A Sentimental Traitor (23 page)

‘Great. What’s the good news, Theo?’

‘Good news? I’m such a rotten lawyer you’d be wasting your money on me anyway. If you had any.’

‘The tragic thing is, that really is the best news I’ve had all day.’

‘So let me buy you a sandwich and we’ll celebrate.’

At every election the churches and other houses of faith in Harry’s constituency gathered together and invited the candidates to a public debate that they entitled
‘In Faith and Hope’. It was to be held this evening.

Harry was driving his new-old Volvo up from London for the event; he hadn’t been spending enough time in the constituency since his arrest, but Oscar tried to reassure him, insisting that
it didn’t make much difference that he hadn’t been there. Harry was not reassured.

As he turned north off the slow-moving M25 onto the road that would eventually take him to the chapel of Haileybury School, he was struggling to think of what he should say, and how he would
phrase it. This might yet prove to be the most important part of the campaign; if he found the right tone, everything might be resolved, and if not . . . The strains of a Billy Joel song came over
the radio, something about being an innocent man, taunting him. He switched to a classical station. Yet no matter what he tried, his thoughts kept coming back to Emily.

So what was the woman’s game? He’d suggested to Arkwright that she was one of life’s rejects, but he didn’t believe that himself. Emily Keane was in all other respects
focused, competent, entirely professional, enjoyed a drink, had plenty of previous, so far as men were concerned. She even had a sense of humour. Not a woman who spent her life swimming in a sea of
fantasy.

He decided to take the scenic route, through the woods of Wormley West End, taking his time, trying to find inspiration in the signs of the new spring that flaunted themselves on all sides,
letting his mind wander. It was as he was driving up the hill in the direction of the golf course that he realized Emily had made a mistake, one that was perhaps profound. As professional as she
was, she hadn’t been professional enough, had relied too much on coincidence, pushed it too far. That a photographer was present on the occasion of one of her visits was just about
acceptable, but to have a photographer at both was about as likely as the BBC finding God or the Greeks regaining their marbles. Such things just didn’t happen. He pulled over. This was no
hysterical woman flying at him, she was a professional. Being paid. Someone – someone else – was setting him up.

He wasn’t yet sure what it meant, but it was a start. He pounded the wheel in excitement. The fight-back had started. He turned the key, restarted the car, it spluttered a couple of yards,
then died. He tried it again, and again, but the engine spun and spluttered most eloquently; it was going nowhere. He looked at the dash, the gauge said he still had sixty miles left in the tank,
but something was telling him it lied. He glanced at the clock, it was getting late. His euphoria began leaking like air from an inflatable doll.

He climbed from the car, gave the door a bloody good kicking, then with relief saw a car pulling up the hill towards him. He stepped into the middle of the road, waving, and it slowed. A
middle-aged woman rolled down her window.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Harry said as she stared, ‘but I’ve broken down. And I’ve got this hugely important meeting in twenty minutes at Haileybury. Is there any
chance you might be kind enough to give me a lift?’

‘To you? To Harry Jones? You’ve got to be bloody kidding,’ she said, slamming the car into gear and leaving him showered in road grit and gravel.

Harry never made it that night. They left an empty chair in his place. Zafira Bagshot made an impromptu sign to hang on it. Rough, handwritten, but entirely legible. ‘Absentee
Landlord’, it said. No one had the wit to instruct her to remove it. And there was scarcely a moment throughout the entire evening when she wasn’t seen smiling.

Five-thirty in the morning. Polling day.

Harry’s eyes were already open, even before the alarm began to vibrate. A disturbed night, vivid, unhelpful dreams, and when he’d got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of
water he’d forgotten he was in his cottage in the constituency and had smashed the bedside lamp. He’d left it where it fell. Now a vicar on the local radio was in the process of
delivering an uplifting homily, a verse taken from St Matthew about the many being called but few being chosen. Harry seemed to recall a snatch of the previous verse, about some poor sod being
bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness. About as uplifting as a stair hoist. He reached out and cut the vicar off. If these last few months had been a reflection of his boss’s
mercy, he’d run the risk of Him not being on side today.

Harry rolled out of bed, showered, found himself in the kitchen. He was in a hurry, didn’t leave long enough for his tea to brew; it was weak, tasteless, he poured it down the sink. It was
always like this, before the start of battle, the nerves, and the crap tea. Kill or be killed. Welcome to election day.

But the world didn’t stop spinning simply because politicians had decided to wage war between themselves. Even as he pinned his rosette to his lapel, his phone rattled. A new e-mail. From
his accountant. Who told Harry he had taken advice from two different legal sources, which inevitably made the message more grammatically mind numbing than usual. But it was easy enough to
translate. Since Harry didn’t deny he had signed the documents Sloppy had used to raid his accounts, the claim that they were signed in confusion or under duress was irrelevant so far as the
bank was concerned. They had paid out his money in good faith. The fact that he had no money left wasn’t their fault. And, for the same reason, since he had signed the partnership agreement,
Sloppy’s creditors were entitled to pursue him for all Sloppy’s debts. Which, because of Shengtzu, were huge. Absolutely astronomic. So bloody high they hadn’t even finished
counting. Financially, Harry was space debris, burning up on reentry.

The accountant suggested Harry had three alternative courses of action. He could make a claim against Sloppy himself. This was the simplest thing to do, but there was one big drawback. Sloppy
had gone AWOL, wasn’t answering letters, no one knew where the bastard was hiding. Or Harry could make a formal complaint to the police and ask for it to be treated as a criminal matter. In
those circumstances, perhaps, there might be some hope of wriggling out from beneath the creditors, although that would inevitably take time. ‘Yet you have directed me,’ the accountant
wrote cautiously and a touch pompously, ‘that this is not an option you care to pursue.’ So in the circumstances, his accountant concluded, his third and most obvious option was
‘to retain an insolvency practitioner who might seek to come to an Individual Voluntary Arrangement with your creditors’. Pay them pence in the pound. It might just work, if all the
creditors agreed to cooperate. Worth a go.

‘Otherwise, I fear we must consider the probability that one or more creditors will move against you and initiate proceedings to declare you bankrupt.’

A bankrupt.

A sensation he recognized as fear sent a shiver down his back. It was the first time Harry had allowed himself to think about it, to bring together the word with his name. Then he burst into
laughter. Bankruptcy. It was one of the few reasons that could get a sitting MP thrown out – that, and mental disorder or a serious criminal conviction. His eyes were watering, his foot
stamping. Lunatics, criminals – and Harry Jones! At this rate the election was going to be a complete waste of time.

Then the gallows humour was gone. He sat on a stool in his kitchen, staring into nothing, into the future. He was profoundly lost in what he found there until a persistent knocking on the door
brought him back. It was Oscar’s wife. She had come to drive him round the constituency. The future wasn’t going to wait.

Sloppy didn’t turn out to vote. He could scarcely walk. It’s difficult to rise above much more than a stumble on a diet of painkillers and alcohol. He was now also
downing antidepressants, on prescription, signed for by his doctor as an antidote to what the overqualified idiot had diagnosed as stress. Sloppy was sure it was these wretched new pills that had
given him the sense that an ice pick was being driven up through his sinuses and into his frontal lobe, and it was this, of course, that had caused him to stumble and fall headlong against what was
laughingly called his kitchen. The kitchen in this one-room short-term let was no larger than a park bench, and it was Sloppy’s typical luck that he had fallen against something hard and
spiteful instead of onto the bed. He thought he might have cracked a rib. So more painkillers. And more alcohol, even though the doctor had warned him not to drink with the anti-depressants, but
then the doctor was, of course, an overqualified bloody idiot.

The single room was in one of the narrow alleyways that ran off Fleet Street, the
pied-à-terre
of a photographer who was spending six months on assignment, and it was here that
Sloppy spent election day, spreadeagled on the bed, not struggling up until he had finished the bottle of vodka and was forced to head out in search of another.

So Sloppy didn’t vote. And neither did Patricia Vaine, or several thousand voters who had previously turned out for Harry.

Oscar’s wife spent the morning driving Harry round the polling stations, while Oscar himself took the afternoon shift. Harry thanked the staff, encouraged the waiting
voters, smiled, lied with his eyes. In mid-afternoon he sat down in his constituency offices with six others, while they called up those who had been canvassed and identified themselves as
supporters, encouraging them, making sure they came out to vote.

‘Hello, Mrs Gordon?’ Harry said, reading from a canvassing card. ‘This is Harry Jones. I’m just calling about the election and wanting to thank you for—’ For
what, Mrs Gordon never found out. She had put the phone down. She wasn’t the only one.

It was the women he was losing, most of all. As his old agent, Ted, had told him when Harry had first stood, that where women lead, the men will always end up following. It was as much a
political as it was anatomical certainty. Ted had been a good man, and a wise one, and had died in harness. Harry missed him, but was glad he hadn’t been around to witness this.

Then the time had come. Ten p.m. The polling stations closed their doors. It was done. Harry, Oscar and his wife made their way to the town hall where the votes were to be counted. They were met
by a group of supporters, not as many as at previous elections, but tribal loyalties continue even when life itself is extinct.

‘You going to win, Mr Jones?’ a young reporter from the local press asked as he made his way up the steps.

‘Of course we’re going to win!’ Oscar’s wife answered for him, and fiercely, carried along by the long day of adrenalin and builder’s tea.

‘But people are saying it could be tight, Mr Jones,’ the reporter persisted.

‘Young man, when you have a little more experience you will realize that this is
our
constituency,’ Oscar’s wife responded. ‘Always has been. We’ve never
lost here!’