by E. M. DAVEY
He returned after nightfall. A cat fled before the heavy fall of his feet as he marched up the garden path. Still nobody answered at the flat, and no lights were on either. He was over the fence in a single bound, climbed a drainpipe at the back and smashed the window of the upstairs bathroom. Inside it was just as he’d hoped: the flat was bare of furniture or possessions. Serval trotted to the bedroom at the front of the property. From there he could see into all sixteen windows of Khan’s mansion, and just as he’d suspected it was rammed full of grannies and cousins and little children. His father would have disapproved of the interior decoration – huge mirrors, modern rugs, all frightfully showy. Like a Premiership footballer’s gaff.
Serval produced a Nikon D5100 SLR camera with a 30-300mm lens worth £34,000. He opened the window and scanned the house, lurking back so he was invisible from outside. A little skip of the heart as he saw Khan himself, dressed in flowing gown and slippers. Serval tracked him through the house, then lost him. It was a while until he saw the target again, padding along the landing. He re-emerged in the dining room for supper and Serval felt his pulse quicken. But bottles of Fanta were being set on the table; kids were everywhere. He realised he was in for a wait.
Only he was wrong.
For after supper Khan retired to his study, exactly opposite Serval’s vantage point. And to Serval’s exquisite joy, he produced a bottle of twelve-year-old Caol Ila single malt. Nice drop, that. The lens was so powerful he could read the tasting notes. Oily and tarry. Serval took a dozen shots as the businessman leaned back in his chair, savouring the dram. He noted with disapproval that Khan took ice. Just when he thought the images could not possibly be stronger, into the study walked a woman wearing a full burka. Serval snapped her standing by Khan with his glass in hand, the whisky bottle in the foreground. Ouch. Khan gave the woman some £20 notes – her pocket money? – and she departed. Moments later the front door opened and she left in the company of a male, trailing off down the road behind him. Typical socialist, thought Serval as he stared at the drinker in his study. Do as I say, not as I do.
54
After the places they had been, it felt faintly ludicrous being back in England. Churchill College lay in the Cambridge suburbs, and each detail was as strange as it was familiar. The tidiness of the streets, the mundanity of the double yellow lines; dog-walkers and pigeons and estate agents’ boards, caravans parked in driveways.
They had changed identity again. Jake had cropped his hair and wore a rocker’s denim jacket; Jenny had acquired leather jacket, heavy-rimmed glasses and a nose ring. He’d been too bruised to bring up her Vienna rendezvous, but the sight of hale young chaps in rugger shirts with ravishing girlfriends did his raging sense of inadequacy no favours.
Churchill College was like an architect’s sketch from the 1950s, tessellated, boxy and very pristine. The library and archive was a minimalist fender of cement set amid manicured lawns. Jake glanced at its motto.
Connecting the past, present and future.
“Rather apt, eh?” he said.
Jenny smiled, and some of the tension between them dissipated.
Books on Churchills from the un-extraordinary to the illustrious lined the walls. A bust of Winston himself dominated the room, and a slightly famous TV historian busied himself with some documents. The archivist, a mousy thing with an endearing smile, did not know of the ‘most curious letter’. But she retrieved the rolls of microfilm on which most of Lord Randolph’s surviving correspondence was stored and led them to a side-room. The microfilm viewer was huge and clunky, humming like some piece of Soviet industrial equipment. Jake fiddled the first microfilm onto a spindle and a letter from 10 Downing Street filled the screen, the address in a gothic font, the message handwritten. At the touch of a button it zoomed off to the left to be replaced by another missive. They spooled to the month of Wolff’s letter.
“There!” said Jenny.
Lord Randolph’s handwriting was beyond the pale and it took them several minutes to decipher.
Blenheim Palace: January 2, 1884.
My dear Wolff,
You are not slow to take a hint, therefore your failure to understand my letter is, I think, a pretence. When I receive ‘very curious letters from political personages’ I have hitherto sent them to you without delay. Your cautious behaviour seemed to call for similar caution on my part. I therefore wrote to you that I had received a very curious letter from the Queen, which I should not show you when we met, and I shall not.
Yours ever,
RANDOLPH S. C.
“Getting there,” said Jenny.
She wrested the buttons from Jake and continued back through the archive. But Queen Victoria’s letter was absent.
“It’s been removed,” said Jake.
*
They worked through the thousands of letters this most raffish of lords had rattled off in his lifetime. Most bore the address of some Kensington club or other. But just as the eyes of crocodiles in the reeds are revealed by torchlight, they began to see things: half-insinuations, little clues.
Politics is not a science of the past; politics is a science of the future.
Jake and Jenny glanced up, each ensuring that the other had understood the import of the line. They read on.
In 1886, Lord Randolph had told a correspondent: I feel much in the dark as to the future.
And the British Army’s defeat by Afghan tribesmen at the Battle of Maiwand was mainly attributable to want of foresight.
Then they read a speech Lord Randolph had delivered to the House of Commons.
6th August 1886.
The most unpardonable crime is not to look ahead and make provision for the future. The Government of England cannot from its very nature look far ahead; it is always a policy of hand to mouth. The sky overhead, to the careless observer, seemed very blue. Yet there was much which ought to have warned and to have roused. All this time the cloud grew bigger, the darkness nearer and blacker; yet counsellors slumbered and slept, taking no thought for the morrow, ignorant of the future which was shaping itself.
“Blimey,” said Jake. “The government cannot by its nature look ahead. It was ignorant of the future. And look at all the references to storms and clouds. Those in the know would have realised exactly what he was referring to. Britain was no longer able to foretell the future.”
“So by 1886, Britain had lost the Disciplina,” said Jenny. “But how? What became of it?”
He had no answer.
Here were Lord Randolph’s musings on the Foreign Secretary of the day, Sir Stafford Northcote.
Northcote’s character was estimable, his talents were distinguished; but heedless of the warnings of Nature, he struggled gallantly forward until he died in harness beneath burdens he was utterly unable to sustain.
“The warnings of nature are bolts of lightning,” said Jake. “They must be. But the Foreign Secretary was unable to read them. By Lord Randolph’s time, augury was a science that Britain had lost.”
“He uses the same turn of phrase in this letter,” said Jenny. “The warnings of nature unheeded once more.”
Mr Gladstone has reserved a conspiracy against the honour of Britain more nefarious than any of those other designs and plots which, during the last quarter of a century, have occupied his imagination. Let a credulous electorate give him a majority, and this Minister will complacently retire to that repose for which he tells us ‘nature cries aloud’. Nature, to whose cries he has turned a stone-deaf ear.
“William Ewart Gladstone was arguably the greatest Victorian politician,” said Jake. “He was a Liberal, highly principled, already a legend by the time Randolph Churchill erupted onto the scene. He dominated British politics for decades and served four times as Prime Minister.”
Gladstone’s Encyclopaedia Britannica entry showed an austere face: snow-white sideburns, furious brow. This was not a man to be trifled with. For leisure he used to cut down trees; Queen Victoria had detested him, claiming he
addressed her like a public meeting.
“Gladstone was nicknamed the Grand Old Man,” Jenny read. “G.O.M. for short. And he was a …”
Her words petered out.
“A devout Christian,” Jake finished. “Of course! He used to wander the streets by night, lecturing prostitutes on the error of their ways.”
“So hardly one to engage with a pagan science. Could that be why he turned a ‘stone-deaf ear’ to the cries of Nature?”
“But the High Court test,” said Jenny. “It doesn’t pass.”
“Gladstone’s QC would take me to the cleaners,” Jake admitted.
There the archive ended.
A man ducked into the room, glanced at them and walked out again. Jenny glared at the vacated doorway.
“What is it?” asked Jake.
“On the sky train in Bangkok a guy took an interest in me. MI6 was my guess.”
“And?”
She jutted her chin in the direction of the departed man. “I only saw the back of his head – but it was the same hair. Sort of … wispy.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’ve got –”
“Oh yeah. A photographic memory.”
“Time to go,” she said.
“Did you find what you’re looking for?” the archivist asked as they left.
Jake shook his head.
“Well – the originals are stored at the Cambridge University Library. They’ve got some letters that we haven’t.”
He turned to Jenny. Long moments passed.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get this done.”
55
They meandered through the Backs, those so unexpected pastures strung along the River Cam. Cows grazed among ornate lampposts and iron gates enclosed the cloisters of the most ancient colleges; the greens were carved up by gurgling streams, bejewelled with glades of forget-me-nots and tangled grass. But Jenny was alive only to the picnicking students, the cars that passed, a council worker emptying bins, subjecting each of them to her scrutiny. And Jake was lost in his own thoughts: the sense that, after so many false leads, they had clicked into the groove at last. This was the loose end that would unravel the mystery; as he paced across the common he had the sense his own footsteps were getting ahead of him, whirring away into the future and beyond his control. Was the success of this endeavour not preordained anyway? Jake looked at a fingernail of moon, suspended high up in the blue sky like an eyelash.
Maybe I should sacrifice to it?
He shivered at what he had just contemplated. Become a fulguriator? Loathsome.
If Hitler invaded hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
Dear Churchill. Jake pushed quotation away, immersing himself in the present.
*
Cambridge University Library was somewhere between a US penitentiary and an oversized crematorium, a Gargantua of brick with a single gigantic chimney looming over it. Two girls gossiped on the steps, both gorgeous: one Mediterranean, the other with chestnut hair and very fair skin. Their smiles pained Jake, their glossy hair was not of this earth. Both were absorbed in the riotousness of being young and desired.
“He said [inaudible],” gushed one of them.
“He said what!?”
“He did!”
“No way!” Hand to clavicle.
Girls like this were meant for someone else, not for him, and their being his was as fantastical as rock stardom. It was a glum reader who registered at reception. If Jake couldn’t make Jenny rediscover what they had possessed together, he would never find happiness. He was sure this was his fate.
Chinese students in Cambridge hoodies clogged the corridors, but the only reader in the manuscripts room was a bloke with baggy jeans and greasy hair poring over a medieval codex that looked as if it had been found under a hedge. Randolph Churchill’s correspondence arrived – the originals, bound in volumes of blue leather the size of a paving slab. Jake turned the pages, and there were the titans of the Victorian age. Gladstone and W.H. Smith, Lord Rosebery and Joseph Chamberlain. Disraeli too, his signature a curlicued ‘D’ – flamboyant as the man himself. Their very pens had touched these pieces of paper. As fast as Jake dared, he manipulated the folios.
No curious letter from Queen Victoria.
His heart was heavy all of a sudden. If these statesmen were referring to a shared secret knowledge, surely nothing would be spelled out? Anything revealing would be a state secret, classified beyond even cabinet level. Together he and Jenny worked though the volumes, seeking out mention of Gladstone.
There was no master mind pervading and controlling every branch of the Administration. Organisation went to the dogs. A stupefying degree of over-confidence, a fatally erroneous estimate of Mr. Gladstone — these causes, all of them preventable, slowly but surely worked the ruin.
“No master mind,” said Jake, “pervading and controlling.”
A sudden iciness, leaching off the page.
“What’s Randolph talking about, ‘worked the ruin’?” she said. “I thought Britain was at the height of its power in the 1880s.”
“Don’t you believe it,” he replied. “The Victorian boom came to an abrupt end in 1870, to be replaced with a decade-long depression. There were signs that Britain was slowing down compared to Germany and the States, even then.”
Jenny turned the page to find another assassination of Gladstone by Lord Randolph, this time addressing electors in 1885:
Irish troubles, Colonial losses, Indian dangers, costly wars, fruitless sacrifice of many heroes. Mr Gladstone’s Government was the author of these disasters. The policy of the Tory Party is to evolve such forces as may enable the mother country to rear that Imperial federation of the subjects of the Queen which many wise and far-seeing minds regard as essential to the perpetuation of our power.
“Randolph wants Britain to once more gain the forces that can allow British imperium to flourish again,” he said. “Which far-seeing minds know will guarantee British hegemony.”
Seeing into the room: Alex McCabe, he of the pointy nose and wispy hair, taking high resolution photographs of their reading material from an upper window as his colostomy gurgled and rumbled.
56
Abdul Khan switched the radio on as he eased the Bentley out of the drive. Talk Sport, as ever – he was a huge Liverpool fan.
Weather now – and Britain’s battening down the hatches, with a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic later this afternoon …
The sky over Walthamstow wasn’t menacing though, and Khan hoped he might get his afternoon game of tennis in yet. The company didn’t take much running these days – that explained why he was off to the office at a leisurely 10 am. He would do two hours’ light work and go to his tennis club before the storm broke; after that he had a date with his eldest daughter Fadwa on New Bond Street. Handbag shopping. He slowed at the end of his street, looked right, looked left. Respectability demanded the girls cover up, of course. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have nice things –
The passenger door opened.
Khan turned, hot with anger. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
But the man simply got in and closed the door. Serval. Blackmailer, killer of a child; peace dove of Sierra Leone; empire builder. Taking in the musculature and expensive tailoring Khan felt fury slide into terror, and a single horrifying word came to mind.
Kidnap.
“Drive the car,” said Serval.
Khan cleared his throat, gave a useless half-nod and nosed the Bentley out of his street, past St Mary’s Church and the Tudor House.
“Pull in here,” suggested Serval. “I want to show you something.”
Khan acquiesced.
A brown envelope was in his fingers and Khan felt a surge of relief – it would be a business offer, something dodgy. A trademark infringement, or a bribe. But photographs spilled from the emissary’s envelope. Of him.
&nbs
p; “Doesn’t look great, does it?” said Serval. “I daresay in the wrong hands these images would prove a little – fissile.”
That was it? A tawdry attempt to wring a bit of money from him? Khan had expected more from a – well, not a gentleman, but someone of breeding. There’s blood there, his Lord on the Board would have said. Khan felt his courage return and he sat up in the driver’s seat. He was a fine-looking man with a beard of silken white and a long, noble face whose hollow cheeks recalled the roots of an oak tree.
“Let me tell you something,” he said with growing bellicosity. “Nobody, nobody blackmails Abdul Khan. Do I make myself clear, you scumbag, you piece of trash?”
Serval gazed into Khan’s soul. “I do,” he said.
There was something Teutonic in that stare: the robotic, strictly-business appraisal of the concentration camp guard, not an ounce of humanity. What childhood could have produced such a man? Khan almost felt sorry for him.
“Copies go to every mosque in east London unless you do as I say,” Serval continued. “And to the local rag. And the Daily Mail, who I gather you had a bit of a contretemps with a couple of years ago. We’ll see how that goes down with the community.”
A twist to the word ‘community’, as though it tasted unpleasant in his mouth. Khan knew then he was dealing with a racist, somebody who hated Muslims.
“So tell me,” he said.
“ZMapp2.”
Khan frowned. “What about it?”
“The shipment to Abuja on Friday. It doesn’t go.”
A gap appeared between Khan’s lips. “Who are you?”
Serval adjusted his position so that his jacket fell open, and on seeing the black metal holstered inside Khan’s pupils flared. Surrender washed through him, every bit as ineluctable as flooding upon the fields of his childhood in Pakistan. He slipped the envelope into the glove box.