The second item on today’s agenda was ‘the situation in the Mediterranean and the likely ongoing response to it by the USA’.
James Callaghan cleared his throat.
“Why wait over a year for a General Election?” He asked. “If you stood now you’d wipe out my Party as a political force overnight, Prime Minister,” he observed dryly.
“Even if that was true, Jim,” she replied, a little surprised that she wasn’t having to fend off a dozen assailants at once. She’d contemplated her strategy for every contingency except the one she was actually facing. “I don’t believe there has ever been one example in the history of the World when democracy was best served by a single, dominant party or faction. Look at what was achieved in both the First and Second Wars by coalitions of the willing and the like-minded. Look what we achieved together under Ted Heath’s leadership in the darkest days of last year. Besides, I suspect I have at least as many detractors as supporters in the country. Gentlemen,” she swung around to make eye contacts up and down the table, “I will never be a dictator. Never, ever. What we might achieve together dwarfs anything any of us could conceivably achieve alone. At some stage this spring I will look to stand for a vacant Parliamentary constituency, as I expect those colleagues around the table whose old constituencies no longer exist to seek their own seats. Without democratic legitimacy we can achieve nothing in the long term.”
James Callaghan looked to his fellow Labour Party members; Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crossland and Christopher Mayhew. Each man nodded wordlessly.
“The Labour Party endorses the Prime Minister’s proposals for constitutional renewal,” the Deputy Prime Minister declared. With a sigh he added: “Without reservation.”
The Prime Minister tried hard not to give her deputy a suspicious look. She had been brought up to believe that if a thing was too good to be true, it probably was too good to be true.
“Forgive me, Prime Minister,” the Foreign Secretary interjected. “Much as I subscribe to democracy and all that,” he grimaced, “I’m not convinced that running for Parliament is my, er, cup of tea.”
Margaret Thatcher morphed into the Angry Widow for a split second.
She didn’t have to say a word.
“Obviously,” Tom Harding-Grayson muttered, “if one must, one must.”
“We’ll sort something out for you,” Iain Macleod, the Minister of Information in the UAUK but still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, assured the man who until a few weeks ago had been the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly stand as a Tory, Iain.”
James Callaghan guffawed at this development.
“Then what will you stand as, Sir Thomas?”
The Foreign Secretary blanched at the Deputy Prime Minister’s sardonic employment of his formal title.
“Actually, I’ve always been a bit of a closet socialist, Jim.”
Margaret Thatcher’s eyes became blue saucers.
Sir Henry Tomlinson coughed.
“Sir Thomas kept very bad company when he was at Cambridge,” he observed helpfully.
The Angry Widow concluded that the ‘boys’ had had their fun.
She glanced to Sir David Luce.
“First Sea Lord, would you brief the Cabinet on the latest intelligence analysis of the situation in the Mediterranean please?”
This had an instantly sobering effect on the meeting.
Chapter 19
Rosa Calleja was in a small airy room at the end of the first floor white-washed ward. Bright afternoon sunshine poured in through high windows. The young woman was propped up in the big bed, looking small and understandably sorry for herself. Her right eye and the top half of her head was swathed in a thick matrix of gauze and muslin bandaging, her right foot and lower leg up to the knee, resting on a pillow was encased in a thick plaster cast and her left arm was in a sling, her hand held high to her throat. There were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a small bedside table on which there was a jug of water and single tea cup. To her visitors’ surprise the patient wasn’t wearing a hospital gown but an oversized white shirt. A sheet covered her lower body — apart from her broken lower right leg — ensuring her modesty.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had wanted to ‘interview’ the woman immediately he had discovered what had happened to Lieutenant James Siddall; but he’d burned too many bridges half-killing that idiot Denzil Williams and besides, Clara had talked him out of ‘turning up at the hospital and making a scene’.
She hadn’t mixed her language: ‘They already think you made up the stuff you told them about Red Dawn. We could both end up in prison if we are not very, very careful!’
The former KGB man had conceded that she might have a point and it wasn’t as if the last couple of days had been entirely unfruitful. Retracing his steps from the last time he was on Malta he’d confirmed that much to his dissatisfaction that somebody — fairly recently — had clumsily manufactured the disappearance of the original surviving Red Dawn cell that he had contacted in November. Manufactured as in some imbecile had persuaded them to attempt to run to ground, which they had done with all the aplomb of headless chickens. He hated amateurs. The three missing members of that cell, two men and a woman, might already be dead, like Samuel Calleja. Although that made more sense than their still being active on the archipelago, unfortunately he couldn’t count on it. Samuel Calleja had thought he was running a tight ship but he was a disturbed man whose motives were liable to shift with his moods. Another amateur; albeit a relatively gifted one with ice water running through his veins.
Clara Pullman insisted on preceding her partner into Rosa Calleja’s room.
Clara was a wonder to Arkady Rykov.
A walking, talking living wonder. That their paths had happened to cross in such an unlikely place — Incirlik Air Force Base near Adana in Turkey — within days of the October War had been so serendipitous that sometimes he was tempted to consider the possibility of their being some omnipotent guiding hand, godlike, in the Universe. However, every time he started thinking that way he chided himself for getting sentimental in his old age. Lucifer he could credit, a merciful God, never. In retrospect, he ought to have established Clara’s credentials before now — long before now — but it hadn’t seemed to matter until now. It was always a mistake to become personally, or as weak-minded people called it; emotionally involved with somebody who knew too much about one.
Undeniably, Clara had finessed his work on Malta. She was right about the British not trusting him. Worse than not really trusting him, they didn’t actually like him and that was a problem. The death of Lieutenant Siddall, and Samuel Calleja’s disappearance had become inextricably linked to the sabotage of HMS Torquay and the people at the top — problematically, the man at the very top, Admiral Christopher — was looking to him to give him answers. Until things had taken such an unwelcome turn he’d been asking himself if he still needed Clara. As things had turned out it seemed that for the foreseeable future, he needed her quite badly.
It was Clara’s idea that they talk themselves into the hospital pretending to be friends of the Calleja family. It helped that she had trained as a nurse in her late teens and had a knack of instantly forming a rapport with practically everybody they encountered. Clara’s scheme had worked perfectly right up until the moment they entered Rosa Calleja’s room.