Читать книгу Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 11

A dirty wind gusted. There were just three days to go before the referendum that would settle Britain’s destiny. The Golden Cockerel swung proudly from the balcony on the top floor of one of the City of London’s most repellent buildings. Even among the swollen glass spikes, cheese graters and vegetables crowding the capital’s horizon in 2017, this pastrami-and-lemon-coloured confection from the boom of the 1980s stood out – vile colours, ill-judged proportions, cheap materials. Architecture is one of the most certain measures of cultural and social decline. Inside the abomination, the Cockerel restaurant offered a cold-eyed English catering executive’s idea of French peasant cooking. In recent years the ‘Cock’ had gained a certain notoriety, because its outside smoking terrace had become popular with City suicides.

A South Asian accountant, bullied at work, had thrown herself to her death after dinner. A City trader whose losses were about to be exposed had leapt the eight floors after a couple of Cock of the Walk martinis. The almost famous and thoroughly cuckolded president of the Society of Costermongers had made a witty speech to a gathering of his best friends, then vaulted over the guardrail into the traffic below, bouncing off the top of a passing bus before experiencing his last convulsions under the wheels of a kitchen-delivery lorry.

This Monday morning there lay, foetally curled in the grey half-light on the pavement below the Cockerel, the young constable’s first corpse. She took in a dark-blue jacket of a Portuguese cut, a pair of German designer jeans pulled down around his ankles, scuffed but new-looking English brogues, arranged at unlikely angles; and finally a mop of dark, curling hair nestling in a half-dried archipelago of blood. This was a youngish, once-handsome man. There’d be a worried girl somewhere this morning. Or maybe a boy. As the wailing police cars screeched to a halt and disgorged more officers, who pushed aside the ghouls and surrounded the body with tape, and then a plastic tent, the constable stared up at the jutting metal balcony and the gaudy metal bird, squeaking nastily in the wind.

Odd, she thought.

Inside the tent, green-uniformed ambulancemen were bending over the body. But you only needed to glance at the twisted figure to know that there was nothing to be done. In the dark, the body could have been a rough sleeper, ignored for hours.

She walked over and rattled the door of the Golden Cockerel, which led to the lobby, which led to the lift. It was locked. Everything was locked. Too early. Even the cleaners wouldn’t be in for an hour. So how had this happened? It was one thing for a drunken, despairing person to jump late at night, or even in the middle of a meal; but who would find their way into the Cockerel early on a Monday morning, and then jump? There were easier places – the bridges over the Thames, for one thing – all around.

It didn’t make sense.

Three hours later, as the body was swaying slightly, tightly tied down on a gurney in a fast-moving van, a mobile phone began ringing in the dead man’s pocket.