A Sentimental Traitor

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘And what has any of this to do with the plane crash?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘More pasta?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘No, no thanks.’

  She scraped the remnants of the dinner into the bin, then turned. ‘I would stay out of this, Harry, but I can’t. All those kids who died, and their families. They wouldn’t want me to do that, would they?’

  ‘Better sleep on it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She closed the door of the dishwasher very gently. ‘There’s another problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The sofa. No way it’s big enough for two.’

  The man followed Felix down the Bayswater Road, and beyond, into the growing gloom of the summer’s night. Felix was hurrying, then glanced at his watch and slowed; no point in getting there too soon. After they had passed beyond the bright lights and turbulence of Queensway, Felix’s pursuer crossed to the other side of the road, lest he appear too obvious. They continued like that for more than half an hour, until it was gone ten, dark. Then Felix disappeared up the pathway beside Holland Park. The man followed.

  Felix stopped halfway down the track, leaning against the railings, consulting his watch repeatedly, a little nervous; he was a few minutes early despite his efforts to slow. The man loitered further down the path, not attracting attention; there were several other men, singly, in twos, doing much the same.

  Felix stirred. Another man was approaching from the other direction. They embraced, talked briefly, then disappeared into the darkness of the trees, but never completely out of the pursuer’s sight. They were there but briefly, a few minutes, before they emerged and soon the other man was disappearing back along the track the way he had come. Felix, meanwhile, lit a cigarette, perhaps looking for another encounter.

  He was lighting another cigarette when he looked up through the swirl of smoke to find a face staring at him.

  ‘Hello, Mr Anderson. I’m Jimmy Sopwith-Dane. Remember me?’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  She woke up to find him staring at her, his nose less than an inch from hers, and a sheet wound round her ankle. The bed was a glorious mess.

  ‘Your timing’s rubbish, Jem. Taking up with me again when I’m just about to be locked away and fed on bromide.’

  ‘On the other hand, Jones, your own timing is getting much better.’ She kissed him. ‘Thank you.’

  She fell asleep once more. He made his own breakfast. Cereal. Toast. And Marmite.

  ‘That’s it, Jem!’ he cried out, staring at his plate.

  ‘What is?’ she called sleepily from the bedroom.

  ‘Don’t you see? For the pipeline to be given the go-ahead by Brussels it would have to pass all sorts of quality controls. It’s what they do with everything nowadays. Even bloody Marmite.’

  ‘No! No, you’re wrong, Harry.’ She emerged from the bedroom shaking the new day into her head, stumbling over to her file. She began ransacking it, casting sheets to one side before grabbing a press cutting and holding it high. ‘Babylon got an exemption.’ She thrust the sheet at him. ‘There’s a provision, an exception, where such matters can be put to one side by—’

  ‘“The overriding security considerations of the Union or its member parts”,’ Harry chimed in, reading aloud. ‘And guess when? The Environment Commissioner announced it. Just after Christmas.’

  ‘It still doesn’t make any sense, Harry.’

  ‘Oh, but it does! Security exemptions. It all leads back to—’

  It was her turn to interrupt. ‘EATA.’

  She came and sat beside him. ‘Even so, what could that possibly have to do with Speedbird? Why was I attacked simply for asking questions?’

  ‘There has to be a connection,’ he insisted.

  ‘But I’ve gone through the files over and over again, all the notes I made. Everything I got from the relatives. I can’t find a thing.’

  ‘So if it’s not what you got from them, Jem, it must be something you didn’t get from them.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Did you ask any of them about a bloody pipeline?’

  Felix was not a physically courageous man. He talked before he died, and the drawn-out moments of interrogation left their marks.

  His violent murder, the police concluded, had been committed by one or more men of considerable strength. The injuries on the face and the deliberately and separately broken fingers attested to that. The body had been dumped in the undergrowth just inside the park, with no attempt to conceal it, suggesting panic, so probably not premeditated. A queer bashing gone too far, that was the initial and lasting assumption. And probably two men because queer bashers didn’t usually work on their own but in pairs, or even gangs, feeding off each other’s intolerance. It might have been a mugging for the wallet was missing, but that didn’t seem to explain the seemingly gratuitous infliction of pain. The police began scouring local CCTV footage. The path by Holland Park would be exceptionally quiet for many evenings to come.

  Sloppy hadn’t intended to be cruel, least of all to kill. He wanted little more than a few answers, and his life back, but he wasn’t in a particularly good state to understand the whimperings that poured from the other man, particularly after the bridge on his front teeth broke away and blood from a split cheek began frothing through the gap. Sloppy himself was in excruciating pain, in some faraway place, had been for a long time, too long, and what with the drugs and alcohol that were dulling his senses, he simply went too far. He hadn’t thought breaking a couple of fingers would kill him. He hadn’t known about Felix’s weak heart.

  Sloppy appeared in the Cheshire Cheese almost as soon as it had opened the following morning. Change of clothes, unshaven, no sleep, confused, not knowing what to do, grappling to understand what he had done, wanting to be someone else. He ordered his drink, scrabbled for money in his pocket. As it appeared, in the palm of his hand, he remembered that it was Felix’s.

  The barman was seeing to Sloppy’s order, waiting for the optic to refill, remarking how terrible his customer looked and wondering whether he should call time on him, throw him out before the first glass. More than simply a problem drinker; a man at war with alcohol, and losing. So why wait until that time came? Do the pub a favour, do this poor drunken idiot a favour, too. The barman didn’t enjoy taking money from fools.

  But when he turned, he discovered that his dilemma had resolved itself. The man had vanished. And scattered on the bar, at the place where he had been sitting, lay a fistful of crumpled, abandoned notes.

  Much later that day and in a different part of London, Suzie, the barman from the Montreal, found himself outside his local police station. He was agitated, deeply distressed, didn’t want to be there. He took a step in one direction, then in the other, hoping for some god of fortune to make up his mind for him. In his overheated hand he held a desperately crumpled copy of the Evening Standard, to which he kept referring, but the headline hadn’t changed. It still screamed at him. Earlier, and uncertain what to do, he had gone home and dressed in his best formal suit, even polished his shoes with the buckles, anything to delay doing what he knew he must. As he’d told a friend at the pub, he had never blown a police constable’s whistle without regretting it, but eventually he had taken his courage in his hands and walked here. And it was while he was twisting and turning on the steps leading to the station that the gods came to his aid and caused him almost to trip over a constable in his summer shirtsleeves.

  The constable eyed this apparition up, then down, curious, both amused and a little suspicious of this moisturized young male with plucked eyebrows and glittering studs in his ears. ‘Can I be of assistance, sir?’

  In normal circumstances Suzie would be the first to pick up on any unintended entendre and exploit it, but the circumstance had dulled his wit. ‘It’s this, constable,’ he cried, opening up his copy of the newspaper to reveal the headline – ‘Murder in the Park’. It was accompanied by an inadequate imag
e of Felix, dragged from the archives of an antiques trade magazine. ‘I think I know him,’ Suzie babbled breathlessly, jabbing his finger at the photo. ‘And I think I know who did it.’

  A pounding at his door. Insistent. Flashing lights from three patrol cars. His value seemed to be increasing, to the police force at least. Harry knew he was in desperate trouble, he didn’t have any idea why, but he knew it was the sort van Buren couldn’t fix. That’s when he knew he couldn’t answer the door, because he would end up wallowing at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and with the odds already stacked against him, she was never going to let him out. He saw one of the policemen advancing with a sledgehammer; they were going to smash their way in. He was trapped – until he remembered the burglary, the rear window that had been left open, the way to the fire escape and the roofs beyond. He could hear the doorjamb splintering as he forced his way through.

  He was clambering over a party wall, across the rooftop of the friendly gallery owner, when his phone began to ring. The noise would betray his whereabouts, so he reached into his pocket to silence it. Then he saw it was Sloppy.

  ‘Not a great time,’ Harry began to say, but his own words froze as he began to listen to his friend. ‘I killed him, Harry,’ he mumbled. ‘Didn’t mean to but . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Felix Wilton, that’s his name, not bloody Anderson. Wouldn’t tell me it at first so I . . .’ Sloppy’s voice faded, and Harry could hear a car engine in the background, making it difficult to catch everything. ‘Didn’t know what to do, been driving all night . . .’

  ‘Where are you?’ Harry demanded, but the other man wasn’t listening. The words were slurred, with alcohol, with exhaustion, and something more. Despair.

  Sloppy kept muttering that it was his fault; Harry stopped running and hid behind an old brick chimney breast to try to catch every word.

  ‘Cost him his front teeth, it did, before I got the name. Didn’t hurt him much. Nothing you and I haven’t seen before, done before . . . Remember that pub in Armagh? Lost some of mine there . . .’ He sobbed, might have been crying, in great pain. ‘Jesus, I never meant to kill the bastard. Please believe me, Harry.’ He sobbed some more and Harry lost the next few words. ‘But not your fault, Harry, all this. I made it easy for them. Screwed up. Big time.’

  Harry glanced along the rooftops. Nothing. Yet.

  ‘Set me up, just so they could get to you, Harry.’

  ‘Who did? Why?’

  ‘That’s what I asked him. Said you’d been asking too many questions. Too nosy. Not your business. You were in too deep, he said. Much too deep.’

  ‘What, Sloppy? Concentrate, dammit! What wasn’t my business?’

  ‘Plane crash? Didn’t understand, so I broke one of his fingers. Shouldn’t have done that. He was crying, pissing himself. Mumbling. I just didn’t understand . . .’

  Harry heard a clattering from the fire escape. They would soon be upon him. He could see a head poking above the roofing now. He rolled over another party wall, ducked behind a water tank.

  ‘Sloppy, I’ve got to go. Where are you, Sloppy? I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘Can’t come with me, not where I’m going.’

  A policeman had climbed onto the roof and was searching around. Harry scampered still further away, but he was running out of roof.

  ‘But who’s behind it all? Who did this to us?’

  ‘Broke another finger. That’s when he started to tell me. Something about the Russians.’

  ‘You sure? What about the Russians? This is important, Sloppy!’

  ‘He said they didn’t kill Ghazi straight away. Needed to know.’

  ‘Need to know what?’ Harry pleaded. From further down the roof he heard a shout; they had seen him.

  ‘That’s when he stopped talking, Harry. He just fucking died.’ Sloppy moaned, a misery that came from deep within and was inconsolable. ‘I hurt, Harry, God but I hurt. I’m so sorry . . .’

  He could hear them running on the roof now, their feet pounding on the felt, and getting louder. ‘Sloppy, I’ll call you back, I promise.’

  But all he could hear down the phone was the revving of a car engine. He cut the link and started to run.

  A desperate man has the upper hand in a fair race, because desperation, unlike health and safety regulations, doesn’t require fire-escape ladders to be climbed one rung at a time. So Harry evaded the pursuit across the rooftops. Desperation is also more imaginative, and Harry didn’t use any of the fire escapes that the police spent their time swarming over, but instead used a drainpipe, and jumped the last twelve feet, landing in a sprawl on the cobbles of an alleyway behind Berkeley Square. The pain from his complaining rib caused him to pass out for a few moments; when he came round, he discovered he had gashed his arm. He staunched the flow of blood with a handkerchief. He lay back against a wheelie bin and groaned. How long could he outwit them, remain free? Long enough to go bankrupt? Not even that long, not walking round with a bloodied arm and torn shirt, not with Arkwright and every one of his friends looking for him. And some bloody Russians, too.

  He spotted his phone on the cobbles, not his treacherous iPhone that he’d left behind but its cheap replacement. He reached out for it, trying to ignore the screaming from his ribs. The screen had been cracked by the fall but mercifully it flickered back into life. He called Sloppy, as he had promised. A message came onto the screen. ‘Call Failed.’ He tried again, several more times. And always with the same result.

  He had nowhere else to go. He walked to Jemma’s, didn’t run, it would have excited too much attention for a man with a bloodied arm and a wild look in his eye. But when eventually he made it to her place he bounded up the stairs three at a time. When she opened her door, he saw she was shaking. The television was on in the background.

  ‘You’re all over the news, Harry,’ she whispered, her voice hoarse with shock that was made no better by the sight of his arm. ‘They want you for questioning, they say. In connection with a murder. Of . . .’ She could no longer fight the fear that was making her tremble. Her voice faded away, unwilling to complete the words and the terrible thoughts that accompanied them.

  ‘It was Sloppy,’ he said, trying to take her arms, but she backed away, shaking her head, unable, or unwilling, to take in what he said. ‘Jem, you have to make up your mind,’ he said, almost fiercely. ‘You’re with me, or you must wash your hands of me. And you have to make up your mind right now because there’s no time. They could be knocking on your door any moment.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, hesitant.

  ‘Clothes. Another place to stay. Somewhere or someone who has no connection to me.’

  She took a deep gulp of breath, she had stopped shaking. ‘I must be totally mad.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I must love you.’

  Her words seemed to stop their world spinning for a moment, but not for long. The television was recounting how Harry Jones, the former MP who had lost his seat at the recent election, was already on bail having been arrested for two earlier vicious assaults against a woman. Now a murder. The implication was clear. This was a dangerous man, in all probability a demented man. On no account was he to be approached if sighted, the news reader instructed; the police were to be contacted immediately.

  ‘They will catch me eventually, Jem. But we need to buy time. Wilton talked to Sloppy before he died, we’re getting closer.’

  ‘And you look a mess. If you think I’m going to be seen with you looking like that . . .’ She crossed to the wardrobe in her bedroom and opened a drawer. She brought out two new shirts, still in their wrapping. ‘I meant to give you these for Christmas. But then you really pissed me off.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve made things so much simpler for you since then.’

  She was also dangling a set of house keys. ‘A friend nearby, Caitlin, another teacher at my school. She’s on holiday. I’m watering the plants and taking care of the cat.’
/>   ‘I promise I’ll try to behave myself,’ he said, ripping the cellophane off a shirt and scattering pins in every direction. Suddenly he stopped and turned.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said softly, the roughness of recent weeks gone from his voice.

  ‘At least when they catch us, I’ll be able to plead insanity. No question about it.’ She began throwing clothes into a shoulder bag.

  From the television came the sight of Suzie being interviewed by a young journalist outside the Montreal. He was explaining in breathless fashion how Mr Wilton had been a valued customer and that his death would devastate his many friends. ‘He often told me that this was his favourite bar,’ he said shamelessly, ‘and we’ll be holding a festival here all weekend to commemorate what a beautiful person he was. The best party of the year. To celebrate his life. He wouldn’t want us to drown in misery, oh no, he wasn’t that sort of person, was our Mr Wilton.’ Suzie paused to smile at the camera.

  ‘Do you know if he had any links to the former politician, Harry Jones?’ the reporter interjected, trying to reclaim control of his interview.

  Suzie rolled his eyes and bounced on his toes. ‘Ah, the police have asked me to be especially discreet, as they expect me to be a key witness.’ Then his expression grew very serious. ‘But I can tell you this. He came looking for Mr Wilton. Searching him out. Even showed me a photograph. But I can’t breathe another word about it.’

  Harry groaned. No wonder Arkwright was so enthusiastic.

  ‘Then do you think the murder could have anything to do with his sexuality?’ the young interviewer pressed.

  ‘But how could it?’ Suzie replied. ‘Everyone loved her.’

  Harry switched off the television. He was feeling desperate enough without Suzie adding to his woes. Meanwhile Jemma finished her hurried packing, then stood taking a last look around her home. The African violets would die. Her parents would never understand. Worst of all was her fear that she might never be allowed to teach her kids again. She was leaving everything behind. She faltered, struggling to find the courage.