The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ he replied and leaned over to write on a pad that was on the desk. ‘What about the funeral?’ He tore the page out and folded it in four.

  ‘It’s next week. The home secretary will represent you. He knew Eyam well and I gather he may be asked to give an address – a stepmother is organising things.’

  ‘We should be there.’ One of the famous prime ministerial pauses ensued. His index finger rubbed the unusually deep philtrum, the indentation above his lip. ‘Seen the early editions?’ he said eventually. ‘Any adverse coverage on the web?’

  ‘They’re taking it at face value. There’s no hint of anything sinister, apart from the barbarous act. The film is sensational – it speaks for itself.’

  ‘Good . . . yes . . . that’s good . . . we would not want it said that . . .’

  ‘That there was something untoward?’ offered Cannon. ‘No. There’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Yes, well, we’re not Russia – the British government doesn’t behave like that. We don’t have people dispatched.’

  ‘No. Quite. Actually the papers are full of news about some toxic red algae that has appeared in the reservoirs. That looks the most worrying of all the stories.’

  ‘Still, I’m interested in what he was doing in Cartagena.’

  ‘A holiday it seems.’

  ‘In Colombia? It doesn’t seem very likely. Eyam was a man for the opera houses of Europe, the great libraries and museums of the world. He failed us, but he did not lose his culture. I mean . . . Colombia?’

  ‘Yet he had a lot of obscure passions,’ said Cannon.

  ‘The point, Philip, is that it wasn’t known he was in Colombia and, given the difficulties surrounding his departure from government, it should have been known. A failure in the system perhaps, or were his plans intentionally obscured? Colombia is after all not a place associated with legitimate activity, is it? And David Eyam was, as I understand it, still regarded as a problem.’

  Cannon kept quiet: he had no interest in things that were unlikely to reach the headlines. David Eyam was old news and had long ceased to be of any concern to him. His ejection from government had occurred without publicity and barely any fuss at Number Ten and in the necessary focus of Cannon’s professional life the film from Colombia was little more than a brief diversion from the algae problem. The next day a tide of fresh events would need to be finessed, burnished or buried to keep John Temple’s government afloat and credible as it moved towards an election. He looked down at his boss – the Everyman of British politics and his best asset in this endeavour – and thought that never was anyone more misconstrued by the public. Seemingly average in all things, formal and infuriatingly prosaic, Temple was one of the most enigmatic personalities that Cannon had ever encountered, a character opaque and inscrutable even, he suspected, unto itself.

  Temple rose. ‘Yes, I think we will find out what Kilmartin was doing down in High Castle.’

  He left the communications centre holding the piece of paper and headed towards his room, where in the evenings he would sit with a whisky, mulling over the day in the worn leather armchair that had moved with him from one ministry to the next as he climbed, unnoticed but inexorably, to the top job. Now he sat at the desk, thought for a few moments while staring at the uncurtained window, then picked up the phone.

  3

  Night Thoughts

  In her dream she was sitting at an outside table in the Bolivar Crêperie. They had made love that afternoon in a hotel overlooking the ocean, with the sound of sea pounding the cliffs below. But then they’d fallen out – she didn’t know why – and she was sitting away from Eyam at another table while he spoke on the phone. The little white van stopped in front of the cafe and the bomber got out and waved to her and gestured to Eyam with a grin. She recognised the bomber and she knew what was going to happen. She leapt up from the table and started shouting at Eyam, but he didn’t hear. He just kept on talking, talking, talking.

  She woke babbling, struggled to find the light switch and threw the tangle of bedclothes back. Her T-shirt was drenched in sweat and her hair was damp and stuck to her neck. She leaned over and rang down to reception to find Karl, the night manager, on the other end. ‘The thermostat in my room’s still broken,’ she said. ‘It’s like a sauna in here. I thought it was going to be repaired.’

  Karl suggested opening windows.

  ‘Right,’ she said, catching sight of her naked torso in the mirror and thinking that she should take exercise, maybe return to the swimming regime she’d dropped the year before. ‘So when’s it going to be fixed?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Can you make sure that happens? Otherwise I’m going to have to move – room or hotel.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Oh, Miss Lockhart,’ he said as she was about to hang up. ‘You haven’t complied with the identity requirements. The form is still here waiting for you.’

  ‘It’s three in the morning! I showed my passport when I checked in and you have my credit card details – what the hell else do you need? Hair samples?’

  ‘Tomorrow will be fine. But as a non-UK resident, you must do it. The hotel has a responsibility to file this form with the police. If we don’t we get fined.’

  ‘Fix the thermostat and I’ll see about your form.’

  She replaced the phone and took a shower, letting the water massage the back of her neck while she thought of the dream and then of Eyam leaving the message for her. It was so odd: the silence had lasted over two years, then on the point of death he phones out of the blue and starts chatting aimlessly as though nothing had passed between them – as though they had been in easy and regular touch, as though they were still the intimate friends of university. She stepped out of the shower and dried, again examining herself with detachment in the mirror. She was now fully awake. She turned on the TV and raced through the channels until she reached the BBC’s international service and the repeat of a programme analysing the riots that had flared in British cities the year before. She turned the volume down and switched on her phone. Why hadn’t she picked up? It was inconceivable because she had been in the office that Saturday, working on the last details of a deal that went through on the following Monday, and they were waiting to hear news of the other side’s response. There was no way her phone would have been switched off then. And if she’d been speaking to someone else she would have received the message immediately on hanging up. She tried to remember where she’d listened to the message and what she had been looking at when she heard Eyam’s voice, but nothing came to her.

  She flung open the windows to a damp and windless night; tiny particles of moisture glinted in the light. Her suite overlooked a wooded valley and she could just hear the murmur of the river below. She went back through the messages and when she reached Eyam’s voice placed the phone on the windowsill and pressed the loudspeaker button. ‘Hello there, Sister – it’s me. Eyam,’ he started. ‘I felt like having a chat but it seems you’re busy.’ Eyam was there with her in the room, present and alive. When it was over, she reached for a cigarette, lit up and listened to the message again, straining to hear every sound and inflection in the message. This she did three or four times, staring out into the dark. Then, shaking her head, she swore to the night and viciously stubbed the cigarette out on the stone window ledge. She stepped back into the room, pierced by a shaft of grief, and sank onto the bed. Eyam was dead and it was doing her no good to keep listening to him.

  After a few minutes she reached for her small laptop, opened it and logged onto Calvert-Mayne’s web mail, using a succession of security passwords, which she kept in her wallet. She began to read the dozen or so emails between them, which she had stored on the site. Up until the final exchange, the emails were rushed but always affectionate. The break came after an exchange that followed dinner in a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Eyam was passing through New York on the way back to London from Washington. The fatigue showed in his eyes and his con
versation was harsher than she had ever known it. She remembered returning to their table and finding him lost in thought. When she spoke he looked up, disorientated and in that moment she knew she could have loved him – no, that she did love him in the most unexpressed way possible. She wanted to take his head in her hands and hold his face to hers. He saw what she was thinking and they talked of becoming lovers that night, in his case with scathing and rather hurtful objectivity. She reminded him that once, for a brief period when they were undoubtedly too young, they had been lovers.

  ‘We didn’t just go to bed, we made love for an entire week,’ she’d said. But he ignored it and then to protect herself she’d matched his flippancy and his cruelty, and very soon it was impossible to return to the point before love and sex were so coolly dismissed. Eyam had a way of moving a conversation along, recasting history, skirting any subject he wished to avoid, and when you challenged him he would turn his mild Socratic genius on you and elicit so many unwilling affirmatives that you ended up agreeing with him.

  And on that night he made his usual diversions, but then started criticising her life in New York, which he claimed was ‘unmoored’ and lacked moral principle. Sitting back with his wine, he told her that although she was successful, rich and sought after she had put down no roots in New York. She was like a beech tree – the tree with the shallowest root system. He called her his big, beautiful beech. She didn’t laugh at the pun.

  Then a few days later she fired off an email to him late at night.

  From: Kate Lockhart

  To: David Eyam

  You’ve got a bloody nerve criticising my life here when your career is hardly the sum of all you hoped for. Yes, you go to DC with the prime minister and you have dinner with the president in the White House but, Jesus, Eyam, you seem so damned unhappy and strung out.

  I’m doing what I do best and I am doing it very well. You don’t have the right to judge the decisions I’ve made, just as I have no right to question yours – and I never have.

  You deny yourself nothing except the truth about yourself; and while that may make it easier to see the faults in others it doesn’t necessarily make what you say true or welcome. By the way, you need a holiday.

  And you might have thanked me for dinner.

  Kate X

  To: Kate Lockhart

  From: David Eyam

  As ever, lovely to hear from you, Sister, though I thought your email was rather sharp. I don’t want us to fall out over this but I do not resile from the view that you are made for better things.

  When I said you were in danger of becoming a prisoner of your gift I simply meant that your job at Calverts, impressive though it is in many ways, is beneath your actual talent; also your humanity. This could have been expressed with more sensitivity and I apologise for being crass. Your remark that I denied myself everything but the truth was unscrupulous because you attacked me for what you suspect to be your own weakness. For the record, neither of us is that stupid. Thanks for dinner.

  Eyam X

  It was typical of him to write an apology that had the last word. The email remained in her inbox without being answered and was quickly buried as scores of new emails piled on top. But it stayed in her mind and she now recalled that she did write a long defence of her life at Calverts telling Eyam what she actually did; that for years after the crash her work was saving jobs and technology as huge sovereign funds took over struggling American companies, sacked thousands to make the numbers work and exploited or suppressed the innovations of those smaller companies. She said it was just dumb and narrow-minded of him not to see that this was important legal work, which was as much concerned with injustice as money.

  She never sent it. Then somehow it became too late to reply and a silence settled on their friendship that would turn out to be terminal, although at the back of her mind she’d always thought they’d make it up, and when he called that Saturday she had been really pleased, actually relieved.

  From the pocket in her purse she took out a slender wallet, which she flipped open to the two photographs. On the left was her husband Charlie Lockhart, dead from cancer, on the right her father, Sonny Koh, dead from suicide. She didn’t look at them often but she always kept the dead men in her life with her. They were always there. The little red diptych would now have to become a triptych of remembrance, as long as she could lay her hands on that picture of her and Eyam at Oxford, the only photograph she possessed of him.

  She stood the open frame on the bedside table and slid down into the bed to watch the footage of the riots that had been violently put down the year before. Suddenly it occurred to her that she was guilty of ignoring Eyam’s less attractive side – in particular his love of exercise of power. For some time before that dinner in New York she’d noticed him becoming colder, more removed and, she had to admit, objectionably pleased with his own opinions. Doubt made almost every personality acceptable to Kate. But as he rose higher and higher, Eyam had lost the ability to express the slightest worry about himself or his decisions. She had to confess that he had become a little boring. ‘You were a little bit of a prig,’ she said to the room.

  Eventually she slept. The following day she stayed in bed late watching the rooks plummet into the trees on the other side of the rocky spur, on which High Castle – complete with Norman fortress, square and church – stands like an Italian hill town. It was a fine and private place to do her grieving for David Eyam.

  4

  The Prime Minister’s Spy

  Peter Kilmartin was certainly surprised. He arrived at Number Ten at nine forty-five p.m. on Monday evening, having been summoned five hours before, and was shown into the Cabinet Room by a brisk young woman who introduced herself as Jean. Temple was sitting at the prime minister’s place on the curved table in front of the fireplace, reading with his hand clutching his forehead. The cabinet secretary, Gus Herbert, stood back holding a red leather folder to his chest, while his free hand toyed with a signet ring. Temple looked up and removed the glasses that were so rarely seen in public. ‘Ah, Peter, good of you to come so quickly. I’ll be with you in a second.’

  Kilmartin and Herbert exchanged nods then both looked out through the two uncurtained windows at the end of the room. The dense drizzle of the last few days seemed to hang in the glare of the security lights. Some way off in the building there was a muffled whine of drilling, which Jean had explained to Kilmartin was caused by cabling work that could only been done at night.

  He looked down at Temple and not for the first time wondered at his extraordinary rise. They’d met a dozen years before when Temple was a junior minister in the foreign office, at a time in his career when he was patronised by officials and had the reputation as a lightweight – a shameless flatterer and seeker of advice. They hit it off because Temple possessed that rare ability in government to listen properly. For his part Kilmartin, who was by no means a natural politician, found that he could influence policy decisions without using his elbows. The combination of his knowledge of foreign affairs and the Secret Intelligence Service and Temple’s patience proved very successful for a while and, as each Cabinet reshuffle came along and Temple kept climbing through the ranks, eventually to head two of the great ministries of state, they kept in touch with Christmas cards and the occasional lunch. Temple’s manner and his eerie calm never changed and to anyone who listened he would confess his astonishment that he and his worn armchair had travelled so far. Not many did listen. His colleagues still saw him as a quaint and amiable nobody, a bit of an oddball. No threat. But when he was invited to form a government he displayed a rare political savagery, sacking several allies and bringing about an iron discipline in the ranks of his party. He was likened to President Harry Truman. One commentator reminded her readers that the haberdasher from Lamar, Missouri, had dropped two atomic bombs just five months into his presidency. After Temple’s na
rrow win at the polls, a victory fraught with allegations of ballot rigging, recounts and general dismay with the performance of a new electronic voting system, that same writer suggested that the only doubtful part of the phrase ‘elected dictatorship’ was the word elected. But Temple stammered his apologies and produced a famous display of nervous blinking when the matter was raised in a TV interview, and somehow people forgave him, or at any rate forgot. In the long slump there were other things to worry about.

  Temple pushed his chair back with a little cough, handed the file to the cabinet secretary and said, ‘Yes, that should do the trick.’ Herbert picked up the file and left the room with an opaque Mandarin nod in Kilmartin’s direction.

  ‘How good of you to come up from the country, Peter. How are you and the boys coping – Jay and Ralph, isn’t it?’

  It was a year and half since Helen’s death and the boys, though grown up and with jobs, had suffered dreadfully. They were just about over the worst.

  ‘Thanks, they’re doing fine, prime minister. I’m amazed you remember their names.’

  ‘One of my very few gifts. And the famous Kilmartin vegetable garden, which I notice now takes precedence over the problems of Central Asia?’

  Kilmartin smiled but didn’t rise to the bait.

  ‘I hear the new garden is beautiful. You’ve moved in with your sister, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s right – though in fact it is the other way. She came to live with me.’

  ‘Good, good,’ he said absently and let out a sigh. ‘I expect you’ve read we’ve got a real problem with this blessed toxic red algae in the reservoirs. Our scientists have no idea where it came from or how it’s spreading. People talk about bio-terrorism, migrating waterfowl, global warming. Nobody knows. It’s the sort of thing that can turn an election. Events!’ he said with exasperation and the smile lines moved into perfect parentheses. ‘But that’s not why I asked you to see me.’ He coughed and took a step to the fireplace and rested his hand on the mantelpiece. Temple was over six foot tall but managed to appear much shorter to the public. Kilmartin glanced up at the portrait of William Pitt the Younger above him. He’d read somewhere that on Temple’s order Pitt had replaced the painting of Robert Walpole, the first man to occupy Number Ten as prime minister and the longest-serving prime minister in British history, because he somehow felt closer to Pitt than any other of his predecessors.