Whispers of Betrayal (24 page)

‘So what makes it right, or wrong?’

‘What makes a deed good or bad, I suppose, depends not so much on the deed itself, but on your motivation for doing it.’

‘Even sleeping with the devil?’

‘What, Bendall? If I climb into bed with him, it’s only because there’s no other way. Doesn’t make me a slut.’

She remains very silent, seems troubled. He wonders if he’s disappointed her, let himself down. She can be so difficult to read.

‘Not wrong am I? Gone too far?’

She buries her head in her pillow. ‘No, my love. I don’t think you have. Not if you don’t.’

She doesn’t want him to see the tears that have gathered at the corners of her eyes. He thinks this conversation is all about him. Poor, blind fool. It’s not about him, it’s about her. And about wine and the restaurant and ghosts from her past, and not relying ever again on any one man, even a man like Goodfellowe. And not entirely trusting herself, which is why she can’t bring herself to place her trust in him, even though she loves him, which makes it all so much more complicated. Bloody men.

He lies on top of her, content, oblivious. He doesn’t realize his world is on the brink of falling to pieces.

London lay prostrate and in confusion. Like a man kicked in the groin or a woman who has lost her handbag, for a while the world no longer made sense. An entire city had been left gasping, disorientated, yet the causes of despair for some are viewed by others as opportunities, and Earwick was nothing if not an opportunist. The failure of the phones had played havoc with his diary for the day, causing all sorts of duties to be rearranged or cancelled. It soon became clear that a hole had appeared in his diary some time after three in the afternoon. Gaps in the schedule of a Secretary of State are as rare and as richly prized as pearls, and he resisted all the entreaties of his private secretary to spend the rest of the afternoon going through his backlog of correspondence and preparing for his five-o’clock meeting with his security advisers. Earwick looked out of his window in Queen Anne’s Gate and found not fog but brilliant sunshine. He braced his shoulders and issued a decree that he would spend an hour at home, studying papers without disruption. And without his private secretary.

A red box was hurriedly stuffed with appropriate briefing material and Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs quit his office promptly at three. But not before he had sat down at his desk and sent a personal e-mail.

Brett Eatwell, the new-ish and straight-ish editor of the
Sun
, didn’t envy the lot of politicians. Why should he? He pulled a salary three times that of the Prime Minister, plus bonuses and an unlimited expense account, he could call his staff bitches and bastards without being threatened with a law suit, and his private life was never, but never, going to be the stuff of gossip in any newspaper column. He occupied that position of respect which ensured that when he changed his mind and stood his views on their head, it wasn’t called a U-turn or a retreat but simply a matter of editorial independence.

At this precise moment he was engaged in a particularly delicate exercise of editorial independence. Eatwell sat in his office in Wapping, sleeves rolled up and pondering the future of the Government. Up to this point he had been a reasonably consistent
supporter. Bendall was a greaseball, of course, but a little grease was always necessary to oil the wheels of the presses. Better a Prime Minister up your bum than on your back. Indeed, so assiduous had the Prime Minister been that on the news desk they usually referred to him as Bendover. When he had called Eatwell to congratulate him on his birthday, the editor had played the phone call over the newsroom intercom, accompanied by extravagant and exceedingly childish hand gestures that he had first practised at public school.

But Jonathan Bendall was beginning to be a pain. He had brought London grinding to a halt, which on the day in question had made Eatwell’s proprietor late for his lunch. Now he had cut off all the bloody telephones. Politicians needed to be lucky, and Bendall’s luck was beginning to look as though it had spent the night on a park bench. Perhaps it was time to drop him. Eatwell was contemplating a choice of headlines which varied from
‘Kicked In The Bendalls!’
to
‘Telef***ed!’
when he became aware of the cartoon platinum blonde on his screen. She was an icon developed by his software department to guide him through the electronic maze of his computer system, and at this point she was opening and closing her legs. This told him that he had received an e-mail message.

Eatwell was not normally an excitable man. It was not his custom to become agitated, rather it was his pleasure to agitate others, and particularly his reporters, until they had squeezed the last traces of life from a story. But this little one was going to see him through to his dotage.

The first anyone else knew of this was when they heard a scream coming from his office that made his secretary think he’d been setting light to his farts again – another habit from public school. She rushed in, concerned, only to be told she was a knickerless little scrubber. She was unable to obtain any further sense from him and so she summoned the news editor.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Mickey was always stylish. Today’s style appeared to be a dress that was one size too small and heels that were more like traffic hazards than shoes. Goodfellowe, by contrast, had arrived sporting
a charcoal grey suit he had bought with a little of the proceeds from the bequest of his constituent. His first new suit in a couple of years. He paused at the entrance to his office to allow her to admire it.

‘Got a funeral?’ she enquired, without raising her eyes from her work.

Suddenly Goodfellowe realized how little he had seen of his secretary in recent days, and how much he missed her. She brought a sense of irreverence to everything, never allowing him to take matters – particularly himself – too seriously. It was the type of loyalty he needed right now. Goodfellowe had spent a sleepless night wrestling with self-doubt. His life had changed so much in recent weeks – haggling with Prime Ministers and Chief Whips, scooped up in the struggle to save the nation. If power corrupts, proximity to power distracts, and much of the fun seemed to have been squeezed out of his life.

Most distracting of all was the dilemma he faced about Elizabeth and Sam. Was it to be Paris? Or Florence? It was a silly and spurious debate, he knew, for a Ministerial salary would sort everything out for him, but somehow he felt he was losing control, becoming beholden once more. He didn’t want Jonathan Bendall to sort out his life for him, he wanted to be able to do that for himself. Yet the two women he loved most in the world were pulling him in opposite directions. He owed Sam everything, but surely there should be room in his life for ambition. And for Elizabeth. Somehow the two women he loved seemed to be drifting into different camps and he didn’t want to decide, couldn’t decide. Paris or Florence.

Obstacles, nothing but bloody obstacles. As he walked towards his desk, a metal wastepaper bin blocked his path, as there always seemed to be something in his path. It was time to change that. Or change the bin, at least. He gave a small hop, drew his leg back and let fly. The bin hurtled the full length of his office and hit the wall with a satisfying clatter.

‘What did you do that for?’

‘Needed the practice. Haven’t kicked anything in ages. Or anyone, come to that.’

‘Like that, is it? Sounds like woman trouble. Or money.’

‘Both.’

‘Sam? Or Elizabeth?’

‘Both.’

Mickey studied Goodfellowe as though measuring him for a straitjacket, then rose from her desk and walked over to the battered bin. She rescued it, examined it for signs of fatal bruising, then walked back across the office in order to place it upright in front of him.

‘Go ahead, be my guest.’

This time he sent it flying into the door.

‘Why does everything come down to money?’ he demanded, feeling better for his exertions.

‘Sex or money. Everything comes down to sex or money,’ she corrected, before returning to her work, sucking the end of a pencil with which she had been drafting a reply in the margin of a letter. It was from a constituent, Mrs Godsell. Mrs Godsell was complaining about the warble fly. She often wrote to complain, and would write again if she hadn’t got a reply within a week. There was always something that concerned her – one week the disappearing habitat of the long-eared bat, the next the destruction of the ozone layer from the methane of French cattle which, according to her, was particularly pernicious. Opinionated and impatient, was our Mrs Godsell. Yet at every election she was the first in line to volunteer to stick stamps and lick envelopes in one of the Marshwood committee rooms, so Mickey always took care to ensure she got a rapid and personalized response. Some day she might even let Goodfellowe see one.

She looked up, distracted. ‘It’s the reason Justin and I split up,’ she mused.

‘What, sex?’

‘No, idiot. That was great. You think I’d get myself engaged to a choirboy? It was the money.’

‘I thought he had plenty of it.’ Goodfellowe stepped forward tentatively, knowing he was on marshy emotional ground. It was the first time in more than a year that Mickey had disinterred the remains of her former fiancé. ‘Didn’t he do something in the City?’

‘A market maker. With a tan, a jacuzzi and a tight butt. And a mother who lived north of Manchester. Or was it Middlesbrough? Anyway, it was enough she hated travelling. Yes, plenty of money,
too. And very sensible about it, he was. That was the problem. I remember he wanted to buy me a very sensible and tasteful engagement ring, while I … you see, I wanted something really huge and vulgar. Hell, if I’m going to wear it, I want people to know about it. Until my arm aches.’

‘You’re kidding. Aren’t you?’

She smiled sweetly.

‘Maybe you should consider counselling,’ he ventured.

‘On the grounds that I’m grasping? Or on the grounds that even though I’m grasping I’ve still somehow ended up working for you?’

Goodfellowe pressed on. ‘So why
did
you break up with him?’

‘Oh, hell …’ As the memories revived, her careful marginal notes grew into absentminded doodles. Mrs Godsell became covered in extravagant bundles of flowers. ‘Because I wasn’t ready for him. He was a really nice boy, thought I was perfect. But you know me, I still felt in need of a second opinion. Several of them, in fact. The wedding ceremony would have turned into a fiasco. I wouldn’t have got the odd one or two standing up to object, I’d have got a full-scale Mexican wave. It wasn’t going to work, would have hurt him even more if I’d stayed.’

‘No regrets, then?’

‘None at the time, I was too young. But now …?’ Suddenly the point of the pencil snapped, sending a fragment of lead spitting across the desk like a missile headed for Serbia. ‘I suppose I’ve changed. Dunno if it’s maturity, but it’s certainly older. Nowadays when I go into a hotel on the arm of a forty-year-old man, the receptionists don’t snigger anymore. That hurts.’

His face creased. She had this extraordinary ability to raise him from the deepest of despairs.

‘It’s serious, Goodfellowe. I may have to dip into my face-lift fund sooner than I expected.’

‘A stitch in time …’

‘Saves a lot of tears. And a lot of money.’

She returned her attention to Mrs Godsell while he retrieved the battered remains of the waste bin and placed it distractedly on top of his desk like a hunting trophy. ‘I wonder if you’re right.’

‘About what?’

‘About Captain Beaky being in it for the money?’

‘I said that?’

‘It’s a thought, at least. Possibly an inspired one. You really can be quite brilliant at times.’

She was beginning to lose track of this one. ‘What thought?’ she asked, enunciating both words carefully as though addressing a foreigner.

‘That Beaky or whatever he’s called might be in it for the money.’

‘What money?’

‘Good question. The water companies lost a small fortune as a result of the attack on Bendall’s bathroom. Someone loses, someone gains. The money didn’t simply get flushed away. I’ve got this funny feeling that telephone shares are being murdered, too, right this minute.’

‘Beaky’s in it just for the money?’

‘You really think so? You could be right. In which case, maybe we should do some digging. You know, you were right not to get married. You’re far too good for Justin. There are brains buried somewhere inside that delectable body of yours.’

‘You’re patronizing me, which is always a sign you’re up to something. Where’s all this leading?’

‘It’s simply that I think you’re right. That it’s worth trying to find out if anyone
has
made a killing on the shares.’

‘Isn’t that sort of share-dealing information confidential? You’d need someone in the City for that.’

‘Yes, I suppose we would.’ A slight pause, like a missed heartbeat. ‘What did you say Justin does?’

She sat bolt upright. ‘Goodfellowe, you devious bastard. You can go jump in the Thames along with your bloody shares. I am
not
going to meet up with Justin. Hear me?
Not
. Nor am I going to telephone him, smile at him, beg him for favours, use him, fondle him for old time’s sake or … or anything else. Absolutely not. Understand? Get that into your scheming head.
No Way
.’