by K J Griffin
In all the turmoil Goss had thrown on his plate that day, Easterby had not had a second to think about his son. An odd coincidence, slightly too odd, that they should be reunited here of all places.
Still startled, the chairman followed Dr Al-Badawi downstairs to the main reception, feeling that he ought to have been elated at what he had managed to salvage from such a burning wreck. But he wasn’t. There was too much funny stuff going on, and for the first time in his career Easterby felt outmanoeuvred and ill at ease. The Ramlis were becoming a little too consistent with their surprises.
*****
Paul Driscoll was enjoying himself. These high-ranking Ramlis were the sort of friends every politician should make in his career. The MP was also glad that his wife had accompanied him to this function; it would do her good to see the explanation for the excessively long hours he spent away from their Barnet home, a slave to public and parliamentary business.
Driscoll was already on his third glass of champagne. While he chatted to Superintendent Whitaker of the Thames Valley Police, and a fat, bearded man who turned out to be the director of a dynamic, young electronics company, Driscoll eyed his wife with approval as she engaged that dreadful Labour MP, Claire Ferris, in conversation. Blonde, outgoing and still early-forties-attractive, the wife of his three adolescent children was a competent socialite, an asset to any man pushing a career in public service.
Driscoll recognized the next distinguished guest—Douglas Easterby’s photograph appeared regularly in the business pages of the national press. The chairman of British Defence Systems was accompanied by a Ramli dignitary. About time! Apart from the quiet, dark, well-dressed fellow doing a poor job as stand-in host, the important Ramlis had been curiously late to their own party. Strange lot. Not that Driscoll was complaining, too much. It still perplexed him why the Ramlis were proposing Barnet, of all places, as one of two possible sites for the world’s newest and largest investment bank. But who cared? If they did choose his constituency, Driscoll knew that he could claim enough of the credit to make his the safest seat in the country. And he felt confident that he would beat that bitch, Ferris, to the Ramlis’ money. After all, Barnet might be an odd venue to choose, but who in their right mind would go for Ipswich?
‘Mr Driscoll, how good of you to come! Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr AbdulAziz Al-Badawi, deputy ambassador of the Royal Embassy of Ramliyya. Is that your charming wife over there?’
The deputy ambassador caught the MP’s wife’s eye, and gave her his politest bow of recognition.
‘If you don’t mind, Mr Driscoll, Prince Omar would like to see you for a few minutes in private before we sit down for dinner. Hasan will show you the way.’
Al-Badawi beckoned to Hasan and gave the MP a gracious pat on the shoulder. Watching the two men disappear from the room, the deputy ambassador assumed Hasan’s role of make-do host with the consummate conviviality that the Somali had so sorely lacked.
Despite the Special Envoy’s tip-off at the end of their meeting upstairs, Douglas Easterby felt unaccountably surprised and anxious when he saw his son enter the salon, accompanied by a ravishing young girl and a bespectacled, curly-haired young man. But with the noblesse oblige of a veteran society man, Easterby ignored his son for the time being, continuing to feign an interest in the faltering conversation of the directors of two smaller but rival companies, both pledged to become major beneficiaries of the Ramli spending spree. And the ex-colonel knew that he could count on Marcus’s social tact to delay recognition until the time was right for father and son to impress the party with the sublime aloofness of their reunion.
To Easterby’s annoyance, it was the curly-haired young man who was first to intrude.
‘Good evening, Colonel Easterby. What a splendid coincidence to catch up with you here in Oxford, of all places! I’ve been trying to speak to you for the last couple of days.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the chairman coldly. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’
‘Darren Chapman of the Guardian. I left a couple of messages with your secretary.’
‘A reporter? I’m sorry, Mr. Chapman. I get so many calls from you fellows. Can’t run a major company and sell your papers for you at the same time,’ he laughed dryly.
Chapman was unperturbed.
‘Actually, it wasn’t about your company’s activities that I wanted to question you. It goes back before that—to your army days.’
‘I see.’ Easterby’s voice was icy. ‘Well I don’t think this is the right time or place to bore everyone with old soldiers’ tales.’
He pointed to the two company directors, a pale man who carried all the forgettable success of the forty-something, balding executive, and a beaked woman who had made a concentrated effort to jettison her English accent in the first class cabin of a passenger jet somewhere over the mid-Atlantic.
‘Oh do go on, Colonel,’ urged the female director with the encouragement of an American talk-show host. ‘We’d be delighted to hear of your old campaigns.’
Chapman needed no more encouragement.
‘Does the name Hennessy mean anything to you, Colonel Easterby?’
“Of course it does! I bet he drank it in the officer’s mess with soda every evening,’ the hawk-nosed woman laughed loud and alone.
Easterby stiffened.
‘Hennessy, you say? Yes…let me see…IRA terrorist. Northern Ireland. Heard he died year or so back. Good riddance for everyone. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, it’s not so much Hennessy I’m interested in as the officer who arrested him: Lieutenant Clayton. Wasn’t Clayton one of your men, Colonel?’
‘Clayton?’ Easterby scratched his whiskers in thought. ‘Yes, he was. Platoon commander at the time. Why do you want to know?’
‘I’d like to interview Mr Clayton for a feature I’m doing—Falls Road Massacre twenty plus years on. It seems that there might be some fresh light to cast on an old story.’
Easterby’s mind was swimming in an ever-deepening morass and his sang-froid was rapidly drowning in the quagmire. First the news upstairs about Goss. Now Northern Ireland.
Why did this jumped-up little hack want to ferret around in that old hole? And who the devil had put him up to it?
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with Clayton. No idea what became of him,’ Easterby lied, trying to keep his voice composed. ‘But I tell you what, Mr.…’
‘Chapman. Darren Chapman.’
‘Give my secretary another call tomorrow and I’ll see if I can give you a few minutes sometime. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to introduce myself to the fiendishly attractive young lady over there who’s been unfortunate enough to get herself stuck in conversation with my arse of a son!’
The bluff worked and the Colonel left the prying journalist behind. His premonition about the evening was so far proving to be disastrously true.
But anxiety only made Easterby more prickly. He greeted his son curtly and scowled when introduced to the rest of the circle: some lesbo-looking tutor, the pickled Warden of Magdalen, a dog-faced, woman Labour MP he’d never heard of before, and this new girlfriend Marcus hadn’t told him about, whose looks were as pretty as her accent was common.
He chatted to his son and the tarty-looking girlfriend until the lesbo tutor interrupted.
‘You must be the star-guest here tonight, Colonel! I’ve heard that British Defence Systems and the Sultanate of Ramliyya go back a long way.’
Easterby glared at the tutor. Did she intend a hidden meaning? Surely she couldn’t know about Goss?
‘So you’ve met Prince Omar before, have you Colonel?’ asked the Warden. ‘Charming gentleman, isn’t he? Most unorthodox, but a real nabob!’
To Easterby’s relief the Warden didn’t wait for an answer, but began to do all the talking himself, telling the group about the donation Al-Ajnabi had made to his college, and the reason behind the Ramli prince’s startling generosity.’
As the Warden went on, Marcus flicked his
blond locks back over his head and looked up at Sophie in amazement. It was the first he had heard of the story. His father gave the young girl a suspicious glare, and Ockenden looked concerned when she saw the look on her star pupil’s face.
Sophie had been feeling increasingly anxious since her meeting with ‘the government man’. But it wasn’t so much the threat that he might expose her and her “arrangement” to the national press, as an unfathomable desire to protect Omar from various undefined dangers that had been keeping her on edge. And why did she care so much about the man who tormented her so? This was getting warped—almost sadomasochistic stuff.
Now she was looking anxiously around the room for Omar. Why was he so late to his own party? Should she tell him that she had been asked to spy on him? Whose side should she be on? Omar’s actions and ideas were quirky, to say the least, but the thought of making common cause with the man from the cloisters was instinctively repellent.
‘Oh, look—it’s the computer nerds,’ Sophie blurted out to Marcus in her growing tension.
‘The who?’
‘Oh nothing. Just some people I’ve seen here before,’ she mumbled, remembering that she hadn’t told Marcus about the strange people and events that peopled Omar’s mansion.
Claire Ferris stopped short in mid-sentence at the sight of Mark Elmer walking into the candlelit salon, and her hand froze on the stem of her champagne flute. Elmer caught her eyes, forcing her to look away, and she flushed uncontrollably in front of the bearded company director with whom she was discussing proposed reforms to the welfare system.
Elmer was followed closely by Linda Groves. Soon after them, Paul Driscoll rejoined the party in the large salon, and made straight for a champagne waiter. He drained a full glass, replaced it on the silver tray and took a refill over to a quiet spot by the window, where he stood silent and alone, peering resolutely into the blackness.
Brenda Driscoll was perplexed at her husband’s unusually antisocial behaviour. She broke away from a conversation with the hook-nosed female company director and a garrulous young journalist to join her subdued husband in his lonely vigil.
Standing in the group nearest the doorway, Sophie looked up to see Omar accompanied by an Arab-looking man. They stood in the doorway chatting for a while, surveying the ensemble. From behind her, in the centre of the room, Sophie could hear the growing babble of voices as backs were turned to glimpse the enigmatic host. She caught his eye; he smiled and escorted his guest to her group, introducing a shifty-looking Khalid to the Warden and Ockenden. Khalid paused when he came to Marcus, and looked questioningly at Sophie.
‘Omar, I’d like to introduce you to my boyfriend, Marcus Easterby,’ Sophie smiled at Omar.
Marcus Easterby shook hands with Khalid, but the special envoy restricted his greeting to a formal bow and turned to the Warden, who was standing far too close to Sophie, as usual.
‘I hope you won’t monopolize Miss Palmer all evening, Warden. She’s protected by diplomatic status now, you know,’ he joked.
The Warden dropped his hand from the back of Sophie’s elbow; Ockenden laughed into her orange juice, and Marcus brushed the blond mop away from his eyes just a little too abruptly.
‘Is there any special reason for your gathering tonight, Prince Omar?’ Ockenden asked, still smirking. ‘Looking around, your guests seem to be almost exclusively a mixture of the business and political élite. Not quite your cup of tea, I would have thought, judging from the opinions you voiced when we last met.’
‘If the flies did not come to the web, how would the spider dine?’ Al-Ajnabi laughed. ‘And thank you for reminding me, Ms. Ockenden—I am neglecting my other guests.’
The Special Envoy walked away, taking Khalid with him to a large group containing Chapman, Ferris and the three company directors.
Sophie looked around the faces in her own circle. The Warden was already too drunk to pay much attention, Marcus too distracted. Instead, she turned towards her tutor and whispered,
‘What do you think Omar meant about flies in spiders’ webs?’
‘Who knows?’ Ockenden sighed wistfully. ‘But I wouldn’t want to be one of his business partners. I’ve got a feeling they might be in for a nasty surprise.’
‘Surprise?’ Sophie asked suspiciously, drawing close enough for the most confidential of tête à tête’s. ‘Has Omar been talking to you about his projects?’
‘Projects? No. Why? Has he mentioned them to you?’
‘No.’ She scrunched up her nose and looked seriously at her tutor. ‘I say, Ms Ockenden…’
‘Call me Emily, please, Sophie.’
‘Ok… Emily,’ Sophie carried on, swiping at a few loose strands of hair in the awkwardness of the moment. ‘What I wanted to ask is, well… do you actually like Prince Omar?’
‘Like him? How do you mean?’
‘I mean do you approve of him?’
‘Approve of him? Well…I find his political views refreshingly sound. I think we share a lot of common ground there.’
Sophie waited for her tutor to elaborate but her explanation was forestalled.
‘Another glass, Soph?’ It was Marcus. He was looking bored.
Just then someone started clapping stridently. Sophie looked up to see one of Omar’s entourage earnestly inviting everyone to take their places in the dining room.
The guests murmured in appreciation when they glimpsed the exotic elegance of the large dining room. Billowing ceiling hangings purled downwards, entwined in each other’s red, orange, brown and yellow folds, converging in the centre of the room, where they were trained into the dome-shaped canopy of a hexagon of tent poles. Musicians in Arab dress were stationed here: a percussionist, two oud players and a female singer pasted in heavy make-up.
There were no conventional dining tables anywhere in the room. Instead, cushions, rugs and supports were arranged on top of the carpet in three discrete convivial clusters and an array of silver trays was already laid out on the floor.
Marcus and Sophie were among the last to walk arm in arm into the dining room. Marcus groaned when he saw the others peering at nametags pinned against the cushions. He and Sophie were bound to be split up. He was right. They found their places in different groups on opposite sides of the room. And to compound his discomfort, Marcus found himself sitting next to Chapman, of all people. Not that the rest of his group was much better: the glum-looking MP for Barnet, a young computer programmer, Linda, whose conversation was as good as binary, a company director, and that awful feminist tutor, Emily Ockenden.
Sophie was opposite Omar, and she knew that the arrangement was no accident. To his right and left, Omar had positioned the MP for Ipswich, Claire Ferris, and the other MP’s wife. The friendlier ‘computer nerd’ and Khalid were sitting on either side of them. At the far end of the room, she glanced at a dull-looking group containing Marcus’s father, the Warden, the superintendent and some uninspiring executive-types.
Chapman was fidgeting. He kept turning round to stare at Sophie and Prince Omar. So far, there had been no opportunity to exchange more than a couple of words with Sophie and the questions were almost bubbling out of him, in time with the stirring Arabic rhythms. Sitting next to the journalist and doing his best to ignore the fact, Marcus kept brushing long blond locks from his eyes, following the sweep of his fingers to look irritably across the room at his girlfriend, who had been snared by that damned show-off Arab.
‘Allow me to introduce everybody,’ Al-Ajnabi smiled at his group. ‘Ms Ferris, allow me to introduce you to Mr Mark Elmer. Mr Elmer is currently working for me on one of my business projects.’
Ferris swigged a large mouthful of champagne and stared at the European-looking Arab prince in disbelief.
‘Actually,’ she confessed, ‘Mark and I have met before. You see, Mark used to work for me at one time, Prince Omar.’
‘Really? What an extraordinary coincidence! Why didn’t you tell me before, Mark?’
Elmer shrugged a
wkwardly, looking at his boss for further encouragement.
‘I’m sorry, Prince Omar. I thought I had done,’ he mumbled.
Al-Ajnabi’s face lit up with sudden enlightenment.
‘Of course! Now I remember!’ he beamed malevolently at Ferris. ‘So you’re the MP Mark was telling me about. How very interesting!’
Ferris looked at Elmer and he smiled back at her wanly, shrugging his thin shoulders. As he did so, Al-Ajnabi leant closer towards Ferris.
‘Perhaps we can have a private chat after dinner, Miss Ferris?’ he suggested, watching waiters in turbans, red tunics, white pyjamas and golden slippers hauling a procession of steaming silver dishes towards the guests. Wine stewards hovered deftly in between. The musicians were playing mournful eastern melodies full of desert, distance and desire. Conversations tapered off. Imaginations and consciences ran private riot in the candlelit gloom.
Sophie studied Omar. He was talking at intervals to the other MP’s wife, a woman called Brenda Driscoll. Suddenly, Sophie remembered what the ‘government man’s’ distressing appearance had made her forget until now: tonight was the night she had agreed upon with Omar. She was going to have to make her first payment on this magnificent mansion.
But strangely, she did not feel as desperate as she had done the night of the original ‘bed duty’, when the obligation had been so much less personal. On the contrary, there was almost a perverse thrill in glancing over her shoulder at Marcus’s back, or behind to the left at his crotchety old father.
She was only worried about one thing—that Omar would exploit the opportunity to humiliate her again. To confirm or dismiss her suspicions, she tried to assess his mood during their random bursts of conversation. He was relaxed, but his shark’s eyes darted here and there among the other guests, smelling someone’s blood, if not her own.
The dishes were mostly seafood or lamb. In between, mounds of salads, sauces, fruits and vegetables were agglomerated on the rich carpets in front of the guests. Brenda Driscoll looked past the band at the group across the room. She could see her husband swaying to and fro on his cushions, making an ass of himself in front of the young woman with blond hair and the serial killer-lookalike executive.