Buch lesen: «Goodfellowe MP»

ONE

Thomas Goodfellowe made a grab for the brakes, only narrowly avoiding a fall to the pavement. He wasn’t yet in full command of his machine, an ancient bicycle with a scratched green frame and a mind of its own. He hadn’t ridden a bike in thirty years and if he hadn’t exactly forgotten how to ride, it was certainly taking time to make contact with the memories. Something had worked its way loose. He hoped it wasn’t him.

The streets of London’s Chinatown were congested with early-evening traffic. Obstacles were everywhere. Travellers rushing, tourists crushing, grubby urchins begging, lovers with blind eyes and revellers whose eyes if not blind were distinctly blurred, with every one of them apparently intent on tumbling from the pavement and falling directly into his path. A kamikaze run, he reckoned, this stretch of Little Newport Street that led to the tube station, but it had been entirely his fault. His eyes had wandered from the road as he waved to Madame Tang. Mind you, since he’d moved into Chinatown some months earlier he’d learnt that it was worth taking a few risks to be on the good side of Madame Tang. She was not so much a feature of the neighbourhood but was the neighbourhood. Of incalculable age and all but invisible wispy hair, she was draped in an ancient woollen cardigan so worn and full of holes that she might have been mistaken for a destitute, shuffling along the pavement pushing a shopping trolley in search of a few fresh vegetables. She had always shuffled, even at the age of thirteen when she had tramped across China, her family’s few possessions strapped upon her back, trying to keep from the clutches of Chiang Kai-shek’s retreating Kuomintang hordes. Black days those, with memories drawn in burning charcoal. Yet nowadays the winds of fortune blew more kindly for Madame Tang. Her eldest son had a degree in engineering from Cambridge, her second son possessed a still better degree from Yale, and beneath that misshapen cardigan dangled a huge bunch of keys which marked Madame Tang as one of the most powerful landlords in Chinatown, with an empire that embraced legitimate commercial premises, dens of impropriety and assorted short-lease apartments which she controlled with considered ruthlessness. And she understood ruthlessness. The soldiers of the Kuomintang had taught her everything there was to know, a lifetime of lessons crammed into one endless weekend in Wuhan when she passed through their hands. It was the last occasion she had seen her two younger sisters and mother, and the last occasion she had ever cried. After that she never indulged in sentiment, and never gave a second chance. Yes, it was worth taking a few risks to be on the good side of Madame Tang.

With a show of reluctance, she acknowledged his wave and shuffled by, clearing her throat in the traditional Chinese manner, which sounded as though she were scraping barnacles, while Goodfellowe’s attentions were drawn to the doorway behind her, where another female figure stood in shameless, almost indecent contrast. Young, barely nineteen but with older eyes, weary from spending too long off her feet and dressed in Lycra hot pants which left not even her moles to the imagination. It was Loretta, longingly watching the world go by just as, she hoped, it lustfully watched her. Two floors above was the room she called her cockpit, rented from Madame Tang, who retained the only key to the premises. It was where Loretta entertained her clients. Loretta described herself as an ordinary working girl, commuting each day from Brighton where she lived with her young daughter and ailing mother, on whose behalf only last week she had sought Goodfellowe’s advice. Something about a housing allowance. He couldn’t be of much help, but at least he had listened, which was more than most. She owed him. From her catwalk on the doorstep she caught his eye and mouthed a few silent words in his direction. He puckered his brow in concentration, unable to catch her meaning, so she repeated the message, her rubied lips shaping the words in a slow and deliberate manner, almost like a nun at devotions. Now he caught her drift and found he was smiling in spite of himself, before quickly glancing away, afraid his cheeks were showing colour. Wouldn’t do accepting such an offer, even if as she was suggesting no money changed hands. The News of the World wouldn’t understand and neither, he suspected, would his constituents. Nor the Chief Whip. Didn’t he know it but the Government was in enough trouble without enforced resignations, even from the obscurity of the backbenches. Still, he reflected, casting a final, fleeting look in Loretta’s direction, he could think of worse reasons to burn and sometimes, particularly of late, burning seemed an almost attractive fate.

He pedalled on. Loretta was scarcely a couple of years older than his own daughter Samantha. No, wouldn’t do, not by any stretch of his middle-aged imagination. Thoughts of Sammy pressed upon him, even more troublesome than the traffic on Charing Cross Road. Oh, Sammy. How much he owed her, how boundless was the part she played in his world, and how stupidly insignificant were the things which nowadays seemed to deplete their lives and form the focus of their row. Row. Not rows, not several of them, but one seamless collision of Goodfellowe stubbornness that felt as though it had lasted without pause since the last summer holiday when, at the age of fifteen, she hadn’t come home till two. The youthful anger that poured out had seemed relentless, like a river in flood. No sooner had he found some means of damming it than it found another, still more unpredictable and chaotic course. What was it last weekend? Yes, of course, her mother’s locket.

He pedalled more energetically, trying to work off his anger. She’d come home on exeat from school, that cripplingly expensive palace of teenage entertainments where they appeared to focus all their energies on finding new ways of extracting money from parents, to announce that she was organizing a charitable fashion show. To him it had seemed yet another excuse to raid his wallet; for her it had been little less than a moral crusade. ‘Fashion Against Famine!’ or some such nonsense. If her words had been sentimental and naive, his had been inexcusably dismissive. But it hadn’t been just the money. She had asked for her mother’s locket. Not to borrow, not just for the fashion show, but for keeps.

‘She doesn’t need it any more. Won’t even know it’s gone, Daddy!’ Sammy had protested.

And that’s what had hurt, scraped open wounds that had never properly healed. Of course she was right. He had bought Elinor the locket to celebrate their wedding anniversary, a lifetime ago when Sammy had been almost twelve and her brother Stevie almost fourteen. Sammy had helped him choose it, had wrapped it for him and admired it from first sight with such an intensity that her mother had promised that, one day, it would be hers. None of them had understood how quickly that day might come.

So he had said no, refused her, not yet willing to let go. Sammy had shouted and argued that it was what her mother would have wanted, and then it was his turn to raise his voice and demand to know how the hell she knew what her mother wanted. They used their anger as shields. Hurting each other, because they were family. Goodfellowes. Sammy had returned to school on Sunday, early and in silence, leaving him to feel as though he had been stranded on an ice floe. That’s what he liked about his rented apartment in Chinatown, not just that it was small and cheap and close to Westminster and because the streets offered impulse and inspiration to rouse the dullest of wits, but even more because you could never be alone in Chinatown, not in the way you could on an ice floe.

The next few moments were to amount to a minute and a half of intense and potentially dangerous confusion. He was preoccupied by lingering thoughts of Sammy, and distracted by the small band of buskers playing jazz on the steps of the Garrick in the half-hour before the theatre doors opened. His new shoes were rubbing raw, which didn’t help when you were about to launch yourself upon Trafalgar Square in the teeth of the rush hour. And if he had to carry his mobile phone along with copies of Hansard and a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet in the battered wicker basket on his handlebars, he really should have switched the damned thing off. But it started to burble just as he passed South Africa House, just as the traffic lights changed, just as dusk began to muster her forces and take control of the sky – and just as a retired actuary from Margate, jaw defiant beneath uncompromising NHS horn-rims, and driving his treasured Vauxhall in town for the first time in twelve years, came to a complete halt in the middle of the intersection while he attempted to locate the switch for his sidelights. Cabbies shouted, traffic weaved, Chaos Theory took the entire east side of the square in its grip. Butterfly wings had nothing on retired actuaries from Margate. Goodfellowe, caught off guard while scrabbling for his phone, lost control.

The chauffeur in the Rolls-Royce behind had witnessed both the mounting confusion and the changing lights. He had also seen what he thought to be a gap, a window of opportunity, a chance to beat the muddled masses. And his passenger was in a hurry. So he had put his foot down, only to find the leap for freedom suddenly barred by what appeared to be an attempted suicide. His foot slammed from accelerator to brake. Turbo drive to rodeo ride. From the back seat of the wildberry-red Silver Dawn, an exasperated and freshly rumpled passenger bent down to gather up his scattered documents. Then he turned to mouth an unmistakably personalized oath at the cyclist.

Thomas Goodfellowe, tribune of the people and Member of Parliament for Marshwood, had had his first brush with Frederick E Corsa, a man who took pride in representing no one but himself.

At almost the same moment as he was staring into the storm-whipped eyes of Freddy Corsa, another confrontation was taking place which was to have an equally significant effect on Tom Goodfellowe’s life and reputation.

Scarcely more than a moderate stone’s throw from Little Newport Street could be found ‘Zhu’s Apothecary’ – but only if one knew where to look. The entrance stood in a covered alleyway off one of Chinatown’s back streets, and nothing but a small window presented itself to the street. The pseudo-Shanghai lamp-post which had once illuminated the end of the alleyway had been moved – at the insistence of the local feng-shui man and at the considerable expense of the City of Westminster – ten yards farther down the pavement, leaving both alley and apothecary in the grey shadow of evening. All sight of the frugal herbal emporium inside was blocked by display cases packed with the strange wares of the Oriental pharmaceutical trade – weirdly shaped roots, seeds, exotic barks, deer tails, dissected life forms of indeterminate origin, sun-dried sea horses and absurdly twisted ginseng, forces of herbalism that offered restoration and renewal from an extraordinary range of ailments, many of which Western medicine scarcely pretended to understand and some it hadn’t even heard of. Chinese doctors, as Mr Zhu was fond of remarking, had been at it a long time, surgically removing abdominal tumours under anaesthetic while Boadicea was still bathing in pig shit and knee-capping Romans.

‘Westerners strange,’ he reflected in his castrated English. ‘Pay doctors when sick. Chinese punish doctor when sick, pay to keep healthy.’ And so from a hundred different bottles and a score of rosewood drawers he would dispense herbs and potions, weighing out the ingredients in his hand-held scales and wrapping them in twists of brown paper, while above him a bright brass ceiling fan turned slowly, mixing the peppery aromas and pushing them gently around his unpretentious shop.

Mostly his customers were, like Zhu himself, from Hong Kong, with a scattering of regulars from the other Malay, Singapore and Vietnamese Chinese communities which were threaded through the fabric of Chinatown. Western customers were few, and usually ignorant, ripe for picking. Often they had little idea of what they wanted and no idea of what they were getting; they were there to experience the atmosphere rather than the herbal cures, most of which required lengthy boiling and smelled foul. So he would mix ingredients like a short-order chef, a pinch of this and a handful of that, anything which could do little harm and which would smell inoffensive to the squeamish Western nose. Much of the bulk was made up of used tea leaves from his brother’s restaurant in Gerrard Street, which his niece and receptionist, Jya-Yu, dried in the kitchen out back. ‘Every ingredient tested,’ he would promise with a grin, although his teeth protruded and his accent was so bad that few Westerners would understand, happily lost in the performance as his hands moved like a magician’s above the piles of strangely coloured herbs. They would smile, Mr Zhu would smile and give a little bob and bow, and on most days everyone would be happy. But not today.

The previous night had been a long and difficult one for Zhu, locked in a fevered game of pei-gau in the basement room beneath Madame Tang’s cake shop. He had emerged at three a.m. with a savage headache and without a penny of the two thousand pounds he’d had in his pocket at the start of the evening. ‘Fate’, as Jya-Yu had pronounced caustically, trying to put the disaster behind them, but Uncle Zhu was the type of man who always believed in giving Fate a little helping hand. So when the callow corporate-image executive shambled into his shop after an extended lunch, demanding tiger bone as a pick-me-up for his manhood and digging in his suit pocket for a handful of notes, Uncle Zhu was not slow to see the possibilities.

‘Tiger bone not legal,’ he warned, unable to scrape his eyes from the cash.

‘Neither’s not paying your VAT,’ the young man responded gruffly and dug out yet more crumpled notes. ‘Come on. Tiger bone. The real stuff.’

Jya-Yu muttered a warning but Uncle Zhu spat back, his judgement temporarily impaired by poverty and his inability to cure his own headache. ‘Fate,’ he snapped, and proceeded to rummage in a drawer at the bottom of the counter, out of sight of the customer. He reappeared with a twist of silver paper, which he opened with considerable care on the counter to reveal a small spoonful of pale grey-white powder.

‘That all?’ rasped the image executive, swaying slightly. ‘Give me more. Tonight’s a big night.’

Zhu ducked down again and bobbed back up with a second twist. ‘Plenty strong, even for big man like you,’ he chuckled. He exposed the additional powder before carefully rewrapping both parcels. He looked deep into the executive’s eyes, which were glazed, focusing in a laboured manner. The breath smelt desiccated, dried by too much red wine. Uncle Zhu decided to add another fifty per cent to the first price he’d thought of.

‘Hundred and fifty.’

Surprisingly, Uncle Zhu’s accent coped with figures far better than any other aspect of the English language and it appeared to be the first part of the transaction the customer even partially understood.

‘A hundred and fifty what?’

‘Pounds. Hundred and fifty pounds,’ Uncle Zhu responded.

‘What? For two tiny packets?’ the customer continued, picking up the twists in the hand that was not holding the money.

‘Very genuine. Very rare.’ Zhu extended his hand for payment, a gesture which the customer, a man of overactive imagination and Bruce Lee fantasies, somehow translated as a demand with menace.

‘You’re ripping me off, you little yellow bastard. You’re not getting me. Shouldn’t be here in the first place.’ He began to back out towards the door. ‘Bet you’re an illegal, no work permit. You wouldn’t dare call the police.’

At this point Uncle Zhu let forth a minor hurricane of untranslatable Cantonese but made no move to come out from behind the protection of his counter. Instead it was Jya-Yu who chased after the fleeing customer, catching hold of his sleeve as he reached the end of the alley and was about to disappear into the crowded street. A shouting match ensued as Jya-Yu continued to tug at his arm and a small crowd rapidly gathered, although no one attempted to intervene, not even Uncle Zhu who had at last left the protective custody of his apothecary and stood remonstrating from the end of the alleyway. The noise level grew.

‘What’s going on here, then?’ A new voice had entered the fray. ‘All right, all right. Cut it out or I’ll nick the both of you.’ The local constabulary had arrived but, at first, seemingly to little effect. Uncle Zhu maintained his stream of abuse, gesticulating at the man, while Jya-Yu, whose English was normally at least passable, found her control of the language falling to pieces in the excitement. Around them the voluble gathering of Chinese traders and foreign tourists offered noise but no greater understanding. Puzzled, the constable turned to the image executive. ‘Perhaps you can explain, sir?’

The sight of the blue uniform had had a remarkable effect upon the young man. His voice had lost all trace of its contemptuous tone while the glaze had disappeared from his eyes, which were now sharp, calculating. ‘Damned if I know, officer. I was just walking back to my office for a meeting when this girl comes up. Says for a hundred and fifty she’ll give me anything I want. When I said I wasn’t interested she starts having a go at me.’

The youthful constable examined Jya-Yu. She didn’t look much like a tart. Very little make-up, a vigorously coloured silk jacket that was perhaps a little gaudy. Anyway, most Chinese vice was kept very much to themselves, not paraded out on the streets. Maybe she was an amateur, doing a little freelancing. ‘You’re saying she propositioned you for sex, sir?’

‘Absolutely. Anything I wanted, any way I wanted it. She’s a hooker.’ He sniffed righteously. ‘But I don’t go in for that sort of stuff.’

At that point Jya-Yu, unable to express herself in any other fashion, launched herself at the man, clubbing at him, scratching. Uncle Zhu resumed his screaming and the crowd began to press closer. It was the sort of situation where a young constable might lose both his helmet and his reputation. He radioed for back-up.

It was as the constable stepped in to separate Jya-Yu from the executive that he noticed a small packet fall to the ground. A silver twist which, on closer inspection, contained a white powder he couldn’t identify. Not for certain, at least, not until it had gone for testing, but he reckoned he was already way ahead of the forensic lab at Lambeth.

‘Yours, sir?’ he asked the executive.

‘Mine? Never!’

‘Miss?’ the constable turned to Jya-Yu, but all he got was a stream of untranslatable abuse and a further indiscriminate pounding of fists. He was still holding her wrists when the wagon arrived and a WPC took control of the struggling girl. Jya-Yu was led to the cover of the alleyway where she was searched. That’s when the police discovered two things.

The first was that, in the confusion, the executive had disappeared.

The other was that in Jya-Yu’s jacket pocket, where the executive had thrust it during the struggle, was the second twist of powder.

The retired actuary from Margate had still not budged, mesmerized by the swaying of the windscreen wipers, still desperately surfing his switches, wits dulled by the insistent horns of complaint which surrounded him. Up to this point he’d always been censorious about drink-driving; now he considered it might be the only option.

Meanwhile the Silver Dawn had eased away and already Corsa’s attentions had been dragged elsewhere. There were always reasons for his attentions to be dragged elsewhere. As Chairman of the Granite News Group (‘one of Europe’s most rapidly expanding and profitable newspaper publishing companies’, as his annual report proclaimed), he lived on a diet of distractions. A headline on a front page. A detail in a corporate report. Finance. His charitable works, or perhaps an engaging woman, both of which he used for public effect. Then there was the new headquarters complex in Docklands. And more finance. Much More Finance.

The newspaper world had changed almost beyond recognition in recent years, somehow skipping over several stages of the industrial revolution. A world that had once been centred on the Gothic wine bars and union chapels of Fleet Street had, in the shadows of night and through the legs of wild-eyed pickets, been shifted out into several large cakes of concrete scattered along the banks of the Thames. Printing presses and distribution operations, traditionally run by the Spanish practices of the union fathers and manned by phantoms and cartoon characters, were now run by New World Control Systems Inc of Korea and scarcely required manning at all.

Corsa had been a prominent rebel in this revolution – ‘a modern-day Merchant of Venice who has fallen upon more refined table manners,’ as the Investors Digest had once jibed. The sensitive souls over at the Commission for Racial Equality must’ve been out to lunch that day and missed the point, but anyone of consequence in the newspaper industry understood. Corsa wasn’t ‘one of us’. Could never be. Bad blood. His father, the founder of the Granite Group, had been an Italian and a prisoner of war who had lost patience with his countrymen’s predisposition to chaos during his one-sided battle with Montgomery and sandflies in the deserts of North Africa. His flight from the true path had been encouraged still further by his POW indenture on a Norfolk farm, where he had come to admire the English, their inherent reserve and particularly the fair-skinned daughters. So Papa had stayed on. His admiration, however, was not always reciprocated in a country still struggling with food queues and black-market nylons. Many simply took the view that Papa Corsa was and would always be a first-generation wop and, still worse, an uppity wop at that. So he’d been cautious, conservative, bought a share in a failing local newspaper and slowly created what became a modest-sized yet comfortably successful newspaper operation. But no knighthood, certainly no peerage, none of the public respects normally accorded to newspaper proprietors and not even much of the fear, not even after he had rescued the ailing Herald and restored it to significance amongst the Fleet Street dailies. But Papa wasn’t bitter. ‘If we’d gone back to Italy to run newspapers there,’ he would explain in his pasta accent to his Winchester-educated son, ‘we’d probably be sweating in a prison cell along with all the rest. Be happy with what we have, Freddy.’

Yet Freddy never was. He’d resented being two inches shorter than all the others at school, no way was he going to have others look down on him after he’d joined the family firm. ‘I bought my manners in Winchester,’ he would later relate with his habitual smile, ‘but I bought my boots in Naples. And neither place sold much scruple.’ Freddy developed an appetite as sharp as a flensing knife and, at the age of thirty-five, pushed his way past his ailing father to usurp the Granite chair, vowing that the Corsas would never again be ignored. In less than five years Freddy had been as good as his word. He had turned the starched and stuffy Herald into a tabloid, added an evening edition and several hundred thousand to its circulation, and bought a series of regional and magazine titles to support it until Granite had matched its corporate claim about being ‘one of Europe’s most rapidly expanding newspaper publishing companies’. Still not in the premier league, perhaps, but well on the way. Trouble was it had not, in spite of the hyperbole, also become ‘one of the most profitable’. He’d borrowed dear and floated the new Granite Group in a sea of debt, only to see interest rates rise and paper costs spiral. Advertising revenues had shattered, while his competitors took him on in a series of desperate price-cutting wars.

And then it got worse. Just as all the froth and fizz was leaking away from the newspaper market the Government had announced, at the insistence of its masters in the European Commission, that it would introduce a new Press (Diversity of Ownership) Bill designed to break the stranglehold which in the view of Monsieur Bourgeois, the Commissioner, was enjoyed and abused by the largest newspaper groups. ‘Competition, not cartel!’ Monsieur B had declared with Gallic fervour and the British Government, almost alone in Europe, had taken him seriously. So the legislative knee was bent. Observers, unused to the inverted logic that a Government should push around the media, predicted conflagration. Having lit the blue touch paper, the Government would now be expected to retire.

But the expected open warfare failed to materialize. The biggest players, already frustrated by the diminishing returns on their investments in newspapers, were growing increasingly distracted by new adventures. ‘I’ve packed my rucksack,’ one of Corsa’s fellow moguls had muttered over lunch in the Savoy Grill, explaining his decision to desert the rock face of Fleet Street for the fertile ground of cable television. ‘This ledge on which we press barons live has given us a great view, but it’s grown too damned draughty for my comfort. Time to find a new perch.’

They’d had their fun and now the big boys seemed almost content to dump a few titles – to the advantage of the second-rank players like Corsa. Or so it seemed. During the first week of the announcement he’d vociferously supported the new Bill and the opportunities it represented to pick up still more titles and move into the big time. By the second week, however, the prospective sales had served only to drag down share prices across the sector, including the price of Granite shares. Shares that Corsa had used to guarantee his huge bank borrowings. Whoops.

The bankers. Let me die alongside my bankers! That way I’ll be sure to take the bastards with me … They’d called a meeting for next week, wanted to discuss the covenants he’d given them for the most recent thirty million pounds. No problem. Not yet at least. He’d get through that one as he’d got through all the discussions with his bankers over the last eighteen months. Encourage them with praise, confuse them with inflated prospects, weigh them down with paper, above all allow them to be deceived by their own voracious appetites and ambitions. Corsa had added so many new companies and newspaper titles to the Granite chain that there had never been two consecutive balance sheets that were comparable. Assets, valuations, hypothecations and depreciations, he’d moved them all around the financial chess board with a speed that left his opponents, and occasionally even himself, bemused. No one knew that so much of the bottom line of the Granite accounts which he proudly proclaimed as profit existed only on paper. No one knew, not yet. But they would. In those silent moments at the very end of day, when sleep eluded him and darkness allowed ghouls and hobgoblins to prey, he knew his time was running out.

They were passing the statue of King Charles I which stood at the end of Whitehall looking down towards the parliament buildings. The Killing Field, where they had taken the King one freezing January morning, paraded him before the crowd and chopped off his head. Where so many others had found their ambitions and abilities dragged in the dust behind the baying mob. The men of the media were kings now. But here of all places he knew that even kings could fall. Torn to pieces and hurled onto the rocks which lay below the crumbling cliff face. He needed a lifeline. And in a hurry. He glanced at his watch. Already he was late.

‘Downing Street,’ he prompted his driver impatiently.

By the time Goodfellowe had parked his bike in the rack at the front of Speaker’s Court he was out of breath and the third toe on his left foot was developing a blister. It was almost seven o’clock, a series of votes lay ahead of him stretching into the night, and he knew he was in danger of being late. He couldn’t remember what they were voting about but there would be trouble if he didn’t make it to the division lobby in time, so he was trying to hurry. Even on a good day the Government’s majority stretched only to nine and there had been few good days recently. Two colleagues on the Government backbenches were recovering from heart attacks, another had had an attack of conscience after his constituency association failed to reselect him, while a fourth was under attack from the tabloids for multiple philandering. She hadn’t been seen in Westminster since the last issue of the Sunday People, hoping in vain that colleagues and correspondents would lose interest in her reported non-culinary uses of lo-fat banana yoghurt. It was at times like these that Whips lost their sense of humour. He wondered whether in another life Madame Tang had been a Whip. Or merely a cat castrator. He’d better hurry.