Authors: Jonathan Coe
And so Graham’s initial phone call had by no means been wasted, even though he never did manage to get in contact with Michael. He seemed to have gone away for a long holiday: or perhaps he just wasn’t answering the telephone any more.
∗
1981
The wedding of Mark Winshaw to Lady Frances Carfax in the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford, had been an altogether grander affair. Britain may have been in the grip of recession, but it seemed to have had little impact on those select members of the aristocracy and business community who attended the ceremony and afterwards convened at the country seat of the Carfax family for a lavish party which was still going strong (according to at least one of the newspaper reports) at four o’clock the next afternoon.
The party, in fact, lasted longer than the marriage.
Mark and Lady Frances had departed the revels early in the evening and joined a flight to Nice: from there, a taxi took them to Mark’s villa on the Riviera, where they were to begin their honeymoon. They arrived shortly after midnight, and slept in until lunchtime the next day, when Lady Frances borrowed one of Mark’s cars to drive into the nearest village and buy some cigarettes. She had only driven a few hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and the car burst into flames, careering off the road and into the stony mountainside. She was killed instantly.
Mark was devastated by the loss. The car was a 1962 Morgan Plus 8 Drop Head Coupé in midnight blue, one of about three or four left in the world, and it would be impossible to replace. He contacted his cousin Henry, who instructed the intelligence services to find out who was responsible, but didn’t have to wait for the results of their inquiry. Three weeks later an Iraqi diplomat contacted him and arranged a rendezvous in Cavendish Square. From there they drove to a secluded house in the Kent countryside. A pristine, off-white 1938 La Salle convertible sedan was parked in the forecourt.
‘It’s yours,’ said the diplomat.
He explained that a comical misunderstanding had arisen. They were well aware, of course, that Mark did business with the Iranians as well as with themselves: they would have expected nothing less from any serious entrepreneur. However, it had been wrongly suggested by an informer that Mark had also been using his position to trade military secrets. Saddam had been most upset to hear this, and had ordered swift retribution. Now the information was found to have been false: the real culprit had been identified and promptly disposed of. They could only be grateful, he said, that chance had intervened to save the life of an innocent man and a most valued friend of the Iraqi people. They were acutely conscious of the damage done to his property, and hoped that he would accept the gift of this car as a token of their continued affection and esteem.
Mark’s formal expressions of gratitude concealed his genuine annoyance at this incident. Marriage to Lady Frances would have been useful. He had been rather looking forward to the sexual aspect – although, to be honest, in terms of imagination and athleticism she could not really compare with the prostitutes whose services he was usually offered on his trips to Baghdad – but, more importantly, her father had a number of influential contacts in the South American market, which he was anxious to infiltrate. In all probability he would still be able to use them, but it would have been easier if his young and glamorous wife had been there to help.
Above all, Mark found it unacceptable that someone should have been telling lies about him, and he was determined to have his revenge. After several months’ sporadic investigation it emerged that the informer had been a leading Egyptian physicist recently recruited to Iraq’s nuclear programme. Anxious to ingratiate himself with his new employers, he had repeated this piece of idle gossip after overhearing it from a conversation between two colleagues; but he had not bothered to find out whether it was accurate or not. Although the Iraqis were furious to discover that they had been misled, the physicist himself was too valuable to be eliminated, and nothing was ever done about it. Mark, however, had other ideas. He knew that the Israelis would be only too pleased to be presented with an opportunity for thwarting Saddam’s military ambitions, and some discreet words in the ear of a contact at Mossad were enough to seal the luckless Egyptian’s fate. It happened when he was staying in Paris,
en route
from the experimental research centre at Saclay where Iraqi technicians were routinely trained under a nuclear cooperation programme with France. He retired to his hotel bedroom early and the next morning his crushed and battered body was found at the foot of his bed by a chambermaid. Beating a man to death is a long, noisy and difficult business, and Mark was surprised that they had chosen this method. Even so, he permitted himself a private smile when the news was announced on Israel radio the next evening; and when he heard the reporter add that ‘Iraqi projects to acquire an atomic bomb have been set back by two years’, he smiled again, because his own fortunes, after all, were hardly likely to suffer as a result.
∗
October 1986
‘So tell me about this Hussein character,’ said Henry, as he and Mark sat in a state of post-prandial near-collapse on opposite sides of a blazing log fire in the withdrawing room of the Heartland Club. The family small talk had been disposed of (never a lengthy process with the Winshaws) and they had just lit up two enormous Havana cigars.
‘What do you want to know?’ said Mark.
‘Well, I mean, you’ve met him personally, haven’t you? Done business with him, and so on. What sort of cove is he?’
Mark puffed thoughtfully. ‘Difficult to say, really. He doesn’t tend to give much away about himself.’
‘Yes, but look,’ said Henry, leaning forward. ‘We’re treading on very delicate ground here. The man’s offering to write a blank cheque for us, as far as I can see. Guns, planes, missiles, bombs, bullets – you name it, he wants it, and if we aren’t prepared to sell then he’s just going to go to the French or the Germans or the Yanks or the Chinese. We can’t afford to let this opportunity slip. The export figures are terrible enough as it is – even after we’ve finished tinkering with them. But, you know, there may be a few eyebrows raised if we start getting too friendly with a chap whose idea of fun is shooting a couple of thousand volts through the odd political prisoner. Which I gather he’s not averse to doing.’
‘Malicious rumour,’ said Mark, waving his cigar smoke away airily. ‘I’ve seen nothing to substantiate it.’
‘Take a look at this, for instance,’ said Henry, producing a crumpled pamphlet from the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘We were sent this thing from’ (he looked at the name on the first page) ‘SODI, they seem to call themselves. The Supporters of Democracy in Iraq. I tell you, it makes pretty nasty reading. What do you make of it?’
Mark glanced over the pamphlet, his eyelids half-closed. Most of the details were already familiar to him. He knew all about the arbitrary arrests, the midnight raids, the trumped-up charges of dissidence or subversion, of belonging to the wrong sort of organization or attending the wrong sort of meeting, of refusing to join the Ba’ath party or agreeing to join the wrong wing of the Ba’ath party. He knew all about the unimaginable conditions in Baghdad’s ‘Department of Public Security’, where detainees would be held in solitary confinement for months at a time, or made to lie on the floor of a cell with fifty or sixty other prisoners, listening to the recorded screams of torture victims by night and the real screams by day. And he knew all about this torture, too: how men and women were flayed, burned, beaten and sodomized with truncheons and bottles; scalded with domestic irons, their eyes, ears, noses and breasts cut off, electric shocks applied to their fingers, genitals and nostrils; how the torturers would wear animal masks and play tape recordings of wild animals as they went about their business; how children were tortured in front of their mothers, and placed blindfold in sacks filled with insects or starved cats; how men and women would be made to lie on their backs on the floor, their feet supported by wooden stocks, then beaten on the soles of their feet with truncheons and forced to walk or run over floors soaked with hot salty water. Mark had heard it all before, which was why he barely glanced at the pamphlet through half-closed lids before handing it back to his cousin.
‘Wildly exaggerated, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘These fringe groups do tend to attract fanatics: you can’t take anything they say at face value.’
‘So you don’t think Hussein is involved with any of this?’
‘Well, he’s firm, there’s no denying that,’ said Mark, pursing his lips. ‘Firm but fair: that’s how I’d describe him.’
‘A bit of a rough diamond, you mean?’
‘A rough diamond. Exactly.’
‘And what does he intend to do with all these weapons, anyway?’ said Henry. ‘Once he’s put Iran in its place, that is.’
Mark laughed in exasperation. ‘Henry, what does it
matter
what he intends to do with them? If it starts to look as though he’s in a position to do any harm, then we find an excuse to attack him and wipe out the whole arsenal. And then we start selling again.’
Henry considered the logic of this argument and could find no flaw in it.
‘If I may say so,’ Mark continued, ‘it’s not like you to give way to fashionable squeamishness on these matters.’
‘Oh, it isn’t me,’ said Henry. ‘It’s the Foreign Office we’re worried about, and that soppy little wet blanket Howe. He’s the one who’s coming over all coy about selling any of this stuff.’
‘So what’s going to happen?’
‘Well, on the basis of what you’ve told me,’ said Henry, settling deeper into his chair, ‘I’d say that the DTI had won the battle for the time being. I’m going to suggest they send someone over to Baghdad in the next couple of months and offer the Iraqis a nice fat credit agreement. How much have the Americans given them?’
‘Several billion, I think: but that’s only for grain and so on. Officially, anyway.’
‘Hm. Well I would have thought we could run to seven or eight hundred million quid. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds good. Should come in very handy.’
‘I
assume
,’ said Henry, leaning forward and looking Mark in the eye, ‘that Hussein can actually lay his hands on this money, at the end of the day. I mean, credit’s one thing but we want to know that he’s going to pay up eventually.’
Mark thought carefully before saying: ‘Iraq has good natural resources. Obviously the money is going to run out if he keeps on spending at this rate: but don’t forget that he has a very wealthy neighbour. A wealthy and vulnerable neighbour.’
‘Kuwait?’
Mark nodded.
‘You think he’d invade?’
‘Wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.’ He smiled as Henry digested this information. ‘But that’s a long way off,’ he said. ‘Which lucky boy gets the job of taking the good news to Baghdad?’
‘Clark, probably. D’you know him?’
‘Vaguely. Seems a decent sort of chap.’
‘Bit of a live wire, to be honest,’ said Henry. ‘We’re not quite sure what to make of him. But he’s definitely with us on this one.’ He crumpled the pamphlet slowly. ‘Well, into the fire with this, I suppose,’ he said, and leaned towards the hearth.
‘Or alternatively,’ said Mark, stopping him just in time, ‘you could pass it on to Hilary. Get her to do one of her famous hatchet jobs.’
Henry thought about this for a moment.
‘Good thinking,’ he said, and replaced it in his pocket.
∗
January 20th 1988
It was getting on for six in the evening, and everybody else had gone home, but Graham was still sitting in his grey, sparsely furnished office at Midland Ironmasters, waiting for the phone to ring. A recording device was attached to the receiver. Over the last couple of years he had recorded about fifty hours’ worth of telephone conversations, but he knew there were only a few minutes that would ever be usable, and he had not yet been able to face the task of editing it all down. It would have to be done soon. He was already aware of an alarming imbalance in the material he had assembled for his film: too much sound, too many still photographs, not nearly enough video. Perhaps it was about time he started taking a few serious risks.
He was waiting for a call from a senior colleague in the machine tools industry, who had been to a meeting in London that day and had promised to phone Graham with news of the outcome. The meeting was with a minister from the Department of Trade and Industry, and concerned the granting of export licences.
Manufacturers of machine tools who wished to export to Iraq were still facing trouble from the Foreign Office. Only recently Geoffrey Howe had suggested to the cabinet that further restrictions should be imposed, and this alone was enough to send Shockwaves through the membership of the Machine Tool Technologies Association, now a powerful voice in the British pro-Iraq lobby (one of whose most influential members, Matrix Churchill, had been bought by the Iraqis in order to secure a manufacturing foothold in Britain). Formal requests had been made to the DTI for clarification, and this meeting was the reward. It promised to offer a clear indication of the direction government policy was taking.
The call could have come at any time. Graham had been sitting by the telephone all day. By now he was ravenously hungry, and he had watched a crisp blue wintry sky turn to black.
The phone rang at ten past six.
Playing the tape back on his car stereo as he drove home later that evening, he would hear:
–
Graham. Sorry to keep you so long waiting.
– That’s OK, that’s OK.
– Some of us went out to lunch, and it went on a bit, I’m afraid.
– That’s OK, really. You had something to celebrate, then, did you?
– It was a good meeting. Very positive.
– What, did they –
– A green light. They gave us a green light.
– You mean they
–
–
The all-clear. No problem at all. We’re a credit to our country, as far as they’re concerned. Leading the export drive, and all that.