Redlaw - 01 (5 page)

“Derek, he was, like, a decent bloke who did his job,” said Keith Bannerman, fighting back tears. “He knew it was dangerous work, like, but the money was good and he was always a bit of a night owl anyway, so the hours, y’know, suited.”

“And what are your feelings about his killers?” the reporter asked, somehow managing to flutter her eyelashes even as she put on a concerned and solicitous frown.

“Scum,” Keith Bannerman spat. “It’s the only word for ’em. Bloodsucking scum. Come over here, make everyone’s lives a misery, we bend over backwards to help them, and this is how they thank us? Send them back home, that’s what I say. I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...”

Six hours later, Slocock stood up in the House of Commons in his role as Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs and quoted the grief-stricken Keith Bannerman verbatim.

“‘I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...’”

Slocock let the words ring round the chamber, before continuing: “The view, Mister Speaker, of a man who has just lost his brother, his
twin
brother, in the most tragic and dreadful circumstances imaginable. A man whose closest relative fell prey to a crazed mob and was brutally, viciously attacked and exsanguinated by them. A man struggling to come to terms with the appalling knowledge that the very individuals whom his brother was helping turned on him and subjected him, along with his colleague, to the most cruel and barbaric form of murder that we currently know of. And Keith Bannerman is far from alone in holding the opinions he does. Rather, he speaks for a broad swathe of British citizenry. I put it to you, Mister Speaker, that the right honourable gentleman before me, the Secretary of State for Sunless Affairs, barely comprehends the level of public disquiet and disgust that his policies evoke.”

There was braying from across the floor of the House, cheering from Slocock’s own side.

Slocock raised his voice to make himself heard. “Furthermore, does the Secretary of State not realise—
does he not realise
—that to continue to pursue those policies is simply to invite repetition of the events of last night? Were it an isolated incident, I could perhaps understand the right honourable gentleman’s apparent lack of concern. However, as we all know, these so-called bloodlust riots have shown a marked increase in recent months, both in frequency and severity. The Sunless, if we must use that word for them, are getting noticeably more restive and aggressive. On behalf of the Great British public, those who rightfully belong here, those with pulses and a dietary appetite that doesn’t extend to haemoglobin, I ask him what is the Department of Sunless Affairs going to do about these uninvited, unwanted immigrants? Their numbers are growing day by day, or should that be night by night? What is the government’s response to a situation which, no one is in any doubt, is becoming more and more untenable?”

Slocock sat down. From the Labour front benches his opposite number rose to his feet.

Maurice Wax, the Secretary of State for Sunless Affairs, was a gloomy-looking man with a sharp widow’s peak and a sallow, greyish complexion. The political cartoonists regularly depicted him with fangs and a black cape, often hanging upside down from the rafters of the debating chamber. More than one stand-up comedian had made the joke that the man with ultimate political responsibility for the Sunless could do with a little sun himself.

Wax had been chosen for the post because he was widely regarded as a safe pair of hands, someone workmanlike and imperturbable who wouldn’t court controversy or fumble what was an exceptionally tricky brief. He lacked flash, but he knew his way around a set of statistics, and nobody could argue that he did not take his job, or himself, very seriously.

“Mister Speaker,” Wax began, “at best reckoning there are a little over thirty thousand Sunless present in the UK. That is to say, one Sunless per two thousand humans. Or, to put it another way, the Sunless currently comprise zero-point-zero-five per cent of the overall population.”

Slocock yawned elaborately for the benefit of the BBC Parliament cameras and the sketch writers in the public gallery.

“In those countries where Sunless are a longer-established feature,” Wax went on, consulting his notes, “it has been calculated that the Sunless-to-human ratio needs to rise to one per thousand before the balance becomes unsustainable. In other words, before they become an active menace. We are, I would submit, a considerable way from that, and indeed this government’s programme of robust, proactive identification and containment will ensure the United Kingdom does not go the way of Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and their ilk in finding itself burdened with Sunless superabundance—the cause, of course, of the Sunless’s initial westward drift some two decades ago. For the record, new SRAs have been established just this month in Liverpool’s Toxteth and Moss Side in Manchester, and we’re consulting with the Scottish Government and the Welsh National Assembly with a view to rolling out further SRAs in...”

By that point Slocock didn’t need to pretend to look bored. He was. He tuned out Wax’s drone, his mind turning to his meeting at eight tonight with Nathaniel Lambourne.

Knowing Lambourne, the restaurant would be an expensive one. But expensive didn’t automatically equate with good.

Slocock arrived punctually at the Flaming Aubergine on Greek Street. He was mildly impressed to learn that the place had a Michelin star. What mattered, though, was that, judging by other diners’ meals, it served proper-sized portions, not namby-pamby little strips of this and that draped crosswise on a plate and drizzled with a few drops of sauce.

“You look hot,” Lambourne observed dryly as he and Slocock shook hands. “Run here all the way from Whitehall, did you?”

Slocock’s face still carried a sheen of perspiration from his session with his
muay thai
trainer, Khun Sarawong, at the nearby Soho Dojo. “Been working out. Absolutely famished. Shall we order?”

The
maître d’
danced attendance around Lambourne like a drone bee around the queen. There were plenty of the rich and powerful dining this evening at the Flaming Aubergine. None, though, was quite as prestigious, nor as apt to tip good service so liberally, as the CEO of Dependable Chemicals PLC.

“May Ah
rah
commend ze oyster of steer stuffed wiz oysters, M’sieur Lambourne,” the
maître d’
said. He was a bilingual Lyonnais who could speak English almost without a trace of an accent, but when at work he laid the Frenchness on thick. It was what people expected.

“Oyster of steer?” Slocock enquired.

“Testicles,” said Lambourne. “Bull’s balls.”

“Ah. Maybe not. You know what I fancy? A nice fat steak.”

“A steak.
Oui
, eet iz posseebluh, m’sieur. Ah sink chef can rustle up that.” The
maître d’
made no attempt to hide his scorn. This, too, was expected. “Wiz ze tomato ketchup,
non
? An ’ow would m’sieur like eet cooked?”

“Rare. Very rare.”

“
Bleu
.”

“Very
bleu
. True
bleu
.
”

“
Formidable
, m’sieur.”

The steak arrived pink and oozing watery blood, and Slocock tucked in avidly. Lambourne, who’d chosen the
à la carte
special of duck breast in a pistachio marinade on a bed of wilted dandelion leaves, eyed the young MP with a lofty amusement in an avarice marinade on a bed of wilted fondness.

“Can’t stomach blood,” he said.

Slocock looked up from his food. “What?”

“Human beings. Can’t actually drink blood in any quantity. Makes you physically sick. You throw it right back up.”

“Oh.” Slocock dabbed steak juice from his mouth with a linen napkin. “Your point being?”

“It’s not natural, what the vampires do. None of it natural.”

“They are, are they not,
super
natural creatures? Clue’s right there.”

“Don’t get snarky with me, Giles,” said Lambourne. He brushed back his wavy mane of silver hair. It may have lost its colour but he still had a full head of it, unlike the majority of men his age. “I’m merely saying anyone who even considers a Sunless a person is an idiot. A dangerous idiot. Your pal Wax, for example.”

“He’s not my pal. And I don’t know if he particularly approves of vamps or not. He’s just toeing the party line on them. ‘We must be fair. We mustn’t judge. We have to treat them as if they were human, different but equal’—which they’re clearly not.” Slocock sheared off another glossy sliver of steak and forked it into his mouth. “What are you complaining about anyway? You’re raking in a fortune off them.”

Dependable Chemicals, from relatively humble beginnings as a minor player in the pharmaceuticals industry, had grown under Lambourne’s aegis into an immense umbrella corporation sheltering numerous smaller firms, one of which was BovPlas Logistics. Lambourne had zeroed in on the cattle blood market at the earliest opportunity, when the first SRAs were being set up, and had created BovPlas by buying up a medical supplies transportation company and a chain of abattoirs and splicing the two together. BovPlas had further benefited from the Private Finance Initiative scheme, a brilliant wheeze whereby private companies working in the public sector were able to charge the government usurious rates of interest on their initial outlay. The Treasury, a seemingly bottomless well, never failed to meet the repayments however extortionate they became and, should the business fail, would invariably bail it out or write off its losses. This meant responsibility without accountability and profit without risk, which for a magnate like Lambourne was something akin to the Holy Grail: as close to a no-lose deal as you could get. BovPlas had undeniably, these past few years, prospered, and Lambourne had personally creamed off the rewards.

“I never complain,” Lambourne corrected firmly. “What you need to appreciate, Giles, is that the public mood is turning against Wax and his softly-softly approach.”

“I do appreciate that, Nathaniel, I do. Did you not hear me in the Commons this afternoon? I said just that. I was sticking it to Wax like you wouldn’t believe.”

“So I gather. Wax, now, may sound like he’s talking tough, but it’s mealy-mouthed stuff. Weasel words. And the public can see through that. The
electorate
can see through that.”

Slocock didn’t miss the emphasis. The deadline for an election loomed less than six months hence, and if the opinion polls were anything to go by, the government was in for a massacre. The constituency map of Britain, now predominantly red, was about to turn an apoplectic shade of blue.

“And if—when—his lot get turfed out on their ear,” Lambourne went on, “it’ll be principally because they haven’t managed to get a handle on the Sunless situation. They’re not prepared to take radical steps. They’re not willing to do what really needs to be done.”

“And I am,” said Slocock. He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “You know I am.”

“Of course you are, my boy. I know it because a seat on the board of Dep Chem awaits you at the end of all this, with the promise of a salary ten times what you can earn as an MP, even as a Cabinet minister. The reason you’re on-side is you think the right way but also, more importantly, you put your own self-interest first. Don’t pretend to pout, Giles. You know it’s true. Hence I’m perfectly assured that when the times comes you’ll be happy to institute the measures we’re busy putting in place. There’s just one small snag.”

“What, you think I might not get returned?”

Lambourne chuckled. “To the safest Tory seat in Buckinghamshire, which is to say one of the safest Tory seats in the country? Oh, there’s no danger of that. No, the snag I’m talking about isn’t anything to do with you. It’s our timetable. We’re going to have to accelerate it somewhat.”

“Eh? Accelerate? Why?”

“Never you mind why. All you need to know is that what I thought could wait until after the election, can’t. We’re going to have to get cracking sooner rather than later.”

“How much sooner?”

“Right away.”

Slocock took a few moments to digest this.

“What you’re saying is you want me to get to work on Maurice Wax,” he said. “Bring him round. Change his mind.”

Lambourne looked pleasantly surprised, like a huntsman whose Springer spaniel pup has just broken its first game bird from cover. “That’s precisely what I mean. Not just a pretty face, Giles.”

“I don’t know if it’s feasible. Don’t you have lobbyists to do this sort of thing for you?”

“None of them has the same level of access. None of them could be nearly as influential on Wax as his mirror image in Her Majesty’s Opposition. None of them, frankly, has your winsome public-schoolboy charm, nor for that matter the incentive that you have.”

Slocock mulled it over. “If I’m to do this, if I’m to stick my neck out for you, I’ll really have to know why. Is it a journalist? Someone snooping around, threatening to blow the lid?”

“We’ve already had several of those,” Lambourne replied with a dismissive air, “and they’ve been dealt with. It’s amazing how little one has to pay to spike a story these days. I blame the internet. All those nosey-parker bloggers, tapping away for next to nothing, queering the market. The smallest of bribes, and crusading instincts go out of the window, along with scruples. No, if you must know, Giles, it’s simply the consortium. The three of us have got a lot at stake here, no pun intended. We haven’t been able to PFI the new project, thanks to Mr Wax and his ethics. Principled
and
stubborn—it’s a bad combination. So my colleagues are getting restless and wanting to know when there’ll be returns and how soon they’ll start coming in. That coupled with the fact that in other areas we’ve been... well, rather too successful, if you see what I mean.”