It had a horrible inevitability about it and a few weeks earlier Beth might have said yes to a night with a US senator who combined power and good looks, but now her life was too complicated.
‘Sweet of you,’ she said, ‘but I have some work to do.’
Flying back to London the following day didn’t help her mood. First Class was full. There were no upgrades and the man next to her in Business Class wanted to tell her in detail all about the range of flashing jewellery he had just sold to a US mail-order giant. She closed her eyes and thought about the future.
At twenty-seven, Beth was on the young side for a British government minister’s political adviser. All advisers live in the grey area between politics and public service and are mistrusted by all sides. There was a food-chain at work and many other hungry mouths were clamouring for a bite of her master’s favour. Alan Livesay, junior minister in the Foreign Office, was busy climbing his own ladder while all those around him clung to his coat-tails, trying to hitch a free ride. Beth was good at getting noticed, and that was the key. She needed to catch the attention of Livesay’s boss, the Foreign Secretary. She had to get to the point where they needed her views to shape their speeches, their policies. It had been dog eat dog and she had lost a lot of flesh before she learnt to bite first.
Then, six months ago, she had played an accidental trump card and got ahead of the game. Six months ago she had widened her sphere of influence from Livesay’s private office to Livesay’s private bed. It hadn’t been a calculated decision. Beth had found out for herself how well power and desire cohabit and, being a new experience, it had not seemed at all like a cliché. Recently, lying together in the soft afternoon sheets, she had nearly let out the love word. He had forestalled her, for which she was grateful afterwards, fearing it would have proved a fatally mistaken kind of intimacy. Just as it was forming on her lips he had turned his head.
‘What planet do you really come from, Wonderwoman?’ he had asked. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
‘You’ve read my CV.’
He traced the shape of her mouth with one finger. That was for your job. This is for me. You don’t need a Cambridge degree for what we’ve just done.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Fluid Mechanics might help.’
‘Don’t be flippant. I want to know.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. My parents are dead. No brothers or sisters. No family at all,’ she said and thought, but did not add, unlike you.
‘But you must come from somewhere?’
‘Not really, just London.’ Then she had blocked his mouth with her own to shut him up, because it was all lies. When they’d done it all again, in a hurry this time because both were aware of their alibis trickling to a halt, he had forgotten about it. As they were finding their scattered clothes, he had told her she was going to take his place for his American speaking trip. Even then, she had wondered if it represented a reward or simply funk on his part, putting her in the line of fire, a stand-in to replace a master who found it politically expedient to have his views expressed in a way he could disown if he had to. Perhaps he even wanted her to go too far, so he could get her out of his life. The career risk was enormous.
That thought had made no difference at all to the line she knew she must take. In her student days and in the doctoral dissertation that followed and which got her to the Foreign Office, Beth had developed the academic ideas that backed up her conviction, held since childhood, that to beat an attacker, you should always strike first. At school it had often got her into trouble. In the early twenty-first century, it got her into power, and Beth was starting to adore power. She decided she would take the chance with both hands and it had worked.
She woke from a short sleep to find the brief, uncomfortable night had passed and a stewardess was heralding their unpalatable return to English airspace with a tray of breakfast. All the glamour had evaporated somewhere over the Atlantic. London looked low, grey and drab as the plane sank slowly towards Heathrow. Beth switched her mobile on in the baggage claim then switched it quickly off again when the voice told her she had twenty new messages. She walked out through Customs, then stood in the arrivals hall wondering why there wasn’t a driver holding a sign saying ‘Ms Battock’. There was one likely-looking potential chauffeur but he was immersed in the Mail on Sunday. She walked closer and as the headline caught her eye, she suddenly understood why there were so many messages and no car waiting for her. ‘Love-Rat Minister Quits’, it said and the photograph was of Alan Livesay.
She walked quickly to the book shop, grabbed a Sunday Times and there it all was in banner headlines.
A cold wash of dread ran out to her fingers and all the way down to her toes. Her first thought wasn’t that her prized job had just gone down the pan. It was even less creditable than that. Her first thought was that Helen Livesay, patient, supportive Helen Livesay, who invited her down to Sunday lunch when she thought Beth needed feeding up, who sent her Vitamin C tablets and bottles of herbal cures when she heard her sneeze, had just found out that she, Beth Battock, had been sharing her husband’s bed in his afternoons and on his nights away from home. Then she looked further down the page to the blonde caught on a hotel step, kissing Livesay goodbye, and it all got even worse because the woman Livesay had resigned over was someone she had never seen before and not her at all. ‘His long-term mistress’, the story said.
The taxi took her to Clapham and she told the driver to drop her at the far end of her street just in case, but there was no one waiting for her outside. They arrived the following morning, when she went downstairs and found two men in her kitchen.
The larger of the two men said, ‘Hello Miss Battock,’ as if this were a normal social occasion. His nose and mouth were submerged in pale cheeks as if his head had been over-inflated. ‘Sorry to walk in but the door was open. Thought we ought to check you were all right.’
‘The door? Which door?’ she said stupidly.
‘This one,’ he said.
The door to Beth’s flat was on the second floor. ‘What about downstairs?’
‘Someone was coming out. We walked straight up.’
She was absolutely sure her door had been firmly closed. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to walk in.’ Who were they? Not police.
‘Derek Milverton,’ said the first man, putting out his hand, ‘from the CPA. This is Phil.’ Phil was hiding behind him, taking in the room in jerky gulps of his eyes.
CPA? ‘Do you mean the Child Protection Agency?’ They must be in the wrong place.
‘No, Cunningham Press Associates.’
‘Which is?’
‘A news agency.’
She’d heard of. Specialists in sleaze. Always somebody else’s problem, until now.
‘We just wanted to know if you might like to say anything about your boss and his…’
‘Reporters? You’re reporters and you come busting in to my flat?’
‘No, no. Like I said, the door was open.’
‘Bullshit. You can open it again and go straight back out.’
‘Look it’s in your interests. You’ll be under siege here in half an hour. Talk to us and we’ll help keep the reptiles off your back, see?’
‘What do you mean? You are the reptiles. Why am I going to be under siege?’
The phone rang and all their eyes switched to the machine on the side table. She didn’t want to answer, not while they were still here. It rang three times, then the answering