being filled in on its grisly past by a helpful neighbour.
Apartment 5A at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz. The McCanns’ family home at Orchard House in Rothley. Casa Liliana, the house belonging to the mother of Robert Murat, the first official suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Praia, a hundred metres from the Ocean Club apartment: a dark house in a landscape of sun-soaked brilliant white render, cocooned within dense hedges and tall wire-mesh fences, bits of the hedge starting to die where people had inserted themselves into it for a better view. Myrobella, the Blairs’ base for twenty-three years in the north of England, with its strategic screening and hot-wired security annexe, its air of concealment, inviting speculation. The West house in Gloucester before the council pounded it to dust, the pedestrian form of its dark shape.
Is there any way of sensing from outside, with whichever organ it might be, in which of two identical properties an atrocity has been committed? A way of telling the ‘house of horror’ from the ‘dream home’, the soap star’s bolt-hole, the prime minister’s residence? Does something of past events linger in the rooms, the places where they happened? Something sensed, felt, remembered, suspected, imagined, no means of perception excluded? In a room, by a wall. The uncanniness of something excluded, closed off.
After very many months, a picture of the room in the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz from which Madeleine had been subtracted – she had been sleeping in the bed with the twins, Sean and Amelie, sleeping either side of her in their cots at the time – was finally released. The white walls, the wall-length wardrobe, the bare floor, the wooden chair, the narrow bed, the mattress stripped, the sheets bunched, a baby-blue blanket thrown over a pregnant pillow, the little chest of drawers. What was locked and what was open? Was there an abductor? A gauze-like green curtain was it, between bed and chair, lifted on the wind, billowing in? The world’s largest-ever manhunt. The town awash with rumour. The clairvoyants and the diviners. The astral seers. The texters and bloggers and the spitters of abuse.
Tony Blair announced his intention of standing down as prime minister on 10 May, a week to the day after Madeleine’s disappearance. The 3 May, the day she disappeared, was the tenth anniversary of Blair’s first full day as prime minister. Overnight on 2 May 1997, he flew from his Sedgefield constituency to London; later in the day, he drove past cheering crowds to the Palace to receive the official invitation to form a government. He spent the following day, a Saturday, finalising Cabinet appointments and completing the fine-tuning of the new government.
Two big publishing events took place in the early summer of 2007. The first was the final instalment of the Harry Potter saga, The Deathly Hallows. (Jo Rowling’s plan to have a bookmark with Madeleine’s picture on it inside every copy was abandoned when it was decided that young readers would find this too distressing.) The other big bookworld push was for Alastair Campbell’s ‘Diaries’ of his years spent spinning for Tony Blair and New Labour.
Campbell’s diary entries for the summer and autumn of 1999 turned out to be dominated by the event of Cherie Blair’s pregnancy and the birth the following May of Leo, the first baby born to a serving prime minister for more than a century. It becomes clear that the new baby brought Blair great solace through difficult times. But returning to Number 10 at the end of a gruelling foreign trip or a long day dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis or strategy meetings for beginning the second Gulf War, he would sometimes return to Downing Street to find that the baby had climbed in with Cherie and he would end up picking his way through the trains and Thomas the Tank Engine toys scattered across the carpet in Leo’s room and collapse exhausted into Leo’s bed.
Madeleine had a plastic kitchen range in her bedroom in Rothley, a present for Christmas 2006. Leo had a plastic kitchen range in his bedroom in Downing Street, a present on his fifth birthday in 2005. Madeleine’s was pink and grey. Leo’s was grey and green. Madeleine had Cuddles, her pink Cuddle Cat – everything pink, her favourite colour. Leo had his cuddly ladybird toy, red with black polka-dot spots that the PM, snuggling up against it, would have to throw out of the bed.
The toy-filled room. The still warm but cooling bed. The man with executive power sleeping fitfully, alone in the narrow child’s bed, twisting the sheets, spilling the blankets.
The political benefits of small wars. In the Reagan years, Dick Cheney was said to speak often, in private, on this topic. The thrusting, imprinting example of Margaret Thatcher had shown the way – standing ovations in Parliament, streets mounded with flowers thrown by ecstatic fans as the waving goddess passed. ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great l
eader,’ Dubya told his sacked biographer Mickey Herskowitz, ‘is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’
In Leo’s room: the tomb chamber of an embalmed pharaonic figure, preserved in hope of resurrection. (Made in China, recalled as a potential health hazard in August 2007).
Teflon Tony. The man without a shadow. Stick with that image of Madeleine’s room in the irradiated apartment block in Praia da Luz, visible even in the dark. How exposed a house looks when it becomes a taped-off scene-of-crime. How stripped of sanctity, wrote V. S. Naipaul, when a room, once intimate, becomes mere space.
The apartment is on the ground floor on a corner plot, the road running right past it.
I see what I see very clearly. But I don’t know what I’m looking at.
It is a portrait of no one there.
Chapter Four
In the past he used to be able to look out of his window straight into the windows of the Follett house on the Embankment. The millionaire novelist Ken Follett, as the press invariably described him (and as he always liked to be described, as he always liked the raised foil lettering, shiny platinum and silver, the high-echelon credit card-colours on his bestselling paperbacks) lived there with his wife Barbara, the Member of Parliament for Stevenage. (She was one of ‘Blair’s Babes’ who came in at the 1997 general election.)
In the summer there were parties, with pretty pink satin-lined marquees and softly parping riverboat-shuffle-style trad jazz bands, the chink of ice, lazily rising peals of laughter. By standing perilously close to the edge of his roof he was able to spot celebrities such as Sir Antony Sher and Salman Rushdie mingling with media folk and prominent political personalities in the gently terraced back garden.
Before she became an MP, Barbara Follett had been retained as an image consultant for Neil Kinnock and certain members of his shadow cabinet. This came to be known in the press as ‘being Folletted’: her decision to put the famously untelegenic shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, Robin Cook, into ‘autumn tones’ for his appearances in front of the media was one that came in for particular mockery.
Ken Follett, whenever he ran in to him at the newsagent’s or in the post office, was always very dapper in expensive suedes and cashmere, Jermyn Street rollnecks and blazers with gold buttons and occasionally tartan slacks.
‘The Folletts’. They were a diary-page staple. The buzz was with them through the Kinnock years and John Smith’s brief period as leader, on into the Blair succession. But then it seems their gilded reputation started to tell against them. It didn’t sit well with New Labour.
The turning point came on the night of a dinner the Blairs attended at the Folletts’ handsome house on the river, soon after Tony had reached his accommodation with Gordon Brown about being the most electable face of the new hosed-down, post-ideology, voter-friendly Labour Party. The distancing of the Party from the unions over the previous ten years meant that it now had to find alternative sources of finance, and Ken Follett had been in the vanguard of fundraising from ‘high value’ donors. But the press had been tipped off on the night of the private dinner at his house in 1995 and the pictures of the Blairs arriving resulted in a flurry of stories about Tony and Cherie’s alleged high-living in ‘luvvie-land’. The pop impresario Michael Levy (later to be known as ‘Lord Cashpoint’) replaced Ken Follett as chief fundraiser, the Folletts were cast out of the inner circle, their garden parties became less frequent and more subdued, and towards the end of Blair’s first term as prime minister the handsome house in Chelsea was sold.
Before he moved in, the new owner, an American so it was rumoured, embarked on a drastic two-year renovation. It is a prestigious property that stands on the site of Thomas Girtin’s late-eighteenth-century watercolour masterpiece, The White House at Chelsea. Girtin died in 1802 when he was only twenty-seven. He was a friend and rival of Turner, and it was on this stretch of the river at Battersea Reach that Turner chose to spend the last six years of his life. After Turner, it was the place artists came to live.
Once or twice he had seen Francis Bacon, whose favourite model Henrietta Moraes lived around the corner, waiting by the bus stop outside the Follett house, hair oxblooded with boot-polish, carrier bag in hand. It was the same bus stop that, according to the biographies, T. S. Eliot used to use when he was a resident of Carlyle Mansions to travel to his job as poetry editor at Faber and Faber.
One afternoon, bringing the dog back from the park, he had come across Peter Sellers and his new wife Britt Ekland appraising the Follett house (although this was several years before it was known as that), craning their necks, admiring a conservatory, speculating (he imagined) on what it must be like to be sitting in it, drink in hand, sunk into the rattan armchairs covered in the green bamboo-pattern fabric that the then-owners had, held in suspension between misty Whistlerian river and the vast expanse of gunmetal sky, floating in a diorama of changing light. (When, after Sellers’ death, Britt Ekland took up with a member of the American retro rockabilly band Stray Cats and he would sometimes spot them together looking dishevelled and hungover in the rougher pubs and cafés of the World’s End – looking like vintage pictures of an off-the-rails Amy Winehouse and her drug-addled husband that ran like a flicker-frame through the whole of that summer – he would recall that other Britt who was an intimate of Princes Margaret’s, one of Peter Sellers’ best friends, and that other time before the Follett house was the Follett house.)
Summer 2007 was the moment of Russia and China and the new super-rich Asian countries. Under the influence of globalisation, the nature of financial markets had changed. Art, for example, had become ‘monetised’. Art had become an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate. Finance, he read without understanding what he was reading, was now an end in itself. It no longer needed a real economy to function because it had gone off into hyperspace, operating in a virtual world.
It was a changed, and still vertiginously changing, world. The rewards for those who knew and understood how to manipulate money were unprecedentedly massive. And Mr Studzinski, the new owner of the handsome house at Battersea Reach, was apparently a part of that world.
He had dogs. Three, and then four big dogs, giant Leonburgers which bayed and, when out for walks, loped slowly, like a pack. An elaborate system of security was installed, and a man in a uniform sent round every night to check. A trip-light was set up over the garage to interrogate every face passing in the street. Spiked fences were erected. Security cameras boxed in with metal grilles. Mature trees were swung in over the rooftops and their big rootballs buried in a line along the back of the house so that, even clinging precariously to the chimney and peering over, his view of the garden was now screened off, blocked by the new wall of trees.
The front of the house with the sweeping view of the river was in a red zone. There was no stopping. And so all exchange between outside and inside took place at the side, through the garages. Standing by the bus stop – the same stop where Francis Bacon and, before him, T. S. Eliot (a lifelong anglophile, like Mr Studzinski) once waited – it was impossible to be unaware of the day-long comings and goings of florists and dry-cleaning people, of his driver, his butler, the first-and second-gardener, the Filipino domestics and the husband of one of them, the odd-job man, the men who walked his dogs. But never the man himself.
There were rumours. He read about him in the papers: about the Picasso collection, the Man Rays, the salons reflecting his polymath interests, ‘mixing artists, authors and musicians with clergy, politicians, royalty and captains of industry … the Duchess of Kent and Sting; Lord Browne of BP and members of the Gucci family’. There had been a £5 million donation that summer towards the new extension at Tate Modern, of which he was a Trustee.
He heard about him from the neighbours: about the black Range Rover with the smoked windows brought up to within inches of the garage door at seven every morning; the papers fanned out just so across the back seat; the rapid acceleration. (This from a woman who lived in the flats directly o
pposite who struck up a conversation with him at the newsagent’s one morning. ‘You have a little dog, don’t you?’ she said pleasantly. ‘You’re a writer. I see you. I’m straight opposite. You’re from the same part of the world as me.’) The new owner was a kind of phantom created by hearsay and rumour – a virtual owner. In this way he was entirely a creature of his time, a time that had stopped caring what companies produced; they existed now only for buying and selling. Hedge funds. Fungible assets. Private equity. The derivatives market. Mr Studzinski was said to be a master of modern financial engineering; a genius at the new prime minister Gordon Brown’s pet subject, fiscal arithmetic.
These were the reasons the directors of Northern Rock retained Studzinki’s services as an adviser when there was a run on the bank in the middle of September, with savers camping overnight outside branches all across the country to withdraw their money. It was the first run on a British bank in more than a century, a scandal of mismanagement that was the result (it seemed, although it was initially difficult to work out how) of something called ‘subprime mortgages’ in America. Divorced from the jargon, this turned out to be the practice of lending money to low-income homeowners, many of them black, who could never afford to pay it back.
The Bank of England had to pump £26 billion of taxpayers’ money into Northern Rock to keep it afloat. Studzinski, by then head of investment banking at Blackstone, the private equity group, was among those who had to weigh up the claims of the various groups and conglomerates bidding to buy the bank. Whatever the eventual outcome, Studzinski himself couldn’t lose. The advisers to the consortium led by Sir Richard Branson were known to be getting a minimum £5 million even if the deal fell through. Studzinski’s guarantee was understood to be at the very least double that.