A Sentimental Traitor (7 page)

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,’ Hamish 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.’