by Jon King
Then, silence…
…For a beat … two…
Then: flash! The headlights were again on full beam, again filling my rear-view mirror, blinding, bewildering. Throwing a desperate glance back across my shoulder I could just make out the silhouette of the maniac as he spun his steering wheel and simultaneously threw his car into reverse, spinning a full one-eighty degrees, tyres squealing and blistering on tarmac before screeching off back down the road and out of sight. It felt like I was watching some Hollywood action sequence, eyes and mouth wide, unable to believe what I was seeing, unable to move or respond. Did he just do that? Who the hell was he? I just sat there for what seemed a small eternity, numbed to the marrow, not knowing quite what to do, or think. By the time I’d stopped trembling sufficiently that I could at least think about continuing my journey home the traffic lights must have changed from red to green and back again several times. The next time they changed, I promised myself as finally I felt the blood starting to thaw in my veins, I would slot the car in gear and attempt the journey home.
Which, a few moments later, is precisely what I did…
…When I arrived home some twenty minutes later I was still shaking. Katie was in the kitchen preparing dinner. We both worked and were used to eating late, sometimes not until eight-thirty or nine—symptom of the times, I guess, but at least we made it a rule that, whenever possible, we ate together. The other rule on evenings when we were both late home was ‘first home does the cooking’. This night was no exception.
Slowing my thoughts, pulling myself in, best I could, I dumped my jacket and attaché case in the hallway and made my way through to the kitchen.
“Hi babe.” Thankfully my voice sounded pretty normal, even though I probably looked a little shaken up. I poured myself a glass of red wine.
“You okay?” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Only you look a bit—”
“No, really, I’m just tired.” I kissed her on the cheek. “How was your day?”
“Busy,” she said. “I haven’t been in long. We had to do a last-minute stock take.”
“Oh? Why was that?”
“I think mum might have to close the shop.”
“What? Why…?”
Katie turned the potatoes up to boil, then took the wine glass from my hand and started to drink from it. “May I?”
“You already did.”
“I’m worried about her, Jon.”
“Your mum…?”
“Dad left her in so much debt. It’s difficult to see a way forward. She doesn’t really have a choice but to close the business and call in the receivers.”
“Jeez. Poor mum.”
“Poor us. I’ll have to get another job.”
“Of course.” The reality suddenly hit me. Katie’s dad had walked out on her mum some months earlier, and it turned out the business they’d run together – an art and colour shop, selling prints, postcards, original works of art, plus other colour-themed objets d’art – was not as healthy as we’d all been led to believe. Katie’s mum had been left to pick up the pieces. And the debts.
But as Katie had just reminded me, it wasn’t only her mum who would suffer as a result: Katie losing her job would have its impact on us, too. It was bad news all round.
I curled my arm around Katie’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, babe,” I said, as convincingly as I could. “I’m sure we’ll be okay.”
“I hope so.” She handed me back what was left of my wine.
“So,” I said. “How long before…?”
“Ten minutes,” Katie said. “Just waiting for the potatoes.”
“I meant…”
Katie knew what I meant: How long do we have before your mum shuts up shop and you’re out of work? But the look on her face told me she didn’t want to talk about it. Not right now. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
“I’ll be in the office.”
I kissed Katie one more time and made my way through to my office. I deliberately didn’t say anything about my journey, about the maniac who’d followed me and tried to run me off the road. Katie had enough on her plate as it was; I didn’t want to worry her more than was necessary. Besides, my mind was already busy attempting to fathom another mystery, one that had been bugging me ever since the maniac had left me mind-numbed and trembling at the traffic lights perhaps half an hour earlier. How did they know I was going to London today? No one had followed me from the house this morning, I’d made amply sure of that. How did they know where I was going, and when?
How did the maniac and whoever he worked for know I would be travelling back from London tonight?
There was only one possible answer.
“You’re on file as a tap,” Lacey had told me, which was MI5 speak for ‘your phone’s bugged’. They must have been listening when I’d arranged the meeting – the time and place – last night, on the phone. It was the only explanation.
I have no idea – had no idea then, have no idea to this day – what made me think I would solve this mystery by dismantling my office phone in search of a microchip-sized bug. I knew as well as anyone that, if my phone was bugged, then it would have been achieved remotely, by wire tap, not by installing a physical bug inside my phone. Taking my phone apart to look for this non-existent ‘bug’ nonetheless seemed the expedient thing to do. I guess given my state of mind it was almost understandable.
Katie, on the other hand, didn’t think so. “What are you doing?” She’d just entered my office without me realizing, and had caught me red-handed, stupidly trying to fit the pieces of my handset back together. She looked at her wits’ end. “What’s wrong with the phone?”
“Oh … nothing,” I said, feeling like a schoolboy caught smoking a cigarette. “It was … it was making a strange noise. I think it’s okay now.”
She gave me that look. “Jon, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s this Diana thing, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean…?”
“Don’t you think you’re taking it too far?”
“Too far…?”
“Too seriously.”
“No.”
“You’re making me nervous, Jon.” She started to well up. “Seeing you acting in this way. It makes me nervous.”
“I’m sorry, babe … I…”
“Why are you so interested in Diana all of a sudden anyway?”
“I’m not. I’m interested in who murdered her.”
“But you don’t know that she was murdered…”
“I do, Katie. I do know. That’s the point.”
All this time I’d been holding bits of telephone in my hand. I let them down on my desk top and went to Katie.
“I’m so sorry, babe. I’m really sorry.” I wrapped my arms around her, held her close for several heartbeats. Then stood back, gently brushed her hair from off her face and looked her in the eye. “Katie, please. I need your support right now. I know Diana was murdered. I feel like I’m the only one outside of MI6 who does.”
Katie didn’t reply. Instead she cuddled into me again, and this time started to cry. Not desperately, but in that way we all do when it just gets too much, when there’s just nothing left to say. There was nothing left to say tonight. So I just held her.
It was the first time Diana’s death had truly impacted on our home life, on our relationship. But needless to say, regrettably, it wouldn’t be the last.
CHAPTER 22
JB was at the bar getting drinks. Distracted by a discarded copy of the Daily Mail lying face up on a table by the window I made my way over and sat myself down, started to read it.
Chauffeur Henri Paul Drunk the headline bellowed.
The accompanying article boasted a photograph of Diana’s death-crash driver enjoying a night out at some or other Parisian bar, drink in hand, as though toasting the camera. It was as predictable as English rain, an irony that was not lost on me. “The media are being primed as we spea
k,” the American had said. He was right. I folded it up and threw it back down on the table.
“Not even subtle about it,” I said.
“What’s that?” JB had just returned from the bar, a pint in either hand—his lager, my Guinness.
I tipped my head at the paper. “Results of the blood tests. They reckon Henri Paul was three times over the limit.”
“And…?”
“What do mean, and?”
“Well in layman’s terms that means he was pissed, Jon. Very drunk indeed.” JB planted my Guinness on the table in front of me. “Like I said, it was an accident. Cheers.”
He picked up the discarded newspaper and started to read it.
I picked up my Guinness and started to drink it.
The thing with JB, I’d learned in the few years I’d known him, was that he took time to change, time to adjust his somewhat entrenched perspective and consider an alternate point of view. For all that he lived life at a hundred miles an hour, out the box, he did so with his seat belt on, I’d realized, especially when it came to serious issues—which was no doubt why he still refused point-blank to entertain the possibility that Diana had been murdered. Or even that she might have been. He just wasn’t ready for it, I told myself, not yet, even less that she might have been the victim of some dark establishment conspiracy. Like so many people at the time, though he shared the mood of the nation, even felt the instinctive unease – suspicion even – experienced by vast swathes of the population, still he didn’t want to believe that the establishment might have sanctioned such an operation—that his tax dollars might have paid for it. The existence of UFOs, aliens at Area 51, even that aliens may have conspired with the US government to take over the world—all of these notions, crazy as they may have seemed, were nonetheless harmless: safe. When the day was done and the kids were tucked up snugly in bed they posed no real threat, not to the daily routine, not to the status quo. Ultimately they were nontoxic. That a powerful cabal within the heart of the British establishment might have orchestrated the assassination of the Princess of Wales, on the other hand, was a notion with a nuclear trigger. Not so much explosive as apocalyptic. Which was why JB, along with half the nation, was reluctant to entertain it.
I swallowed a third mouthful of Guinness and turned back to face him. “Do you really believe he was drunk?” I said.
JB’s nose was still buried in the Daily Mail. “Why shouldn’t I? They’ve done the tests. Look,” … pointing at the article … “it says it here in black and white. The tests say he was drunk.”
“The tests will say whatever they want them to say.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“Whoever’s responsible for the cover-up.”
“What cover-up?”
“The one that says Henri Paul was raving drunk. You’ve seen the footage taken by the Ritz security cameras, the footage of Henri Paul walking around the hotel less than an hour before the crash, up and down the stairs, talking to guests, bending down to tie his shoe lace and standing up straight again—acting perfectly sober.”
“You can hardly conclude anything from that.”
“Are you serious? If Henri Paul had had half as much alcohol in him as they say he did, he would’ve been staggering all over the place. There’s no way he could even have walked out of the hotel, let alone driven that car.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe he wasn’t drunk.”
Again JB jabbed a finger at the article he was reading. “These are the results of the blood tests, Jon. The official results.”
“I know that. But…”
“But what?”
“Well, maybe they switched the blood samples.”
“What…?”
“Maybe the blood they tested didn’t belong to Henri Paul. Maybe whoever murdered Diana switched the samples.”
“Oh, come on, Jon.” He threw the paper down on the table. “Headlights following you home, bugs on your telephone, blood samples being switched. You’re starting to sound like you just escaped.”
“I’m beginning to feel like it.”
Just then, our magazine proprietor David and his partner Claire wandered into the bar, looking like they wished they could escape, but were unable. They made their way over to our table.
“What’s wrong?” JB said, seeing the desperation on their faces.
David was the one to break the news, and he didn’t pull any punches. “It’s the magazine,” he said. “It’s gone under. We’ve been nobbled. As from today I’m afraid you’re both out of a job. I’m so sorry.”
So was I. In fact I was steamrollered, not just for the fact that I was now out of work, but also that such a sudden and final closure seemed to me frighteningly suspicious. At its peak, including subscription and overseas mail-order sales, the magazine had been selling around 60,000 copies per edition, with sales increasing month on month. Now, suddenly, it was gone. Suddenly it was no more. Suddenly, suspiciously concurrent with my decision to investigate Diana’s death and write an accompanying book about what I’d been told, it had been banished from the shelves, the most successful X-File magazine on the market, just like that. David informed us that our wholesaler in America had pulled the plug and our distributor here in the UK had closed our account. Advertisers had discontinued their accounts, too. No explanation, he said. No reason given. We were finished, and that was that.
I was struck dumb, on the spot, there and then, just kept staring and staring at the sheer, cold frustration and utter despair written on David and Claire’s faces. What had they done to deserve this? What would they do? How would they survive? I had no words, but my mind was an industry. Had someone behind the scenes orchestrated this? I was already thinking. Were we the victims of sabotage? If so, why? Why would they – whoever they were – why would they have gone to such extraordinary lengths to close down what to all intents and purposes was an innocuous UFO magazine? To warn me off? Was that it? Was I the reason David and Claire had suffered this devastating loss? Did they really deem me such a threat that they would do this? I mean, what I’d been told by the American was explosive, true—or would be, if ever I could prove it. But, of course, the chance of that was less than zero, a fact they must surely have known. So why such extreme action? I couldn’t fathom it. But as I stood there, speechless – legs trembling, jaw loose – clasping the dregs of my Guinness as though clinging fast to the dregs of some other, more familiar reality, neither could I deny my gut-felt suspicions that, as David had just announced, we’d been ‘nobbled’. Like Diana’s death, it seemed, the unexpected closure of our magazine was no accident, a thought that ran me cold.
I felt scared. I felt isolated. I felt numb.
And things didn’t improve from there, either. Over the next few weeks, in fact, they became decidedly worse, to the point that even JB started to believe sinister forces might have been behind events, especially when a few days later we heard more bad news from Rick Devlin, my literary agent. The three big publishers who until now had been bidding against each other for the right to publish our book about Diana’s death – Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Cape and Hodder – had all pulled out, he informed us, all three of them, within days of one another. One minute wined and dined, the next, dumped. Again, no explanation. In the space of just a few short weeks we’d been hung out to dry—no job, no income: no prospect of either. And now no publisher for our book, to boot.
With Katie also losing her job due to the closure of her mum’s shop things had overnight become pretty desperate, to say the least. Even so we soldiered on. We had too. It was our only option.
CHAPTER 23
“You were in the SAS, Dave. You must know how it was done.”
“Those boys weren’t SAS, not serving SAS, anyway. The SAS wouldn’t get involved in something like that. Too risky.”
“Who then?”
“A private firm, probably made up of old boys—former SAS and other special forces, other elite div
isions, plus a few chancers.”
“So a private firm like the one you worked for as a mercenary?”
“Something like that, yeah. But don’t ask me to name the firm, coz I won’t.”
I was in a working men’s club near my home town of Sandhurst. I’d travelled back there to talk to Dave Cornish, a former SAS sergeant and member of John Banks’ infamous Angola mercenaries back in the 1970s—the ones hired by Rob Lacey on behalf of MI6. I was looking for insights into how – if Diana’s ‘accident’ had indeed been orchestrated – how in reality it could have been achieved. I knew from my association with some of the mercenaries that operations of the kind I believed had been used in Paris were more common than people might readily believe. But I needed to know more about how they worked, whether such an operation could feasibly have been used to assassinate such a high-profile personage as Princess Diana. And if it could, who would likely have carried it out. Having known Dave from my teenage years I knew he was the man to talk to, so I’d arranged to meet him for a game of snooker and a liquid lunch―and the chance to pick his brains. My first impression on seeing him again after all these years was that he really hadn’t changed that much at all. Despite that he was now approaching fifty he was still lean and fit, still the equal of most men fifteen years his junior, although his closely cropped hair was these days seasoned with a dusting of salt-n-pepper grey.
Even so, you’d still be unwise to piss him off.
“It’s not till you go private that you learn what really goes on,” he was saying as he placed the wooden triangle over the cluster of reds and lined them up, ready to go. “I’ve run Semtex for the IRA, arms for the MPLA—we were supposed to be at war with both of them. I’ve even run drugs for the CIA, raw opium, but that’s another story. Who’s first?”