A Sentimental Traitor (24 page)

He pushed his way inside. There was a stage at one end of the hall from where the Returning Officer would announce the result, dressed in a careful selection of flowers of so many colours that
no one might accuse the plants of showing political favouritism. The body of the hall had been cleared, long tables laid out, waiting for the ballot boxes to arrive and throw up their contents.
Overhead, in the balcony, three television crews were setting up, their lights blazing into life, then off again, waiting for the moment. This count had been marked as one to watch.

Harry sought out Zafira Bagshot, shook her hand, wished her luck, she nodded in acknowledgement, offered nothing in return, except a smile. She couldn’t stop smiling, dancing from foot to
foot, and she quickly turned away to be amongst her own supporters.

From the door, a ripple of excitement. The ballot boxes arriving from the polling stations, lifted onto the tables, emptied. The scrutineers huddled round. And it began.

It wasn’t the only count that night, of course. Results were already coming in from other constituencies that had raced for the obscure honour of being the first to declare. Some
constituencies had reduced the weight of the ballot papers to make them lighter and quicker to carry, had given strict instructions to voters how to fold them (only once, North to South), employed
schoolchildren to hurry the ballot boxes down the line. Sunderland won, again, but others weren’t far behind and Oscar, standing to one side of the hall, was consulting his iPad, checking how
things were going elsewhere. From across the room, Harry raised an eyebrow. Oscar stared, then went back to his screen.

As the ballot papers were counted and confirmed, they were wrapped in bundles of a hundred and stacked in lines on one table. As the minutes passed the lines for each candidate grew, but at
different paces, like trenches stretching across a battlefield. In previous elections they’d scarcely needed to do more than weigh Harry’s vote, the count itself little more than a
legal formality, but elections aren’t decided on tradition. Bagshot had already stretched into a lead.

‘Don’t worry, Harry,’ Oscar’s wife whispered, ‘these are her wards. Ours are coming in now.’ But the fire she had shown on the steps had dwindled.

The size of the Bagshot lead waxed and waned, but never completely disappeared. The final boxes from the five most distant polling stations arrived. This was when they would know. ‘Our
boys and girls,’ Oscar’s wife whispered in encouragement from behind Harry’s shoulder as the lids were hauled off and a tsunami of paper flooded across the tables.

He turned, wanting distraction, saw Oscar, was about to ask how the results were going elsewhere, but Oscar had switched off his screen. The hall was filling with the rustle of barely restrained
excitement as activists from all parties crowded around the last counting tables. The atmosphere was growing heated, uncomfortably sticky, when Harry realized he hadn’t thought of a thing to
say. Whatever the result there would be a need for words, yet at this moment his mind was an empty canvas, devoid of colour. He retreated from the hall, found the washroom, splashed water over his
face, trying to revive his brain, staring into the mirror, and it seemed like a stranger who was staring back at him. Perhaps it was the crappy lighting, but the face seemed a thousand years old,
full of creases and shadows.

When he returned to the hall he saw Zafira Bagshot almost lost in the middle of a huddle of her supporters, their heads down, conferring. Suddenly she was jumping up and down for joy.

Oscar rushed to his side. ‘I think it’s over,’ he said ambiguously. ‘The Returning Officer wants you.’ And, as one, the television lights on the balcony kicked into
life. Bagshot’s supporters broke into song. ‘Another One Bites the Dust!’ they chanted. In a corner, Oscar’s wife was weeping.

One of the most searing memories of Harry’s political life had come as a kid, in 1979, too young to know much about anything, but he remembered a face from election night – that of
Jeremy Thorpe, who had been leader of the Liberal Party. He was a huge figure of his day, and after a previous election he had been offered the post of Home Secretary, yet five years later, caught
up in lurid allegations of an attempt to murder his homosexual lover, he had been driven to the brink. He stood there on election day, and the voters pushed him off.

Harry had been watching television with his mother that night when Thorpe appeared from his count. Except it wasn’t Thorpe. The face was a mask, the eyes were dead, the lips barely able to
part, the voice a monotone of fear. As near a ghost as Harry had seen. The youthful Harry had understood very little about politics and nothing at all about buggery, but even at that age he had
known there was a better way to die. There had to be.

The Returning Officer was beckoning. Harry found a smile, pinned it on and strode forward.

Sleep was impossible. Too many thoughts, too much hurt. Harry rose from his bed long before the sun and began writing letters of thanks. It was like the times he had been
required to write to the wives and parents of men in his command who hadn’t made it back. Then telephone calls, with plenty of incoming. He avoided those from the media, had said all he was
going to say the previous night, after the count, when for a little while he had been besieged. But it had quickly passed. Yesterday’s news.

He didn’t turn on the radio or television. Usher had lost, the government had fallen, Harry’s wasn’t the only seat lost that night. He didn’t have the heart to count
casualties.

There would be compensation, of sorts. A pension, around £25,000 a year for his length of service. He wondered whether he would see any of it, or whether it would all go to his creditors.
One of his supporters was a local estate agent. He picked up the phone.

‘Kishor? Harry. No easy way to deal with this except to say thank you. You and Ruth have been brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for more, but there is one more favour, if you would.
Will you sell the cottage for me, discreetly, not too much of a fuss? Any reasonable offer. Furniture, too, if they want. Just send on my personal stuff. No, I won’t be standing again.
I’m not coming back . . .’

He had nearly completed his list, the names ticked off, when the phone rang. A blocked number. He thought it might be media and almost put it through to his voicemail, but answered it anyway.
‘Yes?’

A female voice. ‘I have Mr Usher for you.’ Not the Prime Minister any longer, just plain old Ben Usher.

‘Hello, Harry.’

‘You sound like I feel.’

‘I’m just waiting to go to the Palace,’ Usher said. ‘Twiddling my thumbs. Got a flat full of removal men upstairs and a room full of secretaries downstairs in tears.
Never did know how to handle tearful women, particularly by the dozen. It’s simply . . .’ A deep sigh of exhaustion rattled through his ribs. ‘I wanted to say I’m
sorry.’

‘There’s nothing you could have done to save me, Ben.’

‘No, perhaps not. But I could have taken your call. I feel wretched about that, a little cowardly, to be frank. I believe in you, Harry, you tell me you’re innocent and I’m one
hundred per cent behind you.’

‘A very long way behind me, it seemed.’

‘Yeah. You know what elections are like, people telling me I mustn’t get dragged into your difficulties. I don’t feel proud of that. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.
I’m trying to make amends. I’d be happy to appear as a character witness.’

‘A character witness?’

‘You know, in court.’ Bugger, he hadn’t expressed that very elegantly, but the night after rarely shows itself to be a time for subtlety. ‘Sorry, Harry, I’ll have
to dash. My tumbrel awaits.’

Harry knew a news helicopter would already be hovering, waiting to accompany Usher on the short drive from Downing Street to the Palace for his final conversation with the Queen. It would still
be there an hour later when Dave Murray did the journey in the other direction. The battle was over, the hour had come for the dead to be removed from the field. Except Harry would be a long time
dying. With a charge of sexual assault hanging over him, the media would take it in turns to come down from the hills to bayonet him on a regular basis, and there would be plenty who would help to
give the blade a twist. Politics. Taken from the Greek. ‘Poly’, meaning many. ‘Ticks’ denoting tiny blood-sucking insects . . .

Then it hit him, so hard that he gasped in pain. He had lost everything. He had lost. Everything. And so quickly that he still had no firm grasp on what had happened. He was physically
exhausted, financially ruined, publicly humiliated, emotionally disembowelled. He had been hurled into a pit of despair and there was still no sign of him hitting the bottom. He was falling,
tumbling, utterly helpless.

The screen on his phone came to life once more. A message. From Jemma. ‘So very sorry. J.’ He erased it.

He stood up from his chair, straightened. Do this like a man. He took one last look around, like a refugee, leaving everything behind. Then he walked out of the door. He didn’t look
back.

It took him two hours to reach London. He drove in silence, no radio, his phone switched off. He found a parking meter in Berkeley Square, dumped the car, didn’t pay the
fee, what was the point? They’d stick him with an eighty-pound ticket which would grow with every passing deadline, but by the time they sent heavies knocking on his door it would be too
late, he’d be a bankrupt. Probably wouldn’t even be his door any longer. So to hell with them. Every single one of them.

The old man with the kindly, downcast eyes who ran the gallery further along his street waved as Harry walked past. Harry ignored him. He stood on his doorstep, produced his keys, registering
only vaguely that he hadn’t double-locked the Chubb, slammed the door shut, dropped his bag, ignored the messages, stood in the middle of his sitting room, too drained and numb to register
what was around him. When at last he saw, he stared, and the room stared back, insistent. The final insult. He had been burgled. He stepped back in pain, and disgust, hit a wall, slumped to the
floor, and there he remained for many hours.

It was dark by the time Harry stirred once more. He now knew what he wanted to do, to walk away, close the door, as he had already done that morning, leave no trail. And he knew he could do it.
What was there to hang around for any longer? He felt sick, angry, ashamed, humiliated. He had faced many enemies, but never one as virulent as this. Everything that had happened to him these past
months – Emily, the money, even the assault on Jemma – had cut away at his sense of self-worth. Now he’d been turned away by those who were supposed to know him best, his
constituents. Harry Jones, unfit for duty. That had never happened before, he didn’t know how to deal with it. Silly, he knew, but he felt grubby and dishonoured. So move on, Jones, find some
other life, another place. But before he left he resolved that he was going to get blindingly, chokingly drunk, so comprehensively obliterated that he hoped it wouldn’t hurt any more.

It took him three days to finish off all the booze in the house. By the time the last empty bottle had toppled onto the floor, he was in desperate need of fresh air and a change of company, so
he staggered out in search of reinforcements. His recollections of the next few days were so obscure and filled with fog he half expected Sherlock Holmes to come sauntering out of it, and he had no
memory whatsoever of staggering back to his front door and being intercepted. The next moment of cognition was when he woke an untold number of hours later, on his bed, naked, with his face being
swabbed by a cold flannel. As his eyes regained focus, he saw someone staring down at him.

‘Have I died?’ he murmured. Then he stared. It was Jemma. Her face was drenched in fury. ‘And if I died, did I go up or down?’ He laughed feebly at his own joke before
finding that even that paltry effort made him feel profoundly sick. He staggered into the bathroom and vomited. Afterwards, as he washed his face, he stared into the mirror. A total stranger stared
back. It had worked. He was no longer Harry Jones. His new life had started.

‘You total bloody fool!’ Jemma snapped as he found his way back into the bedroom.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he snarled.

‘Apart from letting you in your own front door which you were too pissed to open yourself, you mean?’ She threw a bathrobe at him. ‘A friend of mine told me he’d bumped
into you. Quite literally. You were flat out on the grass near the Serpentine. Makes me wonder why you didn’t get yourself arrested. Again.’

‘Cuts.’

‘What?’

‘The cuts. Never enough policemen around when you need them.’ With a savage tug of anger Harry tightened the belt of his robe; it made him want to throw up once more. ‘So what
are you doing here, Jem? Come to gloat?’

She was about to retaliate with her own bucket of abuse when she bit her tongue. It would serve no purpose. She lowered her voice, and with it her temper. ‘I came, Harry, because people
were telling me they’d stumbled over my boyfriend in the park. Does wonders for a girl’s reputation.’