If Mark felt any shock or alarm at what he saw in the study, there was again no trace of it in his eyes. He watched closely, making sure that he had not misread the image. But it was plain enough. A man in a tuxedo was crouched over his desk. Somehow he had managed to pick the lock, and a set of papers had been laid out on the desk top. The man had a small camcorder and was slowly tracking along the desk, recording the contents of each document.
When the man had finished, he put the papers back in the desk and slipped the miniature camera down the leg of his trousers. He looked around furtively, and looked up, although he failed to see the camera hidden behind a wall-lamp which was following his every movement. It was at this point that Mark recognized him. It was Packard.
Mark left the monitoring room and took a lift down to the ground floor, calmly sifting this new information in his mind. He was angry, but not surprised. He’d been expecting something like this to happen: you always expected something like this to happen. And it made sense, in a way, because Mark now remembered a small detaiclass="underline" Packard had been carrying a video camera the very first time they met.
1983–1990
Graham had left college with his ideals intact, but seven years later his student radicalism was, to all appearances, a thing of the past: he now occupied a managerial position with Midland Ironmasters, who supplied precision machine tools for the international market and were based just outside Birmingham. He had a house, a wife and a company car, spent a good part of the year travelling abroad at his employers’ expense and was on first-name terms with a handful of Britain’s most influential businessmen and entrepreneurs. His career gave every sign of being well thought out and perfectly on course; but his fellow board members would have been shocked if they had known its secret goal.
He had come to Birmingham soon after graduating, to take up a job programming films for a small arts cinema which went bankrupt within weeks of his arrival, halfway through a John Cassavetes season. Graham signed on the dole and didn’t work again for several months, when one of his new flatmates got married and asked if he would make a video of the wedding. The result was considered so professional that Graham decided to set himself up in business on one of Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance schemes, confining himself to weddings at first and then branching out into promotional videos for local businesses. It was a far cry from his own self-image as subversive visionary, but the money was good and in the meantime he salved his conscience by doing unpaid work for the Labour Party and for various co-ops, unions and women’s groups in the area. In the evenings he pored over copies of Screen, Tribune, Sight and Sound and the Morning Star, and dreamed of the documentary he would one day make: a feature-length masterpiece using all of the cinema’s most dazzling resources, which would hold the worldwide capitalist conspiracy up to merciless, irresistible scrutiny. He dreamed, in particular, of making a film about the arms market, a subject which called for the politics of a Ken Loach or a Frederick Wiseman, combined with the outrageous plot and seductive glamour of a James Bond movie.
It seemed a long way off: but Graham was to find his opening sooner than he imagined, and through an unexpected quarter. Packard Promos — as the one-man company now styled itself — was approached by Midland Ironmasters in the spring of 1986. It was the most important contract Graham had yet been offered: they wanted a thirty-minute video which would showcase every stage of their production process. The budget was comparatively big and he was shooting on to high resolution tape with stereo sound. Graham followed his brief carefully, and when he presented a rough cut of the film to the firm’s directors it was received with great excitement. There followed an animated discussion during which he was quizzed relentlessly for ideas about packaging and distributing the finished product: it quickly became obvious that he was dealing with novices, who seemed inordinately impressed by his routine proposals. The next day the managing director, a Mr Riley, invited him into his office and offered him a job as Head of Marketing. Graham had no intention of moving into this area and politely turned the offer down.
Two days later something happened to change his mind. In preparation for the final edit he was making some establishing shots of the factory floor, when Mr Riley appeared, accompanied by a neat, ratty-looking man who seemed to be taking a guided tour of some of the latest machinery. When they spotted Graham and his camera, they approached and Mr Riley asked him if he would stop filming for a few minutes: clearly at the personal instigation of his guest. Now, at close quarters, Graham recognized him, even though it was some years since he had seen his picture, in a magazine article about illegal arms sales to South Africa.
‘No problem,’ he said, clipping the lens cap on to his camera. Then he held out his hand. ‘Graham Packard, Packard Promos.’
The stranger took his hand and shook it reluctantly. ‘Mark Winshaw. Vanguard Import and Export.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ He turned to Mr Riley. ‘A new contract in the offing?’ he asked, blandly.
Mr Riley puffed out his chest and said, with a mixture of pride and obsequiousness: ‘The start of a long and fruitful relationship, I hope.’
At that moment Graham took several decisions very quickly. If Ironmasters were doing business with Mark Winshaw this could only mean that they were going to let their machines, whether knowingly or not, be used for munitions production, probably in Iraq which was militarizing itself more rapidly than any other Middle Eastern country. From Mr Riley’s remark it sounded like a big, long-term contract. If he took a job with this company, he might be in a position to follow the progress of the deal, perhaps even to start building up contacts: in short, to worm his way inside the very network which he wanted to make the subject of his film, and which until now had seemed so hopelessly inaccessible.
And so before going home that evening he asked to see Mr Riley, and much to his surprise and delight told him that he had reconsidered his offer and wanted to accept the marketing position. And over the next two years he would prove himself such an enthusiastic member of the team that promotion and extra responsibilities came swiftly, until he had moved from Marketing into Planning, and moved from Planning into Expansion, and in 1989 (not long after his wedding) reached the apogee of his career with Ironmasters when he was invited to represent the firm at the First Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production which opened on Saddam Hussein’s birthday in April of that year.
Meanwhile, as soon as Mr Riley and Mark Winshaw had left the shop floor, he took his camera and hurried upstairs to the boardroom, which commanded a good view of the car park and forecourt. Luckily it was empty. He knelt out of sight and, with only his lens peering over the window-sill, zoomed in on the two men, getting a good shot of them chatting and shaking hands next to Mark’s red BMW.
Work on the masterpiece had already begun.
1990
‘The base at Qalat Saleh,’ said Graham, ‘contained twelve reinforced concrete underground aircraft hangars large enough to house two dozen planes, which would take off from an underground ramp, with their brakes on and afterburners lit.’
Listening to his own voice on the headphones, he found it flat and less than compelling. But this was only a test commentary, to help him synchronize the words and the images. When the film was finished, he would hire an actor, someone known for his leftwing sympathies, and whose voice would carry immediate authority. Alan Rickman, perhaps, or Antony Sher. Of course, this would only happen if he managed to get some real money put behind the project, but he was starting to feel quite optimistic on that front. Preliminary discussions with Alan Beamish, head of current affairs at one of the largest ITV companies, had been very encouraging: as long as he still had a job, Beamish had said, he would do everything in his power to see that the film was supported.