The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  Eyam stopped and coughed, a dry chesty cough, which went on for some time. Kate paused the tape because she needed to concentrate on what he was saying. Fifteen minutes later she found an open gateway leading into some woods, reversed a little way down the track, turned the engine off and picked up where she had left off to hear Eyam clearing his throat away from the microphone.

  ‘There’s no point my going on about the dossier now. I know that you will already have mastered the contents, so I wanted to say some things I should have told you before now.’ He paused. ‘It’s odd. I’ve been planning to make this tape for some time and thought I knew what I was going to say, or rather how I was going to say it, but now I come to it I find . . . well, that it’s harder than I thought because I suppose it means I won’t be seeing you again. I suspect that’s why I’ve left it to the last possible moment. Remember that evening in New York? Our last meal together?’

  Kate exhaled. ‘Forget the damned restaurant,’ she said out loud. ‘Tell me about the bloody dossier.’

  ‘I was thinking about it again today,’ continued Eyam, ‘and wondering why I behaved so idiotically. I suppose there was something in me saying, “Wait! Wait until we’re both ready.” That of course seems ridiculous.’ He paused again then asked, ‘Was that it? I still don’t know for sure. I was absorbed by the discovery of DEEP TRUTH and it weighed on me. You see, I was about to take a leap into the dark with this thing, and I was dwelling on my part in it all – my responsibility and failure and hubris. I always knew how to control things, think round or finesse them, but then I found a situation that I couldn’t manage in the usual way. I had a stark choice and I had to jump one way or the other, and there was no way I could avoid that. Yet instead of talking to my friend, asking her advice and resorting to her exceptional judgement I behaved like a bastard and belittled her.’ He stopped again. ‘I am sorry – I’m rambling. Forgive me. I’m pretty much at the end of my tether. We buried my father today and I’ve had a hard time of it lately. In a few hours’ time I must leave the Dove. I will not sleep here again. That’s quite a thought. It saddens me greatly because I’ve never felt quite so attached to a place or more inspired by a setting. I felt at peace here, Sis, and I wish now that you’d got to know it with me. It has an exceptional spirit. There’s a quote from Wordsworth, which captures it well. I can just see that derisive smile of yours, but here it is anyway: “I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought . . . A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought and rolls through all things.” It suddenly strikes me that those two lines might easily refer to DEEP TRUTH.’ He cleared his throat.

  She took out a cigarette, lit up and stared at a line of wild cherry just coming into flower across the road. What was he talking about? ‘What the heck is DEEP TRUTH?’ she murmured.

  ‘Here I am mumbling into a tape recorder on a freezing cold night, trying to make sense of things to you, so let me return to the matter in hand. The purpose of the material that will come to you is to expose how DEEP TRUTH was allowed to happen and who was behind it. The prime minister and Eden White are the key figures, but so are the home secretary, Derek Glenny, the deputy director of MI5, Christine Shoemaker, and one or two high-ranking officials in the Home Office and the police. I would guess that the total number of people who know about it is no more than twenty. It is a well-kept secret and always will be, and the point is that it is so well hidden that it cannot be exposed without the original documents and letters of instruction. Once you have everything it is imperative that you move as quickly as possible to place it beyond the reach of government and Eden White. I have no doubt that the most effective way of achieving this is by using parliamentary privilege. It is true that we have all got used to dismissing Parliament, but there are still some good people there and this course will enable the media to cover the story without restraint. I favour the use of one of the select committees, because there is much more opportunity to really go into detail. It will be your job to approach the MPs who will give the material the protection of Parliament by accepting it as evidence.

  ‘My guess is that the election will be called any time from the first week of April, after Temple sends up the usual chaff suggesting he will run later in the year. He will call it and get it over with as soon as possible. So you should seek to publish as near to that date as possible. Timing is all. If you publish too early Temple can hold off calling an election until the autumn and spend the summer denying everything. He is a ruthless and gifted propagandist.’ He stopped for a few seconds. ‘But, Sis, I cannot hide from you the dangers that lie ahead. Here am I, sitting in my garden, with just a few of my possessions packed and ready to flee the country. I am beaten. That should be a warning to you. They will stop at nothing to obstruct publication. You cannot trust any computer. Be careful when using your cell phone. Do not log onto your work email address because they will break into the system using your password and read everything. Never seek to research any of this on the internet and never discuss anything important in public.

  ‘There are a few people you can rely on. Emile – Peter Kilmartin, is one. I hope he has made himself known to you. Nock is a good man but has no idea of all this and lately . . . well . . . I have to say I have had some doubts about him. It’s possible that he’s been compromised in some way. Our old friend Darsh is however wonderfully loyal, reliable and discreet. Also, there is a fine group of people who I have come to know while living here who go under the general name of the Bellringers. Some may have already made contact with you. Never allow any of them to know of my plans. Oh, yes, one other thing: Oliver Mermagen will seek to make himself useful to you. It was slippery old Promises who brokered the deal with Temple that allowed me to leave London and live in the country. But do not trust him. All his business now relies on the patronage of Temple and Eden, and he must be regarded as the enemy.

  ‘So, that’s about it. My motto has been belt and braces. One way or the other, all the necessary material will reach you. Now it’s up to you.

  ‘I send my love to you, my true friend, with thoughts of all our times together. There is so much I wish to say to you now but the words are all tainted with the consciousness of my own shame and stupidity. I feel completely inadequate. Good luck, Sister. Destroy this tape at the earliest opportunity. Now, I must say goodbye.’

  The recording didn’t end immediately. She heard him walking across gravel and a door being opened. A cough then silence. Eyam had slipped away. Faded like some bloody ghost. He’d had the last word and hung up on her before she had time to ask all the questions that had accumulated during the ten minutes of the recording. ‘Bastard!’ she said, slamming a hand on the dashboard.

  ‘Bastard Eyam! Don’t do that to me!’

  She got out of the car, her mind tearing at the substance of the tape, such as it was, and the references to DEEP TRUTH. Was this a project or some kind of operation? And then there was the will. Had he made it because he expected to be killed like Holmes and Russell, or was he ill? That cough sounded chronic and there was an air of resignation about the whole recording that was utterly unlike Eyam, whose optimism was the nearest thing he had to a faith. And how could he be so stupid as to assume that she’d got the dossier?

  She climbed back into the car, and sat for a few seconds, overwhelmed by an anguished sense that through their entire relationship they’d kept missing each other, and that this was just another occasion when his voice, his need, went unanswered. With a tug of will she shook herself and pulled back onto the road, certain that if Eyam had been defeated she stood very little chance of success. Whatever virtues she might claim, fighting lost causes wasn’t one of them.

  14

  Mother

  It would be perfectly simple to give in now, put the bloody cottage back on the market and return to London, yet as she drove through the deserted Cotswold landscape, she recognised something was drawing her back – the unfinished decryption of
Dove Cottage, the sense of abridgement in Eyam’s tape, and her straight curiosity about DEEP TRUTH.

  She stopped in a small town of honey-coloured stone houses for a bite to eat and bought some groceries. Sitting on a bench by the town’s war memorial she worried at the problem with a bleak sense of her own impotence. Then she tried Kilmartin’s number. There was no reply so she continued on her journey. Near Cheltenham she hit the traffic coming from the racecourse and swung north to cross the River Severn near Tewkesbury. On the road to High Castle she received two calls: the first was from the coroner’s clerk, Tony Swift, who asked to see her that evening. ‘Well, OK,’ she said with a slight hesitation and a hope that the bull-necked Swift had not taken encouragement from a goodbye kiss.

  He added, ‘I’ll have some friends with me. They want to meet you. Same place? Good.’

  A few minutes later she answered to a voice that said: ‘Darling?’ Only her mother could deliver the word with such a note of crisp accusation. ‘Are you driving? If so will you pull over? I need to talk to you now.’

  Kate seldom thought of her family, but when she did a photograph often came to mind of the five of them standing round a table twenty years ago. On one side were Kate and her father, Sonny Koh; on the other her mother – pleated tartan skirt and twinset – her sister Laura in a similar uniform and brother Bruce.

  The two sides could not have been more different. Her father, a gambler and disruptive genius, who killed himself a few months after Charlie Lockhart died, stood back with mischief dancing in his expression, the mixed ancestry of Indonesian Chinese, Indian and Dutch traders evident in his light, liquid eyes and the sheen of his black hair. He was better looking than any man Kate had ever seen and he provoked a passion in her mother that would never otherwise have surfaced in her rather formal personality. Her love for him was epic and, to Kate, redeeming, and when he overdosed in a hotel in the Sumatra leaving debts and an ex-mistress with a child she retreated into a granite stoicism, throwing herself into her work as a barrister, which would eventually lead her to the bench.

  Stricken by her father’s death so soon after Charlie’s, angry at her mother’s self-control, Kate found a kind of solace in the law too – it was the only thing they had in common. New York made it impossible to dwell on her loss, but the anger smouldered like a peat fire deep underground. Even before she talked to a grief counsellor, who despite her misgivings was actually quite good, she realised that the hostility towards her mother was in fact rage for her father. Like Eyam, he had left, vanished without the slightest thought for her or how she would survive without him.

  ‘Are you still in the country, Kate?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yes. Sorry I’ve been very busy,’ she said as she pulled up.

  ‘Were you going to ring, or were you just going to flit off again?’ Her mother didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Well, I’m sure you were going to get in touch when you had time. I read about David Eyam’s death and heard from Oliver Mermagen that you were at the funeral. That is one reason why I am calling.’

  ‘Oliver Mermagen! What the hell’s he doing ringing you?’

  ‘It was the only way he knew how to get hold of you. He found me in the phone book. He told me that you had moved back to this country and were looking for a job. Is that true?’

  ‘I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet.’

  ‘But have you left your job in New York?’

  ‘I left the job, not the firm.’

  She cross-examined her for a few minutes while Kate wondered without much regret why all their conversations lurched from one misunderstanding to another. Her younger sister, Laura, and Bruce got on well with her and had obliged her with conventional marriages and the regular production of extremely dull, pale-faced children. But Kate and her mother always found themselves circling each other.

  ‘The point is,’ she said as though Kate had needlessly interrupted her, ‘Oliver Mermagen has found you a job – a very well-paid post in London working for a man named Eden White.’

  ‘I’ve already talked to White, Ma. He’s a creep.’

  ‘But he’s influential and wealthy and he wants to see you again.’

  ‘It would be like going to work for the Mafia, Ma.’

  ‘Oliver says you would be perfect for his organisation. I gave him your number. Surely you realise that it’s very considerate of him to go out of his way like that, don’t you think? He was always a good sort.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate.

  ‘Good, well I’m glad we’ve spoken. I was sorry to hear about your friend. He was evidently a very gifted person, if you believe what you read in the obituaries. But he went off the rails. Perhaps he should have married.’ She stopped to underline that. ‘I can just remember his face – very intelligent eyes.’

  ‘Yes, that was Eyam.’

  ‘I hope we’ll be seeing you in Edinburgh soon, Kate.’ She paused. ‘Don’t leave it too long, darling: we’re becoming strangers.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said, caught off guard by the genuine appeasement in her mother’s voice.

  Tony Swift led her from the Mercer’s Arms to a private room at the back of the Black Bear pub where five people sat round a table. She recognised the photographer Chris Mooney and Alice Scudamore. A tall man in his mid-forties got up and introduced himself as Danny Church. He was followed by Andy Sessions, a web designer who seemed to her the epitome of the word ‘bloke’. The last was Michelle Grey, a therapist of some sort, who offered her a slender hand that jangled with bracelets.

  Bottles of red and white wine were on the table. The atmosphere would once have been thick with cigarette smoke but now the private room smelled of the pub’s food and the fumes of the coke fire in the grate.

  Tony Swift grasped a pint of beer from a wide hatch that opened onto the bar, sat down and threw a hand out to the table. ‘Who’s going to start?’

  Danny Church said he didn’t mind, and stroked a soft beard streaked with grey hair. ‘We’re here to make contact with you and to tell you about us. With Hugh Russell’s murder everything’s changed. It’s obvious he was killed because of his association with David Eyam and that makes us all feel really jumpy.’

  ‘Threatened,’ said Alice Scudamore.

  ‘We think things are coming to a head,’ said Andy Sessions.

  ‘Everything is connected,’ said Chris Mooney fiercely. ‘Our lives have been made hell. They’re trying to crush us – police, tax inspectors, bailiffs, local authority snoops.’

  ‘Is that really true?’ asked Kate pleasantly. ‘Can you prove there is an organised campaign?’

  ‘Not in the legal sense,’ said Alice Scudamore. ‘But it exists. They’re gradually stripping my house because I refuse to pay identity card fines. They won’t jail me because that would be too public. They just barge in, take what they want and leave. They can do that now you know.’ She shook her head and looked down. ‘I can’t work, I’ve got no money and I’m stressed out. And the worst thing about it is that we all know they’re listening to our phones. They’re watching our email, monitoring our movements. They make it obvious. We see the same men outside our houses. They’re everywhere. Rick and Andy’s web company is falling apart because they’ve lost all their contracts. The tax inspectors are around every moment of the day. Their bank has withdrawn its loan facility. At least six of us have been charged with new offences. The VAT inspectors turned over Penny Whitehead’s home and took her computer to try to prove fraudulent claims, and Michelle’s partner received the same treatment at his restaurant.’

  ‘But you can’t prove it’s a coordinated campaign. The authorities will argue that they’re just doing their job properly, and most people would support them judging by what I read in the papers.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we were told by our member of parliament,’ said Chris Mooney. ‘We tried taking the story to the media, but we got nowhere. They’re not interested – not even the local rag or radio station. They just think we’re all
being paranoid. The national media couldn’t give a toss. The wankers down in London have no fucking idea what’s going on out in the sticks. Do they ask what’s happened to the rights of ordinary men and women? Do they give a fuck? No, because they’re not being persecuted and pushed around like we are. They don’t see what’s happened and you know why – it’s because they’re part of the problem.’

  Alice Scudamore began nodding. ‘Look, just take our word for it: this is a campaign of persecution. They’ve practically admitted as much.’

  Tony Swift took a long draught of his beer and looked at Kate. ‘I didn’t tell you about this the other night because . . . well, I wanted to consult these good people here and . . .’

  ‘What he’s trying to say,’ interrupted Chris Mooney, ‘is that they offered me a deal. They told me that everything would stop if I informed on the others. They gave me the names of the people they wanted me to watch, but I didn’t turn them down flat. I mean, I’ve got to think of my family.’

  ‘Have you any record of this approach? A tape or a phone recording or anything else?’

  ‘No, they stopped me on the road because of a traffic offence and then after a few minutes this guy gets out of an unmarked car that’s pulled up behind me and he leans in the window and tells me he wants me to inform on my friends. I mean, it’s unreal.’

  ‘Did this individual say where he was from?’ asked Kate.

  ‘No, I guess Special Branch or maybe MI5. I didn’t ask. Look, they’ve got me by the fucking balls. I can’t move without one of these bloody agencies giving me a hard time. I’ve had the VAT people on my tail, building inspectors, the police, some damned busybody from social services threatening us with a parenting order and a home environment study because my youngest is in trouble at school. My elder daughter’s flat at university has been searched by the police twice – they say she’s linked to some extremist environmental group. They know everything about my family. When the man offered me a deal he mentioned my wife’s depression. That was like ten years ago. How would they know unless they’d looked at her medical records?’