The Cut-Out

by Jon King

  Unlawful killing…

  I thought about this possibility for a moment, and I had to admit that in some small way it did change the way I felt. It gave meaning to the nightmare Katie and I had suffered these past five or six years, for one thing. JB, too. It gave meaning to the sacrifices we’d made and even made more tolerable the fact that we’d been so manipulated. Of course, as Lacey had pointed out, no matter how open and democratic any inquest may ultimately profess to be, a verdict of murder would always be too much to expect. But the fact that an investigation had finally been forced nonetheless represented a small victory, all by itself—a people’s victory. Perhaps that victory might yet further be affirmed in a verdict of unlawful killing, I allowed myself to hope.

  A People’s Verdict for the People’s Princess.

  Realistically, that was all I’d ever set out to achieve.

  “There’s something else,” Lacey said a few moments later, almost falteringly, as though finding difficulty shaping his words. He cleared his throat. “I said I wanted to set the record straight … there’s something I wanted you to know, about the American—”

  “He set me up,” I heard myself say.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know? Of course you knew. You were part of it. You were at the meeting and you knew I was being set up as a cut-out.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But I didn’t know the extent of it. You have to realize this was out of my league, beyond anything even I had been involved in.” He paused. “The truth is we were all used in one way or another. Even me.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay.”

  “No.”

  Lacey fell silent for a long moment, staring into his half-empty coffee cup as though searching for the words his mind struggled to find. The truth is we were all used in one way or another, he’d said. Even me. And the more I thought about this the more I realized that he was of course telling the truth, at least so far as he knew it. Certainly he would never have been party to the full scope of the conspiracy we’d both found ourselves embroiled in, I had to acknowledge that. I had to acknowledge, too, that the likelihood he’d been used by those higher up the chain, just as I had been, was considerable. Not that I hadn’t questioned. Of course I had. I’d questioned his part from the very beginning, wondering whether he too, like the American, had knowingly strung me along, fed me scripted information, groomed me for a role I had no idea I was earmarked to play. But the thought that he might have been playing this Judas role all along just didn’t sit right. What would have been his motive? Why would he suddenly have sold his soul to a side of the establishment he’d always kicked so heroically against?

  I could find no answer.

  And there was something else I needed to acknowledge. I’d known Lacey now for more than twenty-five years; he was a friend—someone, at least, I could relax with over a game of snooker and a pint, something I’d done on numerous occasions in the past, though perhaps not so frequently of late. Even so, despite that he was a career spook he was someone I’d learned to trust: someone, in any case, whose pride as an MI5 officer was in his determination to do things the right way. Whatever else he may or may not have been, Lacey was old-school, I reminded myself. He was a decent man, and this now was his way of apologizing to me for his part in something that not even he, for all his years as an active field and target officer, could have had the slightest influence over. He’d been used, I allowed myself to believe, just as I’d been used. Even though he’d known in advance that I’d been singled out as some kind of unwitting go-between, a cut-out, it wasn’t Lacey who’d pulled the strings: it wasn’t Lacey who’d set me up. On the contrary, he’d done his best to help me. But he had nonetheless played the game knowing I was on the blunt end of a wrong deal, and that had left a scar that still wept.

  As I glanced across at him now I wasn’t sure if I was mad at him for the scar he’d left me with, or thankful to him for helping to suture it. Perhaps a little of both.

  “Well I suppose I’d best be going,” Lacey said at some length, draining his coffee and pushing himself up from the table. “I probably won’t see you in this capacity again—I’m being pensioned off. You’ll have to get your information elsewhere from now on.”

  I nodded.

  He turned to go, but stopped before taking even a pace. He fixed me one last time. “Well done, Jon,” he said. “You and JB. You did a remarkable thing, considering who you were up against. A quite remarkable thing.”

  He held my gaze a beat longer, then turned and headed for the door. This time he never looked back.

  ●

  A few months later I was in Hyde Park again, this time with Katie. It was a warm, muggy Tuesday, August 31st, 2004—the seventh anniversary of Diana’s death. The Princess Diana Memorial Fountain had recently been completed and opened to the public, and we’d thought that to pay the memorial a visit on this particular day might be a fitting way to bring closure on what had, after all, been a rollercoaster of a ride for both of us. It was also, we’d felt, a way for us to pay our last respects.

  We arrived late morning, and despite it being midweek the crowds were already milling by the curiously designed monument—a vast, shallow stream bed precision-cut from Cornish granite, kind of oval in shape, along which water flowed and bubbled as it cascaded from the monument’s highest point all the way to the bottom, where it came to rest in a calm, tranquil pool. The symbology was evident.

  And so were the politics. I couldn’t help but note that this particular water feature had indeed been built on the opposite side of the park to Queen Victoria’s Italian Gardens, a fact I found quietly amusing.

  It was pleasant enough, though—toddlers splashing about in the water, tourists enjoying picnics, grateful pigeons feeding unashamedly on the scraps. As Katie and I stood and watched the activity I couldn’t help but acknowledge the profound effect Diana had undoubtedly had on people, and I found myself thinking about my meeting with Lacey, here in Hyde Park, just a few months previously. I remembered him telling me that it had been public pressure that had forced the Royal Coroner to order an investigation into Diana’s death, and that its conclusion would determine whether there were grounds for a jury to be appointed at the inquest. Lacey certainly seemed to think it likely.

  It looks like a jury will probably be called and that opens the way to a verdict of unlawful killing, he’d said. That would be as close to an open admission of guilt as you’re ever likely to get.

  A People’s Verdict for the People’s Princess.

  “I wonder.” I heard myself say out loud.

  Katie heard me, too. She was standing next to me, her head nestled into my chest. “What?” she said without looking up at me.

  “Oh, I was just thinking about something Lacey said, about the inquest. I was wondering what people were really thinking, you know, about Diana’s death—wondering what’s really going on in their minds and if we’ll ever truly get the people’s verdict.”

  Katie pushed herself upright and stole my gaze. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “People aren’t stupid. They know what really happened.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I really think so.”

  Just then, a tall rangy guy in his mid-thirties – chinos, bomber jacket, horn-rimmed glasses – suddenly passed behind us, wheeling an old lady in a wheelchair. Physically speaking, the old girl looked frail, it has to be said. But clearly her mind was sharp enough.

  “It’s Diana’s memorial fountain,” the rangy care assistant was saying to the old lady as he stooped and pulled her tartan blanket up around her hips before wheeling her on along the path. “She died in that accident, remember?” He said it in such a way that inferred he wasn’t necessarily expecting a reply.

  But he got one. Chewing on what the care assistant had just told her the old lady suddenly perked up and blurted in a passionate, East End accent: “That weren’t no accident. She was murdered!�
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  And with that, the two of them disappeared along the path into the milling crowds.

  For a long moment Katie and I simply stood there, speechless, shocked not only at what the old lady had said and the timing of it, but also that she’d mustered the strength to say it with such fervour.

  In that moment neither the result of the ongoing British investigation nor the verdict of the forthcoming Royal Inquest seemed even remotely relevant. So far as I was concerned the old lady had just voiced the verdict of the people—

  A People’s Verdict for the People’s Princess.

  —And that was all that mattered.

  Addendum

  In January 2004, in response to massive public and media pressure, the British Government appointed then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to investigate Princess Diana’s death under the code name ‘Operation Paget’, and to submit his findings to the Royal Coroner.

  On the basis of these findings, in October 2007 a Royal Inquest was convened before a jury at London’s Royal Courts of Justice. Former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove and ten other MI6 agents, including Richard Mason, were brought before the inquest and questioned about their involvement in Diana’s death.

  No charges were brought against them.

  On 2nd April, 2008, the jury retired to consider three verdicts: ‘Accidental Death’, ‘Open Verdict’ and ‘Unlawful Killing’. The presiding judge, Lord Justice Scott Baker, forbade them from returning a verdict of murder.

  “It is not open to you to find that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed in a staged accident,” he ruled.

  Despite this, the jury of six women and five men returned a verdict of ‘Unlawful Killing’, citing the negligence of Henri Paul and the drivers of the ‘following vehicles’ as the cause of Diana’s death. It is the ‘following vehicles’ element that is of note.

  In his autobiography, Memoirs Of A Radical Lawyer, defending QC Michael Mansfield would later write:

  “The ‘following vehicles’ element in the verdict was an aspect that very few commentators picked up on, or bothered with, and mostly its implications were not understood. In so far as anyone took any notice, they thought it was merely a reference to the chasing pack of paparazzi. It wasn’t: there were other vehicles clearly present, but never traced, and not driven by members of the paparazzi.”

  In his review of events surrounding the incident, Mr Mansfield also cited a box of Diana’s personal papers that had, at the time of the Inquest, mysteriously ‘disappeared’; the still-unidentified driver of the white Fiat Uno; the three hours on the evening of the crash during which Henri Paul’s whereabouts were unknown; and the disproportionate sums of money deposited, in cash, in Henri Paul’s multiple bank accounts in the weeks and months leading up to the crash.

  Mr Mansfield concluded: “I have always believed that whatever caused the crash, it was not an accident. And, as it transpired, that belief was shared by the jury at the inquest.”

  For the record, the jury further cited Diana’s decision not to wear her seat belt as a major contributing factor in her death.

  Operation Paget Report—Page 421:

  “Examination of the seat belts showed that they were in a good operational condition with the exception of the rear right seat belt, which was found to be jammed in the retracted position [my italics].”

  Princess Diana occupied the rear right seat. It was Princess Diana’s seat belt that was ‘found to be jammed in the retracted position’.

  Medical experts worldwide have since agreed that, due to the angle of impact, the rear right seat should have been the “safest seat in the car”, and that had she been wearing her seat belt, Princess Diana would almost certainly have survived.