"Think that nice Mr Major's going to get away with the Maastricht vote?" Frank asks, his big ruddy face appearing round the side of my screen like the moon from behind a hill.
"Easily," I tell him. "His backbenchers are a bunch of spineless brown-noses and, even if there was any danger, those asshole Lib-Dems'll save the Tories" skins as usual."
"Care to make a small wager?" Frank twinkles.
"On the result?"
"On the size of Uncle John's majority."
"Twenty says the margin's into double figures."
Frank thinks about this. He nods. "You're on."
I've been back on naval stuff again today, interviewing people at Rosyth dockyard, which may or may not be closed soon, putting another six thousand on the local dole queue. A lot depends on whether they get the contract to service the Trident subs or not.
I'm a few hundred words into the story when the phone goes.
"Hello. Cameron Colley."
"Cameron, oh Cameron, oh thank goodness you're there. I was sure I'd got the time difference wrong again; convinced. I really was. Cameron, it's ridiculous; I mean it really is. I'm just at my wits" end, I really am. I just can't talk to him. He's impossible. I don't know why I married him, I really don't. He's mad. I mean literally mad. I wouldn't mind so much but I think he's driving me mad, too. I wish you'd talk to him; I wish you'd say something, I really do. I mean I'm sure he won't listen to you either but, but, but… well, at least he might listen to you."
"Hello, Mum," I say wearily, and reach for my jacket pocket where the cigarette packet ought to be.
"Cameron, what am I to do? Just tell me that. Just tell me what on earth anybody's supposed to do with such an impossible man. I swear he's getting worse, he really is. I wish it was just my imagination but it isn't, I swear it isn't. He's getting worse, he really is. It's not me. It's him; I mean, my friends agree. He'll be the —»
"What's the problem, Mum?" I lift a pencil from the desk and start gnawing the end.
"My stupid husband! Haven't you been listening?"
"Yes, but what —?"
"He wants to buy a farm! A farm! At his age!"
"What, is it a sheep farm?" I ask, because she's phoning from New Zealand and I understand they aren't short of a sheep or two out there.
"No! It's for… angoras. Angora… goats or rabbits or whatever it is they get the stuff from. Cameron, he's just getting impossible. I know he's not actually your father but you seem to get on all right and I think he listens to you. Look, sweetheart, could you come out and try and talk some sense into him, because —?"
"Come out there? Mum, for goodness" sake, it's —»
"Cameron! He's driving me up the wall!"
"Look, Mum, just calm down…"
And so begins another of my mother's marathon phone calls in which she complains at length, depth and breadth about some potential new business venture of my stepfather's she is certain is about to ruin them both. My stepfather Bill is a rotundly fit, quietly amusing Wellingtonian who retired from the used-car business; he met my mother on a Caribbean cruise three years ago and she moved out to New Zealand a year later. They live perfectly well off pensions and investments but Bill does occasionally express a hankering for getting involved in a business again. These schemes never come to anything, and usually turn out not even to be serious commercial propositions in the first place; as a rule Bill just says something quite innocent like "Oh look, you can pick up a fast-food franchise in Auckland for fifty thousand," and my mother instantly assumes he plans to do just that and then lose the lot.
She gibbers on while I browse the wires on the terminal, idly scrolling Reuters and PA to check on what's happening. This is pretty much an instinctive journo-reaction, and fully compatible with the equally programmed dutiful-son «hmms» and «mmms» I'm feeding my mum at intervals during her monologue.
I get her off the phone eventually, reassuring her that Bill is not about to sink all their savings into some decrepit hill farm and that — as ever — the answer is to talk to him about it. I promise to come and visit next year, probably. It takes a few attempts to say goodbye — Mother is one of those people who'll wish you well, say goodbye, thank you for calling or for being there when she called, say goodbye again and then suddenly tear into some whole new conversational seam — but I get the final «Goodbye» in at last and connect handset with desk unit without actually cutting her off. I sit back.
"Take it that was the mater, was it?" Frank calls jovially from the far side of my screen.
Before I can reply, the phone rings again. I jump, grabbing the device and dreading it being her again, remembering something she forgot to say.
"Yes?" I squeak.
"Hello, civilisation calling," says a slightly plummy English voice.
"What?"
"Cameron, it's Neil. You wanted to talk."
"Oh, Neil, hi." Neil is an ex-colleague who went to London to work in Fleet Street when Fleet Street wasn't full of Japanese banks. His father served in the Intelligence Corps during the Korean War, where he met Sir Andrew (Our Ed and recovering coronary patient). Neil is the coolest fogy I know; smokes opium and believes utterly in the Royal Family, despises socialism and Thatcher almost equally and votes Liberal because the family always has since Liberals were called Whigs. Shoots stags and hooks salmon. Hurtles down the Cresta Run each year. Drives a Bentley S2. They could have invented the word «urbane» just for him. These days he freelances in Intelligence matters, occasionally for the broadsheets though mostly for corporate clients. "How are you?" I say, frowning towards my screen. Just then, however, Frank stands up and saunters off, Biro between his teeth.
"Well, and busy," Neil drawls. "What can I do for you?"
"You can tell me what you found out about those five guys who popped their clogs in such suspicious circumstances between "86 and "88. You know; the guys who all have connections with Sellascale or Winfield or Dun-Nukin" or whatever they're calling it these days."
There is a pause. "Oh," Neil says, and I can hear him lighting a cigarette. My mouth waters. You lucky bastard. "That old thing."
"Yeah," I say, putting my feet up on the desk. "That old thing that reads like a spy novel and nobody ever came up with a decent explanation for."
"No case to answer, boy wonder," he sighs. "An unfortunate sequence of coincidences."
"Sounds like a Long Involved Explanation. No?"
Neil laughs, recalling our acronymic private code from the year we worked together. "No; it's the Totally Reliable Utterly Trustworthy… damn, what was the last word?"
"Hint," I tell him, grinning. "We never did come up with a better alternative."
"Indeed. Well, that's what it is; a Fucking Actualite, Cameron, Tovarisch."
"You serious?" I say, trying not to laugh. "All these guys who just happened to be connected with BNFL or GCHQ or Military Intelligence and just happened to croak violently within twenty months of each other? I mean, really?"
"Cameron, I do realise your Menshevik soul cries out for there to be a perfectly irrational fascist conspiracy behind all this, but the boring truth is that there isn't. Or, if there is, it's far, far too well run for it to be the work of any intelligence service I've ever encountered. There's never been any reliable hint it was anybody on our side; Mossad — arguably the only people capable of carrying out such a consistently successful campaign without leaving the scene scattered with their agency-issue trench-coats sporting name, rank and serial number sewn into the collars — had no discernible motive, and we can be even more sure of our friends in Moscow given that, since the unfortunate demise of the Workers" State, ex-KGB bods have been positively falling over each other in the rush to beat the breast and confess their past sins, and not one of them has even mentioned those five deceased sons of Cumbria and environs."
"Six, if you count the doc who did the PMs on the three Cumbrian stiffs."
Neil sighs. "Even so."
I'm thinking. This could be a fairly important decision I'm making here. Do I tell Neil about Mr Archer and Daniel Smout? Or do I keep quiet about it? Christ, this story could just be the biggest fucking thing since Watergate; a plot — if I'm reading the hints right — involving the West, or just Her Majesty's Government, or at the very least a bunch of people who were in positions to pull it off, to arm our once-staunch-ally-against-the-fiendish-Mullahs — now number-one hate figure — Saddam Hussein with nukes, back when the Iran-Iraq war wasn't all going his way.
"You know," Neil sighs again, "I have the most terrible feeling I'm going to regret asking this question, but what leads you to make this enquiry, unless it's the simple explanation that news of these five sad deaths has only just arrived in Caledonia?"
"Well," I say, playing with the telephone cord.
"What?" Neil says, in that why-are-you-wasting-my-valuable-time? voice.
"I've had a call from somebody who claims to know about this who's saying that there's another couple of names involved."
"And who would they be?"
"I've only got one of the names so far." I take a deep breath. I'll do a Mr Archer; I'll give him it a bit at a time. "Smout," I tell Neil. "Daniel Smout. Our man in Baghdad."
Neil is silent for a few seconds. Then I hear him exhale. "Smout." A pause. "I see." Another pause. "So," he says, slowly and thoughtfully, "if Iraq was involved, it's not impossible Mossad would take an interest. Though of course one of our serial self-terminators was himself of the Semitic persuasion…"
"So was Vanunu."
"Indeed. Hmm. Interesting. You do realise, though, that your informant is probably a crank."
"Probably."
"Have they been reliable before?"
"No; new source, as far as I can tell. And all they've come up with is a sequence of names. So it could easily be a crank. Very easily. In fact, probably. I mean, wouldn't you say? Don't you think it probably is?" I'm gibbering. I suddenly feel rather stupid and a little nervous.
"You said there was a sixth name," Neil says calmly. "Any hints there?"
"Well, I've got what my guy says is a code-name for him."
"And that is?" Neil says patiently.
"Well, ah…"
"Cameron. I swear I shan't try to scoop you, if that's what you're worried about."
"Of course not," I say. "I know that. It's just that… it could be nothing."
"Very possibly, but —»
"Look, Neil, I'd like to talk to somebody."
"How do you mean?"
"Somebody in the business; you know."
""Somebody in the business"," Neil says evenly.
Christ, I wish I had a cigarette. "Yeah," I say. "Somebody in the business; somebody in the service. Somebody who'll look me in the eye and tell me MI6 or whoever had got nothing to do with all this; somebody I can give this to."
"Hmm."
I let him think for a bit. Eventually, Neil says, "Well, there are always people one can talk to, certainly. Look, I'll suggest this to some contacts I have. See what their reaction is. But I know that, if I do suggest it, before they decide what to do they'll want to know who it is they're dealing with; they'll want to know your name."
"I thought they might. That's okay; you can tell them."
"Right you are, then. I'll report back what the reaction is, fair enough?"
"Fair enough."
"Good. To tell the truth, I'll be fairly interested in seeing it myself. Assuming this isn't a crank we're dealing with."
"Okay," I say, looking over my screen and trying to peer over my bookcase, wondering who I can scrounge a fag off. "Well, that's good of you, Neil. I appreciate this."
"Not at all. Now, when are you next coming up to town, or do you Picts have to apply for a travel warrant or something?"