by Henry Porter
‘You don’t imagine that GCHQ might have penetrated your little syndicate long ago and is peeling your onions as we speak?’
‘The intended recipient has a code which changes daily and which he acquires from an innocent-looking website. It can be a phrase from any website. If that code is not in place before the message is decrypted by his key, it destroys itself.’
‘Sounds impressive, but they have ways of getting round things. Alice Scudamore told me she had her computer seized. They must have examined it thoroughly.’
‘It made no difference. There was nothing on it.’
‘Why didn’t you use encryption to communicate with Hugh Russell?’ she asked Eyam.
‘I didn’t want to involve him in any kind of cloak and dagger stuff – but I did give him a memory stick which is somewhere in his office, unless they found that too.’ He stopped. ‘But we’re past that. Poor Hugh.’ Then he looked at Swift. ‘Kate has got word that they’re going for the election. So that means we’re on. She’s going to meet Kilmartin and we’ll pick her up from there.’
‘Will he be followed?’ asked Swift.
‘I don’t think so. He’s used to this kind of thing.’
‘Right, let’s get going then,’ he said, pulling a walkie-talkie from his jacket pocket. He pressed a button twice. A couple of seconds later the radio squawked twice in return. He turned and made off down the track. ‘Freddie will be along in a couple of minutes,’ he called over his shoulder.
They went back to the shed to get her bag. Inside Eyam spun round and took her in his arms and kissed her.
‘What’s this?’ she said, drawing back so she could see his expression.
‘Overdue.’
She reached up and brushed his cheek with her fingertips and kissed him once, her eyes never losing his. ‘Is this part of the charm strategy?’
‘I didn’t know I was going to do it,’ he said, holding her a little away from him. ‘It just happened.’
‘Yeah, right.’ She kissed him again. ‘But I’m glad you did.’
‘If I used you . . .’
‘You did.’
‘It’s because I believe in you.’
‘With good reason.’
‘I’m more grateful than I can say. I wonder what Charlie would say.’
‘That’s an odd thing, to bring him up now. Charlie? Well, Charlie would be on your side. He was an old-fashioned liberal conservative. He would approve and he’s half the reason that I’m doing this. There was so much I regretted after his death.’
‘Yes, I knew that,’ he said. Then they kissed more passionately and for much longer. And when they left Eyam’s wretched cabin and walked down the grassy track under clouds that looked as if they would fall onto the earth in an avalanche she held his arm, and all the tension between them had gone.
Later, after they had separated, Kate sent Kilmartin a text – Dick’s X – for Richard’s Cross – +O – the symbol for a church on its side. She knew he would understand, and quarter of an hour after she was left at the covered gateway to the cemetery by Eco Freddie, Kilmartin pulled up in a Citroen hybrid, and ran the twenty yards from the car through the sudden downpour.
He wiped the water from his face, dried his hand on the inside of his jacket and withdrew some rolled-up documents from beneath his coat. ‘These are copies of emails sent between the Security Service and Number Ten in relation to Eyam’s appearance at the Intelligence and Security Committee. There is also a transcript of his evidence.’
‘You’re presenting your bona fides?’
‘Not really – we are both perfectly well aware that I might be using these to gain your confidence. The truth is that I am giving them to you because you will need them, even though they do not say much about this system. I don’t expect you to tell me anything in return. I assume you’ve seen Eyam but I’m not interested to know where he is. Look, let’s get out of the wet and talk. There’s a light on in the church. It’s bound to be open on a Sunday.’
The noise of the ancient iron latch echoed in a whitewashed nave. A woman emerged from the vestry near the altar and called out good evening. Kilmartin asked if they could stay until the rain stopped, then put several coins into a collection box that was let into the wall by the door. Kate looked up and saw the remains of a medieval painting high up in the nave wall, faint red scrolls and the head and shoulders of a saint opening his hand in supplication to an unseen deity.
They went into the back pew beneath a noticeboard that told of good works in Africa.
‘The faith of generations is concentrated in places like this,’ said Kilmartin. He unfolded a large handkerchief and wiped his glasses, then looked at her. ‘They know Eyam’s alive.’
‘You said.’
‘And it’s a matter of time before they track him down.’
‘Right.’
‘I assume he’s somewhere in this area, and they will draw the same conclusion. I don’t have to tell you about the enormous resources they will now apply to this task.’
She nodded.
‘It is clear that an election is to be called. Eyam must go for it now.’ His eyes travelled from the woman arranging flowers at the altar to Kate’s profile. She felt the insistence of his gaze. ‘I cannot stress too much the importance of him placing whatever material he has in the public domain now.’
‘He agrees. We are going to move as soon as we can.’ She turned to him.
‘We?’
She ignored him. ‘Eyam says you are to be trusted. So does a friend of mine in New York – Isis Herrick. You know her?’
Kilmartin nodded. ‘How is she? I knew her father too.’
‘She’s had a baby with Robert Harland, who also worked for the office.’
‘Yes, Harland. A very good sort.’
‘I hope they’re right about you. If someone like you is on the other side, I know this country’s lost.’
‘They are.’
‘Eyam is ill – very ill. It’s Hodgkin’s. He’s not receiving treatment at the moment. I’m not sure how long he’s got.’
‘That’s terrible news.’ He was genuinely shocked. He slid down in the pew a little.
‘Another reason for urgency,’ she said bleakly. ‘He is also convinced that an election is about to be called, but his health is the other determining factor. He’s made the journey back. Now he wants to see it through.’
They sat silently for a few moments with the weight of Eyam’s illness between them. ‘What does interest me,’ said Kilmartin at length, almost in a conversational way, ‘is that the police aren’t searching for him. It’s a simple matter to tell the public that Eyam faked his own death in order to escape paedophile charges and get everyone in the country looking for him. But there’s been no announcement. No news bulletins. Nothing.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
He looked at her over his glasses. ‘We have to consider the possibility that they plan to kill him. He’s already been officially declared dead, which certainly makes things a lot easier if they do take that view.’
She let out a grim laugh. ‘How does anyone get themselves into quite such a fix? He’s dead and he’s dying and yet he’s still got people wanting to kill him.’ She leaned forward. ‘Look, we need to talk practicalities. How long is Temple going to believe you?’
He told her about his interview and cross-examination at Chequers and Temple’s assurances about surveillance. He had made it plain that he would attempt to contact her to find out what he could, but he insisted that he wouldn’t be followed or his calls monitored. ‘I have a little time,’ he concluded. ‘They are pretty taken up with the election and David Eyam, as well as TRA.’
‘Good, so I can tell Eyam you are able to help?’
He leaned forward to rest on the pew in front of them, as though he was going to pray. ‘Yes, I think so. Clearly you need to know precisely when he’s going to call the election and I will do my utmost to find that out. It won’t be tomorrow. But it could
be Tuesday.’
‘I hope not. Look, there are a couple of areas in Eyam’s plans that are fatally incomplete. The first is that an assembly point must be found – somewhere people can make deliveries. We will need photocopiers and a binding machine. Do you know of an office we can use overnight?’
Kilmartin gave his glasses another polish. ‘I might have an idea, but I’ll have to make some inquiries.’
‘It has to be outside an area of high surveillance but within reach of Parliament.’
‘I’ll let you know tomorrow morning.’
‘The second much larger problem is to persuade one of the parliamentary committees to hear the evidence of a man who has come back from the dead, or at least convince the committee to accept the evidence.’
‘That is assuming you can get him to London and smuggle him into the Houses of Parliament without you or him being apprehended or shot.’
She handed him a print-out of the schedule of parliamentary committees for the next week that Eyam had given her. Kilmartin ran a finger down it. ‘So we are looking at the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday morning,’ he said, ‘the Home Affairs in the afternoon or the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which starts later that day.’
‘I’m not sure Eyam is going to be well enough to appear.’
‘Well, someone’s got to do it. Failing Eyam, it probably should be you. How does he look?’
‘Drawn and he has that bright, fierce look of the consumptive. You know? He needs a lot of rest. He didn’t expect to be well enough to return.’ She rubbed her hands together against the ecclesiastical chill. ‘What’s your story about me? I mean, you need to go back to Temple with some information. You can’t just say she’s enjoying the country air and is hoping to bump into her old university pal David Eyam.’
‘I’ll think of something.’
She got up. ‘OK, so we’ll be in touch tomorrow. The committee is the key, but I don’t have to tell you that.’
He looked up at her with a steady gaze. ‘The child porn on Eyam’s computer. They are making a lot of it. There’s nothing in it, is there?’
‘No,’ she said contemptuously. ‘They downloaded it to frame him. When I found it I destroyed the hard drive.’
‘It was still in his home?’
‘Yeah. I guess they planned to arrest Eyam and seize the computer at the same time. That’s the normal procedure in these cases.’
‘The allegation could still sabotage his case, whatever its strength. The important things he has to say would mean nothing if there was the slightest suspicion that he had downloaded pornography of that nature.’
‘Eyam is no paedophile, Peter.’ She sat down again on the edge of the pew and at an angle so she could face him. ‘I was his lover once. I know him like that.’
The glasses had slipped down his nose. He pressed them into place with his index figure and gave her a sideways look. ‘But not recently.’
She looked away. ‘Well, not exactly, but I know. People’s natures don’t change.’
‘It is just that David is known to have catholic tastes, and made no secret of it. Something of Richard Burton about him.’
‘I’m sorry? I miss the reference.’
‘Burton, the Victorian explorer. The translator of the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights. He experimented. He was a man who liked pain, transvestites, young men, prostitutes. Everything, as far as we can tell. David was a little like that.’
She looked at him with total disbelief. ‘Are you sure? I thought Eyam got his kicks listening to the Ring Cycle and reading Cabinet papers.’
‘Yes, I am sure. His private life was never any danger to him because he made no secret of it – except apparently to you – and he was so very good at his job. But if that experimentation strayed into an illegal area at any time, even in purely voyeuristic terms, that would be catastrophic for him and anyone involved in this business. What I’m asking is can they throw anything else at him? We have to know whether there is anything else out there. He owes us a straight answer.’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said. ‘But paedophilia is for inadequates, and whatever Eyam might be he is not that.’
‘There is something else,’ said Kilmartin. ‘I need to know one or two important parts of what Eyam is going to say.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I will have to win over someone in Number Ten as well as the MP: I want to be able to give them a taste of what is about to come out. Something big; something shocking.’
‘You can have two,’ she said. ‘John Temple is on Eden White’s payroll – has been for years. Same with the home secretary, Derek Glenny. Of course, they are not actually receiving money now, but they will when they leave office. In each case an amount is being set aside for them offshore. That means the British prime minister is the paid servant of a foreign national. White isn’t even a British citizen. He’s an American.’
‘Good lord. Where did he get this material?’
‘He seems to have spent the best part of two years investigating it and he was building his case a long time before he left government. There is a more sensational revelation concerning Christopher Holmes, the man that Eyam replaced at the JIC. He seems to have been murdered because he was about to go public on what he called SPINDRIFT.’
‘Has David got proof?’
‘A handwritten memorandum from Holmes’ personal files and a pathologist’s report about head injuries suffered by Sir Christopher and his wife. They were very likely dead before the fire was started, but the report was suppressed. It was never heard at the inquest.’ She gave him the copy of the slim dossier Eyam had handed to her earlier, but kept the summary at the beginning. ‘That’s what Hugh Russell died for. There’s a lot in there.’
Kilmartin glanced down. ‘What villainy! People aren’t going to want to believe it.’ He rose and looked at the altar. The rain had stopped, or at least was about to stop. Sunlight was streaming through a window behind them to strike an arrangement of spring flowers halfway up the aisle. ‘The public will regard it as corrosive and seeking to influence the outcome of an election.’
‘But at least they will have the facts before they vote.’
‘If this doesn’t work, we’ll all end up in jail – maybe worse. The public won’t be allowed to hear this without a fight. There are no rules any longer, Kate. They have killed twice and they will kill again if they need to. Are you prepared for that?’
‘Yes, I am. It is that that makes me want to help Eyam. Having listened to him this afternoon, I know he’s right. Now there’s nothing in my life that is more important.’
‘Good for you.’
‘You know, I always thought you were on the other side,’ she said with a grin.
‘I was,’ he said. ‘I actually liked Temple and once I admired him quite a bit. But I now see that this affair is a product of his character. It took me a while, but I got there.’
She stood up and followed him to the door where he took her hand and wished her luck. They looked out on the almost black sky above a spring landscape lit by golden light and bridged by a double rainbow. The sides of some of the gravestones along the pathway were beginning to steam.
‘England!’ he said with wonder and some exasperation. He unwrapped the cellophane of a cheap cigar, lit up and strolled down the path and vanished through the gateway. She sat down on one of the stone benches that ran along the insides of the vaulted porch and heard a blackbird sing out in the bone-littered grounds of Richard’s Cross parish church, as birds had done for over eight hundred years.
‘Bloody England,’ she said to herself.
25
The Bell Ringers
She consulted her watch and sent a text message to Freddie. No reply came. She sat waiting and wishing she had a cigarette, or had asked Kilmartin for one of his cigars. Nicotine allowed her to think clearly. In New York she was occasionally driven to join the assistants and staff of the mailroom skulking outside the main entrance to the Mayne
building. Rarely did she return to her department without a new insight or an idea of how to proceed. A cigarette gave her a rush of optimism, a feeling that there was no problem she couldn’t tackle, which was exactly what she needed now as Eyam’s vast case against the government teemed in her mind.
Just before five thirty she glimpsed a small group of five or six people make their way up another path and enter a door in the bottom of the tower. A few minutes later a peal of bells shattered the drenched calm of the evening. She stepped out of the porch and looked up at the tower. The bells had a deep declaratory note – a summons was being issued in no uncertain terms: they were richer and more commanding than seemed likely in this modest parish church.
Turning round, she noticed several cars in the car park and by the sound of it more were arriving. People were hurrying up the other path. Then she saw Miff approaching across the grass with an odd, city lope. ‘You should go inside. We’ll be out here until you need us to take you to London.’
She went into the church and saw the woman who had been arranging flowers at the altar in the middle of a small group that contained Diana Kidd, Chris Mooney and Alice Scudamore. Kate nodded to them. The bells stopped and from the stairway leading to the belfry emerged other faces she recognised – Danny Church and Andy Sessions. They introduced her to their fellow bell ringers – Penny Whitehead, Rick Jeffreys, and Evan Thomas, the short intense Celt whom she had encountered at the wake and who ran a book bindery in High Castle.
Over the next ten minutes about thirty people had assembled in the pews at the front of the church. Tony Swift came in followed by Eyam, who nodded to the group but said nothing. Most of them seemed unsurprised by his presence. Swift moved to the centre.