A few days later, Lucien’s father was in his local when he noticed that he was pouring his pint of bitter directly down the trouser leg of the man sitting to his left.
‘Oof. Groourrgh,’ protested the man. ‘Hoi, hoi.’ Nor did he say this in a friendly way. Robson tried to right his glass, but there was no strength in his wrist, and the rest of the liquid gurgled onto the man’s crotch. He said ‘Hoi,’ again, sounding as though he meant it. Robson tried to explain and apologise, but no sound came from his mouth. Then he suddenly slid backwards off his bar stool, and landed face-up on the floor.
He was still feeling an overwhelming sense of irritation when the two ambulancemen arrived. One said to the other, ‘Shall we blue this one?’ The other replied, ‘God yes, we’d better blue him.’ Robson rather liked the sound of that – it made him feel important – but the stroke killed him even as the flashing and wailing ambulance pulled away from the pub.
The funeral had taken place at a crematorium in North London, attended by a ragged platoon of newspaper editors, including a stunned and bewildered-looking Ken Cooper, as well as famous foreign correspondents and columnists from the less popular papers. The rain cascaded down on the backs and hats of some two hundred people who could not be fitted into the chapel. Lucien was not there. He spent the day in his flat, emptying a bottle of his father’s favourite malt whisky, and sobbing.
He survived the weeks following his father’s death by drowning himself in the large, wet eyes of a series of sympathetic girls, and managed to keep working by snuffling fashionable stimulants. But his timekeeping, as Cooper noticed morosely, became ever more erratic.
That Saturday, idly admiring the forthright, no-nonsense names of the old shopkeepers on the street – Lobb for boots, Lock for hats, winking, scarlet Berry Bros & Rudd for booze, Hockney for tobacco – Lucien McBryde turned right just before the Economist building, and wavered his way towards the north-west corner of St James’s Square, and a narrow building with tall windows that was the nearest thing he had to a spiritual home. This was the London Library, a private-subscription affair founded by whiskered and idealistic Victorians, lifelong membership of which had been a gift from his father during a brief phase when he’d showed some promise as a writer. Its collection was unsurpassed by that of any other private institution. Its dark reading room, smelling of old books and old men, was as calming a place as could be found in this square half-mile of clubland.
But that was not why Lucien McBryde used the building. Well-versed in the dangers of email, texting and mobile phones, he had made the library, in effect, his private communications hub. By this time on a Saturday it would normally have closed its doors. But tonight the annual party was in full swing, and McBryde lurched his way inside. For once he was not looking for another drink, free or otherwise. He was here, as usual, to send a message.
When pursuing a woman, or dealing with a particularly private source of information, McBryde avoided all the modern communications systems, which were vulnerable to being spied on by everyone from spotty youths in the pay of rival newspapers to, so the Guardian said, GCHQ, the Americans and probably the Chinese as well. He passed his most sensitive messages on by simply texting its recipient the title and author of a particular book, and leaving an old-fashioned handwritten note inside the London Library’s copy of it. All the girl, or civil servant, or junior minister, had to do then was to go to the narrow, metal-grilled stacks, pull out the book and retrieve the message. They would then repeat the process, texting him the location of his own ‘book-note’. So far, all parties had found this method entirely secure.
Others cottoned on, of course, and the waiting list for membership of the London Library had jumped remarkably. The venerable stacks began to reek of passion and secret liaisons. Many of those apparent bibliophiles fingering a history of the early French kings with an affectedly vague expression, or rubbing their palms along an anatomical sketchbook, were in reality trying to hunt down a passionate letter from a married man or woman, or a proposition for an indecent or politically sensitive rendezvous.
The crucial thing about the London Library postal service was that the messages had to be left in books which were in no danger of being taken out by the wrong person – some wandering visitor who was unaware of the system. They had to be secreted in books about thoroughly dull topics, books no one in their right mind would ever want to open. McBryde had experimented with obscure Swedish philologists, unknown Victorian novelists, and dense tomes of twentieth-century structural Marxism, but had finally settled on the works of the journalist and sometime historian Dominic Sandbrook. Sandbrook had been the unwitting Pandar for McBryde’s life-changing love affair; at last, flickers of energy had pulsed between his pages.
Tonight Lucien was on his way to deliver a message to Jennifer, but one that had little to do with romance, although just writing her name had given his heart a sickening lurch. He swiped his membership card and entered the library, then went upstairs to the History of England section, where he took down the latest of Sandbrook’s tomes, an eight-hundred-page history of Britain from 1982 to 1983. Into it, he slipped his note.
He felt clammy and weak as he made his way back out into St James’s Square, shouldering past the party guests – Sir Tom Stoppard was deep in conversation with Andrew Wilson. Once he was outside he checked his phone, which was full of increasingly terse messages from the office. He scrolled through them. Then deleted them. There was absolutely no point in being a reporter if you had to attend meetings or communicate with your bosses.
McBryde was planning a long – a very long – night. Even so, he remained just slightly more journalist than dipsomaniac. The tip he was passing on to Jennifer had come from Alois Haydn, the notorious Svengali of Number 10. Haydn knew everyone in London. He was London. His deepest secret was McBryde’s last romantic gift to Jen. Passing it on to her was a stroke of genius … Or so McBryde thought. But ever since their meeting a question had been nagging away at him. Why had that famously manipulative little man sought him out? He owed him no favours. Haydn?
A good journalist does not simply receive what is given; he always asks why he was given it. Loitering in a nearby pub over a whisky and soda, McBryde concentrated hard as he began to look his gift horse closely in the mouth. Alois Haydn only ever looked out for Alois Haydn. Everyone knew that. But the story he’d told him was one that put Haydn himself in a bad light – or would, one day. So if it wasn’t about power, what else could it be about? Was it money?
For all the wrong reasons – involving Soho clubs and drug dealers – Lucien had made some quite good connections in the murkier fringes of the City. He texted Charmian Locke, a school friend from many years ago who he had heard was currently working at one of the larger merchant banks, and arranged a clandestine meeting for the following evening. Both would probably be pretty pissed by then, Lucien thought, but he prided himself on being able to hold his drink. He would remember everything that was said.
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