A Sentimental Traitor (25 page)

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Ex.’

‘But the stench still lingers.’

‘Dammit, Harry!’ And suddenly she was fighting back tears. ‘Let’s get some food into you.’ She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

When she reappeared a little later with a tray of coffee and toast, she found him sitting in the living room, staring at the chaos. Chairs pulled over, shelves pulled down, books scattered,
cushions thrown, pictures smashed, and everything covered in a million pieces of paper.

‘I was going to clean up,’ she whispered, ‘but I felt it would be intruding.’

‘Some bastard’s already done that,’ he muttered, no longer wanting to fight. He gazed around him, and the mists of despair closed in once again, allowing no escape. His house
had been violated. But it wasn’t simply his, this was Julia’s house, too. They’d chosen it together, decorated much of it themselves, often late into the night, sleeping in their
paint-spattered T-shirts, even though they’d been able to afford a dozen decorators, and Julia’s presence here had survived everything that the years had thrown at him since then, even
Mel. There had always been a part of this place that was Julia. Her father’s brass shell casing in the hallway for umbrellas, his own ridiculous cooking apron that she’d found at some
hunting store in the Adirondacks, the pair of hideous, funky champagne glasses that made him cringe and always made her laugh. And her desk. He bought it for her, that last Christmas, before
they’d gone off skiing. Now it was lying on its side, where they’d left it, the drawers spilled out, its contents scattered. He pulled it upright, replaced the drawers, knelt down,
sorting through the mess. He found her passport. The date said it had expired, it didn’t seem that way to him.

‘Julia’s?’ Jemma asked. They’d got far enough in their relationship for her to know.

He nodded.

Well, no point in a jealous twitch, it didn’t matter any more to her, did it? ‘I’ll help you clear up – if you want?’

He nodded again.

Jemma began scouting round the room. ‘What did the police say?’

He seemed startled. ‘Police? Never called them. Too many police around this place recently. Too late now, anyway.’

‘Looks like they got in through the back window,’ she said, pointing. ‘You must have left it open.’

‘Better see what’s missing.’

Slowly, methodically, they began sorting through the mess, Jemma righting the displaced furniture, making orderly piles of the displaced books, cleaning up the broken picture glass, while in the
manner of a robot Harry gathered all the pages of paper that had been strewn about and dumped them on the dining table. And as they began to re-impose a sense of order, it became clear to him that
little physical damage had been done. She was fixing the shade back onto a side lamp when she noticed he had sunk to the floor once more.

‘Harry, you OK?’

‘I didn’t leave the bloody window open.’

‘You might have done—’

‘No, Jem,’ he insisted. ‘And the front door wasn’t properly locked, not the way I always do it.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Buggered if I know for sure. That . . . maybe . . .’ He shook his head trying to clear the swarm of fireflies that had found their way inside. ‘They came in the front door,
left the window open as a distraction.’

‘Who has keys?’

‘No one. Not since you.’

‘So how does a burglar get through a locked front door?’

‘I don’t think it was a burglar,’ he insisted impatiently.

‘What?’

‘There’s nothing missing. Nothing I can find, at least.’

‘They got disturbed.’

‘No, I don’t think they came here to run off with the candlesticks. This was about something else.’ Like the thugs who had broken into her place, he thought, but he
didn’t say so, there was no point in making her go through that again. Now someone was trying to get at him, too, and he didn’t very much care any more about who or why.

He felt like a wounded animal that wanted nothing more than to crawl back into his cave and shut the rest of the world out. Yet he couldn’t. Over the next few days there were too many
things dragging him back out into the open. The need to clear out his office, say goodbye to his secretary, accept the commiserations of colleagues before they hurried on their way, leaving him
staring at their backs. Because a man in public life is raised higher, so his ultimate fall is deeper and more difficult to control. Harry knew politicians who had suffered nervous breakdowns, seen
their marriages collapse, become ill. One close friend had committed suicide. Being a Member of Parliament wasn’t merely a job, it was a passion for a certain way of life, and once that life
support system had been switched off, things had a habit of breaking apart into razor-sharp shards, reminders of things that once were, and every attempt to pick them up only made you bleed all the
more. The hundreds of letters Harry received and tried to read did nothing to help, only ground in the sense of failure still further.

He wanted to lean on Jemma, and more, but she made it clear that her help was available only on the basis of friendship.

‘Don’t you believe me when I tell you I didn’t assault that bloody woman?’ Harry asked, petulant, a little aggressive.

‘Yes, but . . . Harry, she was with you late at night, you were drinking. Kissing.’

‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘Nor mine, either. Anyway, I’m seeing someone else.’

‘Seeing?’ He made the word sound as if it was an activity that ought to end in a charge at the European Court of Human Rights.

‘Not serious, not the love of my life, Harry, but . . .’

‘But?’

‘But grow up about it.’

He was hurt, didn’t want to play the man. So Harry spent his evenings alone, climbing the walls of his home – a home that his accountant told him he was in all probability going to
lose. He was there one evening when his phone rang. It was the steward who ran the bar at the Special Forces Club. ‘Mr Jones, you asked me to let you know if . . .’

He never got to finish the sentence. Harry was already running. It was little more than a mile. Harry flew, blind to the traffic or the shouts of startled pedestrians, his heart pounding, lungs
screaming, and he made it in less than ten minutes. He was still running when he hit the stairs and raised eyebrows when he burst into the bar. The man was still there, sitting at the bar, back to
the door, but his figure was unmistakable.

‘Hello, Sloppy,’ Harry declared, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘I think you owe me a drink.’

Sloppy had scrubbed up remarkably well, considering his circumstances. Immaculate St James’s shoes, creases in all the correct places; the old customs of a regiment
refuse to die. It was the eyes that told the story, with their glaze of defiance and rims raw from being washed in drink. He was too far gone even now to show much surprise as Harry sat down next
to him at the bar, offering little more than a flash of confusion. Yet behind the glower, in layers that peeled away, Harry could see pain, humiliation, and fear. It reminded Harry of a face
he’d got to know recently, staring back at him from his mirror. He’d wondered how he would react when he finally got to Sloppy – smash a bottle over his head, break an elbow or an
arm? Find some way of releasing his anger through gratuitous and excessive violence. Yet now he came to it, he didn’t see the point. Or, perhaps more accurately, that wasn’t the major
point.

‘Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it, Sloppy?’

‘What?’

‘Christmas.’

‘Yeah, we’ve both had some bloody awful luck since then.’

The steward intervened: ‘Is that to be your usual, then, Mr Jones? On Mr Sopwith-Dane’s bill?’

‘Of course my bill,’ Sloppy interjected. ‘Let’s make it a bottle – Krug, not the cheap muck.’

The steward offered a cautious eye before disappearing in search of his prey.

‘Krug, Sloppy? Are we celebrating?’ Harry asked.

‘Doesn’t make any bloody difference,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t pay for a pint of piss. Might as well go down in a blaze of glory.’

‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ Harry replied coldly. ‘What the hell happened, Sloppy?’

Mean, red eyes shot at Harry. ‘What happened? We went belly up, that’s what happened.’

‘Talk me through it. For old times’ sake.’

Sloppy chewed his lips, his expression full of contempt. ‘You remember Belize? Jungle training? Hot as hell and ants all up your arse? There’s a liana that grows there, one of those
huge bloody tropical vines, thick as a man’s waist. Wrapped itself around a tree and just grew and grew like Topsy. Covered the tree, smothered it. Until it got just so greedy that it sucked
the life out of the tree and the whole thing collapsed. Dead tree. Dead vine. That’s what you lot are like.’

‘You lot?’

‘You were all over me in the good times, when the money was easy for you, but at the first bit of bad luck . . .’ He swallowed the rest of the drink as the steward came back with the
Krug in a bucket of ice and poured two glasses.

‘It isn’t bad luck conning me into signing false documents.’

Sloppy’s lip curled into a snarl. ‘At least you’ve still got your fucking leg.’ He turned back to his glass.

‘I want to know what happened, for God’s sake. I have a right. I’m told it all went into an investment fund. Shengtzu. Why?’

‘You think you’re the only one who got hammered? Lost everything they’d ever worked for? I didn’t inherit, I earned. And I lost everything!’

Yet Harry refused to get dragged into recrimination. Instead he gathered himself, fought back against his desire to throttle the bastard, knew he would have to tease rather than tear what he
wanted out of him.

‘Shengtzu, Sloppy. Why Shengtzu?’

And, between flashes of defiance and fresh drink, Sloppy’s story emerged. Of Mr Anderson and his moist palms, his cufflinks and camp lips, and a ream of confidential papers about a fund
that even to this day Sloppy believed were genuine. The truth, but only half the truth. And the wrong half, at that.

‘So this stranger walks in and spins you some line, and you bet the entire factory on it?’ Harry said, incredulous, knowing there must be more.

‘It wasn’t as simple as that, of course it wasn’t!’ Sloppy bit back, raising his voice, pouring himself another glass. The steward raised an eyebrow, but Harry’s
eyes warned him to back off.

‘How “not simple” was it?’

‘Money, money, money, it’s all you bastards care about.’

‘That was your job. All of it.’

‘He had a quarter of a million in his pocket. Money where his mouth was. And you’d have taken it, too.’

‘He just gave it to you? Handed it across?’

‘Just like that. In a beautiful white envelope.’

‘Which you invested for him.’

‘In Shengtzu.’

‘And which he subsequently lost.’

‘Every single brightly polished farthing.’

‘That’s one hell of a lot of farthings.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll pay him back. Pay you all back. In farthings.’

Sloppy made some noise, a snort or a snigger, and drowned it in his glass, leaving Harry lost in confusion.

‘So has this Mr Anderson been on your tail, too, chasing you for his money back?’

‘No point. Don’t have any money. Diddly-squat broke, like you. I went down with my ship.’ He drank. ‘But Mr Anderson couldn’t complain. He doesn’t exist. Oh,
I checked him out, of course I did. Seemed entirely genuine. Until the ship went down. Then he sort of vanished. I did some digging, not sure whether I should be apologizing or strangling the
bastard, but it turns out he was never there. All the contact details he gave me were false or entirely temporary. Service addresses and pay-as-you-go phones, and all the rest buried somewhere so
deep in the Caymans it’d take an earthquake to get at it.’ Suddenly his shoulders slumped, his face melting in misery. ‘Should have dug a little deeper, maybe, but we needed a bit
of luck, Harry, you and me. Thought Mr Anderson was it.’ He was growing maudlin, the alcohol taking him prisoner. Nothing he said made much sense any more. The portrait of the Princess Royal
gazed down in disapproval.

Harry knew it was time to call his accountant, his bank, the police. Get the wretched man run in. Salvage something. But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t save himself by sacrificing Sloppy,
that wasn’t the way they had ever worked. It had been Sloppy who bailed him out with his CO when Harry failed to follow the orders he’d been given – Harry had found a better way
of doing it, and done that instead. It was also Sloppy who’d got him out of the mess in Armagh, when Harry had been out on surveillance of a farmhouse stuffed with very bad men and been
rumbled. In the ensuing firefight, Harry had been almost out of time and ammunition before Sloppy and his troop turned up to drag him out. That’s when he’d taken the bullet in the knee,
one that would otherwise have finished up in Harry. He owed Sloppy. The sort of debts that don’t expire.

Now he shook his old colleague’s arm, trying to rouse him from his stupor. ‘Sloppy, I need to know. Where are you staying? Where can I find you?’

‘Sending round the heavies?’

‘No, that’s not going to happen. You know that. Too much previous. But I need to know how to get hold of you.’

‘Me?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m the Scarlet Pimpernel.’

‘Where, Sloppy?’

Sloppy got out his wallet, inspected the cash in it. Less than a hundred pounds. ‘While this lasts, at the Cheshire Cheese. After that, who the hell knows? Or cares?’ He picked up
the bottle, but it was empty. He let it fall back into the ice bucket and soak the counter. Harry pushed his own glass over to him; it hadn’t been touched. Then, with a nod of gratitude to
the steward, he got up and left.