A Sentimental Traitor

by Michael Dobbs

  He had the cowling unloaded onto a trolley that he then pushed to the corner of the hangar where the engines were being inspected. The failed engine was a tangle of fuel pipes, debris and crumpled titanium blades that at first seemed not to make much sense, even to the specialists who had arrived from the engine manufacturers, but when the pierced skin of the cowling was matched up against it, suddenly one mystery faded away, to be replaced by another. The evidence was before him, before them all, yet not one of them was willing to believe.

  He was twisting his head, stretching his neck, trying to get a new perspective on the damage when he heard his name. A colleague who had been investigating the hydraulics compartment was calling. His voice sounded excited, and perhaps a little afraid, repeating the inspector’s name with increasing urgency.

  ‘Mike! For God’s sake, Mike! Get over here.’

  The hydraulics bay was also the compartment where the undercarriage was retracted during flight. As Mike stepped around a scrap of fuselage skin that had yet to find its proper place, he found the other man bent over the twin wheel assembly. He was biting on his knuckle.

  ‘What is it?’ Mike asked, but he got no answer. The other man was lost for words, except for one single sharp obscenity that rushed forth on a gasp of air.

  When Mike joined him, and saw what he was looking at, he did the same. Embedded in the thick Dunlop tyre was a shard of aluminium that was covered in dull-green paint. Most of the immense fuselage of Speedbird 235 was constructed from aluminium, but not an inch of it was painted this colour.

  It was a missile fin.

  They planned to go out for dinner. The Wolseley, her favourite, with its elegant Twenties’ atmosphere. As Harry sat propped up on the bed he watched her step from the shower, her pointed toe searching like a ballerina for the towel spread across the floor. Water was still dribbling down her body as she lifted her arms carelessly to tie up her damp hair. She looked stunning. Yet Harry was troubled.

  Jemma Laing was a primary school teacher whom he’d met at a charity function. Glorious red hair, a little on the short side, with the soft, pale complexion so characteristic of Scots women whose skin seem to have been washed clean of any blemish by a thousand years of soft breezes and rain. She and Harry had been going out for nearly four months and he knew she was growing tired of stopping over, living out of an overnight bag. The time had come for her to make a deeper mark on his life and he couldn’t find a single reason to object, to prevent her from claiming some cupboard space, beginning the process of manoeuvring alongside him, except . . .

  He’d been married twice before. His first wife, Julia, had filled his life in a manner that made him question and revalue everything around him, with the sum always greater than what had gone before. She’d begun gathering together all those loose parts of his young character and tying them neatly together when she had died, killed in a skiing accident for which Harry would for ever blame himself. She’d been pregnant, too. Perhaps that was why he had punished himself second time around with Melanie, a woman who loved to turn men’s heads, couldn’t stop, even after she and Harry had got married. He thought she was somewhere in Cheshire now, married to an older man who made cheese. A lot of cheese, for she had expensive tastes. Since Mel, many women had passed through Harry’s life. Some he had loved, but none had been able to keep up with him. His fault. Until Jemma. She had been careful not to make demands, even to hint that he should slow down, but he had begun to acknowledge that perhaps it was time he did. And with Christmas just a couple of days away, maybe it was time to ask her to hang around a little longer, empty the overnight bag.

  ‘You still planning on going to your parents for Christmas?’ he asked, hoping the question sounded casual as she towelled her hair dry. She flicked it back over her head.

  ‘They’re expecting me.’

  She was an Edinburgh girl, with eyes that reminded him of sun on the firth. She was early thirties, ten years younger than Harry and all grown up, but it was an outcome her parents seemed ill-inclined to share. They were Church of Scotland, small lives lived out in a pebble-dash terrace in the suburb of Livingstone. There would be no room there for Harry, except in her bed, which they wouldn’t allow, not at Christmas or at any other time unless they were married. London ways had never proved popular in Livingstone, not with neighbours peering from behind every curtain.

  ‘I’d like you to come, Harry.’ She bit her lip, afraid she sounded too serious. ‘It would be the sofa in the downstairs room, and the floorboards creak.’ She laughed, trying to make light of it.

  ‘Not with you?’

  ‘No. Anyway, I still sleep in my old metal-framed bed. The springs complain like a shutter in a storm. Not your style.’

  ‘No,’ he sighed, as she wrapped the towel around herself.

  She stared at him, searching. ‘I don’t have to go. I could stay here. In London.’

  There it was. They both knew what it meant. Christmas together, here, in Harry’s home. Cupboard space. He liked this woman, knew he wanted more of her, accepted that she had a right to ask and to be taken seriously.

  He looked away, broke her gaze. ‘Better not let your parents down, if you’ve promised.’

  A cloud passed across her eyes, the sun gone. ‘No, you’re probably right. Silly of me.’

  ‘We’re still on for New Year’s?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Of course.’

  A dullness had crept into her voice; he’d hurt her, couldn’t help it. He was scared, couldn’t afford to get this wrong again, hurt her even more, and himself most of all. Yet even as he argued with himself he heard Julia’s voice – ‘You’re a total tosser, Jones!’ And he knew she was right.

  ‘Let me get dressed, will you?’ Jemma said softly. ‘A girl needs a little privacy.’

  One moment wanting to share their lives, the next demanding privacy. He wanted to say something, to apologize, put things right, but already she had turned her back. He rolled off the bed and went downstairs to drown in another whisky.

  Had it been any other day than Christmas Eve, the matter might have been handled so much more skilfully, but chaos chooses its own moment. The country was already closing down for the long festive break. The dull-green fragment of aluminium was being tested by forensic experts and even though it was too early for any confirmation that it was from a missile, it was enough for the men from the AAIB to put a call in to the private office of the Secretary of State for Transport, under whose auspices they fell. Yet she was already weaving her way down the slopes of Verbier, her office on skeleton staff, and nobody returned the call.

  It was left to the Telegraph to break the news. It took the rest of the media only hours to follow.

  ‘Was It A Bomb?’ the front page screamed, above an image of the aircraft tail sticking from the water that had become iconic. And already the government was being dragged behind events.

  The report quoted ‘usually reliable intelligence sources’, which nevertheless remained unnamed, saying that a new terrorist cell was reported to be operating in northern Europe. It was believed to be Islamist, and although its precise origins were as yet unclear its objective was to ‘punish the Western democracies for persistent interference in the affairs of the Muslim world’ by finding and destroying a substantial target, preferably American. ‘Intelligence officers are speculating that the target might have been Speedbird 235 and the 115 passengers on board.’ There followed a lengthy history of Middle Eastern terrorism stretching from Carlos the Jackal to Yasser Arafat, Palestinian groups to the Taliban, al-Megrahi and al-Qaeda that covered more than forty bloody years. ‘Memories of the Lockerbie bomb still burn deeply into the psyche of the anti-terrorist forces of Britain and the United States. Could this be yet another example of their failure?’ the Telegraph asked.

  It was perilously thin stuff, a theory hanging from a thread, yet that had never stood in the way of a good headline and within hours the story had been picked up by
the rest of the media and was swimming in a sea of speculation. This time when the telephone rang and Ben Usher answered, it wasn’t either the American ambassador or his wife, but the President himself. The two men hadn’t always got on; a relationship that was supposed to be ‘special’ and had more recently been described as ‘essential’ was now openly referred to as ‘stretched’, and became more so as the American leader described how unsettling such news was ‘at a time when Americans should be home celebrating peace and love with their families’. The man had never been known to leave a cliché under-rehearsed.

  ‘Mr President, there is not a single shred of evidence in my possession to substantiate these reports,’ Usher replied. He was standing in the window of his study at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, watching a family of crows tussle on the lawn while his wife was downstairs putting the final touches to the Christmas tree. Was there no escape?

  ‘So it’s untrue?’ the President persisted.

  ‘Totally. So far as we know.’

  ‘So far as you know?’

  ‘I’m not God,’ Usher protested.

  ‘But we play God, you and I, that’s our job. If it’s not true, you should give those imposters of the press one hell of a kicking.’

  ‘I don’t control the media any more than you do,’ Usher all but spat.

  ‘I’ve got a million of the miserable bastards screaming at me trying to nail down this story. It’s your story, Ben. If it’s not going to fly, kill it. Kill it dead. Before it really rips the ass out of Christmas.’

  So, later that dreary and grey afternoon, a denial was issued. The Downing Street press spokesman confirmed it. There was no suggestion of a bomb. The denial had the benefit of being the truth, but as the world was soon to discover, it wasn’t the whole truth. And Ben Usher, a man whose only crime was to get his timings wrong through no fault of his own, was about to be destroyed.

  Patricia Vaine sat by her fire, stroking the cat in her lap, listening to the spitting of beech logs. She was sipping a glass of something that was cold and white but was too preoccupied to identify it immediately. From the kitchen came the sounds of her husband rattling the pans and plates that would soon produce their Christmas lunch. Turkey – Felix was conventional, in some things, at least.

  She had first met Felix at Oxford. They had both been auditioning for the university drama society. He had made little impression either on her or on the casting directors, but their paths had crossed by chance many years later in an antiques shop near Sloane Square. She had wandered in searching for a battered mirror and found him staring back at her. He’d had a serious bike accident that had left him with a frozen spine; he moved stiffly, turned his head from his hips, looked out from the corners of his eyes, which gave him a leering aspect, but Felix and Patricia proved to be a complement of opposites. He was urbane, she was intense, he was a cook while she was always in a hurry, he saw the colour of life while she counted the casualties, and since neither had much desire for children their desperately orthodox sex life didn’t seem to present a problem.

  When they had married she’d kept her maiden name, not using his surname of Wilton; it gave her an additional measure of independence that she treasured, and often proved useful in her working world of middle-aged men. How much she would come to welcome the distance that different names and lifestyles carried was brought home three years after their wedding, when she discovered he was bisexual. The evenings when she thought he was out visiting art galleries were instead spent on a poorly lit path near Holland Park, a habit he could no longer cover up when a youth who called himself Wayne appeared at their doorstep and demanded money. Patricia had answered the door, listened to his tale, then told him that her husband was too busy in the kitchen to be interrupted, but if Wayne were still standing on her step in thirty seconds, she would go to the kitchen, return with a ceramic blade and cut his balls off herself. It had had the desired effect, Wayne had vanished back into the darker recesses of the night. Patricia, educated by nuns, was the sort of woman through whom the milk of sexual tolerance flowed in only intermittent streaks, so that evening she had moved her husband’s clothes into the spare room, and thereafter they never slept together or mentioned a word about their separate sex lives.

  Yet, in the game of spies that was so often fuelled by suspicion, Felix remained her rock. She could talk to him like no other and his advice, although instinctive rather than informed, was sound, often saving her from her own impulsiveness. And she led her own double life, spending her working week in Brussels while returning to London or their country cottage in the folds of Salisbury Plain most weekends. He never asked what she got up to, which was why she felt so comfortable about sharing – some things, at least.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked as he reappeared, wrapped in an apron, bending his back with care to top up her glass.

  ‘Pouilly Fuissé, a big one. Someone from the European Parliament sent it to you in return for a favour. You remember?’

  She shook her head distractedly; she did so many favours. ‘I wonder what the Prime Minister will be having?’

  ‘Not your favourite man, is he?’ Felix said.

  ‘I’m told he starts off his day with a full English, and Marmite spread thick on white toast.’

  ‘Not just the backbone of a Little Englander but the belly, too.’

  ‘Wretched halfwit,’ she muttered. She ran her finger around the rim of her glass, it let out a siren’s wail; the cat, a Norwegian Forest breed called Freya, stirred in complaint, while Felix perched on the arm of a chair, sensing she wanted to talk.

  ‘He’s in a spot of bother,’ she mused.

  ‘Serves him right.’

  ‘Could get worse.’

  ‘Which he would also deserve.’

  ‘The question is, Felix, should I make sure of it?’

  He paused, considered, his lips pursed. ‘Why should you interfere?’

  Slowly she raised her eyes from the fire. ‘I already have.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ She stirred, as though feeling a draught. With abrupt fingers she shoved the cat off her lap; it stalked away, its tail raised in complaint. ‘Because,’ she said, returning to her theme, ‘he’s in the way.’

  Her husband placed his glass to one side and knelt down awkwardly by the fire. He grabbed a poker, raked the embers, then picked up another log. ‘You have to keep feeding a fire, you know, once it’s started. Mustn’t let it go out.’ He dropped the log onto its bed of glowing ash. Vivid red and amber sparks chased each other up the chimney.

  Hamish Hague, the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, had also come home to Britain for Christmas. He was a dour and rotund Scot whose head was flat on top and broad at the chin, as though it had been moulded with a bucket, with wiry grey hair like waves breaking on a shore. He had never been seen dressed in anything other than an ancient and shapeless tweed suit that carried with it the aroma of sweet pipe tobacco, and he walked with the gait of a penguin. He was known as McDeath by wine-swillers throughout Fleet Street, one of the old-timers who sat in the Telegraph’s vast open-plan news room and tapped away with two fingers on his keyboard as though he was poking out an alligator’s eyes. Now his cheeks were more than usually flushed. He’d been looking forward to a relaxed time out on the moors of Perthshire massacring partridge, but instead found himself upstairs in the overheated office of his editor with the door firmly closed. Montague Strauss was many years younger than his man from Brussels. His dark hair had receded in his twenties, leaving his head looking like a light bulb, and his eyes were too close and bulbous, as though his brain was being pinched. The task given to him by his proprietors was to bring the newspaper up alongside a new generation of readers, but he was experienced enough to recognize there were times, like now, when even he was out of his depth.

  ‘What you’re saying, Hamish, is we got it wrong. That it wasn’t a bomb.’

  ‘No, what I’m saying is that you got it wrong, Monty,’ Ha
mish replied, his soft Lowland accent and steady eyes suggesting that he was not a man to rush to his judgements. ‘What I wrote about was a cell of terrorists. You decided it had to be a bomb.’

  ‘You didn’t mention a bloody missile.’

  ‘I didn’t know about a bloody missile. Which is why I didn’t write about it. Or a bomb.’

  ‘So how sure are you of this?’ Strauss waved his hand at the screen, where for the last half hour he’d been staring at Hague’s latest copy.

  He got nothing in reply but a stare of rebuke.

  ‘We’ll look bloody fools if—’

  ‘We won’t.’

  ‘You going to tell me who your source is?’ The fact that he asked rather than demanded made it clear he recognized just how sensitive this was. It also implied that he trusted Hamish.

  ‘Maybe. Out on the moors. Not in here, not with all these glass walls.’ Hague knew newspaper offices leaked like sieves. ‘There’s a night train, if you’re interested.’

  ‘Some other time,’ the editor snapped. He’d never been nearer a bloodied partridge than a dining table in Hampstead. He also knew the older man was winding him up. Still, he deserved it. He had overplayed the bomb bit. He needed to get this one right.

  ‘You are saying that the plane was shot down by a missile.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve written.’

  ‘Russian,’ the editor said, chewing his cheek.

  ‘An SA-24 Igla-S 9K338 portable air-defence missile system. But you can call it a Grinch,’ Hamish added doggedly. He knew when to play pedantic. It confused the hell out of whizz-kids who never did much more than scrape the surface of things.

  ‘Photos? Diagrams? The technical shit?’

  ‘All downloadable from Wikipedia.’

  Strauss put his feet up on his desk and gazed out of the window, which had one of the meanest views in Westminster. Everything was grey; it was raining. He scratched distractedly at his crotch. ‘OK, Hamish, so why should we expect readers to believe this missile theory when two days ago we told them it was a bomb?’