Heaven's Light (26 page)

Lolly had picked up the envelope, discarded by the armchair. She was peering at the postmark. ‘Where’s Den Helder?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘Liar. Look on the other side.’

Jessie turned over the page. In a long postscript, Haagen had thanked her for her other letters. He’d been reading them again. They were, he explained in a rare flourish, like water in the desert. They kept him alive. They kept him
sane. He’d have gone mad without them. Jessie read the postscript a second time, oblivious to Lolly’s accusing glare, feeling the warmth flood through her.

‘Well?’ Lolly snarled.

Jessie looked up. ‘Holland,’ she said. ‘Somewhere by the sea.’

‘But why are you writing to him?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘But why? Tell me why.’

Jessie stared at her for a long time, recognizing the technique, the tone of voice. This was the way things went in Merrist House, those long, ugly afternoons when they all sat in a circle and screamed at each other. Aggression was the key. That’s what loosened it all up for you. That’s what was supposed to set you free.

Lolly was folding the envelope into ever smaller pieces. Her face had gone pale. ‘You told me it was over.’

‘It is over. He’s abroad. He’s gone.’

‘But you want him back. It says so. As good as.’

‘No, it doesn’t. Writing to somebody isn’t the same as wanting them back. He’s a friend, that’s all.’

‘But you miss him.’

‘I feel sorry for him.’

‘Feel
sorry
for him?’ Lolly was staring at her. ‘The bloke that caused all the trouble? Nearly killed your dad?
Sorry
for him?’

Jessie felt the blood pulsing into her face. The riot outside the Imperial had been on television. There’d been no mistaking Haagen’s role and the shots of the beating her father had taken had made her physically sick. Yet even these images she’d somehow managed to lock away, persuading herself that they had nothing to do with the Haagen she’d known.

‘He’s a head case sometimes,’ she said defensively, ‘but you’re right, I do miss him – bits of him, anyway.’

‘Cow.’ Lolly stamped her foot, then collapsed in a heap on the sofa. She began to sob uncontrollably, a signal to Jessie that she wanted comfort, reassurance, sole possession, with nothing left for anyone else. Least of all, Haagen Schreck.

Jessie got to her feet and joined her on the sofa. She began to run her fingers through Lolly’s hair but Lolly turned her face to the wall.

‘Cow,’ she said again. ‘How could you?’

‘How could I what?’

‘Write to him like that? Behind my back? Not telling me?’ In the absence of a reply, Lolly turned round, struggling up on one elbow. ‘How many?’ she said.

‘How many what?’

‘How many letters? How many have you sent?’

Jessie thought. She’d been writing for at least a couple of months, ever since Haagen had broken the silence with a phone call to a mutual friend. He’d fled to Antwerp. Then to Amsterdam. And then again to Den Helder where he now had a semi-permanent address. ‘Four or five,’ she said uncertainly.

‘And he writes back?’

‘Not until now. This is the first time he’s bothered.’

Lolly reached out, her tiny hands closing around Jessie’s throat. When she began to squeeze, her strength surprised Jessie and it was a moment or two before she was able to fight her off.

Lolly was sobbing again, incoherent with anger. ‘I’ve looked,’ she got out at last. ‘I’ve been upstairs and fucking looked. I found them. Just where you hid them. Under the fucking bed.’

Jessie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. In her heart, she’d always known that keeping secrets from Lolly was a contradiction in terms. With Lolly, it was all or nothing. Always had been. Always would be.

‘I wrote first because of the dog,’ she said simply. ‘And that’s the truth.’

‘Oz?’

‘Yes. I thought he’d miss him and I was right.’

‘But you kept writing.’

‘Obviously.’

‘And he wrote back.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Jessie turned away, one hand still rubbing her throat. The sheer violence of Lolly’s anger had frightened her. Someone so small, so physically perfect, should be immune from that kind of ugliness.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘It just happened, that’s all. We were together a long time.’

‘A year and a bit. And he fucked you up.’

‘We fucked each other up.’

‘That’s not what you said before.’

‘It’s true, though.’

Lolly pulled a cushion towards her, hugging it. To Jessie’s relief, she seemed to have calmed down. From the pocket of her dressing gown, she produced a stick of gum, stripping off the silver paper and tearing it in half. Jessie accepted the peace-offering. They’d seldom talked about Haagen but now was obviously the time.

‘What was it about him?’ Lolly was asking. ‘Sex?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. He was special, that’s all. Different. I’d never met anyone quite like him. It was the way he dressed. The way he thought. He knew so much. He took so many risks. He never seemed afraid.’

‘And?’

‘And?’ Jessie shrugged. ‘We just got it on. It just seemed natural. Nothing else really mattered.’

Lolly was frowning. ‘Did you trust him?’

‘Completely.’

‘Even when he turned you on?’

‘Yes. That was no big deal. You know how it happens. Everyone thinks that smack’s, like, huge but it isn’t at all. It’s just another drug. It was there and we did it. He said we could stop whenever, and I believed him.’

‘He was lying, though.’

‘No.’ Jessie shook her head. ‘When he wanted to stop, he stopped. That’s the whole point, you see. He’s so amazingly strong. He wants to do something, he just does it. Regardless.’ She looked up. ‘If I couldn’t stop, then that was my fault. Not his.’

‘That’s shit. You’re talking shit.’

‘No, it’s not. I believe it. Whatever you do, whatever happens, it’s down to you. No one else. Just you. In the end, we’re all alone.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘He did.’

‘And you still believe it?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘So what does that make him?’

‘A friend. Someone who writes me letters.’

‘And me?’

‘You’re different.’

Lolly thought about the answer, chewing furiously.
Then she looked up, the sudden grin emptying her face of anger.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said.

Louise Carlton waited until the interval before broaching the subject of Portsmouth dockyard. The visit to Covent Garden had been her idea, an invitation casually extended over the telephone, and she’d been gratified by the extent of Ellis’s enthusiasm for Puccini. Of all the operas,
La Bohème
was his favourite and, better still, he had a passion for the pale young Australian soprano who was singing Mimi.

They were standing in the crush bar, Ellis guarding the remains of a bottle of Bollinger.

‘If I ever settled down,’ he said glumly, ‘it would be with someone like her.’

Louise did her best to look maternal. Over the summer, she’d treated him to a number of evenings out, surprised by the austerity of his private life. He lived alone in a soulless maisonette in Carshalton. She’d been down there once for a meal, instantly depressed by the smeary windows, the cobwebbed lampshades and the second-hand chintz. When she’d asked tactfully about his plans for redecoration, he’d mumbled something about not being bothered. Most of his waking life was spent in the office or on the train. He returned home, quite literally, to sleep. That may have been true but even a man as dedicated and single-minded as Ellis deserved better than this, she’d thought.

Now, swallowing the last of her champagne, she mentioned Zhu. She’d heard that the dockyard negotiations were in trouble. True or false?

Ellis turned his back on the crowded bar, looking
instantly relieved. Small-talk was the least of his talents. ‘True,’ he said at once.

‘May I ask why?’

‘Of course.’ He offered her one of his rare smiles. ‘It’s because he’s smarter than we are. It’s as simple as that.’

He bent towards her, explaining how the sale had bogged down in a mish-mash of conflicting interests. The minister, with Treasury backing, was only too eager to get rid of the yard. A sale to Zhu would save the taxpayer around £150 million a year whilst safeguarding jobs and maintaining certain facilities for the Navy. The latter condition had been built into the negotiations at an early stage, evidently with Zhu’s blessing. He’d be only too pleased, he’d said, to be able to bid for Navy work. This offer had been music to the minister’s ears. With the Navy’s other two dockyards at Devonport and Rosyth currently in the hands of private contractors, the price of repair and maintenance tenders could only go down. More good news for the taxpayer. Another round of applause at the party conference.

Ellis refilled Louise’s glass.

‘So what’s the problem?’ she asked.

‘The asking price,’ Ellis said. ‘The place is unsaleable and Zhu knows that. The MoD started the bidding at three hundred million. That was back in the spring. Now we’re looking at a dowry situation. Giving him money to take the bloody place off our hands.’

‘Are you serious?’

Ellis inclined his head, almost gleeful. ‘It’s happened before, with other disposals. Dockyards get contaminated. It’s the nature of the beast. PCBs. Asbestos. Heavy metals. Contaminants from ammunition, electroplating, you name it.’ He sighed. ‘Under current laws, the liabilities are already
frightening. In twenty years’ time it could be even worse. Zhu knows that. And he’s not about to spend a third of a billion quid for the privilege of getting sued.’

Louise was studying the remains of her champagne. ‘Any other tenders?’

‘None. Aside from the environmental stuff, you’ve got serious problems with employment laws, and then there’s all the nonsense about heritage. A lot of Pompey dockyard’s listed. Grades one and two. You could buy it but afterwards you couldn’t touch it. Which makes redevelopment a bit tricky.’

‘So Zhu has a clear run?’

‘Absolutely. And that means he can name his price – or even lift the thing for free. Not that the Treasury’s losing sleep. Until we get to capital-cost accounting, they’re only interested in what it takes to run the place. A hundred and fifty million a year off the PSBR sounds good to them.’

‘But what would Zhu do with it?’

‘No one knows. And not too many people care.’

Louise heard the bitterness in his voice. Recently she’d concluded that Ellis was a patriot of the old school, his vision of England untainted by the rush somehow to balance the government’s books.

‘What about the Navy? What’s their line?’

‘They’re doing their best but they know they’re stuffed. We’ve got one too many dockyards. Get any admiral drunk and he’ll tell you Pompey’s useless if it ever comes to war. Badly sited. Wrong ocean. Too far to steam before you get to the bits that matter. It’s just a shame that half the Navy’s based down there.’

Louise acknowledged the logic of Ellis’s case. Missile-carrying submarines had made Portsmouth redundant but history had ringed the city with dozens of other service
facilities. The school of marine engineering was nearby. Ditto the establishments that taught weaponry, communications and tactical operations. Thousands of serving personnel. Hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of hi-tech investment. Without warships and a dockyard in the middle of this sprawl, the web would lose its spider.

Behind the bar, a bell signalled the imminent start of act two. People emptied their glasses and began to move towards the door. Ellis hadn’t stirred. ‘It’s classic,’ he said with relish, ‘absolutely classic. A little Chinese guy arrives with a bundle of fivers and the politicians think it’s Christmas. A couple of months later he’s leading us by the nose. You know something?’

‘Tell me.’

‘There’s nothing in this country that isn’t for sale.’

Ellis raised an eyebrow as if cheered by the thought, then stepped aside, allowing Louise to pursue the eddies of expensive perfume as the last of the drinkers returned to their seats.

Over supper, she’d make sure there was more champagne. They’d eat somewhere nice, somewhere fitting, somewhere expensive and oriental like Hai Tien Lo or Li Bai, and Ellis would tell her exactly how far he’d got with the Singapore people.

By the door, Louise paused. The memory of Mimi’s voice still lingered in her mind and she wondered, for the first time, whether Ellis was ever lonely.

The principal drug prescribed for Billy Goodman was called Epanutin. It mixed badly with alcohol but most evenings, around ten, he slumped in the armchair by the window and emptied the best part of a quarter bottle of malt whisky.
Invariably he’d wake hours later with a foul mouth and a blinding headache but since both were already listed amongst the drug’s side effects, he’d decided the Scotch made no difference. If booze was invented for anything, it was for precisely this. An hour or two watching the world soften beyond the big picture windows was all that remained between himself and oblivion.

Kate sat at his feet, her back against the armchair, her knees drawn up. She’d spent the last ten minutes musing about Charlie Epple’s latest wheeze.

‘Tell me again,’ Billy mumbled.

‘There’s not much to tell. He’s thinking of starting a brand new party. He wants to call it Pompey First. That’s about it.’

‘What’s the party for?’

‘Us. The city. Portsmouth.’

‘And who’d be in charge?’

‘I don’t know. It hasn’t got that far. Charlie’s from advertising. He never thinks things through. Not if he can help it.’

‘So why’s he bothering?’

It was a question that had been niggling Kate most of the day, ever since the phone call had summoned her to watch the video he’d put together. Her friendship with Charlie Epple had deepened over the summer, a welcome counterpoint to the gloom that had begun to envelop her. She needed a court jester in her life and he’d played the role to perfection. With Barnaby preoccupied with business, and her political career at a standstill, he’d been a welcome, if erratic, source of company. They’d had half a dozen meals together, been to the movies, shared a wild day out on the Isle of Wight. He was good fun and, underneath the manic one-liners, she’d sensed a real outrage about the direction
the country was taking, but until she’d seen the video she’d never suspected that his disgust extended as far as political commitment.