The first of these calls was to Joan. It was two or three years since they had been in touch, and he wasn’t even sure that she would still be living in Sheffield, but she answered on the third ring and there was no mistaking the delight in her voice. Yes, she was still in the same job. No, she didn’t let out rooms to students any more. No, she hadn’t got married or started a family or anything like that. Yes, she could certainly try to contact Michael for him, although she didn’t have a current address. Funnily enough she’d been thinking of phoning Graham in the next couple of weeks, because there was a conference in Birmingham at the end of the month, and she’d wondered if he might be interested in meeting up for a drink or something. For old times’ sake. Graham said yes, of course, why not. For old times’ sake.
The strange thing was, as they both reflected afterwards, that in all of the ‘old times’ for the sake of which they had agreed to meet up, they could not remember a single evening which had ended with them leaning across the table to kiss each other, or lying down on the sofa with their arms around each other and their tongues in each other’s mouths, or falling into bed together and making love as if their lives depended on it. And yet all of these things happened, in sequence, when Joan came down for her visit to Birmingham. And once they had happened, she found herself curiously reluctant to leave and return to her house, and her job, and her solitary life back in Sheffield. And although she did return, after taking a few days’ unpaid leave (quite a bit of it being spent in bed with Graham), one of the first things she did was to put the house up for sale. At the same time she started looking for jobs in the Midlands. It took a while, because jobs were not easy to come by, not even for someone as experienced and well-qualified as Joan, but in the new year she managed to get a position running a women’s refuge in Harborne, and she moved in with Graham, and one day in February they both took time off to visit the local register office, and then suddenly they were married: he who had always believed that he wasn’t the marrying type, and she who had begun to think she had left it too late to find anyone to marry her.
And so Graham’s initial phone call had by no means been wasted, even though he never did manage to get in contact with Michael. He seemed to have gone away for a long holiday: or perhaps he just wasn’t answering the telephone any more.
∗
1981
The wedding of Mark Winshaw to Lady Frances Carfax in the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford, had been an altogether grander affair. Britain may have been in the grip of recession, but it seemed to have had little impact on those select members of the aristocracy and business community who attended the ceremony and afterwards convened at the country seat of the Carfax family for a lavish party which was still going strong (according to at least one of the newspaper reports) at four o’clock the next afternoon.
The party, in fact, lasted longer than the marriage.
Mark and Lady Frances had departed the revels early in the evening and joined a flight to Nice: from there, a taxi took them to Mark’s villa on the Riviera, where they were to begin their honeymoon. They arrived shortly after midnight, and slept in until lunchtime the next day, when Lady Frances borrowed one of Mark’s cars to drive into the nearest village and buy some cigarettes. She had only driven a few hundred yards when there was a huge explosion and the car burst into flames, careering off the road and into the stony mountainside. She was killed instantly.
Mark was devastated by the loss. The car was a 1962 Morgan Plus 8 Drop Head Coupé in midnight blue, one of about three or four left in the world, and it would be impossible to replace. He contacted his cousin Henry, who instructed the intelligence services to find out who was responsible, but didn’t have to wait for the results of their inquiry. Three weeks later an Iraqi diplomat contacted him and arranged a rendezvous in Cavendish Square. From there they drove to a secluded house in the Kent countryside. A pristine, off-white 1938 La Salle convertible sedan was parked in the forecourt.
‘It’s yours,’ said the diplomat.
He explained that a comical misunderstanding had arisen. They were well aware, of course, that Mark did business with the Iranians as well as with themselves: they would have expected nothing less from any serious entrepreneur. However, it had been wrongly suggested by an informer that Mark had also been using his position to trade military secrets. Saddam had been most upset to hear this, and had ordered swift retribution. Now the information was found to have been false: the real culprit had been identified and promptly disposed of. They could only be grateful, he said, that chance had intervened to save the life of an innocent man and a most valued friend of the Iraqi people. They were acutely conscious of the damage done to his property, and hoped that he would accept the gift of this car as a token of their continued affection and esteem.
Mark’s formal expressions of gratitude concealed his genuine annoyance at this incident. Marriage to Lady Frances would have been useful. He had been rather looking forward to the sexual aspect – although, to be honest, in terms of imagination and athleticism she could not really compare with the prostitutes whose services he was usually offered on his trips to Baghdad – but, more importantly, her father had a number of influential contacts in the South American market, which he was anxious to infiltrate. In all probability he would still be able to use them, but it would have been easier if his young and glamorous wife had been there to help.
Above all, Mark found it unacceptable that someone should have been telling lies about him, and he was determined to have his revenge. After several months’ sporadic investigation it emerged that the informer had been a leading Egyptian physicist recently recruited to Iraq’s nuclear programme. Anxious to ingratiate himself with his new employers, he had repeated this piece of idle gossip after overhearing it from a conversation between two colleagues; but he had not bothered to find out whether it was accurate or not. Although the Iraqis were furious to discover that they had been misled, the physicist himself was too valuable to be eliminated, and nothing was ever done about it. Mark, however, had other ideas. He knew that the Israelis would be only too pleased to be presented with an opportunity for thwarting Saddam’s military ambitions, and some discreet words in the ear of a contact at Mossad were enough to seal the luckless Egyptian’s fate. It happened when he was staying in Paris, en route from the experimental research centre at Saclay where Iraqi technicians were routinely trained under a nuclear cooperation programme with France. He retired to his hotel bedroom early and the next morning his crushed and battered body was found at the foot of his bed by a chambermaid. Beating a man to death is a long, noisy and difficult business, and Mark was surprised that they had chosen this method. Even so, he permitted himself a private smile when the news was announced on Israel radio the next evening; and when he heard the reporter add that ‘Iraqi projects to acquire an atomic bomb have been set back by two years’, he smiled again, because his own fortunes, after all, were hardly likely to suffer as a result.
∗
October 1986
‘So tell me about this Hussein character,’ said Henry, as he and Mark sat in a state of post-prandial near-collapse on opposite sides of a blazing log fire in the withdrawing room of the Heartland Club. The family small talk had been disposed of (never a lengthy process with the Winshaws) and they had just lit up two enormous Havana cigars.
‘What do you want to know?’ said Mark.
‘Well, I mean, you’ve met him personally, haven’t you? Done business with him, and so on. What sort of cove is he?’
Mark puffed thoughtfully. ‘Difficult to say, really. He doesn’t tend to give much away about himself.’