by G D Harper
‘So that’s a no, is it?’ I tried not to look too disappointed.
Bobbie laughed. ‘When did you get so defeatist in your old age? If you can come out of retirement and write something as great as this, who’s to say I can’t do the same? Here’s my proposition. I’ll come down to Glasgow and direct the thing. I’ve spoken to Davie, and he’s happy for me to give up three months of the croft to do this. I know a great church in Cowcaddens that will work as a venue, and there’s no shortage of acting talent. The only thing I need from you is to cover the financials; there’s not enough left over from a crofter’s income to fund these sorts of indulgences. But this story captures the zeitgeist of the moment. If you say your media contacts are champing at the bit to give it publicity, it should be a smash. What do you say, Duncan? Want to do this together?’
I said yes. Bobbie said she would need £5,000 up front, but wouldn’t take a salary as director. Once the play was up and running and the advance was paid off, we’d split any profits from the run fifty-fifty.
When I got back to London, I got Alex and Sam together at a neutral venue, a hotel lobby in a discreet part of Knightsbridge. I got there first, in case either of them felt uncomfortable sharing a story with a media competitor.
‘I hope this is okay with you both,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very supportive of the Act Now! story and you were the first two people in the media to know about the superinjunction.’
Their faces remained impassive, neither wanting to reveal their hand to the other.
‘The injunction’s only temporary, but the government have been asking for it to be reapplied every four weeks, and the judge is powerless to prevent it. I’ve tried fighting it, but all that does is waste legal fees. Theoretically, the case will eventually come to trial, but there seems to be no urgency about progressing it. I could be stuck in this limbo for years.’
‘Shocking,’ ventured Alex.
Sam mumbled his agreement.
‘But I’ve got a way around it,’ I said in my most confident voice. ‘I’ve finished writing a play, called The Art of Deception. Tells the story of the Russians being the guiding force behind the Labour Party coming to power in 1945, with uncanny parallels to what’s happening now. My lawyer says it’s on rock solid legal ground, no problem with it getting performed.’ I crossed my fingers behind my back as I spoke. ‘It’s booked for an eight-week run in Glasgow starting next month and I thought you could each send someone to the premiere, run a story about it, and that would spark off a discussion about whether any of it could be true today. Maybe coordinate what you’d both be doing for maximum effect. The more it gets discussed, the more we get the story out in the open. What do you think?’
‘Well, it’s a clever plan,’ said Alex. ‘But are you sure people will see the connection between Act Now! and Clement Atlee? It’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Not if I say the play is by Richard Foxe, rather than my author name,’ I replied. ‘Think about it. Richard Foxe is always being talked about, because of all my revelations about the Russians. Then someone who’s thought of only as a political blogger surprises everyone and writes a play, not based on current events, but a piece of historical fiction. That’s even more unexpected. It’s bound to spark off conjecture, and there’s only one way the speculation can go – that The Art of Deception is an allegory on current events. Before you know it, everyone is talking about whether MI5 have recruited a spy to fool a journalist into telling the world the Russians are behind Act Now!. I think it can work.’
‘It might,’ said Sam. ‘I could certainly have our arts correspondent write a review. But getting it onto the political pages is going to be more difficult.’
‘We’d need to have a news story to report on,’ agreed Alex. ‘Something linked to the play that would allow us to do more than hint at it being a comment about Act Now!. A piece of evidence, for example, that we could report on without breaching the injunction, that asks questions about the issues raised.’
‘I do have evidence. The stuff that was on my original blog. The details around the hack into the British Council computer that showed a Ukrainian spy was working for MI5.’ I sighed. ‘I know, I know. All of that is covered by the injunction.’
‘We would need something new,’ said Sam. ‘You could name your source, for a start.’
‘She asked me not to, said it would destroy her life in London,’ I said. Then I thought about it. ‘I suppose I could get back in touch with her, ask her again. But even if she said yes, if I went public on her identity I’m pretty sure that would be breaking the terms of my injunction.’
Sam shook his head. ‘Then the only way to break the story is for us to interview your source. That would be a legitimate news story and the interview would be outside the scope of the injunction because it wouldn’t involve you. I could maybe get that past our lawyers.’ He looked over at Alex for agreement.
‘I’m not so sure, Sam,’ she replied. ‘But if this source did agree to be interviewed, it might be better with your paper, and we pick up on the aftermath.’
I hadn’t given up hope that Sam might go along with my idea, without Tanya having to do an interview. I tried again.
‘You couldn’t use all the publicity from the play, and just come out and say a Ukrainian spy is helping MI5 disclose what’s going on?’
Too risky,’ said Sam. ‘You’ve got the evidence from your British Council hack, but that could all be faked. I’d need some corroboration if we were to run the story. Your Ukrainian going on the record, with all the risks to her that that entails, is the only way the story is strong enough for my paper to take the chance to run it.’
Alex nodded her support.
I forced myself to be objective. All I could do was give Tanya the arguments for doing the interview. It would be up to her if she said yes.
I sent an email to Tanya, got no reply. Followed up with a text. Nothing. I told Alex and Sam that it was obvious she didn’t want to talk, but they told me to try harder. I realised I would have to doorstep her. A bit more confrontational than I felt comfortable with, but I had no choice. I headed round to her flat to catch her first thing in the morning.
A stranger opened the door, told me the previous tenant had moved back to Ukraine, and left no forwarding address. I felt a peculiar resentment. Tanya had apparently wanted to get on with her life without me, but I was hurt that she hadn’t told me she was going to disappear. Then I smiled at my hypocrisy. I had told her I never wanted to see her again and now I was upset that she had taken me at my word.
I called up Nigel to see if he could help. There had not been much for us to work on together since I dialled back on the investigative journalism to focus on writing the play, but I’d made a point of keeping in touch with him every couple of weeks. He was beginning to realise that if we talked about whatever was obsessing him at that moment for more than ten minutes, it was Bad Thing and would mean that I would be getting bored and he should let me change the subject.
We talked about other Bad Things, the fact that the government wouldn’t let us tell our story, that Tanya had lied to us and that Act Now! had been able to shrug off all the scandal and continue to ride a populist wave in the opinion polls. Now I wanted to talk about another Bad Thing, that Tanya had disappeared and I needed to track her down.
‘It’s not a Bad Thing that she’s gone away, it’s a Good Thing,’ said Nigel when I told him the news about Tanya. ‘She was a liar and made you look silly. I hate her more for making you look silly than for being a liar and I really hate liars. That’s how much I hate her.’
‘She thought she was doing a Good Thing helping us find out stuff. We shouldn’t hate her. The TV and newspapers want to talk to her, or they won’t tell people about what we know. And she might be in trouble. Yes, I was furious when I found out she was deceiving us, but I’ve come to understand her point of view. Can you help me find her
?’
‘Only if you make me a solemn promise that she won’t be part of the team again. Just you and me, that’s how it should be.’
‘Solemn promise. So how would you track her down?’
‘I need clues, like Sherlock Holmes. Can you tell me her full name, date of birth, parents, where she lived in Ukraine? Everything you know about her.’
I wrote down what I knew and realised it didn’t amount to much. Petrenko was one of the most common surnames in Ukraine, and she had never mentioned the town where she lived before she left to become a model. I knew her age and birthday, and that was about it. Her mobile phone number turned out to have been discontinued, she’d never had a Facebook profile, and she had switched off video calling. She was serious about disappearing. It didn’t look good.
I wracked my brains for something else that could help track her down. I remembered she’d said to me she trained as a primary school teacher before becoming a model. She had a friend that she kept in touch with in Kiev, but she never told me her name. Nigel said that his hack into the British Council website had been discovered and more security had been put in place. He promised to keep trying, but he didn’t sound particularly hopeful.
He called me a few days later.
‘Tanya Petrenko is her real name. Or if it’s not, someone is being super sneaky. I went back to 2010 when you said she was a model, and her name and photo popped up on some Paris fashion shows and some photoshoots for ladies’ clothes. Check your messages – I’ve sent you some pictures.’
It was strange looking at Tanya’s modelling shots, – the haughty, dour expression that seems to be the done thing in the fashion industry. Nothing like the vibrant, effervescent Tanya that I knew. Groomed to within an inch of her life, full of confidence and charisma, and definitely Tanya.
‘It’s her, alright,’ I said. ‘That’s a result. I suppose with her working at the British Council before MI5 recruited her, it would have been too problematic to suddenly give her a false name. Well done, Nigel.’
‘That’s not all. I managed to find a register of primary school teachers in Ukraine. Easy-peasy to hack into, but trying to read Ukrainian using Translate was trickier. There are seventy-one people called Tanya Petrenko working as primary school teachers, and I know the towns they work in, but not the name of the schools or the teachers’ home addresses. There’s no way of narrowing them down. That’s too many, isn’t it?’
It was. I couldn’t cover the whole of Ukraine, but presumably there were some in Kiev. I could try flying to Ukraine and visiting them, hope they spoke English and might know my Tanya. Maybe the coincidence of having the same name as another teacher might mean they’d remember a Tanya Petrenko who moved to London. But it was a long shot. Probably too long a shot to be worth taking. I encouraged Nigel to keep looking, but it seemed like Tanya had disappeared for good.
In the meantime, the play premiered in Glasgow with a nerve-jangling opening night. I had based the story on a fictitious Lee Symonds, a bold and ambitious twenty-something woman who joins the civil service in 1945, just as Attlee’s Labour Party sweeps to victory, defeating Churchill in an electoral bolt from the blue. Spurred on by her American lover, Lee agrees to spy on the British government for the Americans, who have a hidden agenda in making sure the electorate’s burgeoning Socialist ambitions don’t play into Soviet hands. Not a hint about the world of superinjunctions and gagging orders, but with Richard Foxe as the name of the playwright, it wouldn’t take too long before the parallels to today were being drawn.
Afterwards, I was surprised to find Bobbie in tears.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘Oh, piss off, Duncan.’ She smiled at me as she wiped her face. ‘You’ve really done it to me, haven’t you?’
‘Done what?’ I was genuinely confused.
‘Reminded me of this life. Doing the rehearsals these last few weeks I’ve been happier since, well, I don’t know when. And when I stood at the side of that stage tonight, all I could think about was, in eight weeks this will all be over. I’ll be back to living in Scoraig again, back to the grind and monotony of living in that damp, draughty croft, shut off from the rest of the world.’
I was shocked. ‘I thought you loved it there. And you and Davie seem happy.’
‘We are. But it’s typical of me to run off to the back of beyond whenever there’s a crisis in my life. And now I’m stuck there. Crofting is Davie’s life; he’d never want to move.’
‘Couldn’t you get a farm somewhere else? Somewhere less remote?’
‘Where’s the money going to come from? And even if I could, what if I have another panic attack? Where I live is a different universe from all the stuff that scares me, a different world from Michael Mitchell, Act Now!, and all the other evils in the world. Even if I could convince Davie to give up everything we’ve built together in Scoraig, come back into the twenty-first century, what happens if it all goes wrong because of me? I’d never forgive myself.’
The conversation put a dampener on the evening, and things didn’t get any better. The reviews of the play itself were excellent, but News Today confirmed that, without Tanya, they couldn’t cover it as a news story. Sam stuck his neck out and ran a piece in the Chronicle that featured a full-length article on the play and an interview with myself, pored over by the paper’s lawyers so I could say as much as possible about how true it might be without running foul of the law.
Today, as the world finds itself at the mercy of strained political relations and ever-shifting borders and alliances, The Art of Deception explores another time wracked by similar fears and mistrusts and provides a fascinating insight into a time and place where the fulcrum of power rested on a pinpoint. With the author being none other than the political blogger Richard Foxe, one can only wonder how much of this story is meant to be seen as historical fiction, and how much is really a commentary on current political events.
The Scottish press were also big on speculation, and by the end of the first week there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind that there was no smoke without fire, and that Act Now! had some explaining to do, to answer the question of whether all the rumour and speculation was true.
Damien Zane went on the record as saying he wished the show well, but underneath the good-natured reaction that Act Now! was trying to portray, the real dirty tricks began. Act Now! dug up my past yet again, and the fact that Bobbie was directing the play brought her into the firing line as well. Back in London, when a local radio station invited me to their studios to talk about the play, I couldn’t wait to come to her defence.
‘People have said that you are a vulture, Richard Foxe, writing works of fiction that are based on real people and events and seeing lives ruined as a result,’ said the presenter. ‘Didn’t you learn your lesson twenty-five years ago with the Michael Mitchell case? And now you and your partner in crime from back then are doing it again, criticising Clement Atlee, the prime minister who created the National Health Service, and casting aspersions on the current government? Shouldn’t the two of you be ashamed of yourselves?’
I defended my right to create a piece of political satire, saying that the big problem with writing historical fiction these days is that history keeps repeating itself.
‘But that’s the point, isn’t it?’ the radio show host persisted. ‘The play shadows real-life events remarkably closely until the penultimate scene when the young woman is revealed as a spy, working for the CIA who are seeking to discredit the British government. Do you think what’s happening in real life is more unbelievable than that?’
‘You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment,’ I said in my best House of Cards impression. ‘There are things going on in politics today that bloggers like myself would love to talk about.’
‘Like what, exactly?’
‘That’s just it, I can’t say. I’m n
ot allowed to. Act Now! says they’ve shown a sense of humour about my play. But ask them, if they really find it so entertaining, why don’t they let the real story come out? I wrote this play, hoping to raise questions in people’s minds as to whether such as a dystopian scenario as I depicted could be true in today’s world. Because if it were true, I wouldn’t be able to sit here and talk to you about it. That would be banned by a court order under the Dissemination of Terrorism Act.’
The radio show host remained blissfully unaware of what I’d just managed to get away with saying.
‘There we must leave it, folks,’ he cheerily announced. ‘Is Act Now! under the control of the Russians? Does the CIA have beautiful female spies trying to bring down the government? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that The Art of Deception is running in Glasgow for the next eight weeks, and if the reviews are anything to go by, it’ll be transferred to the West End sometime soon. Thanks to the playwright and blogger Richard Foxe for coming in today and shedding some light on what might or might not be the inspiration behind the play.’
I headed off home, pleased with myself. With every piece of publicity, the story was, little by little, creeping out into the public domain. The strategy was working, and I was convinced that the constant chatter and speculation about how much of the play was true would make it more and more impossible to keep the real story secret.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. That evening there was a knock on the door and two uniformed policemen were standing in the hallway.
‘Duncan Jones?’ I nodded.
‘We have a warrant for your arrest for contravening an injunction granted under the Dissemination of Terrorism Act. Please accompany us to the station.’
‘Arrest? You’re arresting me? For what?’
‘We’ll discuss that at the station.’
I was firmly, even a little forcibly, taken to the police car waiting outside. As the car drove off, the blue light was switched on and the siren blared as we sped off to wherever I was going. It didn’t seem real; I kept expecting to wake up.