With a forced laugh, Radleigh clapped his hands together. The two men broke into a trot. “Ah, my good men! Do help this young lady across the road. Indeed, do take her beyond Trafalgar Square.” He fished out a bundle of notes and began counting them for the appropriate fee. The larger of the two men leaned forward to show more of his hump. Judging from his the tatters of his suit, he’d once been fat. His fall from whatever eminence he’d enjoyed before The Break hadn’t been kind. Upstairs in the club, Radleigh had said this was a world with many more losers than winners. Here was another of the losers. The humpy man made an obsequious bow.
Radleigh’s telephone broke suddenly into the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He peered at the display and gritted his teeth. Wapping went into a smirk of vindication. “I told you the Boss would be angry. You’ll be for it now.” He looked significantly at the car. He shook his head. The driver would be able to hear any conversation. A few seconds of faint but angry buzzing, and Radleigh was muttering away under cover of the club entrance. The humpy man coughed politely and bowed low to Jennifer. The other man looked steadily at his bare feet.
Wapping ended the stillness with a predatory laugh. He stepped forward and took hold of the humpy man’s hair. “Don’t I know you?” He pulled the man’s face up and looked at it in the orange sunlight. “Of course I know you. I know you both. Fancy seeing you still alive—and here, of all places!” He laughed, and, with a sideways glance at Jennifer, spread his arms wide. Avoiding his face, she noticed what looked like a silver spot on the inside of his lower left forearm. It was about the size of one of the redundant fivepenny coins. Or it might have been a button that had come loose from somewhere in his clothing, and was stuck to his greasy skin. But she looked harder. Wasn’t it something underneath his skin? What she’d assumed was a reflection of the sunlight seemed instead to be a bright, internal glow. She couldn’t tell. It showed only briefly, until he realised it was showing, and pulled his sleeve back into place. The two sweepers looked at each other, before bowing low again.
But Wapping wasn’t finished. “Look at this, you little slag.” He pushed against the humpy man, forcing him to stand upright. “Look how we’ve made jobs for everyone. Even lobbyists and general time wasters now get the chance to do honest work.” He laughed louder, and, perhaps still worried about his silver spot, pulled the sleeves of his jacket over frayed and dirty shirt cuffs. He jabbed the humpy man in the chest. His colleague drew his lips open in a smile that revealed a line of broken teeth. Both looked at Radleigh, who was absorbed in a quiet though detailed conversation. Wapping put a clammy hand on Jennifer’s face and pulled it round for a better view. “Look how grand I am!” his own pale, unshaven face almost screamed at her. He stood back and looked again at her thighs, and then up a few inches. His lips quivered, and he turned again to the sweepers.
“I suppose you’ve finally shut up about ‘market-based solution,’” he jeered at the humpy man. “You can be sure I never believed in them—no, not when Madsen himself paid my salary.” He bared his teeth and struck a pose on the kerb. “Free trade, low taxes, civil liberties—how you people wittered on, when you were still let inside that club! Well, it’s all in the past now, isn’t it? The best you can say is that there was a use for the lard you piled up in your freezer against the collapse.”
He looked at Jennifer again, to see if she was paying attention. “You know what Abigail tells me? She says everything you people ever believed in boiled down to selfish atomism. Self, self, self—that’s all it ever was.” There was a cry of pain from one of the geriatrics, and the splash of an emptied chamber pot. A couple of nuns hurried about the business of cleaning, while another led everyone in a rising sound of prayer.
Ignoring this, Wapping leaned towards Jennifer, and painted onto his face a smile greasier than an RTProt sausage. “I’m Abigail Hooper’s secretary.” He found a card to give her. “Come and see me at the Home Office when you’re free.” What he might have said next was silenced by the siren that heralded the late afternoon power cut. While he moved back to avoid fouling his shoes in a patch of urine that had spread over the pavement from another overflowing chamber pot, she allowed herself a look at the card. Frank Wapping, it said—Private and Personal Secretary to Abigail Hooper. It had a mobile telephone number. Though this was crossed out in pencil, it also had an e-mail address.
Jennifer knew that Radleigh was well-connected. She’d never thought he knew the Home Secretary, the most ferocious and energetic mover in the National Government. She it was who’d restored order after the first few weeks of spreading chaos that had followed The Break. She it was who’d turned what armed forces weren’t committed to the Azerbaijani War on the demonstrators, and who remained a nightly and feared presence on the television news. She looked into Wapping’s grinning face. “I’m a man who’s going places,” he said. “Come with me if you want to see them.”
“I think that will do, Wapping,” Radleigh’s telephone call was ended. With an impatient wave, he directed the sweepers about their business. He watched as, with more force than skill, they cleared a path across the road. For some reason, the stump of the nearest sawn-off street lamp had still been clicking softly. It went off with the expiry of the five minute power cut warning. He looked at his watch. “Yes, I know she’s waiting!” he snapped at Wapping, whose face was turning nasty with impatience. He smiled again, and took Jennifer by the arm, and escorted her across the glistening asphalt.
“One final word, my dearest young woman,” he breathed in her ear as they embraced on the other side of the road. “You’re wearing the wrong shade of lipstick for your hat. Oh—and I do suggest that mascara shouldn’t be applied with a paintbrush.” He nodded at the humpy man, before making for the car.
Jennifer watched it start again and, with hardly a sound, move with slow grace towards the junction with Whitehall. Before she could move, she felt a tight grip on each of her arms. “If you know what’s good for you,” one of the men whispered, “you won’t make any fuss.”
Chapter Twelve
Tarquin twisted round from his place beside the driver and arranged his face into one of his deader smiles. “Everything is under control,” he said. Sat bolt upright, Simeon might as well not have heard the assurance. Michael nodded vaguely and went back to looking through the tinted rear window. The glass muted the defiant chanting of the crowd that pressed so closely about the vehicle that the driver had stopped. But he looked at the brown, bearded faces, most of them shining with an exaltation he’d seen more often then he wanted. Generally, these people wore the same close-fitting clothes as everyone else in this country. Enough of them, however, wore the loose robes of their own civilisation. He looked up at the banners that fluttered above the crowd. None of them seemed to be in Arabic, though the script was plainly related to Arabic. But, as the crowd thinned for a moment, he caught sight of a larger banner, covered in English. If the long inscription itself made no sense to him, it seemed to contain transliterations of the Arabic words for holy war and Empire of the Faith.