The Madness of July Read online

  ‘I’ll describe the origin precisely,’ said Flemyng, ‘or as best I can, because in some ways it’s the most important part of the story. I still don’t know how to account for it – who wrote it, or for whom it was meant.’ He said that the way he had come across it might help to lift some of her anxiety about him. ‘And Francesca’s,’ he added, producing a flicker of guilt on Lucy’s face as well as his own.

  ‘Do you see why I had to let you see this? I can’t keep it to myself.’

  He said that after Thursday cabinet the previous week, to which he’d been summoned as an auxiliary because there was a paper on the Americans and the Middle East that lay squarely in his territory, he’d lingered for a few minutes outside the cabinet room to speak to Paul about a parliamentary statement he might have to handle for the office in the coming days. He’d perched on a private secretary’s desk in the ante-room beside the double doors that led into the cabinet room, and talked it through with Paul. Tom Brieve was there too, lounging in a chair and occupying himself with a thick file. Ears red-hot as usual, said Flemyng. By the time he’d left, all the members of the cabinet had passed through the corridor that led towards the front lobby. One of Paul’s secretaries was making sure that no papers had been left on the long coffin-shaped table at which the cabinet sat. Everyone else had gone. Flemyng needed to make a copy of a constituency letter he’d found in his box, so took it from the back of his bright red folder and walked to a photocopier newly installed in an alcove off the corridor on the little passageway that led through to the Number Ten political office. He lifted the lid and saw a document lying face down.

  ‘I turned it over. It was this letter.’ He tapped the desk with his thumb. ‘The most extraordinary document I think I’ve seen in my time in government. And you know some of the stuff that comes across my desk.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ said Lucy. ‘Give it to Paul? Somebody in private office at Number Ten?’

  Flemyng smiled and gave a shrug that combined embarrassment and self-satisfaction. ‘I did the only sensible thing.’ He looked up and grinned at her, opening up for the first time that morning. ‘Just what you would have done.’

  Lucy pursed her lips, knowing what was coming.

  ‘I pressed the button, copied it, left the original where I’d found it, face down on the glass, and took the copy. This one. Put it in my briefcase and walked away. There was no one around. I checked.’

  He had then made an excuse to go and see Paul about something he said he’d forgotten, passing through the connecting passage to the cabinet office where Paul had returned to his lair. He’d managed to spend ten minutes there without any trouble, came back through Number Ten on the pretext of passing on a word to Brieve about a conversation he’d had with the Israeli ambassador the night before, and made a detour to the photocopier on the way out. The letter had gone.

  ‘That makes the whole thing even stranger,’ said Lucy.

  Flemyng was smiling now, his eyes alight. ‘This was typed, and given what it says, the writer wouldn’t want it left lying around. I’m sure the usual carbon copy wasn’t made for the file, nor that it was photocopied in the office where it was typed.’

  Lucy’s eyes were scrolling down the letter. ‘Maybe he – or she – panicked afterwards. Wanted something to keep.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Flemyng. ‘I’m certain you’re right. Whoever wrote this wanted nothing on file. So why take the risk in copying it afterwards? In the cabinet corridor, for God’s sake? And does anything else puzzle you about the wording? Take a step back and think about it.’ He straightened the sheet of paper once more, leaning over towards her side of the desk.

  As he had expected, Lucy didn’t waste time with the obvious point that it was surprising that anyone who had written such a letter – assuming it was the writer who had left it there – would be careless enough to forget to remove it from the copying machine. Instead she got straight to the heart of the question that had most interested him.

  ‘If it was left there by the person who wrote it – and it’s dated on the day of cabinet, which started at ten-thirty, so that’s a sensible starting assumption – I find it very strange. Inexplicable by the usual rules.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘It probably means,’ said Lucy, ‘that someone wrote this intimate letter, which is about as personal and private as you can get, and poured out these feelings. And then, instead of sending it or handing it over, or tearing it up, which is what anyone else would have done, decided afterwards, quite deliberately, to make a copy – before, during or after a cabinet meeting. A change of heart, in panic, or for another reason. It seems that he wanted some kind of proof that it had been written.

  ‘A copy! Of this?’

  She paused, and shook her head slowly, spreading her arms out for the first time since entering the room. ‘It’s… mad.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Flemyng, looking happy for the first time that morning.

  9

  Sam Malachy was planning a morning of exploration. He had devised a winding route of meetings and pit-stops that would take him to three separate floors in his dingy tower block and bring him, he knew with certainty, a rich haul of gossip, all in the name of an ambitious operation that he was putting together for Finland – if only in his head. It had a name, Sam had found an alluring objective for it, and even an old agent whom he could say was willing to be revived for the game. Fiction from top to bottom, but it wouldn’t be the first time. In a week it would be forgotten, one of Sam’s flights of fancy and gone with the wind. A risk to be taken, for Will Flemyng’s sake. Loyalty demanded it, Sam having remembered in recent days his friend’s calming cheerfulness in moments of darkness, most of all his arrival in a clinic one Sunday night when Sam thought the world had left him behind. A smile out of the darkness and a hand on his shoulder.

  He had cleared files from his desk and spun the combination on his safe when a secretary knocked and pushed open his door. He seemed to have known her for half his life, Jean being a pillar of the service, born and bred in its embrace, and a mothering presence to all the boys, ready with a bucket of healing balm when they came home from scrapes and adventures, bruised and sometimes broken. Sam often thought of the shock he’d experienced on learning she was two years younger than he was. She smiled. ‘An old friend rang for you yesterday, after you’d gone. He said his name was Mr Massie.’

  A Flemyng work name from Vienna long ago. She knows, Sam thought.

  ‘Rang from a call box. He said he’s in town briefly, and would like to see you. Same place as last time, at five this afternoon, if you can manage. He didn’t leave a number. That’s all.’

  ‘Thanks, Jean. You are kind. Forget it, won’t you?’

  ‘Always glad to help old friends.’ She smiled.

  It was with a cheery expression that Sam set off to start his morning calls on the floor above, certain that Flemyng was operating once again. He turned his mind to Helsinki and his own Operation Endymion, which he was sure would bring him rewards for ingenuity. ‘Hey, Maurice,’ he said to a young colleague on the stairs. ‘Bend your ears. Have I got a story for you,’ and steered him into the empty back conference room.

  Across the river, Flemyng was preparing for Paul’s council of war with Lucy at his side. The letter they had read together was back in his briefcase, and by silent agreement had been set aside for now. Lucy was busying herself with embassy telegrams for his box, and a draft of his speech for his Sunday seminar in St Andrews. ‘It’ll be in good shape by lunchtime, never fear,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you to apply the polish.’

  Flemyng said he wanted to spend a few minutes alone before meeting Paul, and asked Lucy if she could find him a London telephone directory. ‘Switchboard can find anyone for you,’ she said. ‘Don’t waste your time.’ He shook his head. ‘A to D, if you can find one. I want to check something.’ She rummaged under her desk and found a battered directory, with clumps of pages missing. He took it and shut himself in his i
nner room. Ten minutes later he was ready for the meeting.

  His first impression on entering Paul’s office a few minutes later was that morning had turned into autumnal afternoon. No one had pulled the curtains back properly to let in the light, and there were shadows on the desk. Heaps of paper had appeared, and Paul appeared to have sunk under their weight. He didn’t rise as Flemyng came in, and compared with his performance as presiding officer at the opera house, when he had pulsed with good humour, this was a thinner and darker character altogether, his sparkle gone.

  ‘We’re expecting Gwilym in a minute,’ he said. ‘This is Chief Inspector Osterley,’ gesturing to his left.

  The short, neat policeman, pleasantly open-faced, sprang to his feet. ‘I’m Jarrod,’ he said, with a smile that suggested he knew that Flemyng would be wondering when officers, even in Special Branch, began to acquire such names. ‘I’m not sure whether or not I should be here,’ he said with a grin, and Paul flinched. He was shaking his head, the stuffing seemingly knocked out of him.

  Gwilym’s arrival compounded Flemyng’s feeling of shock at seeing Paul’s unsteadiness. Their confederate was grey and dishevelled as if it was the end of a long day and not the beginning. Paul’s office seemed to have developed its own micro-climate and become a place of fear and alarm, where anything might happen without warning. Osterley, however, whom Gwilym greeted with notable wariness, appeared immune to the atmosphere. He was alone among them in having no gleam of sweat on his face, which was deeply tanned and looked as if it had been shaved moments before. He cheerfully laid a couple of sheets of paper on Paul’s desk, side by side.

  ‘Shall I tell you where we are?’

  Paul waved a hand, and said, ‘That’s why we’re here. Please carry on.’ Flemyng had never before seen him surrender command in such a way. Paul sank lower in his chair.

  ‘Right. I’ll bring you all up to speed,’ said Osterley. ‘I’ll be quick, starting with what you already know.

  ‘First, let me explain that Aidan McKinley doesn’t exist. Well, obviously he does in Dublin and points west – bound to, of course – but not here. Not in our midst. The passport that the boys picked up at Heathrow was a dud, one that we knew, although it’s a classy one, if you follow me. We’d known it for a couple of years, and it was safely there on our watchlist. Odd that it should be used again, when there’d been trouble before, but there you are. There’s no rhyme nor reason for some of the mistakes people make. May have been in a rush, who knows?

  ‘The man who was carrying it was Joseph Manson, thirty-seven, resident of Miami, Florida, and known by us to be a representative of a small, bespoke outfit of American intelligence that – if I may put it like this – we know a little about, though far from everything. And rather admire, so I’m told by those who paddle in that canoe.’

  Flemyng’s attention quickened. Where Paul’s wide grey eyes were dull with weariness, his had the quality of jet, black and alive with light. But he was motionless.

  Osterley described the loud ringing of bells when the passport was logged, then the observation through the one-way glass of McKinley at the baggage carousel – ‘they were nice and slow with the bags as ever, I’m glad to say’ – his progress to the taxi queue, and the tail that they managed to scramble to find out where he was bound.

  ‘Quite a fuss,’ said Flemyng, one hand massaging his neck. ‘Unusual these days. Why?’ He looked at Paul, not Osterley.

  ‘You may think it was over the top.’ Paul’s expression was sombre when he spoke. ‘There was good reason, believe me. Sadly, as it turns out, we should have done more. Forgive me for leaving it there for the moment. Press on, will you?’ A long look at Flemyng.

  Now Osterley made his great leap, leaving aside events at Westminster and dealing with the second coming.

  ‘My uniformed colleagues from Kensington were called to the Lorimer Hotel at just after three o’clock yesterday afternoon, Thursday. The chambermaid dealing with room four two five noticed that the Do Not Disturb notice had been hanging on the doorknob for more than twenty-four hours, so she followed the instructions they’re given for that eventuality, and knocked very loudly several times. Called out. She hadn’t been in the room since the guest arrived the day before. She then opened the door – very carefully, she says in her statement, in case the guest was sound asleep… or busy in some other way.’ He gave a grin that got nothing back from Paul. ‘What she found was the very unpleasant sight of which you’re already aware. She called the housekeeper, who rang the police, and here we are.’

  ‘We certainly are,’ Gwilym murmured, raising bloodshot eyes.

  Osterley was watching Flemyng, not Gwilym. ‘My uniformed colleagues called a doctor, surveyed the scene, and after the person was officially pronounced dead, rang the American embassy to inform them that one of their citizens had been found, apparently having succumbed to an overdose of drugs. The doctor had no doubt at all. Naturally, the name given was McKinley. We had the other passport that was with his things in the room, the Manson one. Much better like that. Safer,’ he said, as if dealing with the aftermath of a street disturbance. ‘It will be returned to the appropriate people in due season.’

  He described how the police had contacted the consular officials for help with family, if there was one, getting the settled procedures under way. ‘The presumption was of an accidental death, which means a formal inquest at some stage, so the body remains in our care pro tem.’

  Paul intervened. ‘I have made certain enquiries in the quarters that you would expect. I can help with a little bit of the background to the day that McKinley… let’s hold to that name for the moment, I find it easier… McKinley spent in London, before all this happened. Before he died, I mean.

  ‘As the Chief Inspector – Jarrod – has explained, he was picked up from Heathrow on Wednesday morning and it was established that he was staying at the Lorimer. We couldn’t keep a full-time watch on him. It would never have been agreed for an American and I didn’t really want to ring all the alarm bells at that stage. But our man who followed him to the hotel did keep on his trail to lunch – young and enthusiastic, so it appears, and he stuck to his man. McKinley met a junior guy from the American embassy – he’s called Halloran – who seems to operate in the same line of business, broadly speaking. They ate at an Italian place called Le Ville off the Fulham Road.’

  Gwilym said, ‘I know it,’ surprising them by taking on the role of aimless commentator. ‘Nets on the ceiling, dangling Chianti bottles. Charming in its way.’ Flemyng wondered if Gwilym would be able to stay the course.

  He asked, ‘And what did the target do next?’

  Paul clasped his hands together on the table, preparing himself. ‘We don’t know. I wish we did.’

  Gwilym said, ‘So do we all, so do we all,’ resuming his gravedigger’s commentary.

  ‘From then on,’ said Paul, ‘he rather slipped under the radar.’

  Flemyng said, ‘You mean there’s no information at all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And Gwilym said, ‘God Almighty,’ as if he had known nothing of it.

  Despite Osterley’s care, and perhaps generosity, in editing out of the script the first discovery of the body, they had no choice but to return to the subject. Flemyng watched for Osterley’s response.

  Paul said, ‘Manson wasn’t seen again after that lunch on Wednesday until he was found, for the first time, in the parliamentary precincts on Thursday morning.’ A glance at Osterley, no more. ‘I hope you are following me. There were drugs on the scene. A syringe.

  ‘The medic who had a look at him before he was… taken… I’m referring to the first discovery,’ Paul found it hard to leave anything unsaid, ‘is apparently convinced that he died of an overdose. Probably a long-time user. Anyway – not much doubt.

  ‘But the first people couldn’t do a great deal – couldn’t intrude, so to speak – bearing in mind that he had to be found again. Properly.’ He gave an unnatural, nervous c
ough. ‘Our man couldn’t leave any traces. He did say rigor mortis was only just beginning to set in, so the victim died on Thursday morning. Not before.’

  No one in the room asked for more detail.

  Paul added, ‘I wish I didn’t know this, but I can’t pretend that I don’t.’ His first concern was to avoid breaking the rules, let alone the law, but the speed of events had left him on the back foot, for the only time that Flemyng could remember. ‘Here’s our problem. We don’t know the circumstances in which he died. That’s the truth of it.’ He gave a sudden, loud sigh. ‘Had he spoken to anyone? Why had he gone there in the first place? What was his game?

  ‘The syringe was nearby and had his fingerprints on it, I’m told. Just what you would expect. It was on a bookshelf. But where we go from here, I’m not sure.’ He looked towards Flemyng.

  ‘God save us,’ said Gwilym, still flailing around, despite having heard everything for a second time.

  ‘Let me spool back,’ Paul said. ‘In McKinley’s room, we found his real passport in a pile of clothes. It confirmed that he was the person who had used the McKinley one before. A Mr Manson. As the Chief Inspector said’ – a glance at Osterley – ‘we’ll hang on to that for a little. The Americans will be up to speed by now, and dealing with it in their own way, I’ve no doubt. The police officers who found his body – the second discovery – never saw the other passport so he remains McKinley to them. There were drugs of various kinds, I’m told. I haven’t heard of any of them. The syringe, of course. Wallet and keys. A small leather notebook. And that’s about it.’

  He looked at Flemyng, to pass the silent message that Osterley had agreed that there was to be no mention of his own phone number. Another gesture. No matter that everyone in the room was aware of the piece of paper that had been fished out of the dead man’s pocket at the first discovery, the deal was that it would not, as Gwilym had put it to Paul, be placed on the table for all and sundry to peruse at their leisure.