The Turning Tide (17 page)

‘You can take your continued good health as a positive sign,’ the Major offered.

‘Touché,’ Erykah smiled. ‘But I want more than that. Like I said, I have nothing. A month from now I’ll probably be divorced. So I need security of some kind. And what I want is a leg up in the organisation.’

‘What makes you think it’s an organisation?’ the Major asked. ‘For all you know it could be me and a couple of associates—’

‘You don’t have that kind of money,’ Erykah interrupted, ticking off points on her fingers. ‘And you don’t have that kind of influence. No, your value is your media profile, which as we agreed, is something of a waning commodity. So it’s someone else’s gig, only they don’t show their face. And it’s someone you know well, otherwise you wouldn’t be involved in the first place.’ The Major’s eye twitched again. Another hit. ‘Who?’

Major Abbott shook his head. ‘No can do,’ he said.

Erykah narrowed her eyes. ‘Whoever it is has your loyalty. Is it a woman?’ The Major switched his eyes away. ‘What kind of woman?’ Erykah said. ‘Not your wife. A lover? An ex?’

‘It’s none of your business. You won’t get that information out of me. I’ll give you anything but that.’

‘Then I want your help,’ she said. ‘You have the
MEP
slot to aim for, and if you fail, no huge loss really, it will have done the job of raising your profile and you have more time for hitting the media pundit circuit. But me? Whichever way this goes, I have nothing.’ She spun the ring round on her finger. ‘No lottery win. No marriage, not a real one, anyway. And since the press release went down like a lead balloon . . .’

‘You want a job,’ the Major said.

‘What’s your staff situation?’

‘I have a secretary and sufficient interns to handle the admin if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘You have,’ she said. ‘But no one you can confide in, is there? A secretary is not going to be the kind of person you trust, a secretary who sounded like she would have reached through the telephone and wrung my neck if she could have done.’ The Major tipped his head in concession. ‘Her loyalty extends no further than office hours. With me you could have something more.’

‘I presume that when you say “something more”, you don’t mean stuffing envelopes and answering the phone.’

‘I have skills,’ Erykah said. ‘We haven’t even scratched the surface here.’

‘Is that so?’ the Major said. He could see that whatever she was thinking, she was growing bolder. Maybe she hadn’t walked in uncertain of what she was going to do after all. Maybe she had simply been trying to screw up the courage to do it.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘In the last day we’ve had calls from all the glossies, and several broadsheets wanting photo shoots and one on one interviews. They all want the human face of your party, and why not? It beats having rings run round your media strategy by some anonymous troll. You and me co-fronting this. A double act. For now.’

‘It’s not solely a matter of getting media attention,’ he said. ‘There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than some press conferences and a nifty campaign ribbon.’

Erykah nodded. ‘I have no problems getting my hands dirty. I want what you have.’

The Major barked a laugh. ‘What I have? More trouble than you can imagine.’

‘I can imagine plenty,’ she said.

‘Lady Livia won’t be pleased,’ he said.

‘Who?’

The Major’s faced blanched. ‘Who what?’

The Major was many things, but he was not a good liar. ‘The name you just mentioned. Lady Livia. Who is she and why won’t she be pleased? Is she the one funding this?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said and frowned. But she had something he didn’t want her to know now, and she knew it. ‘Tell me about these skills.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Apart from the obvious.’

‘Let’s start with technology,’ she said. ‘I know a thing or two about computers. I may not be a social media genius, but seems to me neither is that – what’s her name?’

‘Heather.’

‘Right. Heather.’ Erykah ticked off the point on her fingers. ‘She’s what, a glorified intern? I’m resourceful. Loyal. And I look bloody great in a paparazzi shot,’ she said. ‘But then, you already knew that.’

The Major chewed the inside of his cheek as he thought. He finally stopped gurning and spoke. ‘You wanted a deal, fine, we can discuss a deal. But before we go on, so you know – this would be a carte blanche. My help for your silence,’ he said. ‘And there is going to be a hell of a lot of silence.’ He rapped his knuckles on the table as he said it, for emphasis.

‘Oh?’ Her mouth was a perfect lipstick circle of false surprise. ‘There’s more than the money laundering?’

‘There may be. As I said, my help, your silence.’

‘So it’s agreed then.’

‘Yes, fine,’ he said. ‘You are right. Strength in numbers. Consider this a deal.’

‘Good.’ She put out her hand to him, which he took, briefly.

‘I suppose,’ the Major said. He still had an odd feeling about her, but couldn’t put his finger on it.

‘Fair exchange is no theft. Isn’t that one of your favourite sayings? It was in your book, three times.’ She paused. She was thinking something over, he was sure of it. But what?

Erykah bit her lip. She reached in her bag and pulled out her phone. ‘By the way? You should trust your instincts next time.’

The Major stiffened. ‘What’s that?’ She set the smartphone on the table between them. A little smile played on her lips, like a schoolgirl who had done something especially clever. ‘I am recording this and it’s uploading to a cloud site as we speak.’ The Major’s face fell as he watched a zigzag line recording their voices weave across the screen. When he’d thought she might be trying to set him up, he should have held on to that thought a little while longer. Like a schoolboy, he had been distracted by a nice body and a pretty smile. ‘Don’t worry, it’s for my own use,’ she said. ‘And it’s encrypted, so only I can retrieve it. Unless something happens to me.’ She picked up the phone again, tapped at the screen, and dropped it back into her handbag. ‘In which case it goes directly to the press. Amazing all the apps they have these days, isn’t it?’ she smiled.

‘Bitch,’ he spat.

‘There’s no need for that sort of language. We’re not in the field. You should be thanking your lucky stars,’ she said. ‘That it was me and not, say, a journalist.’

He looked at her hands, at the sparkling wedding bands. She noticed his glance and the implied threat that maybe she shouldn’t be so cavalier with someone else’s safety potentially at stake. ‘Oh, by all means, take care of my ball and chain. Do me the favour,’ she said. ‘Relieving me of Rab would be a bonus.’ She rubbed her wrists reflexively. He noticed marks that looked like fading bruises. ‘And the life insurance is, how shall I put this? Comprehensive. You wouldn’t just have my permission. You would have my blessing.’

‘What’s to prevent me telling the press you set me up? You’re not exactly a clean slate, yourself,’ he said.

‘No?’ she said. ‘Just imagine how it would play out – me, a desperate woman with a past, taken for a fool by a ruthless ex-Marine and politician. You think this street goes only one way, but I can assure you that a damsel in distress is still as popular a storyline as ever.’

The Major ground his jaw.

‘Listen,’ she said. ’I didn’t come here to threaten you. I came here to do business. But like I said, I went from twenty million to a lot less overnight. I need something to go forward with or . . .’ She looked away again. ‘I don’t even know what. But if I have to spin this? I will.’

She wasn’t wrong. He knew it wouldn’t take much more than an accusation of sexual impropriety – amply supported by the viral snapshot, as well – to turn sympathy her way. He would become another casualty of the political correctness wars. ‘Is there anything else?’ he said.

Erykah frowned and thought a moment. ‘I guess that’s it.’

The Major looked out the window. He knew when he had been outplayed. And outplayed by someone who wasn’t even committed to the game in the same way he was, at that. The noise of city traffic ebbed and flowed. The constant sound of footfall in the café underpinned their conversation like the ticking second hand of his bedroom clock.

‘Before I forget,’ Erykah added, ‘I’ll need cash for this. If you’re sending me out on errands, then there are going to be expenses.’

‘You can’t have it.’

‘Can’t I? Let’s call it a tax. For not doing due diligence.’ She offered her hand. He made no move to shake it but they both knew the deal was done. ‘We’ll iron out the particulars another time, shall we?’ Erykah raised the coffee cup to her lips and slurped down the last of her drink, holding the stare. The flicker of doubt he had seen on her face when she came in was gone, for now. Whitney was the first one to look away.

: 15 :

A constant traffic of pedestrians poured along the Victoria Embankment. The grey and drizzle did not stop tourists from snapping endless, unremarkable photos of the Thames. If anything they seemed to think it was better when it was raining, more like the London of their imaginations. Picturesque. Major Abbott found that he too was part of the scenery. Every few minutes or so someone would stop and do a double take, sniggering to their companions and pointing in his direction. The Major tried his best to look nonchalant, which, as a silver-haired man with a moustache and a kilt alone on a park bench in the middle of the afternoon, was a challenge. This was not Scotland, after all. And if they did recognise him, what was he to them? A joke of a would-be politician? A washed-up memoirist and soldier? Or notable only as the son of a bona fide hero?

The Major’s father might have landed in Normandy in 1944, wet behind the ears with a new commission and no field experience, but he got his baptism of fire by surviving the beach and liberating a French village along with the rest of Four-Five Commando. The next January he was deployed in Europe again. This time heavy shelling took out every member of the company apart from himself and two seventeen-year-old privates who still went on to complete the task they had been assigned, unbelievably holding a crucial crossroads open until Allied tanks arrived seventy-two hours later, on their way to Montforterbeek and Germany.

Lieutenant Abbott and the two privates found themselves the toast of the media when they returned. They were dubbed the Good Guys by the press and newsmen fell over themselves to profile the group, and in particular the young officer, now swiftly promoted to captain. A bestselling book soon followed. The Good Guys’ exploits were optioned for a film starring Anthony Steel and a university lectureship in military history and a column in the
Sunday Telegraph
for Abbott Senior was inevitable.

There was no one who could compare to the public’s image of Captain George Abbott. Least of all his son Whitney. Growing up as the only son of a war hero was objectively not the worst upbringing in the world, but it was never going to be easy.

George Abbott was not an attentive father and his wife was more concerned with gardening than with parenting, so they sent their boy away to school early. Whitney saw his parents on school holidays and often not even then.

After university he floated around in a few jobs, was set up in promising appointments by friends of the family. But though he stayed in work, he never excelled. Half-hearted attempts at teaching and a diploma in law fell by the wayside. There had to be something more, some arena in which his natural superiority would surely shine through?

Eventually, and with only six months left before he would have been too old to qualify, he drifted to Lympstone for Marine training. It was there he realised the real legacy of being who he was: everyone knew who his father was, and for once this was not a good thing. They more than loved the elder Abbott there; they revered him. Whitney couldn’t help but disappoint everyone he met by comparison. Even after the Falklands, even after writing a book, he always knew that in the eyes of most there was no way he could measure up.

The Major thought about the encounter in the coffee shop. His left eye twitched uncontrollably. How dare she. How very dare she. That bloody woman had got the better of him.

Though perhaps, on reflection, she had a point? They needed more faces in the press and hers would do as well as any. Better, in fact.

At least he was out of the office. There he would be withering under the glare of his secretary or fearing the inevitable afternoon check-in call with his wife. There was no way of getting work done, no peace to be found indoors, if you were being overlooked by women.

The Major ground his teeth, ‘Cunts,’ he muttered, and kicked dirt in the direction of a hobbling pigeon that was circling his feet. A group of old women in plastic rain hats looked up at him, startled by the sudden outburst. He smiled and nodded, looked away and hoped they hadn’t recognised him.

At last, his appointment turned up. Over the road he spotted a woman’s figure in a parka and oversized black sunglasses standing at the foot of Cleopatra’s Needle. She gazed up at the monument’s point and looked down at what might have been a London guidebook grasped in her hands. The worn hieroglyphs on the granite obelisk made no impression on the capital’s modern skyline. A monument to a time when the engineering achievements of men were both more impressive, and less so.

The furry otter skin sporran around the Major’s waist started vibrating. It was her. He fumbled with the clasp and extracted a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. ‘I see you, hen harrier,’ he said.

‘And I see you, Whitney,’ the woman said. Between them lanes of traffic crawled past.

The Major harrumphed. ‘Have you forgotten to use the code name?’ Sightline confirmation was no reason to let protocol slip.

She heaved a sigh. ‘I see you, golden eagle. And by that I mean I really do see you. You’re not exactly blending in, are you? Is it too much to at least try to be a little less conspicuous?’

‘I am dressed in my normal workday attire,’ the Major grumbled. ‘You on the other hand appear to have come out wrapped up for Everest base camp.’ His vision was not as sharp as it used to be, and he had to admit it wasn’t warm, but she had clearly put on a far larger coat than her correct size, and what appeared to be two hats. Perhaps it was to disguise her figure with layers of extra clothing underneath. The overall effect was of a misassembled mannequin lurching along the Embankment.

‘Well then, next time we’ll dress each other,’ she snapped. ‘If there is a next time. Which I doubt. I have news, and it’s not good. At this rate we’ll be finished by the end of the month.’

A double-decker tourist bus crept through the road traffic, obscuring his view of her while its tannoy blared random facts about the sights on the Thames. Evidently the needle was not Cleopatra’s at all, but rather had been carved for some obscure pharaoh he had never heard of. At least New Labour and that crew hadn’t seen fit to redub it the ‘Tesco Extra Needle’ in return for an all-expenses holiday in Tuscany, he mused.

‘What news?’ he said. ‘Has the kitten seen the kibble?’

‘Eh? What?’ The woman’s voice grew even more irritable.

‘You know – has the bucket been in the well. Are the ducks on the pond yet?’ Another bloody group of tourists paused to snap his picture. Whitney waved them off impatiently.

‘Fuck’s sake, Whitney, enough with that stupid code,’ she said. ‘I’ve managed to get a sneak peek of the post-mortem results.’

‘Good or bad?’

‘Terrible. Either the pathologist wasn’t as much of an idiot as we were led to believe, or someone else has been having a word with the police. Either way it doesn’t matter. Bottom line is that this business with the corpse refuses to lie down and die. You said you had a fixer,’ she hissed. ‘You said this was under control.’

‘You were asking for a miracle,’ the Major said. ‘Even the best fixer couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.’

‘Whoever your boys were, they ballsed up this job. Rather spectacularly so.’

The Major snorted. ‘If the police had anything we wouldn’t be having this conversation, we would be in a cell somewhere waiting for our solicitors. There is no evidence connecting us. Without evidence, there will never be a trial. Even if there was there would never be a conviction.’

‘Now it’s a trial, is it?’ the woman squeaked. ‘How about we rewind to the bit where you and your mates guaranteed the body would never be found? And then, when it was, that it would look like a natural death?’

‘Nobody guaranteed anything,’ the Major said, flashing a pearly smile at a pack of giggling teenaged girls who stopped to take a picture of him on their pink smartphones. ‘The deal was they got the thing far away from London, no questions asked. They held up their end of the bargain. The situation developed because your goods were in poor condition. Even the thickest doctor in the land wouldn’t have missed a slit throat.’

‘I had no control over that. The puppy was over the wall . . . arse, you know what I mean. There was no way to make it look clean. What was I meant to do, wait for him to poison himself on a bottle of water he never opened? You said you would take care of this. And you dropped the ball.’

The Major’s smile was as rigid as his military bearing. He spoke through clenched teeth. ‘It was not my fault, but you are making it my responsibility,’ he said. An understatement if ever there was one. Anyone else faced with the conundrum she was up against would have slandered their enemies, or at least tried to buy their silence. His darling goddaughter had opted instead for murder. He had always known that she was ambitious, but he had not expected her to go so far as bumping someone off. ‘I did my best to come to your aid. Many wouldn’t have done.’

He remembered the night well: a panicked call, late, at his office. She refused to say what had happened over the phone – repeating that he should come to her house straight away and tell no one.

The Major was familiar with the good and the evil that people are capable of. Even so, nothing had prepared him for what he witnessed that night.

When he arrived he listened at the door: a voice somewhere deep inside, but no one coming to answer. He let himself in with the spare key. Inside the rooms were dark, the radiators cold, as if whoever was there had come home in a hurry. Only one light was on, the downstairs bathroom in the back hallway.

The scene in the bathroom was like something from a horror film. The Major had walked in to find her leaning over the bath, a kitchen knife in one hand, her arms covered up to her elbows in bright arterial blood. A body was slumped half in and half out of the bath and there was as much blood pooling on the floor as there was going down the drain.

The worst part was the man wasn’t even dead yet.

He had seen plenty of gore in his time but the sheer impulsive violence of it shook him. He had her pegged as a stone-hearted calculator, not physically violent. He didn’t ask the details and she didn’t look as if she could have told him anyway. He barred the bathroom door, guided her to the living room with a couple of Valium and a bottle of whisky, then got on the hooter to the boys. When he flipped on the flat’s other lights, he could see that the blood started in the front room and went the whole length of the ground floor.

It was the right thing to do, he told himself. If you botched a shot on a grouse, you were the one who had to finish the job and break its neck – end it quickly, don’t let them suffer. Anything else was torture. Anything else was unacceptable.

That was what he told himself, but it didn’t stop him feeling tainted with the stain of murder.

To attack a man was one thing. There were many times when it was, if not justifiable in the eyes of the law, at least understandable. In war. In self-defence. But to go after someone in cold blood, that was something else. The kind of people who did things like that were the ones you stayed far away from on the battlefield. Only in this instance he had no choice but to try to make it right.

‘You know I’ll always be grateful for what you’ve done,’ she said. ‘I thought we had a plan. The story put around was that the Professor was suicidal. You get a corpse in a bag washed up on a beach, this starts to look a little unlikely, no?’

A less patient man would have walked away from the situation long before now, but the Major had a lot of time for his goddaughter. Not to mention common business interests these days. ‘There was nothing we could do about those kayakers,’ he said. ‘It was on a remote island off Scotland where there isn’t even a road. You have to understand. There was a million to one chance of it being found.’

‘Yeah, and the one in a million happened. You could at least have taken the head.’

‘And then what? Heads don’t simply evaporate you know.’ The Major sighed. The situation with the body was neither here nor there. There was nothing they could do about it now, so why not move on? As they said in the corps: mag to grid, get rid. Next problem. ‘Now about the Internet – the tweeter, or whatever it is.’

‘I know,’ she sighed. The headlines had been mortifying. The entire situation was less than ideal, but that picture – the Major caught ogling Erykah’s cleavage at the moment the press conference fell apart – was devastating. If it had been one or the other they could have weathered it. Without that picture, the tweet might well have faded out as quickly as it surfaced. Without that tweet, the picture would have been brushed off as unimportant. Both together, though. Sex plus dodgy money equals irresistible scandal. ‘I hope you’re not putting the same men on that job too,’ she said.

‘Obviously not,’ the Major fibbed. ‘This requires a far more subtle touch.’ And where subtlety was unavailable, Seminole Billy would have to do. ‘I have a computer expert hunting them down, we’ll have a name before the week is out.’ He was lying through his teeth. But she was so wrapped up in her own cocoon of half-truths he wagered she would never detect it.

‘I should hope so,’ the woman snapped. ‘You’re still on for Cameron Bridge at the weekend, but if this sinks any lower we’ll have to call it off.’

‘Remind me – that was the long march idea, was it?’

‘Highlands to Holyrood, we’re branding it,’ she said. ‘Over the hills and glens. Real march of the people sort of thing.’

‘Christ,’ he sighed. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be, you know . . .’

‘Whitney, calm yourself,’ she said. ‘No tents involved. You will be on the trails only for photo ops. I’ve had someone book luxury B&Bs. But there’s no sense doing it if you’re going to be accosted by Internet trolls the entire way.’

‘It would be a pity not to go,’ the Major said. ‘It would look bad to never even campaign in the country I am proposing to represent.’

‘We’ll cross that bridge as and when. This is the more pressing problem. If this situation gets any more out of control you’re as ruined as I am.’

‘What about asking that woman from the press conference to come to Cameron Bridge?’ he said. He hoped it sounded casual. ‘What was her name?’