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.
Alois Haydn carried his wealth lightly too. He called the substantial reserves of money he had amassed his ‘dither fund’ – inheritance and earnings he had been thinking about investing in property, shares or holiday treats, but had never got round to using. Because it was just sitting in the bank, slowly losing value, he also called it his ‘ice money’: drip by drip, it slowly shrank in value and leaked away. When, just before the previous Christmas, he had finally stopped dithering, the dither fund stood at £4,745,201.20. He wired most of it to a new account in the Gulf, cashing out the remaining half a million in £50 notes. This took a lot of paperwork, tedious discussions with bank staff and nervous packaging, but he eventually had the sum wrapped in waterproof paper and jammed into a rucksack.
Alois may have had an obscure background, but he had a very clear mind. Britain, he believed, was finished. Thirty years of spending ever more money on ever pleasanter lifestyles, while working ever less hard and ever less efficiently, had done the once-great nation irreversible damage. Tory and Labour alike: locust years. It wasn’t politics. It was decadence.
As Alois saw it, there were now two possible courses of events. Either the socialists would get back, and in the prevailing mood of public outrage the demands for higher taxes would drive the rich and the foreigners out, fleeing London like flocks of migrating birds affected by a sudden chilling in the weather. Or, despite the best efforts of the current prime minister, the radical and nationalist right would take over, doing enormous short-term damage to everything, including employment. Either way, property prices would crash, and those who remained in Britain would have nowhere safe to put their money. Alois didn’t trust government assurances about the security of the banks. He knew a little history.
He had screwed up his courage to talk about his worries with the prime minister. It wasn’t easy. The PM had a way of looking at you, his forehead creased and his thick, shaggy eyebrows casting dark shadows over his eyes, his mouth twisted in a wordless disdain that had you beaten in argument before he said a word. When it finally came, his voice – all gravel and pebbles and fast-running water between them – reminded Alois of his recent personal triumph in Germany, and the possibility of a negotiated solution acceptable to all sides. The very thing he was putting to the country in a referendum.
‘Why, Alois, do you suppose I am ruining – ruining – my health, and shredding what’s left of my popularity, if not to steer the poor old British people deftly between the two disasters you so eloquently describe? Grab the tiller. Port and starboard: the economically illiterate socialist Scylla and the saloon-bar nationalist Charybdis. My job is to jam wax into the ears of the people and get us past the Sirens, through the white horses and out into the open sea. And I will, if it’s the last thing I do. Believe me, Alois. Stick with us, and leave your money where it is.’
Alois had always admired the prime minister just this side of idolatry. It was his only weakness, and he rather liked himself for it. But after this conversation, and despite the prime minister’s almost hypnotic stare, he walked away unconvinced. Two days later he liquidated the entire dither fund and bought tickets for himself and Ajit to Dubai.
Various interesting people from the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Pakistani security service had found Dubai more discreet than Switzerland and as secure as Singapore – as well as much nearer than either. The banks there would open an account for a large amount of currency passed across the counter with the minimum of questioning or paperwork. The architecture, the heat and the vulgarity of the shopping were minor inconveniences compared