Then he spotted Dillon walking up the steps to the hotel with two fit-looking young men. Probably his taste, thought Hannah savagely, bloody Foreign Office. He was not in a good mood.
Across the square, a flock of Mr. Quince’s parishioners—the men in neat dark suits, the women brightly caparisoned like birds of brilliant plumage—were streaming out of the church at the end of morning service, prayer books in white-gloved hands, wax fruit bobbing and nodding on straw hats. It was an (almost) normal Sunday morning on Sunshine Island.
In the home counties of England, things were not quite so peaceful. At Chequers, the country residence of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, set amid twelve hundred rolling acres of Buckinghamshire, Mrs. Thatcher had been up early as usual and had plowed through four red dispatch boxes of state papers before joining Denis Thatcher for breakfast before a cheery log fire.
As she finished, there was a tap on the door, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, entered. He held the Sunday Express in his hand.
“Something I thought you might like to see, Prime Minister.”
“So who’s having a go at me now?” inquired the PM brightly.
“No,” said the beetle-browed Yorkshireman. “It’s about the Caribbean.”
She read the large centerfold spread, and her brow furrowed. The pictures were there: of Marcus Johnson on the hustings in Port Plaisance, and again, a few years earlier, seen through a gap in a pair of curtains. There were photos of his eight bodyguards, all taken around Parliament Square on Friday, and matching pictures taken from Kingston Police files. Lengthy statements from “senior DEA sources in the Caribbean” and from Commissioner Foster of the Kingston Police occupied much of the accompanying text.
“But this is dreadful!” said the Prime Minister. “I must speak to Douglas.”
She went straight to her private office and rang Douglas.
Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Douglas Hurd, was with his family at his official country residence—another mansion, called Chevening, set in the county of Kent. He had perused the Sunday Times, Observer, and Sunday Telegraph, but he had not yet reached the Sunday Express.
“No, Margaret, I haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “But I have it within arm’s reach.”
“I’ll hold on,” said the PM.
The Foreign Secretary, a former novelist of some note, knew a good newspaper story when he saw one. This one seemed to be extremely well sourced.
“Yes, I agree. It’s disgraceful, if it’s true. ... Yes, yes, Margaret, I’ll get onto it in the morning and have the Caribbean desk check it out.”
But civil servants are human beings too—a sentiment not often echoed by the general public—and they have wives, children, and homes. With six days to go to Christmas, Parliament was in recess and even the ministries were thinly staffed. Still, there had to be someone on duty the next morning, Monday, and the matter of a new Governor could be addressed then.
Mrs. Thatcher and her family went to Sunday-morning service at Ellesborough and returned just after twelve. At one they sat down for lunch with a few friends. These included Bernard Ingham.
It was her political adviser Charles Powell who caught the BSB program Countdown at twelve o’clock. He liked Countdown. It carried some good foreign news now and again, and as an ex-diplomat that was his specialty. When he saw the program’s headlines and a reference to a later report on a scandal in the Caribbean, he pressed the “record” button on the VCR machine beneath the TV.
At two, Mrs. Thatcher was up again—she never saw much point in spending a long time over food; it wasted part of a busy day—and as she left the dining room a hovering Charles Powell intercepted her. In her study he put the tape into her VCR and ran it. She watched in silence. Then she rang Chevening again.
Mr. Hurd, a devoted family man, had taken his small son and daughter for a brisk walk across the fields. He had just returned, hungry for his roast beef, when Mrs. Thatcher’s second call came through.
“No, I missed that too, Margaret,” he said.
“I have a tape,” said the Prime Minister. “It is quite appalling. I’ll send it straight to you. Please screen it when it arrives and call me back.”
A dispatch rider roared through the gloom of a dismal December afternoon, skirted London via the M25 motorway, and was at Chevening by half-past four.
The Foreign Secretary called Chequers at five-fifteen and was put straight through. “I agree, Margaret, quite appalling,” said Douglas Hurd.
“I suggest we need a new Governor out there,” said the PM, “not in the new year, but now. We must show we are active, Douglas. You know who else will have seen these stories?”
The Foreign Secretary was well aware that Her Majesty was with her family at Sandringham but not cut off from world events. She was an avid newspaper reader, and she watched current affairs issues on television.
“I’ll get on to it immediately,” he said.
He did. The Permanent Under-Secretary was jerked out of his armchair in Sussex and began phoning around. At eight that evening the choice had fallen on Sir Crispian Rattray, a retired diplomat and former High Commissioner in Barbados, who was willing to go.
He agreed to report to the Foreign Office in the morning for formal appointment and a thorough briefing. He would fly on the late-morning plane from Heathrow, landing at Nassau on Monday afternoon. He would consult further with the High Commission there, spend the night, and arrive on Sunshine by chartered airplane on Tuesday morning to take the reins in hand.
“It shouldn’t take long, my dear,” he told Lady Rattray as he packed. “Mucks up the pheasant shooting, but there we are. Seems I’ll have to withdraw the candidacy of these two rascals and see the elections through with two new candidates. Then they’ll grant independence, I’ll hoist the old flag down, London will send in a High Commissioner, the islanders will run their own affairs, and I can come home. Month or two, shouldn’t doubt. Pity about the pheasants.”
* * *
At nine o’clock on Sunday morning on Sunshine, McCready found Hannah having breakfast on the terrace at the hotel.
“Would you mind awfully if I used the new phone at Government House to call London?” he asked. “I ought to talk to my people about going back home.”
“Be my guest,” said Hannah. He looked tired and unshaved, as someone who had been up half the night.
At half-past nine, island time, McCready put his call through to Denis Gaunt. What his deputy told him about the Sunday Express and the Countdown program confirmed to McCready that what he had hoped would happen had indeed happened.
Since the small hours of the morning, a variety of news editors in London had been trying to call their correspondents in Port Plaisance with news of what the Sunday Express was carrying in its centerfold page spread and to ask for an urgent follow-up story. After lunch, London time, the calls redoubled—they had seen the Countdown story as well. None of the calls had come through.
McCready had briefed the switchboard operator at the Quarter Deck that all the gentlemen of the press were extremely tired and were not to be disturbed under any circumstances. He had himself been elected to take all their calls for them, and he would pass them on. A hundred-dollar bill had sealed the compact. The switchboard operator duly told every London caller that his party was “out” but that the message would reach him immediately. The messages were duly passed to McCready, who duly ignored them. The moment for further press coverage had not yet come.