Читать книгу Head of State: The Bestselling Brexit Thriller - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 22

The cool of the Monday morning had lifted. A cloudless sky, and eye-scorching brightness, reflected from top-floor windows across the capital. A body had been deposited in the mortuary reserved for suspicious deaths. The pavement had already been cleaned, the police tape removed, and commuters were now passing heedlessly over the spot at which a young journalist had died. A mile or so to the west, almost equally invisible, a perfectly groomed little man was gliding purposefully along Piccadilly, his tiny feet barely touching the pavement.

It was once said of Josef Stalin, no less, that during his rise to power he was like a grey blur, always in the background, never quite in focus. Alois Haydn had the same talent. Somehow, one never looked at him closely. No matter how hard you tried, you could never remember his face, even after a difficult meeting. If he ever threw a shadow, it was a thin, vaporous one. This morning he was on his way to an important meeting with the executive members of a somewhat mysterious company, Professional Logistical Services, or ‘PLS’.

Alois Haydn’s name had been on the lists of the Most Influential Britons for more than a decade. All the political parties paid him court. His summer parties in Oxfordshire attracted ministers, celebrities and intellectuals alike. By the lake and in the marquee, prize-winning novelists and rising politicians mingled: the Lucasian professor could be found deep in conversation with the Eton-educated star of a hit American TV series; Prince Andrew and the crop-haired, boyish editor of the Guardian might be seen sitting at the same table. To receive one’s invitation, a month ahead of the event, had become part of Britain’s unofficial honours system, on a par with appearing on Desert Island Discs, being lampooned on the cover of Private Eye or speaking at Davos. Ordinary snappers clustered at the gate to capture the arrivals; a royal-connected fashion photographer took informal pictures inside the grounds.

Yet the host, Alois Haydn, was rarely photographed. Gatsby-like, he was little more than a linen suit glimpsed in the background shadows. And this year, to widespread disappointment, the party had been cancelled. Haydn had moved his home from the Cotswolds, rural heartland of the English establishment, to the Essex coast, on the edge of the island, where he was building a new house. The symbolism was much commented on.

Having bought Rocks Point, an elegant Victorian seaside mansion perched on a spit of sandy soil, Haydn had caused local uproar by demolishing the whole building, from its brick turrets and fancy battlements to its sprawling stables and wrought-iron greenhouses. In its place there had arisen a bleak outcrop of cubes, pyramids and mushrooms, as if a shoddily constructed alien spacecraft had crash landed on the site. Intriguingly, it was just a few miles from Olivia Kite’s Danskin House.

There was a lot of snooping. Mini-drones, tiny helicopters equipped with cameras and microphones, had just begun to be used by the mainstream media. Wildfowling in the marshes had long been a local tradition, so Haydn invited friends from London, county types and shadowy Eastern Europeans alike, for the shooting. Again and again they brought down the drones. Website owners were outraged. Lawyers rubbed their hands.

He could afford that: Haydn Communications had smashed through the old world of gentlemanly corporate public relations back in the 1980s, not long after Nigel Lawson had smashed up the cosy old world of the City: one of Alois’s big breaks had come from the privatisation of British Gas. His early years were lost in mystery, but he appeared to be a member of a famous family. His much older sister Camille Haydn had won the Turner Prize with her installation on the history of female sexuality, and his much younger brother Liddell Haydn was the eponymous creator of the successful TV production company. Haydn himself was of almost Middle Eastern appearance, and some said he had been plucked from a children’s home – there were no pictures of him from his early childhood. But he never spoke of such things, either to friends or in public.

Haydn’s bride, the daughter of the radical Tory peer and landowner Lord Mortlake, had brought him modest inherited wealth and an entrée to the highest levels of the Conservative Party. The wealth and the contacts lingered on after the dissolution of the marriage when Alois came out. He was now in a civil partnership with the Indian short-story writer Ajit Gupta. It was often stated by those who claimed to know that Haydn was ‘more New Labour than anything’, and he had certainly prospered under Tony Blair. He had given Tony, Cherie and the children the use of his holiday villa in Umbria, and had been pictured playing tennis with Tony at Chequers. Peter Mandelson was said to have him on speed dial.

Alois Haydn was, it seems, a hard man to pin down, and a hard man to describe. On this particular morning, walking past the Ritz in the late-summer sunlight, he was on his way to meet a roomful of people who prided themselves on being good observers – some of them professionally so. What might they have noted down?

They would have reported that Haydn was a man of something below middle height, and of average weight, and of middling years. His hair was light brown, and slightly curled. His face was olive-shaped and avocado-coloured, with dark, sunken eyes like two soft dates. He could almost have been Indian. His suit was Ozwald Boateng, and his shoes were Italian brogues. He wore a light-grey silk tie over a cream shirt, and his nails appeared to have been varnished. His views? Unfathomable. His educational background? Unknown. His psychological drive? Hush. He carried a small leather bag neatly in both hands, and he walked so lightly it was almost as if he were being blown gently along by the wind.