Читать книгу A Secret Worth Killing For - Simon Berthon, Simon Berthon - Страница 9

Twenty-six years later, UK General Election night, Friday, 5 May. 2.41 a.m.

‘I, the Acting Returning Officer for the constituency of Lambeth West, hereby give notice that the total number of votes given for each candidate was as follows . . .’

Anne-Marie Gallagher squinted down at an army of flashlights, TV cameras and microphones. The next five minutes would shape the next five years of her life. Yet, until one day and one conversation three months before, what now lay before her would have seemed unreachable.

‘They’re imploding,’ cried out her head of chambers, Kieron Carnegie, flicking through the newspapers. ‘Those smug idiots are imploding. Split from top to bottom.’

‘There there, Kieron, we don’t want you imploding too.’ She spoke with a hint of Celtic tinge too polished to place.

He rounded on her. ‘But it’s our chance. This time, even after the last mess, we might actually get back into office.’

She observed him fondly – still, in his early sixties, a craggily attractive man with a rich voice and greying blond hair hanging down to his collar. He had a reputation as a Lothario of the law but had never tried it on with her. From the day she joined Audax, her body language had said no to affairs.

For his part, Carnegie still saw the smart, pretty, petite twenty-three-year-old with the quick brain and spiky wit who had brightened his office the moment she’d stepped into it twenty-two years earlier. The same straight, dark-brown hair that settled in a bob above the join of her neck and shoulders. The same fringe falling over her forehead like wisps of fresh grass. The elegant little nose. The small mouth and curve of her lips. The tiny gap between the whiteness of her front two teeth. The same aura of untouchability.

‘I have an idea.’

‘Oh?’ She went on instant alert; Carnegie’s ideas could be dangerous.

‘I never personally wanted to enter politics.’

‘You’ve always cultivated the party’s leaders.’

‘Me cultivate the leaders?’ His eyebrows jumped in horror.

‘Sorry, Kieron.’ She grinned. ‘They cultivated you.’

‘I’d never have hacked it as a Member of Parliament. Don’t have the discipline.’ He paused. ‘You do.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘I only joined the party a couple of years ago.’

‘I know. But you’re getting noticed. Appearances on Newsnight and Today, pieces in the Guardian. The go-to lawyer for comment on human rights.’

‘It’s nothing more than a sideshow to my work here,’ she protested.

‘Listen,’ he said, pointing at the headlines yelling disarray at Westminster, ‘there’s no solution to this but an early election.’

‘So?’ she interrupted.

‘There’s going to be a vacancy in Lambeth West.’

‘What do you mean? Harry Davies is the candidate there.’

‘Not for much longer. Few know it but he’s had a stroke. The medics have told him he’s got to take it easy.’

‘So?’ she repeated.

‘You live there. You’re attractive and articulate. You have a rising profile. Put your bonnet in the ring, my dear.’ He launched his most extravagant smile. ‘And I will do a little moving and shaking in the background.’

For once, she did not return the smile. She felt a stirring, an echo of youthful ambition that had seemed irretrievable. ‘If I were to do this, I’d enter the goldfish bowl. The media would scrutinize me, try to rake over my past, exercise their bloodlust.’

‘Are you afraid of that?’

For a woman so quick on her feet, it took a split second longer than usual to find a response. ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ she quoted.

‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inauguration speech, March 1933.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s your answer, isn’t it?’

Carnegie’s forecast was accurate. The government moved from bickering to in-fighting to self-destruction. No alternative could be formed to command a majority. The only way out was an immediate General Election. There was a vacancy at Lambeth West.

Anne-Marie cross-examined herself, both present and past. Since her reinvention after Dublin and entry into a different world, she had not come face to face with anyone who remembered her. Standing as an MP would expose her but, in a national election, an unknown first-timer would attract only local attention. In any case, there had been no shame in adopting her new life. The circumstances could even win her sympathy. Which left the two jeopardies. The knowledge of the dead and disappeared had vanished with them. The chance of any credible, living witness emerging this many years later was too remote to stand in her way. She could not always hide from risk.

‘OK,’ she told Carnegie. ‘I’ll give it a go. But don’t you forget it’s your fault.’

The first hurdle was the panel to select a shortlist of candidates. The males were easy meat but then came the formidable Margaret Wykeham, the well-bred chair of a progressive school to which she would never have sent her own children. ‘Ms Gallagher, your grasp of the issues is formidable,’ she began. ‘But perhaps we could know a little more about you.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Anne-Marie was prepared for it. ‘After university, where I graduated with first-class honours, I joined Audax Chambers. There, over the years, I have been lucky enough to form firm friendships and eventually to oversee the expansion of its human rights practice.’

‘You were at university in Dublin?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘And, before that, one has rather little sense of your background. Your family, for example.’

‘Mrs Wykeham,’ stated Anne-Marie with cool deliberation, staring at the emerald brooch pinned on the bosom of her interrogator’s cashmere sweater, ‘this election is not about whether I was born with a silver spoon or a poor mother’s saliva-wetted finger in my mouth. I am a self-made woman. I am happy to discuss my professional life, even happier to discuss the problems that confront our country. But the condition of my candidature is that I will not speak in public beyond those.’

The die cast, she fired a defiant stare at the panel. After a silence interrupted only by the rumble of a passing train, grins began to spread across the faces opposite, including Margaret Wykeham’s.

At an open meeting three weeks later, constituency party members selected her as their candidate with an overall majority on the first ballot.

During these weeks Anne-Marie came to wonder at her gift for artifice. She felt a sheen of hardness beginning to cloak her like a sleek, well-tailored suit. What surprised her, once she had entered the fight, was her will to win.

‘Jonathan Alfred Ashby, Conservative, 24,317,’ continued the acting returning officer. The sitting MP maintained a rictus smile below bulging eyes.

‘Brian Hugh Butler, Liberal Democrat, 2,318.’ The forlorn loser failed to disguise a murderous intent towards his one-time partner in government.

‘Joy Freedom, Hen Party “Backing Genuinely Free Range”, 141.’ A figure buried inside a giant yellow chicken costume did a hop.

‘Anne-Marie Gallagher, 25,779.’ An eruption of shrieks, youthful OmiGods, cheers and whistles exploded through the hall. ‘And I declare that Anne-Marie Gallagher has been duly elected Member of Parliament for Lambeth West.’

Amid the racket, the outlandishness of the moment seized her. The cheers went silent; she was confronted by a mass of mute, mouthing faces. There was something unreal about it. She had a déjà vu of another moment of unreality in her previous life; it chilled her like a blast of arctic wind.

Catching herself, she moved along the row of beaten rivals, shook hands – a pat on the beak for the hen – exchanged false congratulations on a campaign well fought, and approached the microphone.

‘There are so many people to thank, particularly the acting Returning Officer and his most efficient staff.’ She spoke with crystal purity, realizing that any delay in this traditional act of courtesy would show an unwise contempt for election-night protocol. ‘But before I give other thanks,’ she continued, ‘and while this hall commands its brief moment of attention, there is something I want to say.’

She paused, her smile yielding to a cool intent. Right up until the last minute, she had not been sure of what she might say. Now, in this crucible of democratic fervour, hundreds of eyes bearing up at her, TV cameras trained on her, an unexpected sense of destiny tugged.

Perhaps Kieron Carnegie had been right. Perhaps this was her time, her chance at last to cash in years of slog in the mire of law chambers and courts, and the frustrations of committee rooms and thwarted campaigns.

Heeding the instant, her audience ceased its cheering. An expectation created by her magnetic fragility reduced the hall to a hush.

‘Are human rights a joke?’ She fired the question like a crossbow bolt, puzzled faces beneath straining to understand its target.

‘Sometimes you might think so. We read stories of voting rights for child rapists. Refugees granted asylum to look after their cat. Such stories are always distorted, if not invented. But what they betray is an attitude. Human rights are a nuisance. Or silly. Or something foreigners deploy to take advantage of us.

‘Such a state of mind makes us an ungenerous nation. We give the impression of wanting to send asylum seekers into danger, not welcome them to safety. To keep families separated, not united. To make ourselves less civilized, not more.

‘But what ultimately prevents us from so demeaning ourselves is law. The laws that enshrine human rights. I want to tell you on this extraordinary night that I have stood in this election for the lawful human rights of every individual in this nation. And of those who with just cause seek refuge in it.’

There were stirrings not just on the floor below her. A few minutes earlier, the party leader and his entourage had swept into Festival Hall, commandeered for a mass gathering of the ranks. Pummelled by jostlers and backslappers, they paused to watch the Lambeth West declaration, knowing that victory there would surely see them into Downing Street. After the announcement of the result, they made to move on but were halted by the remarkable speech of their winning candidate.

For a moment Anne-Marie thought of stopping there. But, almost despite herself, the words flowed on, an undercurrent of payback throbbing within her.

‘No human right has been more trampled,’ she resumed, ‘than the right to live our lawful lives unobserved in the privacy of our homes, our meeting places, with our friends, with our families.

‘Under the cloak of fear, of exaggerated threats from terrorists and other convenient enemies, technology – and a lust for control – has created the surveillance state.

‘I condemn that state.’

She could hear the collective gasp around her. A single cough reverberated like a gunshot. In Festival Hall, the volume dropped again and the now Prime Minister in waiting watched on. In a few still-lit rooms in Whitehall, in two fortress buildings by the Thames, and on comfortable sofas in commuter belts, a network of men, and a few women, were taking note of this upstart lawyer just turned MP.

‘There must be no more snooping on the lives of tens of millions of innocent people by NSA, GCHQ, CIA, MI5, MI6 or any other sets of initials and numbers the faceless, unaccountable watchers choose to hide behind.

‘There must be no more dirty tricks, extraordinary renditions, unexplained disappearances.

‘Every citizen of this country is entitled to a life that is private, unviolated, and free.

‘I make you a promise. I will work to dismantle the surveillance state. Nothing will deter me from keeping that pledge.’

For a few seconds, the Lambeth West election revellers remained stunned in a frozen silence. Then came the first ripples of applause, followed by waves of cheering and chanting. At Festival Hall, normal service was resumed, though raised eyebrows were exchanged amid mutterings of, ‘Did you see that?’

Social media buzzed. The speech began to trend on Twitter; party workers posted it on Facebook and ‘likes’ mounted in their thousands. Anne-Marie had hit a nerve.

But, as well as in the secretive recesses of Whitehall, other nerves were less favourably struck. Long-in-the-tooth politicians noted the rashness of her words. Patriotic support of the ‘vital work’ of the security services was a mantra – particularly if you wanted your own secrets to stay buried. One senior member of her party amused himself by wondering what skeletons might lurk in pretty little Anne-Marie Gallagher’s cupboard.

Having stepped down from the platform, Anne-Marie found Margaret Wykeham alongside her, leaning in for a hug. ‘Your speech was wonderful. But take care.’ They locked eyes, two women in a stadium where the gladiators were still largely male. ‘Get some rest. It’s allowed, you know.’

It was past 3 a.m. Small groups were setting off to join the Festival Hall throng, beckoning her to come with them. She realized that all she wanted was to be rid of them, to find silence to take in what had happened to her. She waved happily, leaning the side of her face against joined hands to indicate sleep. While other newly elected MPs and defeated candidates retired to their homes with loving wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, she left the arena alone.

Melting into the night air and walking briskly to expel the fustiness of the crowd and the clamour, she cut through the side streets of low Victorian terraces towards the river, stopping occasionally to listen for pursuing steps. The further she walked, the more the sense of unreality took hold.

Within half an hour she was entering her apartment block, one of five modernist buildings its architect called ‘pavilions’ overhanging the Thames – just one element in the massive new city within a city housing fifty thousand people. A new embassy row. A new haven for rich oligarchs when the going back home got rough. Thousands of pods of secluded anonymity. Her shield.

She took the lift to the eleventh floor and entered the flat she had reserved two years before. Then, she had analysed the model in the sales suite and lined up the view she wanted. Now that imagined outlook lay before her in spectacular reality. It never ceased to take her breath away.

She flicked on the television. Nearly 4 a.m. Counting had stopped for the night but her party was certain of an overall majority.

She undressed, scrubbed her face and teeth, and changed into the comfort of her pyjamas. She walked to the swathe of glass revealing London and the river. To the right the Millennium Wheel was still alight and revolving on this long election night, catching its celebrating stragglers. Sweeping left came the tower of the House of Lords, the ugliness of Millbank, then, peeping through a tiny gap in the forest of concrete and brick, the face of Big Ben.

She stared at these icons of the British state, the alien fortress she would soon inhabit. Below, apart from one lonely tug crawling slowly upstream, water gleamed emptily. A few cars flowed along the Embankment opposite, then an ambulance flashing its light. Their motion was silent and ghostly, deadened by the thickly insulated glass. She looked down on the river below and then right as the towpath resumed its curl towards Vauxhall.

There she saw the figure.

Stooping, long coat, dark brimmer hat concealing his forehead and upper face. He – it was a man for sure – lifted a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger to his lips, puffed, and exhaled smoke that streaked into the night. He turned his head up and towards the window she was watching from. She caught a glimmer of chin and lip. There seemed something familiar about their contours. She felt she saw him start, as if he had seen an apparition. He threw the cigarette onto the path, turned on his heel, and shuffled away. It was his back view as he left, the brimmer raked at a hint of an angle over his neck, strands of hair falling beneath that made her shudder. A wraith dissolving into the blackness.

The moment passed and she told herself to snap out of it. The transformative events of the past hours must have dislocated her. She repeated her calculation: any man with any interest in tracking her down these many years on was dead or disappeared.

Cold logic dictated imaginings of coincidences.