To Play the King

'That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.' Mycroft's hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away. 'What's his name?' 'Kenny.' 'He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.'

The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.

'Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,' Mycroft explained.

'Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.'

'I'm very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.'

The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land. 'It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.' 'Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.' 'Meaning?' 'I'm not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.' 'By whom?'

'By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.' 'It would require someone who could sink very low.' 'The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of you, have no doubts. There will be more.' 'Then I hope I can find your courage.'

'You already have. All you need is the courage to face up to yourself, that's what you said. To play the man – your own words. Facing up to others holds fewer torments, believe me. But I think you already know that.'

'I shall need your advice, David, more than ever if, as you say, it is all to get worse.'

Slowly at first, then with gathering force, drops of cold-hardened rain began to fall across the two lonely figures. Darkness was encroaching fast.

'Then the best advice I have for you, Sir, is for us to get off this bloody moor before we both freeze to death and save Francis Urquhart the bother.'

February: The Second Week

It took less than a second for the phone to be answered in the foreign-currency dealing room at one of the City's leading finance houses which squatted alongside the Thames, in a site near to where the Great Fire that had destroyed half of London more than three centuries earlier had started. It wouldn't take another fire to ruin the City again, they joked, just another Japanese takeover.

The phones never took long to be answered. The difference between disaster and success could often be measured in seconds, and the chief currency dealer couldn't afford to be caught napping by either the markets or any of the seventeen other currency dealers, all of whom envied his job and the commissions that went with it. He dragged his thoughts away from the ruinously fashionable forty-foot cruiser he had just agreed to purchase to concentrate on the voice at the end of the phone. It was not, however, a deal, but an enquiry from one of his many press contacts. 'Heard any rumours about some scandal at the Palace, Jim?' 'What rumours?'

'Oh, nothing very specific. Simply a buzz that there's something brewing which is just about to blow the Royal Yacht out of the water.' He didn't see the dealer wince. 'My editor's asking us all to check around, bit of a dragnet, really. But something's smelling pretty ripe.'

The dealer's eyes flashed up to his screen yet again, checking the mixture of red, black and yellow figures. Sterling seemed to be fine, all the attention today was on the rouble following news of a fresh outbreak of food riots in Moscow. A cripplingly severe winter seemed to have frozen both the capacity of its leaders and the nerve of its foreign exchanges. The dealer rubbed his eyes to make sure; his eyes ached from the constant strain, yet he didn't dare wear his prescription glasses in the office. His position was all about maintaining confidence and at thirty-seven he couldn't afford the slightest sign of age or physical decline; there were too many waiting eagerly to push him off his seat. 'Heard nothing this end, Pete. There's no activity in the markets.'

'I can tell you, the flies are definitely beginning to buzz at this end.'

'Maybe it's just another load of Royal bullshit being spread about the Royal parks.'

'Yeah, maybe,' responded the journalist, sounding unconvinced. 'Let me know if you hear anything, will you?'

The dealer punched the button to disconnect the line and returned to massaging his eyeballs while trying to figure out how he was going to stretch his already crippling mortgage to cover his latest material indulgence. He was dreaming of naked girls covered in smiles and coconut oil and laid out across glass-fibre reinforced with kevlar when the phone rang again. It was a client who had heard similar rumours and who wanted to know whether to make a quick switch into dollars or yen. More flies. And as the dealer looked once again at the screen, the sterling figures began to flash red. A fall. Not much of one, only a few pips, but it was another hint. Could he afford to ignore them? Hell, he was getting too old for this, maybe he should pack it all in and spend a year sailing around the Caribbean before getting himself a proper job. But not yet, not before he had made one last big hit, to cover the boat and the bloody mortgage. He tuned in his aching brain to the box that connected him to the brokers and their constant dangling of buy and sell prices, pressing the button which put him through.

'Cable?' he enquired. It was dealers' kvetch for the price of sterling, harking back to the days when the two great financial empires of London and New York were connected only by unquenchable avarice and a submarine cable.

'Twenty, twenty-five. Five by ten,' came the crackling response. Even in this age of space travel they still couldn't fix the lines connecting them with the brokers' rooms less than a sparrow's fart away. Or were his ears going, too? He sighed. In for a penny, in for five million. 'Yours. Five.' The selling had begun.

The door to the editor's office had been slammed shut. It wouldn't make any difference; everybody in the building would hear about it within minutes. The deputy, news and picture editors stood around the chief editor's desk in a formation which gave the impression of Sioux circling a wagon train, but he wasn't giving up without a fight.

'I'm not holding the front page for this. They're disgusting. An invasion of privacy.'

'They're news,' responded his deputy through clenched teeth.

'You know the proprietor's breakfast rule. Nothing on the front page that would offend two old ladies reading the paper over breakfast,' the editor countered.

'That's why there's no one other than old women who read our paper nowadays!'

The editor wanted to shove the words straight back down his pushy deputy's throat, but since they were precisely those he had used in his increasingly frequent rows with the ageing proprietor, he couldn't. He stared once again at the two plate-sized photographs which had already been cropped in red pencil to concentrate the attention away from extraneous features such as the bed, the disarranged pillows and entangled legs, and onto the body and face of the Princess. 'We can't. It's simply obscene.'

Without a word the picture editor leaned across the desk and, with red pencil and ruler, drew two neat lines cutting both photographs just above the nipple. What was left had all been seen before in countless beach photographs of the Princess, but it made no fundamental difference; the expression on her face, the arched back and the tongue in her ear told the whole story. 'What does the Palace have to say?' the editor enquired wearily.