Heaven's Light (42 page)

‘Of course.’ Liz pulled a stool towards her. The reporter wanted to check that she was married to Hayden Barnaby. ‘Yes,’ Liz frowned, ‘I am.’

‘The same Hayden Barnaby who’s involved with Pompey First?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause. Then the reporter was back again. She understood that Liz had a connection with a young German, Haagen Schreck. True or false?

Liz blinked. Had Mike Tully run Haagen to earth? Was he under arrest? ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why on earth do you want to know?’

The reporter sidestepped the question. She wanted to confirm that Haagen Schreck was the same young man who’d been involved in the riot outside the Imperial Hotel. Back last year.

‘Yes,’ Liz said. ‘He is. But why? Why all these questions?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Barnaby, I’m just confirming a report.’

Liz was alarmed now. The last few months hadn’t been easy and she’d developed an instinct for impending disaster. I shouldn’t have answered the phone, she thought. I should have shut the door and left home.

The reporter was asking her to go back to last year. In March, she’d written a cheque for £3,000. The cheque had been made out to Haagen Schreck and had been lodged with a local travel agency.

Liz shut her eyes. Her attempts to get Haagen out of the country had haunted her for months. Not because they had failed, but because she’d felt such a fool to trust him. Her instincts had been right but her faith in human nature, as ever, had been sadly misplaced. Haagen had taken the
ticket and the currency. God knows, he may even have gone to Germany. But he’d certainly reappeared, making the headlines outside the Imperial Hotel.

The reporter was talking about drugs.

‘
Drugs?
What kind of drugs?’

‘Heroin, Mrs Barnaby. We have evidence that Haagen Schreck bought heroin. In Amsterdam. With your money. It’s a serious allegation, Mrs Barnaby. And, as I say, we have the evidence to prove it.’

‘What is this evidence?’

‘Photographs, Mrs Barnaby, and a copy of the cheque. Do you have a white raincoat, by any chance? And are you still banking with NatWest?’

Ellis took a cab to the address Louise had given him for Tully. Number 66 Selbourne Place was a three-storey building at the end of an attractive terrace. The brass plate beside the door read ‘Quex Ltd. Corporate Security’.

Tully answered Ellis’s ring. He was already wearing a raincoat and he looked left and right up the street before leading Ellis to a 200-series Rover parked across the road. He unlocked the passenger door, standing back to let Ellis clamber in. Only when he was behind the wheel, reaching for the seat belt, did he bother with conversation.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Who?’

‘That boss of yours.’

‘Louise Carlton.’

‘OK.’ He reached for the ignition key.

Tully had a maisonette in a new development five minutes’ drive away. There were clumps of dead daffodils in the neatly edged flower beds and two bottles of milk on
the doorstep. Tully unlocked the front door and stooped to pick up the milk.

The tiny sitting room was upstairs, adjoining the kitchen. A desk occupied one corner of the room and there was a cheap MFI sofa beneath the window. Tully waved Ellis onto the sofa and retreated to the kitchen. Ellis looked round. On the mantelpiece, over the gas fire, was a framed photograph. It showed a younger, leaner Tully. He was wearing some form of tropical battledress. He had a carbine in one hand and a radio in the other. In the background, rolling away into the distance, was a series of thickly wooded hills.

Ellis got up to study the photo more closely. He didn’t hear Tully returning from the kitchen.

‘Brunei,’ he said briefly, ‘’seventy-two.’

Ellis took the proffered mug of tea. It was far too sweet for his taste but he was grateful nonetheless. Tully sat down at the desk. He unlocked a drawer and took out a loose-leaf binder. Inside it were pages of lined paper. A thick vertical line formed a margin on the left-hand side of the top page, and the rest had been divided into blocks of information. Ellis looked at the lines of impeccably neat handwriting. Tully’s, he thought. Had to be.

Tully reached for one of the audio-cassettes stored on the shelf above the desk. He weighed it in his hand very carefully, as if something inside might spill. ‘There are twelve of these,’ he said. ‘Did that boss of yours tell you?’

Ellis shook his head. ‘I’ve just come back from Singapore,’ he said defensively. ‘Flew in this morning.’

‘She didn’t mention anything?’

‘No.’

Tully shook his head in disbelief, then gave Ellis a little of the background. Haagen Schreck was the junkie boyfriend of the daughter of a woman called Liz Barnaby. Liz
was a friend of Tully’s. Schreck was big trouble and Liz was keen to keep him away from her daughter. Hence the tapes.

‘I don’t follow,’ Ellis muttered.

Tully explained about Charlie Epple’s house and the intercept he’d plumbed in. The electronic trawl had netted a number of items including a great deal about an outfit called Pompey First. Pompey First was a brand new political party. And Charlie Epple was one of the founding fathers.

Ellis at last began to understand. Over lunch, Louise had told him about the dockyard fiasco and about the extraordinary rise of Pompey First. Together, these two events signalled a major crisis for Tory Central Office and the shadow extended as far as Downing Street. Tomorrow she and Jephson were due to brief the Prime Minister ahead of parliamentary questions. Whatever Tully had to say might contribute to that brief.

Ellis was looking at the row of cassettes. If each one lasted ninety minutes, he and Tully could be here for days.

Tully tapped the binder. ‘Most of the conversations are between Epple and a bloke called Hayden Barnaby.’ Ellis nodded. Louise had mentioned Barnaby. He was a local solicitor. He’d been in at the birth of Pompey First. Lately, he’d taken to styling himself ‘President-Elect’.

Tully showed the binder to Ellis. In the left-hand column, he’d listed various headings. They began with ‘Constitution’. Underneath came ‘Suffrage’, ‘Currency’, ‘Defence’, ‘Education’, ‘Health’, ‘Pensions’, ‘Investment’, ‘Utilities’ and ‘External Relations’. Beside each heading, Tully had meticulously noted details of tapes, dates and specific conversations. Each conversation had a separate index number which, Ellis assumed, referred to a transcript or perhaps a summary. The analysis was extraordinarily detailed. It must have taken Tully weeks to sort it out.

‘Why go to so much trouble?’ Ellis queried. ‘What’s the point?’

‘Point?’ Tully looked shocked. He picked up the file. ‘Choose a heading. Anything. Go on.’

He pushed the file at Ellis. Ellis’s finger stopped on ‘Utilities’. Tully began to leaf through the file. More writing, pages and pages of it. At last he found what he was looking for, quotes from dozens of conversations, carefully correlated, all addressing the provision of electricity, water or gas.

‘Take electricity,’ he said. ‘Epple’s been talking to Southern Electric. He calls it exploratory conversations. What he’s really doing is research. He’s trying to sort something out for afterwards.’

‘After what?’

‘Independence. UDI.’

Ellis stared at him. Then his eyes returned to the binder.

‘Here?’ he said. ‘In Portsmouth? They want to go it alone? Set up outside the UK?’

‘That’s right. When they tell you it’s Pompey First, they mean it. At least they’re honest. That’s quite unusual, isn’t it? In politicians?’

‘But they’re admitting this? You’re telling me it’s in their…’ he shrugged ‘… manifesto?’

‘Christ, no. That’s the point. That’s why I tried to phone you yesterday. I’ve been worrying about it for months. At first I thought it was a piss-take.’ He poked at the pad. ‘It’s not. And after yesterday’s
Sentinel,
I don’t really have much choice. Zhu won’t stop with the dockyard. He wants to buy the lot.’

‘Zhu?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s behind all this?’

‘He’s supplying the cash.’

‘And he wants everything?’

‘Yeah.’ Tully nodded, glum now. ‘The whole bloody city.’

He told Ellis to read the intercepts on electricity. Ellis did so. The fragments of conversations, so carefully excerpted, told their own story. Over a period of months, Charlie Epple had established that the private electricity companies were flogging power in a totally unregulated market. They could contract with as many customers as they could satisfy. Nothing in law, no Act of Parliament, prevented them from concluding a deal with Charlie Epple’s infant city-state. On the contrary, given the buying power of 180,000 people, Charlie could probably negotiate a fat discount.

Ellis reread the conversations, putting on his DTI hat, trying to spot the problems. Tully was watching him, a thin smile on his face.

‘What about the plant? The power lines? The delivery systems? All the stuff the electricity people own? Here in Portsmouth.’

Tully nodded at the binder. ‘Next page.’

Ellis turned over. Charlie Epple, answering exactly the same question from Hayden Barnaby, had come up with a series of options. They began with sequestration. On a formal declaration of independence, the sovereign state of Portsmouth could simply seize everything within the city limits.

‘That’s theft,’ Ellis looked up, ‘in my book.’

‘They’d call it nationalization, but you’re right.’ Tully was still looking at the binder. ‘Read on.’

Ellis finished Tully’s analysis. Power-supply options included negotiations with other regional companies or
even the purchase of French electricity through the seabed interconnector, but the perfect solution had only occurred to Charlie ten days ago. Ellis read this conversational exchange twice, making sure he had it right. Then he looked up again. Tully was in the kitchen, rummaging for biscuits. Ellis joined him, still holding the binder.

‘Zhu would
buy
Southern Electric?’

Tully was ripping the cellophane from a packet of custard creams. ‘Sure.’

‘How much would it cost him?’

‘There’s a bid from National Power already on the table. Two point eight billion. He’d have to top that.’

Ellis did the sums in his head: £2.8 billion was a fortune, even to someone as wealthy as Zhu, but after privatization the regional electricity companies had become a licence to print money, one of the reasons why American companies were queuing up with bids of their own. In terms of simple investment Zhu couldn’t go wrong, and if National Power beat him to the draw then there was no obvious reason why he shouldn’t buy them instead. That way, he’d end up selling electricity to most of the UK. At a profit, of course.

Ellis returned to the file, putting Zhu to one side, trying to absorb the scale of the task these novice politicians had set themselves. He had yet to hear Charlie Epple’s voice but the way he used the language, the stop-start pattern of his sentences, spoke of someone prepared to shimmy their way around any problem.

The conversations bubbled with ideas and through all of them ran a thread of pure mischief. Here was someone who simply didn’t believe that prospects for the city and its people couldn’t be bettered. Under the Tories, he said, life had become a simple two-way bet. A few won. Most lost. In his view, that meant the guys in London had been
running the casino for far too long. It was time, at last, for the punters to have a shout. At least, that way, something might be done about the odds.

Ellis found himself nodding. Might this not work? Didn’t Charlie Epple have a point?

Tully abandoned the biscuits and retrieved the file from Ellis, flicking quickly through. An obvious problem was the welfare state. How would Pompey First go about funding hospitals, schools, pensions, income support? Wouldn’t that cost a fortune? Charlie Epple, once again, had anticipated the challenge. Conversations in February recounted his progress with a number of leading insurance companies. He’d asked each to prepare private schemes to enable a young married couple to see themselves and their kids through bad health, education, unemployment and retirement. In each of these areas, the companies had prepared insurance plans. Together, these proposals would replace the welfare state. Ellis blinked, tallying the various quotes. The lowest came to £874.56. A month.

Ellis put his finger on the figure, pointing it out to Tully.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ he said. ‘No one’s got that sort of money.’

‘You’re right,’ Tully grunted. ‘But that’s where Zhu comes in.’

They returned to the lounge with the custard creams. According to one of Charlie’s conversations with Hayden Barnaby, only last week Zhu had outlined a scheme whereby the city could pay its own way. Given real independence, and a benign tax regime, international investment would flood in. There were companies in Hong Kong desperate to find a new home for their capital. This was serious money, billions and billions of dollars. With that kind of funding, and the jobs that came with it, Pompey could afford something
infinitely superior to the threadbare welfare state the Tories were in the process of dismantling.

This prospect had triggered a longer conversation than usual, and Charlie had spent the best part of an hour rhapsodizing about new schools, decent money for teachers, first-class equipment, the chance for every child in the city to excel. The same vision awaited the city’s hospitals, the city’s old. Pensions would be doubled. Unemployment benefit, for the handful without jobs, would be turned into a decent living wage. The list went on and on, promissory notes scribbled on Zhu’s account, and at the end of it Ellis found himself battling to put these glittering prizes in some sort of perspective. He was looking at a blueprint for a new society. But where would it lead?

‘It’s a new Singapore,’ he said slowly, ‘without the sunshine.’

Tully was munching a custard cream. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Think that through, add Hong Kong to the equation, and you’ll realize why I made the call.’

When the phone rang, Barnaby was settling down to watch
Newsnight.
Earlier, he’d asked Jessie to come over but for some reason she’d said no. Kate, too, had been tied up with a prior engagement, and of Charlie there’d been no trace.