The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  Although the address of the murder wasn’t given, Kilmartin was certain the location had to be Dove Cottage, the place that Kate Lockhart had inherited. He returned to his study pursued by a knowing look from Helen and sat down to think. Perhaps they really were bent on eliminating everyone who knew about SPINDRIFT, in which case Link’s discoveries were even more puzzling. He found the number for Eyam’s landline at Dove Cottage and rehearsed what he would say. ‘It’s about the seeds you ordered from our catalogue, miss,’ he said to himself. ‘You must leave immediately to collect them.’ No, that sounded bloody stupid. Before the number rang out he hung up. He would stick to his original plan. Kate Lockhart was capable of looking after herself.

  She left Dove Cottage in the Bristol at eight and stopped by the police car at the top of the drive to tell the two officers she would be away from the cottage all day and that she had left Newsome a message on his phone telling him of her movements.

  She drove slowly, taking her time to get to know the foibles of Eyam’s forty-year-old car, the sluggish steering, the throatiness of the engine in acceleration and a mulish tendency to veer right when the brakes were applied sharply. The trip took just under two hours and at some point she became certain – as certain as McBride’s law of instincts dictated – that she was being followed. Yet if pressed she couldn’t say by which cars or where she first became prey to the sensation. Maybe it was the knowledge that for years the police in Britain had recorded every journey made on every major road with automatic number recognition cameras. She went through a routine to see if any cars were on her tail, slowing and accelerating and twice turning off the motorway and circling a junction roundabout to glimpse the traffic following about a mile behind her. But she saw nothing. She tried playing different parts of the cassette, but found only music on both sides. It didn’t make sense. Why had Eyam gone to so much trouble? She decided to wait until she reached Oxford, where she could look at it properly and maybe buy a small tape player if the ancient tape deck in the Bristol was the problem. But when she arrived in the city from the south and drove into a car park near Magdalene Bridge she ejected the cassette, saw that she had failed to follow the instructions to press ‘forward’ and ‘play’ at the same time, and placed it in her handbag.

  She crossed the bridge and walked up the High Street to a cafe near Queen’s College. Kate was impervious to nostalgia of the white flannels and dreaming spires kind and never understood people who pined for their university days, but this cafe still held something for her. During one summer, the year after she had left, she came back to see Eyam when he was haunting New College, light-headed with indecision about his career. He had finished his postgraduate work and could not decide whether to stay at Oxford, accepting the offer of a post at the university, or to find a job in the outside world. She used to fetch supplies from the cafe while he lay on a couch like a doomed juvenile poet. They holed up in his rooms getting sloshed on wine and listening to early music and took some kind of oath of undying friendship, which in Eyam’s case was accompanied by many extravagant quotes. The most unromantic and practical of these was Montaigne’s observation that a good marriage resembled friendship rather than love. It was then that they slept together for the first time, a natural outcome of a day of messing about and also of their whole time at Oxford, and an affirmation of closeness but also – at least in her case – a night of erotic fulfilment never matched before or since. When they went in the rain to the station after four days of speaking to no one but the cafe owner, she to go back to London to her law studies and Eyam to his family in the north where his mother lay ill with cancer, she clung to his arm, certain from his manner that he was closing the door on her.

  The cafe had extended the delicatessen side of its business. She ordered a cup of tea and placed herself at a corner table so she had a good view of the street through a display of hams and breads. She was on home ground. If there was a team tracking her they’d have to follow on foot and she knew the university well enough to lose them. Sipping the tea, she watched for ten minutes and saw nothing untoward. She left and walked towards the town centre, then took a right turn and made for Brasenose College. There were several places she could use to sift her wake for watchers. This she did twice with a slight sense of unreality before entering the maze of Blackwell’s bookshop for quarter of an hour. Finally she headed down the canyon of New College Lane and stepped through New College’s ancient door to find an old friend – the head porter, Cecil, who looked up from a clipboard and without missing a beat greeted her by name.

  ‘Miss Kate, always one of my favourites: now, what brings you back?’

  ‘Oh, I thought I’d look over the place and see a friend of mine at the same time,’ she said.

  Cecil’s expression clouded. ‘I was sorry to read about your Mr Eyam. You were his friend, weren’t you? A fine young man he was too. There was always something special about him. You could tell that from the first.’

  She nodded.

  ‘A bad business to be sure,’ he added.

  They talked for a few minutes while she watched the lane. Cecil seemed to sense the alertness in her eyes. ‘Something troubling you, miss?’

  ‘I just wonder if you could keep an eye on who comes into the college over the next hour or so. I can’t explain now, but it’s very important that I meet this friend in private.’ She paused. ‘And that no one sees us together.’

  ‘No problem – leave it to me.’ He appraised her with an amused look. ‘Heard you were doing very well in New York. Saw something about you in the college magazine.’

  ‘And the photograph? I look retarded,’ she said, smiling. Her eyes fell on a phone inside the lodge and she asked Cecil if she could use it. The woman answered at St Antony’s Middle East department and she left a message for Kilmartin to say she’d be at New College for the next hour or so. She gave the number of her cell phone.

  Then Cecil told her of a small panelled vestry between the chapel and the hall: they should go there if they wanted absolute privacy and quiet, and he would keep a lookout. Cecil’s ability to spot a wrong’un, as he put it, had not dimmed with the years.

  She passed into the Front Quadrangle, the first quad to be built in either Oxford or Cambridge, and turned left to the chapel. It was not quite noon, so she went through to the cloisters where students had walked since the time when the college was founded to replenish a priesthood ravaged by the Black Death. Little had changed in the twenty years since she had been there. The great European evergreen oak shaded a fifth of the grass courtyard; the bench where they’d posed for the photograph after Eyam won the John Hicks prize was in the same position; the atmosphere in the vaulted cloister was still heavy with the devotions of the past. At six on a winter Sunday the place had all the dismal foreboding of a nineteenth-century ghost story: even on a bright spring day its powers of suggestion were strong. She could almost see Eyam on the bench in the middle of the grass with a book. It was his bench – the bench where he read and thought and celebrated. That was why she went to the cloisters: to remember Eyam.

  The clocks of the university began to strike twelve and she moved quickly inside the chapel, pausing in the ante-chapel to listen – no sound came from the main body of the building – then passing through the great screen into the chapel. She saw Darsh perched on a carved misericord in the stalls immediately on her left, the exact same spot where she had found the homesick and rather bewildered maths prodigy over two decades before.

  He gave her a rueful look. ‘You know what I was thinking, Kate? How my whole life was changed when you took pity on me that evening. All those people you knew became my friends – the sort of friends I’d never had before. Friends for life. I owe you.’

  ‘What’s come over you?’ she said, grinning and sitting down beside him. His head was sunk in a thick orange scarf. ‘That may be the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me. By the way, that was quite a show you put on at the funeral. I thought you’d be locked up fo
r taking a swing at Glenny.’ She paused. ‘But I wanted to say you spoke the only true words of the service, Darsh.’

  His face spread in a surprising smile. ‘Glenny is a bastard. There were so many hypocrites at the funeral; so many complete and utter bastards!’ His voice rang out in the religious chill of the chapel.

  They made their way along the chapel to a door on the left and found Cecil’s ecclesiastical cubbyhole. It smelled of a mixture of cleaning fluid and antique incense.

  ‘Were you followed here?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. What about you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I lost them in the Mathematics Institute.’

  ‘You lost them with that scarf – it’s like a beacon.’

  No second smile. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘since the funeral my rooms have been turned over by the police – everything searched and picked apart. Imagine, one of the great mathematicians of our time treated like a common criminal.’ He said this without irony. ‘I am followed everywhere and snooped upon at every turn and now I’ve had enough. England has become intolerable. I’ve decided to take up a position at Yale. I leave in June.’

  She moved a vase and a broom and sat down on the edge of a table. Darsh arranged himself on a high stool that was covered with dried droplets of paint. The gloved hands brushed dust from his suit. His domed forehead glistened in the light as he directed a look of hooded inquiry at her.

  ‘You should check your computer,’ she said. ‘Someone put a lot of child porn on David’s.’

  ‘I don’t use computers of that sort,’ he replied as though talking about public transport. ‘David told me all about that. It was the moment he knew he was beaten; that they would stop at nothing to destroy him.’

  She leaned forward. ‘What the hell did he do? I mean, Eyam was like the head prefect, the chief boy-scout. He never stepped out of line. He was far too grand to be a whistleblower. Tell me, Darsh.’

  ‘He made an honest man of himself. He took the ultimate test. His principles triumphed over ambition, vanity and the love of power.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He went to a parliamentary committee and told them the truth about a secret that only a few know about. The committee suppressed it – naturally; this is England.’

  She shook her head. ‘Take it from the top, Darsh: I want the whole story.’

  He sniffed and looked out of the window. ‘All I know is he was asked by John Temple to become the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee while a new chairman was found.’

  ‘Surely that job goes to someone who has experience in the intelligence services, someone much older,’ she said. ‘It takes a lot of skill to coordinate and make sense of raw intelligence for policymakers. Eyam had a few months’ training in SIS, that was all.’

  ‘I have no idea about these things, but you’re forgetting his analytical powers. I once heard that he was respected even by foreign delegations for his agility of mind at the negotiating table. Temple trusted him and I guess he persuaded him to take up the position for a few months. That appealed to him. He was fascinated by the big strategic issues of power, food and water and maybe he felt he could influence the government on them.’

  ‘Then what?’ she said, realising how little she had known about Eyam’s life in government, an ignorance only in part due to Eyam’s discretion and reserve about his work.

  ‘He was summoned by a parliamentary committee – I forget its name – and he was asked a specific detailed question and he replied with something that was not true, although he didn’t know it at the time. Then he learned that he had been misinformed and he told one of the committee members he had more to say on the subject. They called him back and he corrects the record.’

  ‘And you have no idea what this was about?’

  ‘No, nothing was revealed by the committee. Their hearings are held in private. David was removed from the Joint Intelligence Committee and offered some inferior position – I believe it was in the Work and Pensions Department. He declined and left the civil service. Then his troubles began. He was followed, his flat was searched, his calls monitored. He was given a full security interview that lasted two days. He told me he could feel himself falling apart. They destabilised him – that was the word he used. Then he began to run.’

  ‘Run? What do you mean?’

  ‘He began running. He found it kept him sane. It also amused him to lose the people who were always following him. Eventually, he wrote a private letter to Temple pointing out that he had done nothing wrong; that he was not in breach of the Official Secrets Act because he had the highest clearance and he had revealed nothing to anyone outside government, apart from complying with his statutory obligations to answer the committee’s questions truthfully. Temple understood that beneath the surface there was a threat. Eyam knew a lot of damaging things about Temple’s government, things that weren’t covered by the Official Secrets Act. The prime minister had no option but to make a deal. There was a meeting, just the two of them late one night in Downing Street. Temple agreed to stop the harassment if Eyam left London and went to live somewhere quietly and have no contact with anyone in the government or the media.

  ‘So he went to live near High Castle and began to prepare his counter-attack – an account of official secrecy, and the government’s capture by international corporations. That’s how he described it to me anyway. I surmised his plan was to publish it before the general election, which people believe will be announced some time in the next six months. He told me nothing in detail. That was David all over. You see he didn’t want to involve me. But you, Kate, you are a different matter. He wants you to wage his war. I can tell. I know the way he operated.’ He stopped and examined her with his chin held high. ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘As a matter of fact yes, Darsh.’

  ‘But you abandoned him. Why was that?’

  ‘Maybe it looks like that but—’

  ‘It does,’ he said unsparingly. ‘I loved him but I did not abandon him, Kate.’

  ‘You were in love with Eyam?’

  He looked away.

  ‘I mean he wasn’t gay, was he?’

  ‘What a profoundly stupid question.’

  ‘Darsh, he left me pretty much everything in his will. We were the best of friends, even if we did fall out from time to time.’

  He peered up at the top of the window. ‘No, he wasn’t gay, as you well know. But I am and I loved him.’

  ‘Look,’ she said after a while. ‘I’d like you to have anything you like from the house: books, pictures – anything. He’d have wanted it. And to be honest I have no idea what to do with it all.’

  ‘He left it all to you for a reason.’ His eyes returned from the window to settle on her. ‘He wants you to fight his fight. That’s why he left it to you. Not because he loved you but because among his friends you are the most resilient. A “demure, bloody-minded, headbanging bitch” was his expression. Did you know that’s what he thought of you?’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘So who’s the villain – John Temple?’

  ‘This isn’t a fairy story with one villain and one hero; it’s about a political condition; it’s about Eden White and his companies . . .’

  ‘I met Eden White after the funeral. He’s like some kind of manifestation – ectoplasm.’

  Darsh ignored her and continued. ‘It’s about Temple and that creep Glenny and the Home Office, the state within a state; it’s about apathy and fear; it’s about the collapse of . . . look this is England . . . I don’t have to explain the deep cultural complacency of the English.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s the kind of theoretical shit you read in newspaper columns, Darsh. Someone hounded Eyam from office and then persecuted him and planted child porn on his computer. That’s illegal and wrong. Someone killed Eyam’s lawyer with a rifle outside his cottage last night probably because he’d seen documents. The documents were intended for me.’

  He shook his head with genuine sadness.
‘We’re getting to see that bastard side of life, you and I.’

  ‘Yes, and the point is that David was murdered – by whom we don’t know – and now Hugh Russell. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they are all connected. Have you ever heard of a monitoring system called ASCAMS? Do you know what that is?’

  He shook his head but she knew he was holding something back.

  ‘After the funeral Eden White gave a dinner in honour of David, a lot of government and corporate people. What was that about? Why was White there?’

  He snorted an odd laugh. ‘To make sure David was gone?’

  ‘Is there any evidence to say that this all involves Eden White? His companies sell systems to governments around the world. We know this has got something to do with a monitoring system called ASCAMS. Was ASCAMS one of the systems supplied to the government by White?’

  ‘These are things for you to find out,’ said Darsh. He removed a boiled sweet from his pocket and unwrapped it.

  ‘So, Eyam goes into exile in High Castle. What happened then?’

  Darsh held the sweet between forefinger and thumb, examined it like a jewel and popped it into his mouth where it moved from one cheek to the other several times before he answered. ‘I went down there to see him last summer. He seemed content – fulfilled even – and happy with this place you have inherited. He was contained, pregnant with some big idea. But then something went wrong. In a letter he told me he was under extreme pressure. I assume that by late October he had made his plans. He spent two weeks caring for his father before he died in late November. It was around then he discovered they’d tampered with his computer. He told me at his father’s funeral – he asked me to go for moral support – and that he thought he would be arrested very soon. It was the last time I saw him. On December 8th he left for France.’