I returned from Zaire in the late spring of 1985, staying with my parents in their house in Budleigh Salterton. Budleigh is a small, genteel seaside town in east Devon. The locals call it ‘God’s waiting room’, and it’s much favoured by retired folk of the moneyed kind. There are avenues on the southern edge of the town, up towards the golf course, where it’s difficult to find anyone below the rank of Rear-Admiral, but my father had long since settled for something a little more modest, a neat thirties house near the town’s centre, with a decently kept garden and a couple of fruit trees and distant glimpses of the sea from the upstairs bedrooms. I’d grown up there, an only child, and I’d loved it.
The summer came and went. I’d managed to save a little money from Africa, and when that had gone I began to commute daily to Exmouth, a bigger town along the coast. A young couple my mother knew had opened a nursing home and they were always short-handed. They’d bought a property called Beacon Hill House, a handsome Georgian mansion with wonderful views down the coast. Inside, the place was shabby and chaotic, but the couple who ran it – Eileen and Pete – became good friends, and I spent three months emptying bedpans and spoonfeeding elderly women until the novelty began to fade. By September, both my parents and I agreed that my life, post-university, was going nowhere.
Part of the problem was my spell abroad. People say you don’t leave Africa by getting on a plane. On the contrary, you take the place with you, its smells, its madness, its frequent and at times brutal reminders that life isn’t all fast food and bus stops.
One particular episode had made a deep impression. A couple of weeks before I was due to leave, there’d been an incident down by the docks, a brief flurry of violence between a group of fishermen from upriver and a couple of local merchants. The cause of the quarrel was obscure, but the fishermen returned upriver with one of their number savagely beaten. Later that night, they came back. Unable to find the merchants, they kidnapped a relative of one of them. They woke him up, bound his wrists behind his back and walked him on to the street. There they beat him unconscious with lengths of rubber hosepipe and cut his throat with a gutting knife. Then they hacked off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth. Next day, he was still lying dead in the street, his body in full view. I saw him on the way to the Mission Hospital. I recognized what was left of his face because he’d recently helped us fix a puncture on the jeep. His name was Malu and he was barely eleven years old.
There was an investigation of sorts, but no arrests. Everyone knew who’d done it, but no one seemed to care. Monique and I attended his funeral and laid flowers on his grave. His family hardly dared look at us. The message was plain: we were white; we didn’t understand; Malu had been taken; there was no point making a fuss. For months, back in England, I brooded on this incident. Economically, Zaire had long been a basket case even in Africa, and I’d seen plenty of suffering. The place was a real mess and I’d gone way beyond the point of being surprised or angered by it, but the sight of Malu’s broken body, already swelling in the heat, had tripped a switch deep in my head.
I’d never been remotely political, but that single image forced me to think for the first time about the glue that sticks society together. Old-fashioned things. Like justice. And law. And order. Sometimes, on the occasional evenings I spent at home, I tried to discuss it with my father. We’d never been especially close – he’d spent most of my childhood away on various postings – but my descriptions of daily life in Kisangani struck a chord with him, too.
The British, it seemed, were also locked in conflict. The miners’ strike had dragged on through the winter I’d been away, no quarter offered or given, and the prime minister seemed to have turned confrontation into a way of life. Everything, quite suddenly, had become black and white. There was good and there was evil. There was right and there was wrong. The middle ground had gone. Either you were a believer or you weren’t, and if you weren’t then you were simply ignored. The moderates, according to my father, had been neutered, and the only language that now mattered was the language of violence. Anarchists on the rampage. Riot police on horseback. Thirty pounds of Semtex in a Brighton hotel, the prime minister escaping death by the width of an en suite bathroom.
Recently attached to some kind of forward planning unit in the Ministry of Defence, my father was now close enough to the heart of it all to understand what a delicate structure our society really was. Concepts like law and order, he said, rested on an elaborate conjuring trick, an illusion. There were more, lots more, of them than us. Exactly who ‘they’ were and what my father meant by ‘us’ I never quite fathomed, but the moment ‘they’ realized the true odds, the sleight of hand at the heart of democracy, then the trick was revealed and the game was over. What remained was chaos and violence and the slow surrender to corruption and anarchy. Poor Malu.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t make too much of these conversations. They happened twice, perhaps three times, and what mattered most about them to me was the interest my father took in what had happened in Zaire. I warmed to his questions. They seemed to me to be the beginnings of a real relationship and accordingly I told him everything. But my father, I suspect, took a great deal more from our heart to hearts. Behind the slow smile and the occasional asides, he was thinking, as ever, on practical lines. I was twenty-three years old. I was highly educated. I could handle myself in most situations. I was wasted at the Beacon Hill House Nursing Home. I, and perhaps my country, deserved rather better than that.
The phone call came in October. Autumn had descended on Budleigh Salterton, and I was cutting back the roses behind the conservatory when my mother signalled through the sitting-room window. She gave me the phone. I recognized the voice at once.
‘Rory!’
‘Sarah. Long time …’
We chatted for a while. Rory had been a young instructing officer at the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone. We’d met a number of times before I went to Africa. He was tall and wild and very funny, with a ruddy, raw-boned face and a passion for windsurfing. He was nearly ten years older than me, but we’d always got on extremely well, mainly, I suspect, because he regarded me as ‘a good bloke’. I wasn’t dainty, like the other girls. I didn’t lie around mooning about rock stars or fashion spreads in Vogue. On the contrary, like Rory himself, I was game for virtually anything, providing it offered physical excitement and a few laughs. Now, after a brief exchange of news, he suggested I come up to London. He, too, was working at the MOD. I caught myself frowning. Something in his voice made me hesitate.
‘Why?’
‘People I want you to meet. People who want to meet you.’
‘What kind of people?’
‘Good guys. You’ll like them.’
‘Why do they want to meet me?’
‘No idea. I’ve told them you’re an old slag. Made no difference.’
‘Will you be there?’
‘Sure. They’re civilized. Speak the Queen’s English. You’ll need an interpreter.’
I laughed. We agreed a time and a place. He hung up. Lovely man.
It was about the same time that Wesley found himself in trouble. At first, he’d greeted the news of his infection with disbelief, keeping it at arm’s length and treating it with a mix of derision and contempt. HIV was someone else’s nightmare, something that wouldn’t – couldn’t – happen to him. The diagnosis, Dr Webber’s glum letter, had been a mistake, some wild medical fantasy, a rumble of stage thunder in the on-going play that passed for his life. Accordingly, he decided to ignore it.
This period, he later told me, lasted about a week. Then, like any good reporter, he began to ask questions. He went to several voluntary bodies. He tried to work out who made sense and who talked bullshit. He did his best to separate the medical facts from the political hysteria. The latter, a bush fire whipped up by various gay factions, he found particularly hard to take. They were, he said drily, a pain in the arse.
But the facts, none the less, alarmed him. By 1985
, doctors were putting a two-year tag on the period between infection with HIV and the development of full-blown AIDS. To some degree this was a guess, but the evidence from the States, acquired in bulk by Wesley, made grim reading. Guys in San Francisco were dying in their hundreds. The word on the lips of the spokesperson from the Center for Disease Control was ‘exponential’. No matter how bad things looked today, tomorrow would be a whole lot worse.
Sobered by bis research, Wesley conducted what he later described as ‘a brief audit’ of his life. Two years meant twenty-four months meant 104 weeks. Ever impatient, he did the sums again and again, wondering how much of the two years would be surrendered to the doctors and nurses and how much he could rely on as his own. Without doubt, by now, he was in shock. An express train of his own making, he’d sighted the buffers rather earlier than he’d anticipated. No longer immortal, he was obliged to make a few decisions.
One of them had to do with his work. Wesley had never been remotely casual about journalism. From early adolescence, it had been his only choice of career, the one thing in his life that he wanted to do properly and do well. By nineteen, he was starring on a small Essex weekly. Two years later he moved west, to Bristol, accepting a job on a big provincial daily. He started on the general reporters desk. Within a year, he was business editor, filing copy by the yard, building a reputation for dogged footwork, exhaustive research and a bloody-minded defence of his right to ask the truly awkward questions.
Colleagues I’ve contacted from that period talk of him with affection and some awe: a driven man in his mid-twenties with an uncertain grip on the world that most of the rest of us inhabit. He had no dress sense, no social life, little time for small talk or gossip. He had few close friends and never forgave anyone who lied to him or let him down. On the other hand, he was utterly loyal and immensely generous. Money, I can vouch, meant nothing to him. If someone else’s need was greater than his, he simply emptied his pockets and gave it all away.
On 16 October 1985, after nearly a year on Fleet Street, Wesley made an appointment with his editor. The appointment and its aftermath occupy several pages in the loose-leaf ring binder that served at this period in his life as a kind of diary. Sitting down in front of the editor’s desk (‘totally fucking empty – just like his head’), Wesley explained that he was HIV positive. The editor, wrongly thinking Wesley already had AIDS, was shocked. In the interests of the paper, for the sake of his colleagues, he said, he’d have to review the situation. Wesley, appalled, explained the difference between HIV and AIDS. He had the virus, no question. The virus was at large in his body, knocking off the warrior cells. He was infectious, certainly, but he had no plans to screw anybody and it would be a while before the virus got the upper hand. Once it did and his body’s defences were shot to pieces he’d doubtless succumb to something horrible, but until then he was still good for the odd story or two.
At this, the editor had evidently looked a bit dubious, and although he’d done his best to temper his disgust with a little sympathy, Wesley knew in his heart that his days in the sun were over. The newspaper world thrives on gossip and in his own small way, Wesley himself had become the current news story. ‘So how’s this for a sign-off?’ he confides to his diary. ‘Gay Plague Sweeps Fleet Street. Hack Banned From Newsroom. Bleach Sales Hit New High.’
I went to London in mid-October. I met Rory in the coffee shop at Paddington Station and we took a cab to a small Malaysian restaurant in Soho. Upstairs, at a discreet table by the window, he introduced me to two colleagues. One of them was in his late fifties, a sombre, jowly man in a dark suit, not Rory’s kind at all. The other was much younger, crop-haired, neat, watchful. Neither, as it turned out, was much interested in small talk.
2
I joined MI5 in time to attend the Curzon House Christmas party, an awkward, joyless affair that descended from perfunctory conversation and the exchange of witty presents to deep eddies of gossip, vicious and, past midnight, wildly drunken.
The recruitment process had seemed, to me at least, utterly haphazard. The lunch with Rory and his friends had lasted no more than an hour, me doing most of the talking. Rory filling the occasional silences with a series of badly told stories that he’d dredged up from our social get-togethers in Devon. Several of the stories were pure fiction, designed somehow to convince our hosts that I was on the level, a good sport, heart in the right place, a safe pair of hands, and afterwards, when our hosts had paid the bill and left, I asked him what he’d been up to.
The atmosphere throughout the meal had been chilly. Neither of the two men had bothered to explain themselves and I’d no idea why I’d been invited, or who or what they represented. If their intention had been to offer me a job, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to accept. Who were they? What did they want? And why did they find it so bloody hard to smile?
Rory dismissed my questions with a wide grin and a wave of the hand. The restaurant was nearly empty now. A waiter hovered patiently in the background with our bill.
‘Spooks,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Intelligence. Security wallahs.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Brothers in arms.’
‘You mean spies?’
‘No. Spycatchers. MI5. The home team.’
‘What do they want with me? What have I done?’
Rory hooted with laughter. Laughter suited him. The pale, freckled planes of his face were seamed with deep lines, and when they filled with laughter he created the sensation, at once dangerous and playful, that something was about to happen: a prank, a joke, some wild physical adventure. For a man in his early thirties, with a mortgage and two kids, he could sometimes be deliciously adolescent.
‘They want you,’ he whispered. ‘They want you to work for them.’
‘Why?’
He leaned forward. The melodrama, the big eyes, the clowning had quite gone. Instead, there was another expression, utterly serious. ‘Because you’d be bloody good at it.’
‘Who says?’
‘Me.’
‘What do you know about it?’
‘Quite a lot,’ he said, reaching for the bottle, ‘as it happens.’
Ten days later, back in Devon, I got another phone call, from a woman this time. I was to return to London for a formal interview. The interview took place two days later in an overheated office on the second floor of an anonymous building in Gower Street. The office was shabby. The paint had bubbled on the big iron radiators and the nylon covers on the chairs were printed with swirly patterns in orange and olive green. The place reminded me of my one and only visit to the DHSS outpost in Exeter: good intentions, zero budget and absolutely no taste.
The interview was conducted by two men and a woman. One of the men was the younger of Rory’s colleagues I’d met at the restaurant. Ten days had done nothing for his conversation and he spent most of the morning making notes on a large yellow pad. The other man was older, with a small, white face and a habit of gazing out of the window. Of the three of them, the woman did most of the talking and it was she who led me patiently through my life, pausing from time to time to ask a question, note a date or ask me to expand a little on this or that. She was evidently senior to the other two – there was a very definite sense of deference when they occasionally conferred together – and when she’d mapped out my twenty-three years to her satisfaction, she became suddenly brisker, closing her file and returning her fountain pen to her bag.
‘You’ll be sitting a couple of tests: English language and mental agility,’ she said. ‘The latter is a bit of a game.’ She smiled. ‘You ever play dominoes?’
I took the tests in a room down the corridor. The dominoes were arranged in certain sequences. The test was to guess the next sequence. I spent half an hour toying with various pieces. As a preparation for defending the state, it seemed a curious exercise.
The woman reappeared before lunch. She carried her bag in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. On top o
f the papers, clearly visible, was a copy of the Official Secrets Act. She put it carefully on the desk. Beside it, she laid another official-looking document.
‘This is the Maxwell-Fyfe Declaration,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome to read it but I’m afraid you can’t take it away. The photocopier’s broken.’ She smiled thinly, nodding at the document. ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’
I picked up the declaration and read it quickly. It turned out to be a statement of the aims of the security services. I looked across at the woman. Thus far, no one had spelled out what I was doing or why I was here.
‘Are you offering me a job?’ I said.
‘Yes. Subject to the usual checks.’ She paused. ‘We’ll need four names. Four referees. Just to make sure.’
‘But what for? What’s the job about?’
She paused again, frowning.
‘It’s a government post,’ she said at length. ‘Security service. F branch. I understood you’d been briefed.’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ She nodded, sighing, ‘I see.’ She looked at me a moment, speculative, then glanced down at the papers on the desk. ‘Do you have a pen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then perhaps you’d like to sign this.’ She picked up the copy of the Official Secrets Act and indicated the relevant page.
I didn’t move. I was still looking at her. ‘But what if I don’t want the job?’ I hesitated. ‘Whatever it is?’
Thunder in the Blood Page 2