The Third Attempt - a story of a coup d'état in Britain

[James G]

This is a story of mine I wrote several years ago. It is long and complicated.
It was my third attempt to write the particular story and much longer than planned.

The Third Attempt is about a coup d'état in Britain conducted in 2014 (events starting the year before) in a political landscape similar to what it was in OTL then but, all the same, different in other ways. That was a time before Brexit, fake news and so much more.
The title concerns the fact that there were two rumoured attempts at a coup to topple the Wilson governments en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories though neither of them was like this is.

There are six primary characters in the story - Neil Baxter, Harriet Byrne, Lauren Carter, Lord Edward North, Jane Snyder & John Williams - as well as MANY others: nearly all of the story is told through the eyes of those six, but not all. the many characters can get confusing.
I'll post the story - it is in 96 pieces - in bunches of updates at once rather than 96 separate ones.

[James G]

Prologue – A Vision
Near Driffield, East Riding of Yorkshire – October 14th 2013


Lord Edward North of Fairford didn’t like to be kept waiting. He also didn’t like to hear people repeat themselves in an unnecessary effort to try to convince him of something that he’d already decided upon.

Both things were happening at the moment.

Within his study here in his country mansion up in Gods Own Country – Yorkshire –, Lord North had one of his associates from London with him. The younger man, a self-styled ‘political consultant’ by the name of Michael Snyder, was currently drinking Lord North’s whiskey as he paced backwards and forwards across the solid oak floor of the room. He was talking while he walked up and down – something that he was very good at – and the subject of his words was another man, Neil Baxter.

Baxter was whom the two of them were waiting upon: he was already half an hour late.

“This is the first time I’ve ever known him to be late, Edward. Being a soldier drilled a sense of punctually into him… well… he’s a former soldier. Fifteen years in uniform behind him too, all of unblemished service up until his misfortune.”

Snyder was talking almost to himself. He couldn’t stop doing this and ignored or didn’t care about the look of annoyance that Lord North was giving him.

“Baxter’s a very angry man. Wait until you get him talking and you’ll see; politics makes him passionate. Out of the five people that I picked to have a detailed look at, Edward, Baxter stood out not only for the military prowess he had to offer – his soldiering skills combined with his previous work in intelligence operations – but due to that.

He doesn’t need convincing to do this.

When we first talked back in the summer about doing this, there was the concern about talking the right candidate into this. We don’t need to worry about that at all with Baxter.”

Finally, Snyder stopped talking and walking. He sat back down in the chair near the window and Lord North watched him lift up his drink and take a sip of that. Snyder’s eyes, watched by Lord North’s, went to the darkened gardens outside. With it being late and raining quite heavily, Lord North knew that his guest wouldn’t be able to see anything out there.

Meanwhile, Lord North stretched out a little and yawned as he remained sat in his own seat. He was behind his desk and his legs had plenty of room. He told himself that he was getting old and that was the reason he was so tired. It wasn’t that his work – he sat in the House of Lords down in Westminster as well as running his own international company – was getting him down, it was old age. Soon he’d be seventy-five and he was still a long way from completing all of his life dreams.

Since as far back as he could remember, Lord North had a vision. He wanted to see his country governed a certain way. He had an idea about what his country should be and what future it should have.

Britain at the moment didn’t conform to what Lord North’s vision was.

The phone on the desk before him rang. Lord North reached out and picked up the receiver and placed it to his ear. Across the room, Snyder – who, worryingly, drunk too much too often – looked up with anticipation written across his face, but he was not a concern at the moment. Lord North listened to what his employee on the other end said and then gave a short instruction: “Show him in.”

“So he’s here then?” It appeared to be a rhetorical question from Snyder that didn’t require an answer. “That’s good news. I heard on the radio when I was driving up here that there was a hold up on the motorway behind me. Knowing Baxter like I do, he would have tried to make up the time.

He’s very capable: a real problem solver. I got hold of the secret Ministry of Defence file about him. It showed all of his military career right up until that mess last year in North Africa that saw him very ungraciously thrown out of the Army. He’s done some amazing things.” Snyder was again unnecessary ‘selling’ Baxter where he didn’t need to be sold.

Lord North had read that document that Snyder had procured from the MOD down in London. The man had countless contacts with Westminster political circles and had obtained the official record of Baxter’s military service. In his many years wearing his country’s uniform, the former soldier had impressed and impressed again. He’d served across the world on various military operations until his career had come to a sudden end when a rescue operation concerning British diplomats in Libya last year had gone terribly wrong. A trio of the diplomats due to be rescued, along with seven Libyan nationals that some people called terrorists while others considered them freedom fighters, had lost their lives.

Blame had been unfairly placed upon Baxter for those deaths, despite him being only a senior Sergeant, by politicians who wished to apportion blame; commissioned officers with the rescue party that Baxter was with hadn’t incurred the wrath of London. Lord North had read the transcripts from that inquiry and been stunned by its conclusion that Baxter was to blame for what occurred out in the North African desert.

That former soldier now knocked at the door to Lord North’s study.

“Come in.”

The door opened and from the semi-darkness of the hallway Baxter stepped into the room in which Lord North and Snyder were.

He swept his eyes over the man who stood there looking a little hesitant. He knew that appearances could be deceptive. Baxter looked out of his depth here among what were plainly civilians. He was a soldier through and through. He was also a professional killer with a real grudge against people who stood in Lord North’s way.

Baxter was the perfect agent for the acts of political violence – something new for Britain – that Lord North knew would need to be unleashed across the country for his vision to succeed.





Chapter One – Fine Mist
Norwich, Norfolk – November 1st 2013


Baxter had been inside this house yesterday. Just like he did tonight, he snuck inside uninvited. If he was caught doing so, especially this time, he knew that a police charge of burglary would be the least of his worries due to what he was carrying.

The house sat on a quiet almost suburban street even though it was right on the edge of the city centre. House prices down this little road were high because of its location and the fact that it wasn’t used as a rat-run by traffic. At this time of night, gone two o’clock, there was no one around to spot Baxter using a ghost key and opening the front door.

Baxter slid the key back into his pocket once the door was open. He took care not to drop it; it was greased with WK40 and he was wearing latex gloves.

The door that he’d opened was only slightly ajar, and Baxter swung his eyes to the left and then to the right along the road to make sure that there was no one walking along before he pushed it fully open. Baxter quickly moved properly inside and closed the front door behind him as quietly as he’d opened it. His attention now turned to the plastic box located on the hallway wall.

Yesterday, Baxter had dealt with this household alarm system by simply entering the manufacturer’s emergency alarm code. All systems had such a numerical code and Baxter had a list of them downloaded off the internet – for a hefty price. There was no need to disable the alarm tonight though for (as he’d expected) the homeowner didn’t have it set when he was at home sleeping.

Baxter saw that there was no flashing LED light and so moved away from it.

Standing on the mat inside the door, Baxter now took a moment to allow his night vision to readjust. He couldn’t turn on the lights and nor did he want to use the flashlight he was carrying: that was for emergencies only. He needed to see where he was going, despite getting a real feel for the place when he was here yesterday.

Soon enough, Baxter was moving. He saw the stairs ahead of him, and the kitchen at the back of the house beyond, and towards those stairs he went. Baxter was wearing a pair of plimsolls on his feet and they made no noise at all as he took his first few careful steps across the carpeted hallway floor. He then reached the bottom of those stairs and started going up them.

Just as he knew they wouldn’t, the stairs didn’t creak under his feet. Baxter counted them as he went up them: all twelve steps. There was a bedroom at the top of the stairs and in there was the man whose life he’d come to end.

*

Roger Mayfield MP couldn’t sleep. He’d been having problems drifting off at night for the past couple of months and tonight was no exception. His bed was comfortable, there was no light or sound to disturb him and he’d had a long day at work and then travelling. Sleep should have come to him hours ago but it was denied to him.

Mayfield wanted to scream! He needed his sleep.

With his wife away working – which she did a lot recently – there was room in his bed for Mayfield to move over to the other side. He rolled to the left and the side of his face touched the cool pillow there. It was a nice, temporary feeling of relief. He quickly straightened himself afterwards so he was on his back. Mayfield kept his eyes closed and willed sleep to come to him.

Mayfield didn’t want to look over at the clock radio on the bedside table. It was over on the other side and he knew that it would be damn depressing to see what time it was. He’d gone to bed at midnight and reckoned that he’d been here at least an hour, maybe even two. When was he ever going to fall asleep?

The only thing that he was grateful for was that he wasn’t working tomorrow. As a Member of Parliament alongside being a junior minister in H.M. Government, Mayfield always had a busy week Monday to Friday, sometimes Saturday too. This weekend was going to be one that he had off. So, if he only got a few hours of sleep, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

He still wanted it though.

Almost anything else that he wanted in his life, Mayfield could usually get. He was a powerful man with a lot of people who could do his bidding. Three people worked here in Norwich at his constituency office for him, another trio at his private office in the Houses of Parliament and five more at the MOD. At the last, Mayfield was the Minister of State for the Armed Forces. He was in effect the Under-Secretary to the UK Defence Secretary.

This job came with a lot of responsibility; others saw it as something prestigious. To Mayfield it was a pain in the backside. He wanted to advance further up the career ladder and soon be a full Secretary of State. Not at the MOD though. Mayfield found military people not to his taste. He came into contact with far too many of them for his liking. They thought they were so important and had an inbred arrogance in them from the minute they first put on their uniform. To Mayfield, they were just uncouth civil servants who didn’t understand that politicians were the ones who paid them and gave them orders.

Mayfield did not like the soldiers, sailors or airmen who served his country.

*

There were two other bedrooms and a bathroom up on the house’s first floor. Baxter crept past the door that led to those three rooms and went to the one at the very end of the upstairs landing. He came to a stop outside the door then and carefully placed one hand on the handle.

Baxter didn’t lower it just yet to open the door. Instead, he moved an ear towards the thin wood and rested it against that. Against his other ear he placed a hand.

A confidential medical report from the local GP that the homeowner saw on a regular basic was a document that Baxter and the small team of people working with him had recently read. The man had a medical condition – the exact name of that escaped Baxter at the moment – that brought on a snoring condition. The handwritten notes attached to that report had said that the snoring had had a detrimental effect on his marriage. There were other, interesting things in the medical document, but the snoring was important at the minute.

Baxter couldn’t hear any snoring. He couldn’t perceive anything on the other side of the door. The homeowner had come home tonight and certainly hadn’t left. He was nowhere else in the house apart from in that bedroom. He wasn’t snoring though. Thinking back to what he’d read, the doctor had told his patient that there was a problem with his windpipe; he wouldn’t be snoring loud all of the time though he would breathe heavy enough in his sleep to be heard.

Perhaps, Baxter had to admit to himself, that he couldn’t hear any noise on the other side because the door was thicker than he’d anticipated. Instead of coming here in the daytime hours to look around before he undertook his mission tonight, he should have come another night for a dry run. He was here now though and already to go.

The plan was to sneak into that bedroom and delivered a coup de grace to the sleeping homeowner in his sleep. Baxter had a special ‘tool’ with him to do that. Thankfully, he had a back-up plan though.

*

Mayfield opened his eyes and turned his eyes towards the door to his left. He was sure that he’d just heard a noise out there.

Was someone out on the landing?

Sitting up in bed, though not getting out of it, Mayfield wondered what it could have been. He finally looked over at the clock and saw that it read 02:12.

Damn, I’ve been lying here for two hours!

He wondered whether it might be his daughter. Sarah was fourteen and very much a troublesome teenager. She was lazy when it came to getting up in the morning though never wanted to go to bed at night. He pondered over whether she was still up and awake. She might have been on her computer and was sneaking about.

Well, he wasn’t going to have that!

Mayfield swung his legs out of the bed as he pushed the duvet back way to make sure that it didn’t come with him and end up on the floor. He took a few steps forward and then got hold of the dressing gown that was hanging off the wardrobe door.

She’s going to get a right telling off!

*

Baxter heard the movements on the other side of the door. He’d deliberately stepped too hard too many times on the landing floor – which did creak – to get movement in the bedroom. The target was getting up and surely coming out.

He took a step back and took something else from one of the pockets sewn into the black nylon all-in-one overalls that he was wearing. It was a small plastic container with a spray nozzle atop of it. Baxter raised it up to the correct height as he released the safety catch. With just some gentle pressure from his thumb, it was going to be a very effective and deadly weapon.

Controlling his breathing in difficult situations was something that he had been long ago trained to do, even when wearing the chemical-laced face-mask he had on now. Baxter had been in positions far more dangerous than this before. There’d been armed men with bayonets, guns and explosives trying to kill him in the past in places that he’d never been before and were much more dangerous. He hadn’t known what was coming towards him and been scared for his life.

This was different, he kept reminding himself though. He was in control here. He had his surroundings detailed and knew that the man about to open the door ahead of him would be unawares and unarmed. There was no danger here; he was safe and no risk was posed to his own life.

The door opened…

*

Mayfield cursed his luck that he should yawn just the moment that he was up and out of bed. His limbs, every part of him in fact, ached like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He told himself that he could get back into bed after he’d checked up on and probably told off his daughter.

The light was switched on and he opened the door.

There was a man in the hallway. Mayfield felt his jaw drop open in shock as he froze in place and stared at the unexpected person standing just beyond the doorway.

What the hell was this guy doing?

Why was he wearing such an outfit? Was that an all-in-one swimsuit of some sort? Was that a balaclava covering his face?

What did he have in his hand there?

*

When Baxter pushed down on the nozzle, the spray worked exactly as planned. He heard the hiss and was certain that he saw the fine mist come out of it and lance towards the target before him.

It was like the homeowner had been shot. The man fell backwards once the mist hit him.

Baxter stepped forward and knelt down a little so that he was in the doorway. Once again, he pushed down hard on the stray nozzle and another dose of the chemical went towards the man’s face.

There was the worry that the man would call out. Baxter had checked that the homeowner’s daughter was sleeping soundly, but she would certainly be awoken by a call from her father.

He didn’t shout out though. Instead, the homeowner was coughing. Baxter reached backwards in the dark and found the door. He moved forwards on his hands and knees so that he could push that door too.

Then he sprayed the man in the face a third and final time.

The coughing was getting stronger now. The man on the floor ahead of him was really struggling to breath. His body was automatically trying to expel the foreign substance that had been sucked in, but it was doing no good.

Baxter had been fully briefed on the chemical substance that he’d just used by a rather serious man from a medical research facility a few days ago. That white-coated scientist had said that it had no name, just a random number. It was a deadly weapon created in secret in a laboratory where the scientist worked; no one else but him knew about it. The chemical was tailor-made for this job alone. It would harm, maybe even kill Baxter should he inhale it – hence his mask – and would certainly end the life of the man he’s just used it against. It was a cyanide-based substance that would enter the blood stream via the lungs and quickly shut down the heart. It had been specially designed to strike at the lungs and the heart of the homeowner on the floor though. He had a pre-existing medical condition that it would seize upon.

Far more importantly, Baxter had been assured that it was undetectable in any post-mortem exam because it was unknown and would mimic the symptoms of a cardiac arrest.

Baxter remained where he was. He had delivered three doses to the man after being told that one, two at the most would kill him. He wasn’t going to take any chances here though. The spray nozzle was only inches from the man at the end of Baxter’s extended arm.

The homeowner, the target of the assassination that Baxter and others had ever so carefully planned, had stopped coughing. He lay spread-eagled on his back across the floor and perfectly still. Baxter couldn’t hear him breathing though his eyes were opening and closing very rapidly. That was odd but encouraged Baxter to do something that he hadn’t planned to do.

“Remember me, you bastard?” It came out as a whisper.

There was no response at all to that. The homeowner’s eyes stopped blinking though and his mouth remained open.

Baxter kept waiting and started to count.

Once he reached one hundred, Baxter carefully set the safety device on the plastic container. He gently pressed down again afterwards on the nozzle and saw that it wouldn’t work. Satisfied with that, he reached down to put it back into the pocket from where he’d taken it. He righted himself afterwards so he was crouching on the ground next to the man before him. Now was the time to check that he was dead.

Baxter had basic medical training from his time in the Army and his fingers sought a pulse at the target’s wrist and then his neck. He could feel nothing at either place. He waited another one hundred seconds and then tried again at both places.

He had to be sure.

Next, he took a wet-wipe from another pocket and carefully ran that over the dead man’s face. This had been chosen carefully so that it would leave no tell-tale fragrance behind. It would also be remarkably effective at removing any trace of the spray. Again, that was pocketed before Baxter moved on as he made sure that he would leave nothing behind.

When Baxter lifted the target up, placing his hand’s under the dead man’s armpits, he found the homeowner to be heavier than he’d expected. Though it wasn’t a real struggle, Baxter had to give the man a good heave to get him up onto the bed. He worked out every day and kept himself in near perfect physical shape, but moving a dead man about wasn’t easy.

When he had him on the bed, Baxter removed the dressing gown and placed that over the back of a chair. Yesterday, that had been there so he assumed that it was always kept there. He returned his attention to his target and positioned him back in his bed. Baxter left him on his back and brought one arm in and placed it on the chest while the duvet was left pushed back. He took a step back and looked down at what he could see: it did appear to look like the homeowner had suffered a heart attack in his sleep and woken up to place his hand on his chest before he succumbed to it.

There was a history of chronic heart disease in the target’s family history and that curse looked like it had repeated itself.

Baxter gave the dead man on the bed one final look when he reached for the door. He’d stopped so he could carefully listen to make sure that there was no one out there before he made his escape. Instead, he turned to stare at the politician on the bed before him.

“Robert,” Baxter whispered again, “I hope that it hurt.”

No answer came and Baxter left.

He’d only realise an hour later, when driving down the M11 motorway, that he’d left the bedroom light on.





Chapter Two – Red Access
Portcullis House, Westminster, London – November 4th 2013


In the modern era of Twenty–First Century politics, everything was about the right sound-bite. One could give a fine speech that outlined all the key points and gave an excellent conclusion, yet it was the sound-bites that the media would use and would deliver to the all-important voting public.

John Williams didn’t hold the voting public in the same disdain as he knew the vast majority of his colleagues did. They were the people that he served, who paid him and who kept him in a job that he loved. They wanted to be impressed and they were the ones who his sound-bites were targeted towards. Of course, in a perfect world, that shouldn’t have been the case, but modern politics couldn’t exist in a perfect world.

So today, when the cameras would be rolling and the print journalists set about furiously taking notes, Williams would use those carefully-crafted words and phrases that he knew the soon to be assembled media were briefed to expect. Those would be passed on to those they would have the desired effect… such was the plan anyway.

Williams knew all about the media. He was married to a senior political journalist who worked for one of the nation’s leading newspapers. Away from home, Williams dealt with the rest of the media because he was a long-serving backbench MP at Westminster. He headed up an all-important Parliamentary committee as well; the media was always there.

That committee was the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee and he had a short speech that he would be giving during their meeting later today several floors below his office here in Portcullis House. A group of backbenchers from the leading three political parties would listen to what he had to say in summing up a report that they had been working on concerning nationwide law and order matters. The text of that speech sat before him at his desk at the moment with those sound-bites that he had carefully selected for the visiting media to pay attention to highlighted using a luminous yellow felt pen.

The committee would meet in about two hours. Until then, Williams had some paperwork to do. He had a staff here at this Parliamentary building that sat opposite the Palace of Westminster to support him in all of his work, but there were always some things that needed his personal attention. There were other pieces of paper on his cluttered desk in which addressed them, but Williams really didn’t want to get that that at the moment.

He was thus very pleased when the phone on his desk rang.

All calls to Williams’ office came in through his personal secretary so he knew that the call would be of substance.

“Yes?”

“Mister Williams, I have Mister Snyder for you.” Ellen was professional as well as loyal; two character traits that Williams held in high regard for a secretary.

“Put him through for me will you, Ellen?”

“Of course, Mister Williams; one moment.”

The call was transferred quickly and Williams spoke again. “Michael?”

“John? Hi. I’m downstairs. Can we meet for a quick chat?”

“Where?” Williams wasn’t sure what his friend meant by ‘downstairs’.

There came a gentle laugh before a response: “The coffee shop, John; it’s called The Dispatch Box, isn’t it?”

“I know it.” Williams took another look at his cluttered desk and decided to go. “Give me five minutes.”

After he ended the call, Williams got up and walked over to the window. His office had a view of the Thames as well as the London Eye. It was a nice view even on this overcast day, but not one to his particular taste. The urban environment of central London was one for tourists. Williams preferred his native, rural Cambridgeshire to this.

Soon enough, he was out of the office and heading for the lift. He told Ellen where he was going and also took his mobile phone with him in case she needed him; he knew she’d only call if it was important.

Portcullis House was a building opened twelve years ago. It was located on Parliament Square in the heart of London and housed offices for more than two hundred MPs on its upper floors. On the first floor were very modern committee rooms and deep below ground was Westminster Underground station, while on the ground floor there was a large meeting area as well as administration services. Visitors going across to the Palace of Westminster itself entered those secured premises through Portcullis House and then went below ground through a connecting tunnel.

Access into Portcullis House itself wasn’t something that anyone could get. In the majority of cases, you had to work here or be invited on official business. There was another method of entry: you could have a Red access pass.

Williams had a Green pass that he wore on a lanyard when he was here; so did other MPs, their staff members and senior civil servants. Blue passes were for regular visitors such as junior officials from various Government departments. Security and building administration staff had Black passes. Visitors (including the media) would be issued White passes that they would have to return upon exit. The different coloured passes represented different levels of internal access.

Snyder had got into the building and into the coffee shop on the ground floor using his Red pass. These were issued to former MPs like he was. He and Williams went back many years to their days when the two of them were part of the new intake of Parliamentarians in 2001. Four years later, Snyder had lost his seat due to unhappy voters in his West Country constituency: in all honestly, he had given a lacklustre performance as their representative in Westminster. However, due to his time in Parliament he was allowed to return at any time he wished without supervision.

Democracy in the UK had little quirks like that.

Once no longer an MP, but with his Parliamentary access pass, Snyder had gone to work in political consultancy. He was a freelance lobbyist for political pressure groups and business interests. Snyder was able to do well at this because politics was his life, he’d made many contacts when he was an MP and also because he could return directly to Westminster to mingle where politicians were.

His Red access pass put food on his family’s table.

Williams was thinking of that pass that his friend had as he went down in the lift and then got out on the ground floor. He fingered his own as it dangled down in front of his tie, though he didn’t look it; he picture on there of him was immensely unflattering.

Arriving on the southern side of the building, Williams walked across the lobby heading towards the main entrance. The centre of the building was an open courtyard and it was raining out there so Williams took the long way round to get to the coffee shop. It was a busy Monday morning and there were plenty of people here. He knew several by sight, fellow MPs as well as staffers, and nodded at many of them. Yet, no one seemed to be in the mood for even a passing conversation and neither was he.

The Dispatch Box was a little eating and drinking establishment near a cafeteria and a restaurant – named The Debate and The Adjournment respectively – and other administration facilities like the post office and a visitor information point. Williams bumped into a Labour MP he knew coming out: “Arthur…”

“John…”

The other MP walked on afterwards, paper coffee cup in-hand, and Williams gave the man’s back a fierce look. He despised that corrupt and self-centred man who had just walked away. Williams wistfully wished that perhaps one day he’d get a chance to tell that man all that he thought of him.

One day…

*

Snyder was waiting at a table in the corner of the little shop. Williams saw that there was no one at the nearest tables though there were other people – alone or in pairs – at other tables nearby. His friend often liked to talk out of earshot of others, something which was odd for a politician (even a failed one as Williams would have to unkindly admit Snyder was).

Williams walked straight across to him. “Do you mind if I get a drink first, Michael? Do you want me to get a refill for yours too?” Snyder’s cup of tea looked empty and Williams fancied a coffee for himself.

“I’m fine, thanks. Go get yourself one.”

Within minutes, Williams came back to the table with his own cup and sat opposite Snyder. “So, what’s up?”

“Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff, John. There’s something that I wanted to talk to you about without anyone else’s ears open.”

“Go ahead…” Williams spoke at a normal tone despite Snyder using a much lower tone in what he guessed was an effort not to be overheard.

“I heard something last night – contacts, you know.” He winked in a conspiratorial manner that Williams found far too unnecessary. “The P.M. is going to offer you a Government post.” Snyder raised his cup slightly off the table in some sort of mock salute.

“Doing what?” This was the first Williams have heard of this. He was rather taken aback by it and had done something that someone in his profession rarely did: speak without thinking first.

“John, you heard that Robert Mayfield had a heart attack Friday night, yes?” Williams nodded and Snyder continued. “It was unexpected, of course, but the P.M. and the Chief Whip have taken it as an opportunity to conduct a mini-reshuffle of Junior Ministers. Parsons is moving across from his National Security brief at the Home Office to the M.O.D. to take over there from Mayfield – there’s other changes at the Treasury and the Foreign Office too – but they want you to be National Security Minister.”

Rather than say something at once, on this occasion Williams took time to think about this for a moment. Snyder was telling him information that wasn’t meant to be in the public domain. He clearly had good connections to some well-informed people in Westminster who knew these secret details. That was a matter for later consideration, though first he thought about what Snyder was saying.

The deceased Mayfield was a career politician who Williams hadn’t known that well… nor wanted to. He had held his position at the MOD for over a year and had been on the path to a Cabinet role sometime in the future: that clearly wasn’t going to happen now. The other Junior Minister Snyder had mentioned (Parsons) was another up-and-coming politician who worked at the Home Office. Williams and Parsons had worked together several times due to the latter’s work at that important Government department and the former’s committee work dealing with Parliamentary legislation put forward from the Home Office.

Williams was a Conservative Party MP like Parsons and the members of the current Government, but he and Parsons had clashed. Previous select committee work that Williams had been part of had investigated and criticised the Home Office for failings on national security matters and Williams knew that he’d run afoul of the Government and the top ranks of the Conservative Party. For them to offer him a Government post was strange…

… or maybe it wasn’t.

Ah, he silently said to himself, I see: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Williams realised that someone in the Government was being very clever indeed. They were unhappy with his work at his committee and were planning to bring him aboard so as to neutralise his vocal opposition. He reckoned that within a year he’d no longer be a Minister and he wouldn’t return to his committee either. Instead, he’d just be an unimportant backbench MP without any of the influence that he had now. In addition, when a Minister he’d have to follow the principle of ‘collective responsibility’ that was inherent in being part of the Government and not speak out against his colleagues and their actions.

“Your information, Michael,” Williams finally responded, “is quite something. I’m not even going to try and speculate on how you got this. Are you certain of it?”

“I wouldn’t have come to you if it wasn’t true.”

“Why did you come?” Williams asked the question knowing that the answer he would be given could be particularly important.

“Don’t take the position, John. It’s nothing more than a gag that they’ll force on you.”

Clearly, Snyder was thinking the same thing as he was. Yet, that still hadn’t answered his question.

“I worked that one out for myself, Michael.” Williams let loose a little smile. “Again, why did you come here to tell me this? Did you want a Thank You for telling me this before the Chief Whip calls me over to Downing Street?”

“We’re friends; you’ve helped me before with titbits of information and I just thought that I would return the favour.” Snyder didn’t appear to be adversely affected by Williams’ comment, one which he realised afterwards came out a little too sharp.

Almost in unison, both men took a sip of their drinks and then each started to talk again at exactly the same time.

“How is Jane getting along at her new…?”

“Jane suggested that we do dinner soon and…”

Williams had started to ask after Snyder’s wife and her new job while Snyder had spoken about his wife’s wish for a dinner date. Jane Snyder would have made sure that when her husband next saw Williams that he mentioned something like that; Lisa Williams had fallen out with Jane over something or another and had been trying to make up with her friend for the past month.

Neither finished what they were saying and broke off in a moment of mutual embarrassment.

“You go on, John.” Snyder graciously gave way and opened his hands briefly in an exaggerated manner to show this.

“I was asking after Jane. How is she doing at The Express?” Both men’s wives were journalists.

“Her editor is a bit of a dick, if I’m honest. She’s had to take a step down career-wise,” Jane had previously worked at The Telegraph with Lisa, “but it’ll do.”

Williams knew that Snyder got a lot of work for his one man consultancy business through his wife; in addition to what he could get through his Red access pass privileges. It was unethical for both of them, but when had either politics or the media been professions of upstanding ethics?

“I’ll talk to Lisa about us all doing dinner soon enough.” Lisa wouldn’t agree, but he’d ask anyway.

“You should get back to your office, John. Isn’t your committee meeting in public this afternoon?”

“It is.” Williams nodded along with the verbal acknowledgement. “Will you be there?”

“Of course I’ll be there.” Snyder ran a hand over the Red-coloured pass that hung down from his lanyard like Williams’ did. “Are you going to say yes to the P.M. when he calls to ask?”

“He’ll have the Chief Whip call to sound me out first. A yes or a no to him means whether I’ll get to talk to the P.M. today.”

Snyder screwed up his face: “But…”

“I could say that I’ll think about it, Michael, and give it much thought… but we both know that I’m not stupid and wouldn’t take it.”

Williams wondered why Snyder seemed very pleased with this response.





Chapter Three – No Surprises
Outside St Albans, Hertfordshire – November 7th 2013


The initial thinking had apparently been that they would set themselves up in a hotel. A large suite of rooms would be rented out for a few months under false names and a measure of anonymity could thus be attained by that. From what Baxter had been told, that notion had lasted more than a day before a more sensible conclusion was brought forth. There could be no hope of being anonymous at any sort of hotel facility; all of their computers, encryption equipment and visitors would attract far too much attention.

There was the security risk to take into consideration too.

Soon enough, Baxter’s team – minus him because this was before he had been finally selected – had set themselves up in a rented office within a little business park on the outskirts of the Hertfordshire city of St Albans. The small office that they’d rented gave them very good access to major transport links; the M-1 motorway, the London-orbital M-25 and London itself via many main roads. The money for this came from one of Lord North’s multitude of nationwide companies: he had countless interests in the financial services industry.

‘Stevens & Co. Ltd.’ was quickly listed as a small business. Telephone lines and an internet connection were set up. A lone secretary was employed to man the front desk and greet visitors as well as turn away the curious from what was deemed a start-up private detective services firm, which had quite a few clients come to visit.

The whole thing was a front though. Lord North had brought two people he knew well to work in the office and they had no interest in helping people track down long-lost loves or debtors to businesses, or even those who wished for someone to spy on their partner for them. Instead, they spent all of them time conducting internet searches and reading documents that were brought to them by representatives of small private investigation companies up and down the country. Those self-employed detectives knew none of the activities that others in their profession undertook on behalf of Stevens & Co.: they believed that they were working for divorce or paternity lawyers that the little company in St Albans represented.

The two people in the office came from not too dissimilar backgrounds.

Liz Jackson was a former employee of the Government: she’d spent more than twenty years working at the Security Service (commonly known to the British public as MI-5) before working in the legal office of one of Lord North’s major financial services trading companies. She was in her mid-Forties now and had spent her working life investigating people. Working with Liz was an ex-policeman named Kevin Nye. A little younger than his co-worker, Kevin had many years of experience as a detective with the Metropolitan Police in London. He’d worked fraud, vice and child protection cases in his career, though he had primarily been a murder detective. Like Liz, since he’d left his civil service post, he’d been with Lord North and been greatly trusted by the man. Kevin had worked ‘security’ for Lord North – a catch-all term that meant he did many semi-legal and sometime illegal things to allow his employer to life a comfortable life.

Before Baxter had joined Liz and Kevin, the two of them had been actively creating large and detailed dossiers concerning a select group of people up and down the country. Everything that could be found out about these men and women was collated and re-checked by different sources. With external help, they were able to construct on paper all the details of the lives of the people that they looked at. Working from just a name to start with, the investigators that they hired found out everything.

The home address, the job and the relationship status of the person in question were gathered. Pictures and even short video surveillance were sought. Medical records as well as bank accounts and credit card records were looked into. They were followed to gain an understanding of their daily routines and social habits. Taps were put on their phone and internet usage. Whether they drove or used public transport was important, so too was if they smoked or used recreational drugs. If there were any secrets that these people had – a hidden criminal past or an extra-marital affair – these were more valuable information.

No matter how skilled and experienced Liz and Kevin were, they could not have done all this background investigating on their own. It had been too much work due to the geographic locations of the people that they’d been tasked to look at… as well as the number of individual people.

Then Baxter had come along to make use of some of the information held on the dossiers.

*

The bubble-headed secretary that was employed at Stevens & Co. to answer the phones always had a smile for Baxter. She looked up from her computer screen when Baxter walked through the building’s front door and gave him what he was expecting.

“Good morning, Mister Baines.” She knew him by this simple pseudonym, one which everything within his wallet stated that he was.

“Hi, Danielle.” The girl was very pretty and he couldn’t help but smile back at her as he replied to her greeting.

Baxter had been told that she was only twenty and a former hair-dressing student who had dropped out of evening college because the work was too hard for her. When Liz had said that to him, he’d waited for the punch-line – there hadn’t been one.

That was why she’d been hired though: she had no intelligence to her and didn’t ask questions. Kevin had later added to Liz’s description of the girl by telling Baxter that when they’d advertised for a secretary, she’d been the dumbest candidate by far and thus perfectly suitable for the job. The girl was there to answer phones and greet people. She had no interest in anything at all that they did in the back office and spent her time on the internet using social media networks and also reading fashion magazines.

The last thing that they’d wanted was someone bright and eager working here and potentially taking an interest in what they were doing.

Once past Danielle’s desk, Baxter walked to the internal door beside it. This held a simple lock that he had the key too (Danielle didn’t) and he went through that into a small and empty office space. There was a second door there: a steel one with a trio of complicated locks that Kevin had fitted himself.

Only once through that door was Baxter truly inside Stevens & Co.

“Is it raining out there, Neil?”

“A little.” Baxter gave a shrug with his response to Kevin’s usual poor attempt a small talk; the man had a window underneath his desk.

“I thought it might do…” Kevin’s comment trailed off as if he was thinking of saying something more, but he didn’t. The ex-policeman turned his attention back to his computer.

Baxter wandered over to his own desk. He sat down in the chair there and then looked up at his computer screen. The thought occurred to him to turn it on, but then he realised that there was no point. There would be nothing on there to do should he do that.

Having his own desk and computer within an office was something that Baxter found very strange. This was all new to him.

What am I doing here?

He was so out of place here. The life of an office worker, even though it could be argued that he really didn’t have such a job, wasn’t for him. Baxter knew that he’d more comfortable crawling through the mud with soldiers like he still felt he was. A field exercise on a cold, windy and rainy day like today would make him very happy indeed. The company that he used to keep would have pleased him too. Baxter yearned to be back in uniform and serving his country.

That life was gone now.

Being in the Army for all the years that he had, Baxter had no other life before that had abruptly come to an end. He’d never had any time for a wife or children and short-term girlfriends had come and gone. Reaching a medium-level rank within the Army as he had done – before he’d been forced to retire, Baxter had been a Colour Sergeant within a battalion of the Parachute Regiment – had been all that he’d wanted in life. That was all gone now and here he was… in a smart suit sitting behind a desk that he had no purpose for.

Looking away from the blank screen, and turning his mind away from his depressing thoughts, Baxter swept his gaze across the office. There was something missing.

No, someone…

“Where’s Liz?”

“She went down to Wandsworth this morning; she’ll be back soon.”

“Is everything set up down there?” Baxter was due to go down to Wandsworth tomorrow evening himself.

“Yes.” Kevin was adamant on that. “Everything that we initially had on Mister Young checks out. Liz is just giving everything the final once over so when we go down and do what we have to, there’ll be no surprises.”

Baxter had been looking across at Kevin as he spoke to him and so gave him a nod that he hoped denoted the end of that conversation for now.

His mind turned tomorrow evening.

Like with the trip to Norwich last Friday night, tomorrow he and Kevin would drive down to south-western London and undertake what he saw as a ‘mission’. There was a man who lived there and Baxter would take his life. Kevin would come along for support – technical, not moral – and it wasn’t planned that they’d be there for very long.

Liz was at the minute checking on everything; as Kevin said, they didn’t want there to be no surprises in store for them. The risks of something going wrong were far too worrying.





Chapter Four – A Personal Touch
Canary Wharf, the London Docklands – November 8th 2013


Lord North no longer liked to be directly involved in delicate matters. He was getting to an age when he knew he was irritable and could say the wrong things. Throughout the majority of his life, it had been the opposite. Without his forceful and ambitious nature, combined with his own personal touch, he never would have made of himself what he was.

Should he not have worked hard and made unethical deals with dodgy people, he would never have built up the great personal fortune that he had amassed. If Lord North had shied away from meeting in secret with people who commanded power, no one in politics would ever have taken notice of him after he handed over his hard-earned cash to their political campaigns. Such actions had brought him even greater wealth later on and allowed him to have the title before his name.

Which was a fine achievement for a miner’s son from rural Yorkshire.

This afternoon, Lord North had to use the personal touch and he wasn’t enjoying it at all.

He had been forced to invite someone to have lunch with him: a journalist by the name of Kate Parker. Parker worked for The Daily Mail and had come out to this restaurant on the ground floor of the Marriott Hotel on West India Quay from her office in Kensington. To Lord North, Parker was just a girl. She was in her mid-twenties and reminded him of his granddaughter. He was not impressed by her, but made sure that she was unable to gather this from his mannerisms towards her.

Lord North made it clear that he was paying for this lunch and carefully battered away objections from her to pay for herself (though she’d be putting it on her generous expense account). A gentleman, he had assured her, doesn’t let a lady pay. Though Michael Snyder had set up this meeting, he wasn’t in attendance due to personal matters between him and the journalist. Yet Lord North was using the words and ideas of that man as he spoke to Parker.

“So, now Miss Parker, we get down to business…”

“Displaying your gentlemanly skills wasn’t what this meeting was to be about?” Parker gave a sardonic look with this remark. She clearly knew that Lord North hadn’t brought her here to write a piece about him – successful businessman and important politician – because she wasn’t known to be that sort of reporter.

“Alas, no. I have a story to tell you. It’s a story that other journalists have heard,” Lord North lied as gracefully as he could, “but have chosen not to act upon. I am of the understanding that you are the type of journalist that will act upon this story.”

“The plot thickens…!” Parker was known to be a smart-arse; a very sarcastic young lady indeed.

“When it was told to not one, but two other members of your profession, they made all the right sort of noises about outrage and then promised to act upon it, but afterwards chose not to.

Another journalist, a well-known one at that, committed a crime – probably many similar ones – a while ago. This has been brought to my attention. It offends me… and I want something done about it.”

“There is always the police…” Though Parker gave a disinterested reply, Lord North could tell exactly what she was thinking. The woman was thinking of the publicity that she could gain from this; Snyder had surely chosen well in Parker.

“The police have already looked into the matter and referred the case across to the Crown Prosecution Service: they thought that there was enough there for the matter to be pursued all the way to the courts. However, Miss Parker, the man in question has friends in the right places.

No action was taken by the C.P.S.”

“Tell me more. Who is it and what has he done?” She bit and she bit hard. Lord North had expected this to take a little longer, but he knew that he had built this up just right.

“Andy James from The Guardian – he committed a rape of a summer intern. A twenty-two year-old university student to be exact.” As he said the name and what he was accusing the man of doing, Lord North saw the metaphorical light-bulb switch on inside Parker’s head.

Snyder really has picked the perfect one here.

“How much proof is there? Rape cases are nearly always ‘he-said-she-said’.”

“As I said, Miss Parker, there was enough evidence for the police to refer it across to the C.P.S. He also has a history of this type of thing, I’m sure that you’ve heard the rumours before?” Lord North knew full well that Parker had heard such mutterings about Andy James’ forceful sexual nature before, though not actual allegations of the act of rape. “The police also have details on file of a similar accusation made back in Twenty Oh Two.

This man likes raping women, Miss Parker, and he gets away with it because of who he is.”

“What’s your interest in this, Mister North?” She called him ‘Mister’. She also quickly came to the question he was expecting.

“The young woman eleven years ago is the daughter of an employee of mine. I recently found out about this latest incident by chance. I had a private investigator look into him, at my own cost, and decided that I didn’t like the things that I was hearing. All of those young woman he’s groped and molested, and then gotten away with, and the two police investigations that never got anywhere.

I have a wife. I have two daughters. I have a granddaughter. I have young female employees.

I am a man and this upsets me. Andy James shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.

I have brought this to you on purpose, Miss Parker. I understand why you are questioning my motives, but that makes sense. I appreciate that this may appear to be of no concern to me, yet it is. I do not want this man to carry on doing what he’s been doing for more than a decade, maybe even longer.

As I said, I came to you. You have a reputation and I’m hoping that you’ll live up to that and put a stop to this man’s activities.”

“I see.”

The waiter came over to them and asked for their order. He knew Lord North and the two of them had a brief and friendly chat. Lord North had offices nearby and would often eat here with business acquaintances. Lord North kept an eye on Parker as he spoke to the waiter and was certain that she was thinking just what he hoped she was.

When the waiter left them, she got back to their discussion: “You know my reputation as a campaigning journalist, especially on women’s matters, and that is why you have chosen me, yes?”

“It is.” Lord North gave her a serious look and then a nod.

“You picked me to take on Andy James because other people have backed out because of who he is. Yes?” This time she didn’t wait for an answer. “When I write the story, my editor will have kittens. My colleagues – friends, enemies and those who don’t know me – will turn against me for turning on one of their own.

You also know that I don’t give a damn about that too, don’t you?”

Damn, she is smart. She is also going to do this!

“You are correct on all that you say, Miss Parker.”

“Who can I talk to? I guess that you have a name for me… a policeman, I suspect?”

“Detective Sergeant Ward. He’s with the Met. Police at Ealing police station. Ward is the investigating officer for this latest accusation, though I understand that he reviewed the one eleven years ago and has also spoken to several other young women who have had unwanted contact with Andy James over the years.”

“I’ll speak to him about it.” From the look on her face, Lord North reckoned that she’d be on the phone the minute she left here trying to track him down.

“Miss Parker, I want nothing from this. I do not want my name mentioned in anyway, not in print and not in passing. I’m just a concerned private citizen here.” Lord North had wanted to phrase this better, but couldn’t. He didn’t want his name involved though and made that as clear as he could.

“There’s no reason for me to do that.” She seemed sincere. “I have a question though…”

“Yes…?” Using all of his willpower, Lord North stayed calm.

“I know Michael Snyder well enough – we have history. He arranged this meeting, but is not here. Why is he not present? Why did he get you, Mister North, to bring this to me?”

Thankfully, Lord North was expecting this. “Michael has done some work for me on my business interests. We are friends and we talk about all sorts of matters as friends do. When I told him what I’d heard, he offered to help me do something about it. He suggested that I talk to you in person rather than everything going through him. Michael was concerned that you might suspect that he has personal motives at stake for wanting Andy James’ reputation ruined and that might adversely affect how things went.”

“He’s a shit-bag.” Parker displayed some serious venom for the briefest of moments. “He always has an angle. He’s used you, Mister North, but that’s not important.

I’ll write this story and Andy James will be out of a job.”

“I’ll be happy as long as he never gets a chance to force himself on another young woman again.”

“No, he won’t, I can assure you of that.”

And it’s done!

*

His afternoon work done, Lord North set off back to his office after lunch was finished and the young Parker gone. He had not enjoyed dealing with the journalist for he knew that they were all snakes who could turn on anyone in an instant, though he was more than satisfied with how things had gone.

Lord North knew that he had handled himself very well indeed. Parker had spoken of her suspicions as to why he had given her the information that he had, but she was very wrong indeed. She had played against her own prejudices and would believe what she thought rather than the truth.

She had left his company determined to go and write a story about Andy James.

Snyder had first remarked to Lord North that the man was a candidate for the selective campaign of murder that they had both unleashed against people who stood in their way. Lord North had understood that, but had decided to go a different way when it came to Andy James. He did not believe that everything that he wished to achieve could come about with the staged deaths of certain people. They were other things that could be done to get rid of people who stood in the way.

The beauty of his meeting with Kate Parker had been the few lies and little work that needed to be done with it. She could set about destroying Andy James without any external help. There were hardly any lies either. Lord North hadn’t approached any other journalists and he had told her what he had at his own behest – not that of Snyder – but those were the only lies.

Everything else was true there and she was capable enough to get proof of it.

Andy James was a well-known and seemingly respected columnist with The Guardian. He wrote a regular full-page column twice weekly in that bastion of left-wing journalism. The man frequently appeared on political talk shows and spoke at universities and award dinners. He held what were regarded as mainstream, right-on political views and wrote about them in his newspaper. He was seen as someone who should be listened to, even if someone not always who people would want to agree with.

He also liked to molest and sometimes rape young women and got away with that because all of the above, despite him writing about female empowerment and such like.

Andy James stood in Lord North’s way because of the influence that he had and was also someone that he was looking forward to having a (detached) part in wholly ruining.

[lordroel]

Jun 26, 2020 16:27:15 GMT James G said:

This is a story of mine I wrote several years ago. It is long and complicated.
It was my third attempt to write the particular story and much longer than planned.

The Third Attempt is about a coup d'état in Britain conducted in 2014 (events starting the year before) in a political landscape similar to what it was in OTL then but, all the same, different in other ways. That was a time before Brexit, fake news and so much more.
The title concerns the fact that there were two rumoured attempts at a coup to topple the Wilson governments en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories though neither of them was like this is.

There are six primary characters in the story - Neil Baxter, Harriet Byrne, Lauren Carter, Lord Edward North, Jane Snyder & John Williams - as well as MANY others: nearly all of the story is told through the eyes of those six, but not all. the many characters can get confusing.
I'll post the story - it is in 96 pieces - in bunches of updates at once rather than 96 separate ones.

Nice to see it here James G.

So what are the two previous coup attempts.

[James G]

Jun 26, 2020 16:52:04 GMT lordroel said:

Jun 26, 2020 16:27:15 GMT James G said:

This is a story of mine I wrote several years ago. It is long and complicated.
It was my third attempt to write the particular story and much longer than planned.

The Third Attempt is about a coup d'état in Britain conducted in 2014 (events starting the year before) in a political landscape similar to what it was in OTL then but, all the same, different in other ways. That was a time before Brexit, fake news and so much more.
The title concerns the fact that there were two rumoured attempts at a coup to topple the Wilson governments en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories though neither of them was like this is.

There are six primary characters in the story - Neil Baxter, Harriet Byrne, Lauren Carter, Lord Edward North, Jane Snyder & John Williams - as well as MANY others: nearly all of the story is told through the eyes of those six, but not all. the many characters can get confusing.
I'll post the story - it is in 96 pieces - in bunches of updates at once rather than 96 separate ones.

Nice to see it here James G .

So what are the two previous coup attempts.

There were two alleged attempts against Harold Wilson in 1968 and 1974. The first one was only a meeting where senior people - a newspaper owner, a journalist, a top civil servant and the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten - met and briefly discussed getting rid of him. The second one saw the British Army take over Heathrow Airport one day, citing a possible anti-terror operation, with no one in Downing Street told and a belief there that it was a dry-run for a possible coup. Details are there in that link I provided but are believed by many people to be nothing serious. Wilson had a difficult relationship with the Security Services. He long thought they were trying to get rid of him and some of that has been proved true with time: a spy called Peter Wright was much involved.

[lordroel]

Jun 26, 2020 17:07:35 GMT James G said:

Jun 26, 2020 16:52:04 GMT lordroel said:

Nice to see it here James G .

So what are the two previous coup attempts.

There were two alleged attempts against Harold Wilson in 1968 and 1974. The first one was only a meeting where senior people - a newspaper owner, a journalist, a top civil servant and the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten - met and briefly discussed getting rid of him. The second one saw the British Army take over Heathrow Airport one day, citing a possible anti-terror operation, with no one in Downing Street told and a belief there that it was a dry-run for a possible coup. Details are there in that link I provided but are believed by many people to be nothing serious. Wilson had a difficult relationship with the Security Services. He long thought they were trying to get rid of him and some of that has been proved true with time: a spy called Peter Wright was much involved.

Would that be this also then: Did Lord Mountbatten really plot to overthrow Harold Wilson in a coup?

[lordroel]

You can shoot me James G,, ore file a lawsuit, in which i will remove it, but here is the banner for:

[James G]

Jun 26, 2020 17:09:58 GMT lordroel said:

Jun 26, 2020 17:07:35 GMT James G said:

There were two alleged attempts against Harold Wilson in 1968 and 1974. The first one was only a meeting where senior people - a newspaper owner, a journalist, a top civil servant and the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten - met and briefly discussed getting rid of him. The second one saw the British Army take over Heathrow Airport one day, citing a possible anti-terror operation, with no one in Downing Street told and a belief there that it was a dry-run for a possible coup. Details are there in that link I provided but are believed by many people to be nothing serious. Wilson had a difficult relationship with the Security Services. He long thought they were trying to get rid of him and some of that has been proved true with time: a spy called Peter Wright was much involved.

Would that be this also then: Did Lord Mountbatten really plot to overthrow Harold Wilson in a coup?

That is where it comes from, yes.

Jun 26, 2020 18:00:42 GMT lordroel said:

You can shoot me James G,, ore file a lawsuit, in which i will remove it, but here is the banner for:

That's brilliant!
I'll only be posting the whole story for a week though.

[lordroel]

Jun 26, 2020 19:10:34 GMT James G said:

That's brilliant!

Well i had a issues in that i already used other pictures of British troops in London from one of your TLs , thus a burning flag to represent the destruction of democracy pf the United Kingdom was my second option.

[James G]

Chapter Five – A Dog Called Billy
Wandsworth, South London – November 8th 2013


Later that day, Emma Cartwright came home from work and wasn’t greeted once inside the door by her Labrador. Billy didn’t come bounding towards her like he always did with that look on his face. Emma put down her bag of shopping from the mini-supermarket that was located a few minutes away as she closed the front door behind her and then again looked down the darkened hallway in the hope that her faithful friend was about to appear.

“Billy!”

No response came. There was no friendly bark or his appearance.

Once Emma took off her shoes and hung up her coat, she switched on the light and walked down the hallway towards the kitchen. She went past the door to the living room as she did and saw that Billy wasn’t in there either. Nor, she noted as an afterthought, was Chris.

She pondered over whether her partner had taken the dog out for a walk. On rare occasions he would do so, though only when she browbeat him into doing such a thing.

When she reached the kitchen, Emma turned the light on in there too and walked over to the side where the kettle was. She’d had a long and stressful day at work – as she always did – and wanted a cuppa. As she set about making herself a hot drink, she called out again: “Billy!”

Immediately, there came a bark.

Emma smiled as she turned her head around and down to look at the floor beside her. She was expecting Billy to be right there even though his bark hadn’t sounded right. Yet, he wasn’t there in the kitchen with her.

The sound had instead come from the back door leading out to the garden.

Billy was out there. Emma reasoned that Chris – who had presumably gone out somewhere without calling to let her know he wouldn’t be home when she got in – must have put him outside instead of leaving him in here. She forgot the kettle and went towards the back door.

As Emma reached it, something caught her eye down on the mat just inside. The light in the kitchen wasn’t that great over near the door but it looked like…a knife!

Without thinking, Emma picked it up by its handle. She recognised it at once as one from the kitchen draw. There was something on it too… was that tomato sauce?

It was blood, not tomato sauce.

Emma dropped the knife back down when Billy barked again from on the other side of the door. She took a hold of the key in the lock and tried to turn it to the left to unlock it. The key wouldn’t go over any further and so she moved to the handle and lowered that she as she pulled it down. The door had been closed but unlocked; it opened as she tugged the handle.

Emma let out the first of many screams when she opened the door. Meanwhile, Billy kept barking.

*

The police arrived after several calls from neighbours along with one who had gone into the house that Emma shared with her partner Christopher Young. A patrol car with two officers inside pulled up on the busy road where the house was and they were shown inside by a pair of concerned (i.e. nosy) neighbours. They had been told that there was a man dead at the property and a hysterical woman inside. An ambulance was on its way too – just in case the reports that the man was dead were wrong – as well as back-up.

The initial reports made to the 999 operator were correct though: there was a deceased man.

Very quickly, the police on the scene established that all evidence pointed to a murder as having taken place here in suburban Wandsworth. The man in the garden, found just outside the door, had multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest. He’d bleed to death sometime within the past half an hour or so (the time of death would later be established by a coroner) and they had what appeared to be the murder weapon recovered at the scene. There was no sign or any forced entry into the house, no evidence of a burglary and no violence seemed to have taken place inside the house itself – there was dried blood on the pavement right outside the house’s back door.

There were two people in the house along with a cute dog that seemed to want attention from all of the unexpected visitors. One of those people was an elderly lady from the a-joining house while the other was the common-law wife of the dead man. The former appeared to be in shock and had been taken to the living room with a female officer. As to the latter, the initial attending policemen had noted blood on her hands. They’d taken her name and calmed her down a little and she was with another officer as she sat at the bottom of the house’s stairs out in the hallway.

A uniformed sergeant was the first senior officer on the scene and he took charge of things until the pair of detectives that he had called could arrive. He’d also requested a forensic team to attend and alerted his Inspector that he might need more manpower. This had come after a remark by another neighbour – there was a small crowd of them gathering outside among all the commotion – that the dead man inside, thought to be Christopher Fredrick Young until proved otherwise, had a job that would bring media attention here; the sergeant didn’t want nosy reporters about with the cameras and their questions.

The deceased was reportedly some sort of media coordinator with the Parliamentary Labour Party, a so-called ‘spin doctor’.

*

Emma was taken to the police station up on the High Street. She’d only been here last month to report a suspicious man that she was sure she spotted leaving her garden; that had been a bothersome experience with the policeman she’d spoken to not taken her worries about that as serious as she’d liked. This time she was driven there at high speed and then ‘processed’ when she came into the building through the back way.

It was a very unpleasant experience for her, the act of them processing her. They’d told her that she wasn’t under arrest and that they could contact a solicitor on her behalf, but she really hadn’t been paying attention to that. She could only think of Chris and kept picturing him as she’d found him in their garden. He’d been covered in his own blood and his face had shown much pain as well as being ever so pale.

It was a horrible image.

Emma wanted to go somewhere to lie down and cry, but instead the police wouldn’t leave her alone. They took pictures of her, especially her right hand, and took away her clothes. A doctor examined her and then she was put in a cell: they told her that she needed to rest before they could talk to her.

She asked about Billy, but the police didn’t care about her dog: they just wanted to get her into the cell.

All the while, the thought never occurred to her that she was in serious trouble.

*

The media were slow to respond to the death of Chris Young.

With it being a Friday evening, most senior London journalists were at the beginning of their weekend. Like most people who worked in the capital, they lived out in the suburbs – out in the Home Counties. Most were with their families though others were off getting gloriously drunk. Less experienced people thus worked in the offices of twenty-four hour news organisations at this time as they didn’t have the length of service behind them to get weekends off on a regular basis.

Thus, calls from police officers who usually had ‘relationships’ with journalists were unanswered for a while until mobile phones were looked at. Word was slow in getting out that someone newsworthy had died under violent circumstances.

However, local news organisations in the Wandsworth area were quick to converge on the scene of the murder. They were tipped off by all of the police activity and went to find out what was going on. The name Christopher Young wasn’t one that set off alarm bells among all of them, but one local journalist knew the man and his radio station reported on his death (before it could be confirmed by the police) in a special news bulletin. It was a scoop for them and something that was later picked up by national media outlets as they understood that someone of national prominence had been killed in his home.

Even later in the night, a tabloid journalist for The Sun would make a call to the police detective from Scotland Yard who had been trying to ring him for the past few hours. The reporter was told by his contact of Christopher Young’s death and then informed that the Met. Police had a record of contact with both the dead man and the woman that he lived with. The month before, and on another occasion a few months previous, police had been called to their house when neighbours reported shouting, screaming and crying coming from within. They’d launched a domestic violence investigation into Christopher Young and Emma Cartwright.

The journalist would ask his contact why that news had not got out beforehand, only to receive the response that it wasn’t the usual sort of domestic violence enquiry. In this particular case, it was the woman, not the man, that the police had come close to arresting twice for physically assaulting her partner. Though he didn’t know it at the time, when the reporter’s newspaper went out to print on the Saturday morning the front page insinuation would be that Christopher Young had been murdered by his violent female partner.





Chapter Six – Constituency Business
Sawston, Cambridgeshire – November 10th 2013


Parliamentary convention dictated that an MP maintained a home within his or her constituency. For many a politician, this was something that they didn’t like. They wanted to be close to Westminster, not those who interests that they went bound to serve, and there weren’t enough seats near London within an easy commutable distance.

For John Williams, such was the opposite. He had grown up in south Cambridgeshire, his family was from here and so he thoroughly enjoyed having a home here inside his constituency. He had brought one on the outskirts of the village of Sawston when he’d become an MP and stayed here ever since; he had no intention of leaving the area. Yet, he did have a second home too, one down in London. He and his wife had purchased a flat in fashionable Knightsbridge so that they both could have somewhere to sleep when they worked early or late within the city. Lisa would be staying there tonight because she was working today and tomorrow, but Williams himself was up here at home in Cambridgeshire.

His son Nathan – fourteen years old and as troublesome as all teenagers were – was up his room and on the internet while his father sat downstairs in the living room. Williams had browsed through the Sunday newspapers earlier today, but now he went back to them and read several articles in depth. He was in his favourite armchair, had his feet up on a stool and a glass of lemonade beside him: near bliss.

Things would have been even better with a cigarette, yet Lisa had finally forced him to quit in the New Year. Marriage was all about compromise: doing what you were told.

Williams preferred to read both The Times and The Telegraph during the week, yet he read almost all of the published newspapers on a Sunday rather than just the Sunday editions of his two favourite ones. He stayed away from the trashy, red-top tabloids and focused on the others. Each newspaper was different in content and the political outlook that it had. Their publishers and editors wanted different things in print and there was always something in one that wasn’t in another. To be able to do his job effectively, he needed to get a feel for what they all said too because they were all highly influential not just to the voters, but to fellow members of his professional circle as well.

The Observer (the Sunday sister of The Guardian) had an interesting feature article that he turned to first. He had only recently come back from having his Sunday dinner and his stomach was settled enough now to read this particular newspaper. He and Nathan had driven across to the nearby village of Whittlesford to eat there. Almost every Sunday, they would go to eat at a pub in one of the villages within his South Cambridgeshire constituency. Lisa was almost always at work and her husband (nor his son) was any real good at cooking. This allowed a lot of variety in Williams’ routine and allowed him to run into constituents. Nine times out of ten this was a pleasant experience; only rarely did they meet someone unpleasant. Spending money and showing his face in local businesses was always going to go down well too.

The article that he turned his attention to concerned the current state of unemployment within the country. Williams didn’t like the author who had composed this piece, and noticed that the man couldn’t stop himself from allowing his prejudices to influence what he was writing, yet it was still something interesting. Unemployment in the UK was still on the rise no matter what the Government did to change that. This Williams already knew; he was also aware that people up and down the country were losing their jobs no matter what their profession, age or skills. Rather than pick heart-wrenching examples, the author pointed to the general state of matters. He used numbers instead of names. This wasn’t the ‘in’ thing to do, but it worked. The numbers were staggering: three million.

Across in The Sunday Telegraph, Williams read a similar sort of article. This one concerned employment: part-time employment. There were millions of people up and down the country employed on a part-time basis. He knew that years ago, this wasn’t seen as a problem. Young mothers and students and the old took jobs that they did a few hours a week to meet their financial needs. Yet, in the past few years, with the national job shortage brought about by the economic mess that the country was in, more and more people were taking jobs that gave them twelve, sixteen or maybe (if they were lucky) twenty hours a week work. The Sunday Telegraph article pointed out that the vast majority of these were low-skilled and low-paid jobs that the people doing them had no choice but to do. There were a lot of people doing two or sometimes, in extreme cases, three at once. Complicated tax issues came with this and so too did a diminished time spent with family.

The Sunday Mail had a well-written article about the state of the economy. Williams knew much more of this matter than the newspaper put in print here, but the article wasn’t rosy in any way. The country was sliding further into debt as the Government kept borrowing more and more. Pension funds were propping up the nation’s finances at the minute, yet people were paying less into their pensions. Many people were dipping into their savings for general, everyday expenses. Millions more were not saving at all: so there was soon going to be a shortage of money that the Government could borrow from banks if things kept going as they were.

The final article he read was from The Independent on Sunday. That focused on Britain’s ever-growing energy dependency from the Russian Federation. The journalist was out in the Siberian wastelands and writing from there. Only earlier this year, in a controversial decision that Williams had in no way supported, the Government had started subsiding the nation’s energy bills as it brought oil and gas direct from the Russian government. The nation’s cars ran on Russian petrol and its homes were heated by Russian natural gas. By selling this directly to the UK Government, and not private energy companies, Moscow had taken a lower price. They had wanted geo-political concessions for this though, which Williams (and many others) regarded as detrimental to the country’s interests. The article in The Independent on Sunday warned of the journalist’s suspicions that the Russians were soon to up their ‘ask’ for the energy to keep flowing.

Williams didn’t like any of this that he was reading.

His country was going to shit, as the Americans would say. Where was the Great in Great Britain? Where was the conservative in the actions of the current Conservative government? Didn’t these people have any notion that the mistakes which they were making today were going to come back to bite ten times as hard in a few years’ time?

There was no one to ask these questions to though. He thought that he had some of the answers to solve many of the country’s problems, but who was going to listen to him at the minute?

Williams’ phone was on the table next to his glass. It vibrated and beeped just as he turned to have a gulp of his drink. He picked it up and saw that there was a text message on there; he opened the message and saw that it was from Lisa.

His wife was never one for pleasantries when using any form of electronic communication as so just had a question for him rather than any sort of ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you’. Instead, she just had an enquiry: had he ever heard any rumours about Andy James molesting young women?

He gave an instant response to this, one that he realised afterwards that he wouldn’t have written with reflection. Rather than directly respond to her question, Williams asked what she’d heard. All he got back was to check the online edition of her newspaper at ten o’clock: tomorrow’s headline for the printed edition would be up on there at about that time.

Knowing that Lisa got excited about things in her newspaper that he personally thought would be forgotten about by most people within minutes, Williams decided that he didn’t want to get into a long discussion about whatever ‘exclusive’ her newspaper had. What her newspaper was going to write about that socialist warhorse from The Guardian would be of interest to a lot of people, he knew, but it wouldn’t change the world.

Finished with his newspapers, Williams left his armchair and went over to the computer on the other side of the room. The house had a room that the previous owners before him and Lisa had used as a study, but neither of them liked it. That room was too small and draughty for their tastes. Moreover, they had long ago agreed that having a study in their house would mark them both out as a bit snobbish.

Therefore, they had the computer at table in the living room.

Once it was on, Williams saw that Nathan was using the internet upstairs in his room. He wasn’t able to see what websites his son was using – the kid always had many open at the same time – though he told himself that he shouldn’t want to know. His son was soon to be an adult and wanting to snoop on the boy wouldn’t be right.

Williams had several email accounts. There was a private one, a Parliamentary one and one for constituency use. He accessed them one at a time here and now. The first one was mainly full of junk messages though there was a confirmation email there from some books that he’d ordered online. There were many emails that had been sent to Westminster office, yet none of those were important enough to need dealing with now. His secretary would see all of them tomorrow and let him know if he needed to address any matters within those when he got into work late tomorrow morning.

Finally, Williams went into the third email account. It was full of constituency business: the unglamorous, but important, side of being an MP.





Chapter Seven – The Jogger In Green
Woolwich, South London – November 12th 2013


Baxter had been to Woolwich back when he was a soldier. On the outskirts of the town centre lay the historical Royal Artillery Barracks. He’d never been stationed there, though had visited on many occasions. Away from the barracks, all that he knew of the urban area in southeast London on the banks of the River Thames was that the place was a shithole.

Coming back here today, even when the morning was as dark as it was now, he saw that nothing much had changed.

The man he was going to follow this morning apparently lived in a new housing development down near the river itself – a gated community of sorts where the prices for flats were immense – but that was still in Woolwich. No smart sales pitch about luxury apartments with river views, good transport links to central London or gentrification was ever going to convince him that this was a really bad neighbourhood.

Baxter sat in his parked car at the minute. He’d pulled up on a main road that ran up a hill and out of the town centre, though he was still within the main shopping area of the town. Because it was just gone six in the morning, and not even dawn yet on this cold, dark and rainy morning, there was hardly anyone in sight. Baxter was using his car mirrors to look around and couldn’t see anyone. There were no brave commuters heading for the train station yet and certainly no one out going to closed shops. There should be a lone jogger though: one man who lived down near the river and would be coming this way if Baxter’s information was as correct as the woman sitting beside him said it was.

Liz was seated in the rented car’s passenger seat. She was dressed in vastly different attire to Baxter this morning. Liz had a heavy raincoat and jeans on, complete with her trademark leather boots. In contrast, Baxter wore comfortable trainers as well as a jogging outfit. He was getting ready to go outside, while she was fully intending to stay within the warm confines of the vehicle.

“I see him.” Baxter spotted Marcus Bland coming up the road, just as Liz had said he could.

“Where?” Baxter caught a glimpse of Liz turning her head to look in the wing mirror on her side of the car.

“He’s just coming up on the other side of the road: green tracksuit.”

“I see him now.” She paused for a moment and said nothing as the jogger ran past them. When she spoke again, she whispered as if she was afraid that he’d hear them even though the car’s windows were closed: “He’ll be easy to follow wearing that.”

“I’m off. Red, I’ll give you a call when we come back into town and get to the edge of his little housing development.”

“I’ll come and get you; don’t call me ‘Red’ or I’ll leave you here alone.” Liz flashed him an odd smile before Baxter opened the car door. When he turned to close it behind him, he noticed how she was climbing across and moving into his seat so that she didn’t have to get out of the vehicle to drive it afterwards.

“Crazy woman.” When he spoke this time, Baxter was out of earshot of Liz – who really didn’t like his nickname for her – and had also started to run. He had been stretching ever since he’d woken up two hours ago because he knew that this morning, he was going to get one hell of a workout. Back when he’d been in the Army, he’d jogged six days a week; since then he rarely got much exercise and when he did it wasn’t on a regular basis.

The intelligence that they had on the jogger in green was that he ran for forty odd minutes every morning over a varying course that took him around the edges of Woolwich. He appeared to like going up to and then across the high ground to the south, near where the barracks was, before taking a route home. Baxter wanted to trail the man as he did this so that he could commence a dry run of the assassination that he planned to undertake against Bland later in the week.

Within minutes of following his fellow jogger, he was regretting not getting any more exercise recently.

The two of them – separated by about fifty yards, a distance that Baxter fought very hard to maintain – went uphill and towards where Baxter knew that the barracks was. The course got steeper the closer they came to the top and Baxter could feel every muscle in his body screaming at him to give it all up. He was panting like a maniac and reckoned that the sweat he was releasing might soon be enough to drown him.

All that kept him going was the desire to continue the Mission that he had set himself upon. He couldn’t give up following this man today because not being exactly sure of how the jogger in green did his run – his pace, whether he stopped, if he ran into anyone he knew out doing the same thing etc. – was of great importance. Baxter had never failed at anything in his life too and he was determined that this hill wasn’t going to beat him.

Continuing on despite the pain, Baxter looked up and ahead just as Bland reached the top of the hill and turned to the left. The man had just done what was expected: turning towards the open expanse of Woolwich Common.

Fifty yards, Baxter silently told himself as he nearly killed himself getting up to the horizontal road than ran past those famous old barracks.

Baxter mentally congratulated himself when he got to the top. He didn’t follow his urge to stop, but rather kept going. He’d thought that the road levelled out here and thus was unpleasantly surprised to find that there was still an incline as it kept going. Still, it wasn’t as steep going at it had been coming up and out of the town centre. He kept an eye on the jogger in green, though he did also take a second to look over the right towards the barracks there.

The famous building frontage and that immense parade ground came into view over a low fence and Baxter had memories of the past on seeing that. There were no soldiers out on parade there: he wasn’t sure if he was happy or sad at not seeing such a sight. He would have been reminded of happy times soldiering, though he knew that on the other hand there would have been much regret at the loss of what he was in his past life before he had become what he was now.

What Baxter was now was a hunter of men and that man was slowing getting further and further ahead. Bland had picked up his pace and so Baxter had to do the same.

With it being so dark, Baxter knew that he had nothing to fear if his fellow jogger up ahead should choose to turn and look around for a moment. Should he do so and take notice of Baxter, there was no chance that he would sense any danger. Baxter would be dismissed as just another early morning jogger coming for a run up here.

That’s what Baxter told himself.

A crossroads came up and Baxter watched as the jogger in green ran across that in a diagonal manner. There was no traffic – hence he decision not to follow the man in a car and be very conspicuous – and Bland went straight over so that he reached the edges of the common. Baxter felt the wind pushing raindrops violently into his face as he sought to keep up and had to ignore the urge to turn his face out of the wind. It was whipping across the open ground with full gusto and only by giving up would it be stopped from affecting him as it was.

Woolwich Common was both where Baxter wanted the jogger in green to go and not where he wished the man to run across as well. When the time came to take the man’s life, this would be the perfect place to do it. Nonetheless, to directly follow him across here this morning would also leave Baxter open to being observed by the target. To exactly follow the man’s path would make it clear that he was doing such a thing. Baxter thus had to comprise, something which he never liked doing but what he had been doing ever since he’d been forceful forced to ‘retire’.

On the eastern side of the common, over near the hospital, were trees and thick undergrowth. The jogger in green ran towards that area, though he went across the open western side of the common to get there. Baxter planned to run into the man over there on Friday and he didn’t want to spook Bland by following him into there now. He thus stuck to the road that followed the edge of the common while the jogger in green ran across the grass. Baxter kept turning his head towards his target and didn’t appreciate the distance opening up between them; he had no choice at the minute though.

It took a while, but soon the jogger in green went into the trees. Liz had mentioned back in the car that Bland would be easy to follow when wearing such clothes, but she wasn’t very skilled at this type of thing. Under the glare of streetlights when back alongside main roads, that had been the case. Yet it was the opposite up here on Woolwich Common. Bland’s outfit was almost camouflage and with it being dark too, Baxter lost sight of him in seconds.

Baxter and Liz had been in the Woolwich area since three o’clock and had driven around the area extensively. The muggers that the town was well known for had gone home and so too had the drug dealers and the shockingly violent teenage gangs by that time. Baxter had thus been able to wander around a little without worry, even through the pitch-blank area of the common where the trees were. It had been hard to follow the track that served as a walkway through there, but he had been just about able to do so with a low-level handheld light. He’d timed that passage through the trees too and then figured out afterwards what he’d have to do.

The plan was for him to meet the jogger in green on the other side, but that meant the Baxter now had to run very fast around the hidden area to get to the road on the other side at the same time as Bland arrived there.

He ran.

Baxter went past the hospital there and kept following the road. He couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain that he would meet his target where and when he wanted to, nor even that the jogger in green would stick to the pathway. He only suspected that Bland would follow the logical way through that part of the common and emerge back out on the other side in preparation for the final part of his run back home. He kept on telling himself that the jogger in green would be there and Baxter would make the rendezvous.

In the end, Baxter’s timing was a little bit off. The other jogger was out of the trees and already heading back in the direction of home by the time Baxter got there. The man was only just in sight and maybe two hundred yards off. Baxter wanted to slow down, but he didn’t want to lose sight of the jogger in green just yet. He allowed himself a smile though: the intelligence on Bland had been perfect in all respects.

Instead of going back down the hill that he’d come up, the jogger in green went down another main road. This was one that Baxter had driven down earlier and he knew it wasn’t going to be fun to follow Bland this way either. The road went downhill and then straight back up again onto high ground to the east of Woolwich town centre. By following that, only afterwards would his target drop back down and towards reach his home. Baxter kept on following the man – he’d managed to close the distance down to less than a hundred yards – and went down into that dip while he tried to remember the layout back up on the other side.

How Baxter wished for a nice flat piece of ground away from all these hills!

The jogger in green didn’t go back up the other side as Baxter had feared though. Instead, he turned left when he got down to the bottom and ran past a pub. Baxter saw a small council estate that way and recalled that earlier on he’d come to the end of a close when driving there. Such a road was fine for those on foot though and also led straight back into the town centre.

Finally, Baxter came to a stop. It felt fantastic to halt his running and he involuntarily bent over as he caught his breath. His target was very quickly lost from view, yet he didn’t care! He’d stopped next to a lamppost and he leaned against that while he tried to recover from his near-death experience. When he was ready, he’d call Liz and tell her where he was. She would probably be unimpressed that he hadn’t followed Bland all the way home, but he was prepared for that verbal abuse.

It didn’t matter, because when he went after the jogger in green, who Baxter made himself think of as just another name on his list, that man wasn’t going to have his life taken from him near his home. No, Baxter would do that up on that common and away from anyone else.





Chapter Eight – The X-Files
Thames House, Central London – November 13th 2013


Apart from her father (who knew better), to her friends and family, Harriet Byrne was a junior civil servant. She was an agricultural administration specialist with the Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and worked in one of their off-sited locations in Central London. She took a train into the city every morning from her home in Chelmsford and returned to Essex in the evening. Sometimes she took trips up and down the country on DEFRA business, though that was a rare event. When she spoke about her work, which was a rare occurrence, anyone listening was soon bored. A husband of one of her girlfriends in Chelmsford had once jokingly remarked that she had ‘the cover worthy of a spy’; laughter had followed this offhand comment…

… yet it had been the truest words spoken about Harriet away from her colleagues.

Harriet had an agricultural management degree from the University of Manchester – attained six years ago now – though she’d only done any work that had anything to do with what she’d studied for a couple of months. Straight from university, she’d gone to work for Essex County Council in their environmental management department. Harriet had previously worked as a summer intern there and her expectation had been that she’d spend her life as a low- to middle-ranking civil servant within that organisation. Fate had intervened though to bring her to where she was now.

Unknown to Harriet, her father had spent his entire working life not as the junior diplomat with the Foreign Office that she’d always believed he had, but rather as an intelligence officer serving the interests of his country. The elder Byrne had served with the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI-6 of James Bond fame) all over the world. Before she’d graduated from Manchester, her father had sought out some old colleagues in the UK intelligence community and professed to them that his daughter had all the makings of someone who could well serve her country like he had. Harriet had the smarts, the common sense, the dedication to work and the patriotism for such a job. Checks had been made with an previous professor of hers who done work with the intelligence services in the past and she’d been unexpectedly invited to a job interview that her father had arranged for her with what she was told had been DEFRA.

In the end, Harriet had not gone to either the Secret Intelligence Service or the code-breakers and encryption service of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) as her father had hoped. Instead, she’d been offered a role at Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and anti-terrorism organisation: the Security Service.

Popularly known as MI-5, the Security Service was a large and important government agency. It operated nationwide (not abroad) in a concerted effort with other intelligence services to defend the country from threats against it. Her father had told Harriet before she’d joined it that the Security Service was in many ways just another large government bureaucracy. Any ideas that she had about running around with a gun chasing down foreign spooks, her father had added, was baloney. Instead, Harriet would spend her days doing what he’d always dreaded doing: paperwork.

The Security Service had field offices in the cities of Manchester and Glasgow as well as in Northern Ireland. Its headquarters was in London though, at Thames House on Millbank. The northern half of the building had previously housed the Northern Ireland Office before that government department had moved up onto Whitehall: Harriet and her colleagues were in the southern portion. In there she worked for one of the three directorates that the Security Service had.

Reorganisation of the Security Service in the past decade had split it into a trio of component parts. There first was Administration. Harriet had worked in this directorate up until late last year and done there what the title suggested. The Security Service needed admin support for its functions and there were more than a hundred staff members in that directorate. There were a lot of secretarial duties and paper-filing, but also other ‘interesting’ functions that Administration undertook. Employees of the Security Service were paid by other government departments (the money transferred across from their own budget) and so too were their PAYE and national insurance contributions. This wasn’t an easy thing to do, but it was necessary so that those who worked at Thames House could keep their job anonymous from prying eyes.

In addition, Administration dealt with technical support for the two other directorates. When Security Service officers were deployed on sensitive intelligence gathering missions, they needed all sorts of hi-tech equipment. Harriet hadn’t had many dealings with the technical support people in her previous posting within the Security Service, yet she had seen plenty of descriptions of their fancy gadgets on paper.

After her time working for Administration, Harriet had at first been slated to move across into Anti-Terrorism. This was the Security Service’s high-profile directorate and its personnel spent a lot of their time away from their desks. The threat of terrorist attacks being undertaken against the country and its civilians was very real and the Government had long ago made it clear that they considered stopping these to be the priority of the Security Service. Bombings and murders carried out by Islamic extremists were the main threat, though there was still the ever-present danger that came from Irish republicans too who didn’t respect the peace process in Ulster. The Security Service worked to prevent attacks as well as the spread of terrorist ideology. Work was done with police forces and even community groups nationwide, while they also worked with foreign representatives (from embassies in the UK) to stop this.

However, Harriet had eventually moved to the third and biggest portion of the Security Service: National Security. The National Security Directorate (NSD) was the home of British counter-intelligence. She had only had a limited idea of what the NSD would be all about when joining the Security Service as an Intelligence Officer. Monitoring and curtailing the activities of foreign agents to spy against Britain was just a small (though vital) part of the NSD’s mission. The directorate had all sorts of other important functions too. Undertaking thorough background checks for those working for the higher-echelons of the government in sensitive positions took up much of their work and so too did later scrutiny of people in such roles who were suspected of misusing the trust they had been given.

Guarding the national security of the country was more than just about secrets though. Harriet found herself working as an analysis looking at confidential and open-source information before passing it along to the relevant people who would act on what she found. The Security Service worked with Customs to prevent the import and export of sensitive goods, technology and information. There were threats to foreign defectors and high-profile asylum seekers from a political background that needed to be stopped. The economic and cultural wealth of the nation was something that the Security Service protected too. Nation states and private individuals had to be stopped from damaging the national security of the country by conducting industrial espionage against British companies; those companies paid taxes and created jobs which were vital for the country’s well-being.

Another role of the NSD, and one which the Security Service didn’t like to publicise due to adverse public reaction, was maintaining the current political structure of the nation: ‘Democracy Security’. They were sworn to uphold Parliamentary democracy, one which was backed up by the force of law and the age-old institution of the Monarchy. Harriet had quickly learned that there were a surprising large number of people and groups who wanted to change things in the UK through illegal and violent means. Some worked with foreign backers (knowingly or unknowingly), while others didn’t, and they all had to be stopped.

In dealing with all of these threats, members of the NSD often worked away from their desks. Harriet had yet to find herself in a situation where there was a personal danger to herself, yet there had been a few close calls. The Security Service would investigate maters and would then turn to Special Branch to physically stop and arrest those whose aim was detrimental to the country’s national security. Her colleagues in Anti-Terrorism often turned to UK military special forces to stop terrorists, but the NSD worked extensively with the civilian police before people were handed over to the courts to be punished for their crimes. Harriet would deal with people who were committing crimes on a grand scale and they acted like criminals too. They were boastful to others and would leave paper or electronic trails of their activities.

How the NSD would come across threats that they investigated was something that Harriet had always found interesting. In the main, senior police officers up and down the country would contact Thames House with their suspicions of criminal acts being undertaken that required more investigative skills than they had and were also deemed as potential threats to the nation. However, on other occasions, other government departments or even MPs would contact the Security Service to take action when they had their suspicions. For example, someone might try to bribe a civil servant at the Treasury for tax information on a national company involved in foreign ventures, a diplomat at the Foreign Office may notice personal surveillance of himself being undertaken, or an MP might have been approached by someone who was suspected of working for a foreign country. There were a hell of a lot of false leads, Harriet found, but also plenty of real work to be done.

Within the NSD, there was a small section of personnel – eight officers in all, Harriet among them – who worked for ‘Unusual Inquires’. Harriet had heard the nickname ‘The X-Files’ for what was done in this section of the NSD when coming to work at Thames House though only found out what they actually did when her supervisor had assigned her to work within it. Her own, personal analytical investigative skills (which other people regarded as a tad odd) had been the force behind this. It had seemed like a demotion when she’d been moved from ‘Democracy Security’ across to the X-Files, though that fear had been unfounded on her first day at her new desk. Her new supervisor wanted people who would keep following lines of inquiry that other people dismissed as irrelevant until they were run down. This was because the X-Files dealt with matters that didn’t fit into any other description of what the multitude of sections within the NSD usually investigated.

Today, Harriet was about to be assigned an X-File that would take her places where she never expected to go, learn things that were very worrying and even threaten her life. She had no idea of those consequences when she and one of her colleagues were called into see their supervisor this afternoon though.

*

Jamie Trent, the man who ran Unusual Inquires, was an unusual man.

Harriet respected him on a professional level though was physically scared of him on a personal one. He was a hulking figure of a man with a stare that she could never hold for longer than a few seconds. He had an odd accent: one that come from spending his life between his native Northumberland and then working in London for many years. Trent had a nervous tic that mean he would involuntarily jerk his left arm to a noticeable effect every few minutes or so. Harriet understood that this wasn’t something that Trent wanted to do, but she couldn’t help by find it unnerving.

When Harriet and her colleague Patrick Collins entered Trent’s little office on the fourth floor of Thames House, they found him standing behind his desk and seemingly impatiently waiting for them.

“Harriet, Patrick…” There was a sense of urgency in his voice that confirmed Harriet’s initial suspicions.

“Good afternoon, Chief.” Patrick spoke up and called him by the title that he used for everyone in authority; Harriet chose to say nothing for the moment and just nodded at her supervisor instead.

“I presume that the whole business with the strawberry company is all finished up, Patrick?”

“Yes, it is. All paperwork has been filed in the relevant places, though my conclusion is that there was nothing there to start with.”

“I agree.”

In the silence that came over the room for a moment, Harriet quickly remembered what they two of them were talking about. Back in the summer, a Welsh MP had approached the Security Service concerning a private company in his constituency that had suddenly been given an infusion of capital. The money came from what were first described as ‘Italian sources’, though after taking an interest because many of his voters worked for the company, the MP had learnt that those who had supplied the money to the company were Albanian immigrants to Italy. The concern on the politician’s part had been that there was some sort of money-laundering or even drug-smuggling connection between the strawberry growers and exports in his rural constituency. Such things may have sounded crazy, she knew, but similar things had happened before.

Patrick, a hard-working and long-service intelligence officer more than twenty years her senior, had been looking into that but was now saying that that particular X-File had nothing to it.

“And you, Harriet, you have nothing urgent on your desk at the minute?” It was not so much a question rather a statement. Trent’s words demanded an answer though.

“No, Jamie, I have not.”

“Excellent…” He reached down to his desk with one hand, just as his other arm twitched, and picked up what appeared to be a dossier. She recognised the official folder a saw a lone word printed on the front: YOUNG.

“I’ve got something that I need the two of you to look into. I want you both to give this a serious investigation. Take your time… but don’t mess around either.”





Chapter Nine – Records: Altered & Unaltered
New Scotland Yard, Central London – November 14th 2013


Everyone wanted to know where Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke was.

His family – a wife and two young children – hadn’t had him at home in four days.

His police colleagues at Scotland Yard had not seen him in six days, and they had people out searching for him.

Harriet and Patrick were now looking for him as well.

*

Clarke was a fifteen year veteran of the Metropolitan Police. He’d spent the majority of his career a desk man, Harriet had found out, in junior management roles. After a few short years as a uniformed officer in the London suburbs, Clarke had been assigned to a vice crimes unit at Scotland Yard first as a detective and then promoted to a sergeant. During that time, he’d divorced his first wife and also accumulated significant debts from that separation. His career had been imperilled some by those personal issues, though he’d remarried a few years ago and held down his job. Last year, Clarke had transferred out of his vice duties across to an administration role within Scotland Yard. His current role was with their computerised crime recording system that was used nationwide: HOLMES.

Harriet had learnt a little bit more about Clarke too when her and Patrick had yesterday started looking at the YOUNG investigation. The policeman lived out in Walthamstow within a smart little house with the mortgage fully paid off. He’d been investigated early last year as part of the tail-end of the News of the World phone hacking inquiry and suspected of passing information to journalists for cash. Nothing had been proved, yet that had resulted in his reassignment away from frontline policing and there had been a black mark against his name ever since.

Clarke was someone very much suspected of once, maybe still, being in the illegal pay of journalists.

*

Events that had taken place six days ago had brought Harriet and her currently-assigned partner Patrick here to Scotland Yard today. She’d read last Saturday how Christopher Young, the chief spin-doctor for the Labour Party, had apparently been murdered by his live-in girlfriend the evening before and hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Nor had hardly anyone else either… until the Metropolitan Police started to look into their own organisation’s history with both the dead man and the woman in their custody.

A Murder Investigation Team from Wandsworth Borough Command had taken over the enquiry within an hour of the initial 999 call being made and a Detective Inspector assigned to head it up. As a matter of routine, they had run the names of both the deceased Young and the arrested Emma Cartwright. Paper records on-file showed that the former had been arrested (but later released with no charge) four years ago – on September 3rd 2009 – when suspected of committing a drink-driving offense, and the latter had made an official report to their station on October 14th of this year about a suspected prowler around their property. There had been no further contact with both people either beforehand or since.

Therefore, it came as a surprise to the Metropolitan Police officers the next morning when they read in The Sun newspaper that Cartwright had been detained on two recent occasions on suspicion of domestic violence directed against her partner. The newspaper had stated that this had occurred on September 3rd and October 14th of this year. Those dates were at once seen by the Metropolitan Police as being significant because one matched up precisely to past contact with Cartwright and the other was exactly four years off from contact with Young. While remaining focused upon the crime scene in Wandsworth and the suspected murderer that they had in custody, the investigating team still took time to check on those dates back with Scotland Yard. The Detective Inspector had been annoyed with the media for making such a big mistake in the public arena and also more than a little curious at such a mistake too.

The Metropolitan Police were anything but sloppy when it came to record keeping. Maintaining accurate data on past crimes committed was something that they excelled at because it was important in future investigations as well in in current ones that they passed onto the courts. The Detective Inspector had thus been stunned to learn that there were two different sets of dates and circumstances concerning police contact with Young and Cartwright. Wandsworth police station had been experiencing technical problems with its computers on the Friday evening and so they had relied upon paper records at first. Those vastly contradicted with those that the media had been told were accurate and what was quickly shown to be currently listed on the nationwide database of criminal activity.

An anti-corruption investigation was at once opened within the Metropolitan Police in addition to the murder investigation down in Wandsworth.

The Sun newspaper was soon contacted and at first reacted as expected. The journalist who had broke the ‘story’ concerning Cartwright’s previous alleged assaults against Young refused to speak to the Metropolitan Police as to how he had got the information that he had. He was supported by his editor and lawyers were prepared to get involved in an effort to defend ‘journalistic sourcing integrity’. However, once The Sun was shown a (selective) copy of Metropolitan Police records, one which didn’t match up to what they had been told it had, their attitude changed. Their sister paper – The Sun on Sunday – wouldn’t repeat the allegations against Cartwright made the day before and the journalist at the centre of the original story agreed to give up his source at the Metropolitan Police.

Anti-corruption officers at Scotland Yard had already had a suspect despite what had happened with the media.

It had been determined that the HOLMES computerised records concerning Young and Cartwright had been tampered with three days previously using an access code to the nationwide system that had been issued to a senior officer who had retired earlier in the year. An access code like that was very difficult to obtain and also one that left a trail when used; unfortunately, yet another code from another retired officer had been used to try to erase the sign that an original change had been made. The perpetrator had tried to cover his tracks, yet the Metropolitan Police had many clever computer forensic investigative officers within its ranks who followed the trail back and came across one senior man who they believed responsible for all of this: Clarke.

Two days (Saturday and Sunday) had been spent confirming this and senior officers had been ready to confront the Detective Sergeant in question on Monday morning to hear an explanation. Clarke hadn’t showed up for work though and so officers had gone to his Walthamstow house to arrest and question him. Again, there was no sign of Clarke, though his wife informed the anti-corruption officers that he had been upset by something that he’d read in the newspapers the day before (later thought to be something that he hadn’t read, when expecting to see further ‘revelations’ about Young and Cartwright) enough for her to be concerned. Yet, he had left their house on Monday morning and told her that he was off to work.

Due to this high-level tampering of official records, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was informed of what was going on. Following that, because of the political implications concerning Young’s profession and links to the Government Opposition, the Security Service was alerted.

*

Clarke wasn’t senior enough to warrant an office, though he did have his own personal work station within an open-plan office area. He had a desk which came with a computer and a phone. Harriet looked at his in-tray and saw paperwork requests there. The missing man had a job confirming minor amendments to records on the system that he was suspected of tampering with. Alongside another man of equal rank, Clarke had been responsible for updating mistakes; that official job required that two people authorise any changes like that on HOLMES.

It was clear that the man had decided to make changes on his own and they hadn’t been minor either.

While Harriet stood browsing that paperwork, with policemen nearby watching over her and no doubt angry that an ‘outsider’ was in here, Patrick was seated at Clarke’s desk and looking into his computer. As directed by their office the two of them were not here to prove what Clarke had done, but to find out why. To do that, Patrick thought that there might be something in the man’s computer that would help them with that.

Despite his age, Harriet knew that Patrick was somewhat of a whizz at computers. There were some very bright and technical people back at Thames House who would want to complete a forensic examination of this computer and probably Clarke’s home one too, but here at Scotland Yard her fellow intelligence officer was busy searching though this quite thoroughly. There wasn’t much yet to the YOUNG investigation for them to be getting on with apart from a missing man who had some answers that a lot of people would want to hear. In the absence of him, wherever he’d run off to, there was just this computer and a whole bunch of seemingly-innocent files and records of internet activity.

Patrick had already found a draft copy of a novel that Clarke had been writing while at his desk (the policemen present weren’t visually pleased at how their colleague had been spending his days) along with a scanned copies of the man’s divorce certificate from his first marriage and the certificate from his second wedding. There was a Word document that listed a couple of hundred email addresses and passwords to access those. Patrick said that this list had been compiled over a long time and was something that they’d want a record of; there would be the question of what this was all about. Clarke had been downloading porn here at his desk too, though text-based porn – not images. He had plenty of this and that brought more strange looks from the policemen.

Only the list of email addresses among the files on the computer might be relevant to the YOUNG investigation – the rest was of no interest to Harriet.

Patrick moved onto the internet searches conducted by Clarke and within seconds had something: “Gotcha!”

“What have you found?”

“Can I print from here?” Patrick raised a finger towards Harriet (she hoped that this denoted a polite request for her to wait a second) and spoke to one of the policemen.

“You’ll see it; fifth floor west printer.”

“Now, let’s see what we got here.” Patrick got up and went over to a printer in the far corner of the room. He soon returned with a couple of sheets of paper. “It’s a long list, but it’s a complete record of internet activity.”

“We’ll need his work phone records too, please.” Harriet gave the policemen before her a smile as she asked for these. In theory, she could demand such a thing though that would be counterproductive. Whatever end game Clarke had in mind when he’d been here altering records, she had no idea. Maybe nothing they found here would matter, but it just might. Therefore, she needed the timely cooperation of the Metropolitan Police.

*

Patrick wanted to smoke before they headed back to Thames House this afternoon. He had been unable to have a cigarette during their time inside Scotland Yard and Harriet wouldn’t let him smoke in the car when they drove back to their office (Scotland Yard and Thames House weren’t that far apart, but there was no Underground service and the use of taxis was frowned upon by the Security Service).

The pair of intelligence officers thus left the building and went outside onto the pavement. They’d kept their temporary access passes because the car was parked within the building’s grounds and they’d need to get back in.

After he lit his cigarette, Patrick had a question: “So, what do you honestly think of all of this?”

“I honestly think that it’s a bit of a rubbish time to come out and have a smoke. My hair doesn’t like the rain, Patrick.”

Harriet knew exactly what Patrick meant, but she chose to mess with him a little by pretending that the weather was the only thing on her mind. She did this because she’d been stuck inside the building behind them for the past few hours among people who continuously gave her and Patrick unwelcoming stares. She’d dealt with many police officers during her work at the Security Service, and had never before seen such hostility. The people who worked in the HOLMES department – she’d learnt today what HOLMES meant after hearing the backronym before: Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – really hadn’t liked ‘damn spooks’, as she heard them whisper, being in their workspace.

“You’ll still look great no matter how much it rains.” Patrick gave her a wink after he said this in what Harriet saw as yet another failed attempt to flatter her though pretend that he was being ironic. Only a moron wouldn’t be able to witness how he was around her and say that he didn’t have an almighty crush on her.

“Hurry up and smoke will you!”

“I’ll be done in a minute.” This time, she witnessed a millisecond of annoyance at her chastising him. “Again, what do you think of all this?”

“Jamie was right in what he said yesterday: this could be very important.” Harriet was back to business now. “At the very minimum, what we have here is a major criminal act being undertaken by this Mark Clarke character. If he changed those records for his own end, to then tip of that journalist and earn some money, then it’s nothing to do with us and we should leave it to the police. But…”

“But he changed that information last Wednesday!” Patrick butted in, showing how he had listened too and understood what had been said.

“Oh, I guess there’s the chance that he is psychic and he knew that Emma Cartwright was going to kill Christopher Young two days later and he could make some money out of that. Yet, I doubt that.”

“And there’s a good chance that she didn’t kill him too.” Patrick spoke of a briefing that they’d been given this morning by the investigating murder Detective Inspector in Wandsworth where he reminded them of Cartwright’s prowler report the month beforehand.

“Let’s stick to what we know for sure.” Harriet sought to sort this all out in her mind by verbalising it. “To begin with, Cartwright files a police report last month about a suspected prowler in her garden: the police make note of this but do nothing.

Last Friday, she comes home from work and finds Young dead. A neighbour calls Nine-Nine-Nine and the police arrive. They at once suspect and arrest Cartwright even though they had circumstantial evidence at best.”

“Then Clarke calls his journalist friend that night and spins his lie.”

“Exactly. Afterwards, his newspaper puts that in print because of Young’s job. The police look into that because it doesn’t match the records that they have. They further discover that Clarke changed the records on the national computer, which is not something that can be done by accident. They then try to speak to him Monday, but he disappeared that morning. They have no trace of him since then.”

“Something spooked him and so he ran…” Patrick was thinking what she was.

“Do you remember what his wife told the police: he expected to see something in the Sunday papers – further accusations against Cartwright, probably based on his initial lie – but didn’t.

So, he then realised that something was up and decided he didn’t want to stay around to face the consequences. He’s been missing for four days now too, despite all efforts to find him.”

“Harriet,” Patrick dropped his cigarette and trod on its remains, “this is conspiracy at best, a real X-File.”

“That it is, yet…” She paused and thought for a second in an effort to sum this up as Patrick had. However, she couldn’t find the right words and moved onto her next thought. “But to what end? Clarke probably did this for money, but The Sun didn’t pay him. Who would have paid him? Did he know that Young was going to actually get murdered?”

“Away from our missing Clarke, who is behind this? What is their angle?”

“I don’t know.” Harriet couldn’t get her mind around the motives of the person or persons or unknown who had set this whole YOUNG investigation off. Nevertheless, she wanted to find out just what the hell this was all about and she told herself that she probably wouldn’t stop until she knew everything.

[stevep]

Jun 26, 2020 17:09:58 GMT lordroel said:

Jun 26, 2020 17:07:35 GMT James G said:

There were two alleged attempts against Harold Wilson in 1968 and 1974. The first one was only a meeting where senior people - a newspaper owner, a journalist, a top civil servant and the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten - met and briefly discussed getting rid of him. The second one saw the British Army take over Heathrow Airport one day, citing a possible anti-terror operation, with no one in Downing Street told and a belief there that it was a dry-run for a possible coup. Details are there in that link I provided but are believed by many people to be nothing serious. Wilson had a difficult relationship with the Security Services. He long thought they were trying to get rid of him and some of that has been proved true with time: a spy called Peter Wright was much involved.

Would that be this also then: Did Lord Mountbatten really plot to overthrow Harold Wilson in a coup?

  Very interesting and worrying.  Glad that Mountbatten had the morals and sense to reject the idea.   That King was removed from his position of power on the papers within a few days is possibly a good sign that others in influence thought the same way.

[stevep]

   James G ,

   Very interesting and complex plot.  Good that there are questions already being raised.  Fear a lot more people are going to suffer and die before its over however.  Good that Baxter made that mistake with the light in the 1st murder.  Pity we don't still have the death penalty for treason however.

 

  Steve

[James G]

Jun 27, 2020 10:59:14 GMT stevep said:

   James G ,

   Very interesting and complex plot.  Good that there are questions already being raised.  Fear a lot more people are going to suffer and die before its over however.  Good that Baxter made that mistake with the light in the 1st murder.  Pity we don't still have the death penalty for treason however.

 

  Steve

There is a heck of a lot to go on, making it more complex. Re-reading it again in recent days, I am trying to work things out! It all connects in the end of the story though... well, should do.
The death total will be high in the end.

[James G]

Chapter Ten – No Women, No Children
The City Council House, Birmingham – November 16th 2013


Baxter had heard the saying before ‘no women, no children’ used in films. On the silver screen, a hitman – the role that he was arguably preforming – would make the statement that they wouldn’t murder women or kids as a moral statement. That was all fine in fiction, but Baxter had to live in the real world.

In a few minutes time, he was about to take the life of a woman.

He told himself that he shouldn’t feel guilty about doing such a thing, but he couldn’t help it. A little voice in Baxter’s mind told him that he was doing the wrong thing here. Yet, at the same time, he knew that it had to be done. Sonia Patel was another name on his list which needed crossing off.

*

Saturday morning in Birmingham was extremely busy with shoppers. Baxter had been in Britain’s ‘second city’ since daybreak and once the city centre came alive when the shops opened, thousands upon thousands of people had crowded into it. He’d heard the distinctive Brummie accent over and over again and it had reminded him of former Birmingham native soldiers that he’d served with over the years.

Those were good memories.

Only for a while had Baxter been in the city’s shopping districts though; his mission had taken him on a walk to the Victoria Square and the civic centre there that housed the council offices. The time spent wandering had all been about waiting and also getting a little feel for the city. While he had been waiting, he had been in contact with Kevin via text message as his colleague shadowed the woman whose death both of them were about to bring about.

Miss Patel was the Council Leader for Birmingham. The politician had a mixed British and Indian background and a long career in local politics here. She led a terribly busy life both professionally and socially, though much of her social activity revolved around her work. She was rarely alone and thus had presented a difficult target to pin down in one place where she could be vulnerable to attack. An opportunity had opened up today for Baxter to strike and it wasn’t one that he was going to miss.

Baxter walked across the open square towards the council building. Kevin was inside and shadowing Miss Patel and Baxter went straight towards them both. He made sure that he avoided eye contact with people milling about, though he knew that he couldn’t hide from them… nor the CCTV cameras that he knew were everywhere.

There was a ceremony going on with the council building. A local sportsman was being given an award for his sporting and charity work; normally such a thing would have occurred on a weekday, not at the weekend. Yet that personality had a very busy schedule and so it was happening today. There were hundreds of interested locals around, members of the local media and dignitaries in attendance. The actual ceremony wouldn’t take that that long and would occur within the building. However, Baxter walked through the crowd of people that were outside and up the main entrance steps that led inside.

Far fewer people were inside and there was no sign of any security guards. Kevin had just sent him a message (they were using ‘throw-away’ mobile phones that would soon be ditched) saying that their planned distraction was in progress, one which would keep those few guards busy, but even then there had been only a few of them around today anyway. No one appeared to be taking notice of him as he approached a flight of stone stairs off to his left and started to go up them.

There was a camera up above that Baxter kept his eyes upon as he went upwards. It was a standard-issue CCTV device linked to a central display point. It should have filmed him going towards the building’s first floor, yet Baxter had come inside here because that camera and all of the others had only moments ago had their power supply deliberately cut. He still didn’t like being under its gaze, despite it being dead.

The layout of the first floor was something that Baxter had been studying for the past few weeks (he’d even been thinking about it when he committed his assassination yesterday in south-east London) and he reckoned that he knew it by hand. He went straight along a long corridor and turned into a shorter one. At any moment, he expected to see someone else coming either towards him or out of a door from one of the many offices and small function rooms up here. Baxter was poised to duck his head and advert his gaze should that occur, but he was lucky in this not occurring.

He got to the door that he was looking for: there would be two or three people behind it and none would be expecting him.

*

Baxter didn’t like the idea of using a silencer. The idea of that was just the same as ‘no women, no children’: all well and good in theory, but not so great in practise. A silencer made a gun longer and also slowed down a bullet. Neither of these was particularly good for good gunfire because it took longer to draw the weapon and also gave those who were fired upon what could be a few vital extra seconds to save their lives. However, with a building like this, its high ceilings and generally empty rooms that would combine to cause echoes, there was a need for it. The council building was a public place with plenty of people around who would hear and recognise the sound of gunfire.

He also knew that a silencer also didn’t make gunfire something that people couldn’t hear. Nothing could kill the sound of a gun going off apart from a vacuum. The pop was something that those who knew what they were listening for would understand.

All of this didn’t matter at this moment in time though because he had his pistol out as he walked through the door that he opened.

“Excuse me…”

“What the devil…?”

Two of the people inside the room greeted him with these comments. They saw him come into the room and looked around from over on the other side. The first to speak was a young man in a business suit whose face at first showed annoyance then great alarm. The other man was twice the age of the other and instantly scared. Neither posed any threat to Baxter. He turned his attention to the woman sitting at the desk behind the two of them and aimed his gun that way.

Miss Patel did exactly what Baxter thought that she would: she had been starting to stand up but stopped to freeze in a moment of terror. Her eyes locked onto his and her mouth dropped open. Compassion almost swept over Baxter because she was so helpless in the face of death that she could clearly see.

Yet, he had a job to do and pushed that emotion aside as he applied pressure to the cold metal object in his hand with his trigger finger.

Pop.

Miss Patel went backwards a few steps under the force of the impact of the bullet and then collapsed to the ground. She fell away to the left, exactly the same way that the younger man was moving. Baxter’s gun was already lined up on him before he had a chance to do anything and he again squeezed the trigger.

Pop.

“Please… don’t… please…” Seemingly involuntarily, the older man had dropped to his knees. Baxter had just shot the two other people with him directly in the forehead, yet the man directed all of his attention towards the man with the gun. His arms extended outwards and Baxter could see the man’s eyes reddening before tears.

The man had seen his face though, and that required an unfortunate death sentence.

Pop.

At the very last second, the third person that Baxter had shot in the past few seconds had moved slightly to the side. The bullet that was fired at him struck him on the right-hand side of the face. It caused him to fall down on his side and there was a lot of blood. Baxter knew that the shot hadn’t been fatal though and so he took a few steps forward so that he was right over him. He took careful aim at the back of the man’s head…

Pop.

Baxter checked both the other man and also Miss Patel. His shots with those two had been perfect and they were both very dead.

The gun was now dropped onto the floor as Baxter took his phone out of one of his pockets and he walked back towards the open door through which he’d come.

*

Once his pre-written (and innocuous) text message was sent, Baxter walked briskly back the way that he came. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest and was sure that he could hear himself breathing heavily too. This reaction was not in response to what he’d done, he told himself, but what was about to happen.

The building’s fire alarms went off as Baxter reached the top of the stairs. By the time he’d reached the ground floor, Baxter was joined by people coming out of other doors and all heading for the main entrance as he was. The blazing noise was unsettling though very necessary to bring this reaction from everyone nearby.

He was instantly lost in the crowd; Kevin would soon be too as he came out of another door on the other side of the large building.





Chapter Eleven – Silly Speculation
Portcullis House, Westminster, London – November 18th 2013


Maybe it was because he had spent a little too much time with Michael recently than he usually would, but Williams was starting to find the other man a tad annoying. He knew exactly what to say in an interview with the media and didn’t need any coaching. Snyder had been far too forthcoming in offering ‘help’ though and wanted to talk to Williams now moments before it was to begin.

Williams waved him away and as he did so he hoped that the reporter who’d come to talk to him wasn’t taking too much note of this.

“Can we begin, John?”

“Of course, Tim.” Williams gave the man a good-natured smile. “When you’re ready…”

“As you know, Mister Williams,” Tim Allen was back to the formalities, “the murdered Sonia Patel spoke before your committee last week and it was her last public appearance. Can I ask your reaction to her untimely death?”

“I am still rather stunned by it all, Tim. When I heard the news, Saturday night, my initial reaction was one of sadness for her friends, family and the people of Birmingham that she served for so many years. Later, that turned to outrage that such a thing should have occurred.”

“Can you expand upon that, please?”

Allen worked for The Times. He had been a senior political journalist there for many years and Williams had known him all the time that he’d been an MP. The reporter was currently inside Williams’ office and seated opposite his host; they were on the chairs to the side of the room and away from Williams’ desk. Allen had his notepad out and was scribbling away like the old-fashioned journalist that he was, though he had a miniature tape-recorder in his lap too. His article would go online tonight and then into print for tomorrow morning.

Williams knew that Allen wanted him to further elaborate on what he’d said. That had been one of Snyder’s issues and Williams watched the other man – seated over at Williams’ desk – open his hands in an exaggerated manner to display some sort of signal that meant Williams should elaborate.

Of course he was going to say more! Williams knew what kind of journalist Allen was. The man worked for a serious newspaper and his readers would expect more than just the little that Williams had already said.

“Political violence is something that cannot be allowed. It cannot be justified, it cannot be excused and those who undertook it cannot be permitted to get away with what they have done.

My outrage comes from that someone would dare to do commit an act like that.

Miss Patel appeared before my committee last week. Several of my colleagues disagreed with some of her actions as Chief Executive, yet that disagreement was discussed. This country is democracy where our leaders are accountable to the ballet box. Politicians work with each other and compromise.

Politics cannot be solved with violent means, and certainly not with the barrel of a gun.

I am certain that I speak for all of my elected colleagues nationwide, despite their political affiliation, when I say that there is a lot of anger at what occurred in Birmingham. No one has the right to take the life of another, especially not over politics and certainly not in such a cowardly manner as in the murder of Miss Patel.”

“As you know, Mister Williams, the police in Birmingham are still investigating the matter…”

“And I wish them all possible success in that endeavour.” Williams didn’t usually like interrupting people, but he thought that such was the right thing to interject there.

“So do we all.” Allen gave a serious nod to that that Williams hoped denoted his agreement with what had just been said. “As I was saying, the Birmingham Police remain at the council officers where Sonia Patel was killed. In a statement this morning, the officer leading the investigation stated that they were still looking for the person or persons unknown who committed this act and were appealing to the public for assistance. There were apparently thousands of people in the immediate area of the crime, yet so far they have no real witnesses.”

“Yes…?” Williams didn’t understand where Allen was going with this.

“Several Birmingham M.P.s have already urged their fellow citizens to aid the police in any way that they can. Will you be echoing that call?”

“Of course, Tim. If anyone has any information at all, they should assist the Birmingham Police… just as they would in any other criminal investigation.”

“There have been comments made to the media from unnamed Westminster figures, Mister Williams, that many people have rushed to judgement with regards to Sonia Patel’s murder.” Allen finally came to his point.

“I sometime wish that ‘unnamed figures’ wouldn’t speak behind the cloak of anonymity. The police have stated that the murder was politically motivated by the evidence that they have and that should be the end of that.”

“There were two other people with Sonia Patel when she was murdered and there is speculation that their deaths may not have been as inconsequential as they seemed.”

“I simply cannot agree with that statement!” Williams realised that he lost his temper as he spoke, but couldn’t stop himself. Strangely, he saw that Snyder – still sitting silently over at the desk – didn’t make a gesture in reaction but rather gave a smile unseen by Allen. “Those two men were civil servants of Birmingham City Council. They worked with Miss Patel in representing over a million people of the city and their deaths are not ‘inconsequential’: they had loved ones who are in mourning today.”

“Such thoughts are commendable, Mister Williams.”

Allen’s remark here was something that Williams couldn’t understand. He wasn’t sure if the journalist was being patronising and just shutting him up. The question about what people were saying anonymously had been something that Williams had no choice but to react to. Those fellow MPs were cowards who were trying to spin a conspiracy theory or such like about Saturday’s events in Birmingham and trampling on the memory of three public servants who’d been callously murdered; those who had suggested such a thing were almost as bad as whoever had committed the acts of violence in the first place. Williams had felt that he had to put his feelings on this matter across as forcefully as he could so that Allen (and thus the readers of The Times) knew that he wasn’t going to play those games.

Innocent people had died and it was no time for political games with that.

“The Home Secretary,” after a moment’s pause, Allen was back to the interview, “wrote yesterday in the Mail that Birmingham Police would be fully supported by the security services in their investigation. Do you agree with her that this is a matter of national security?”

“I do, Tim; I fully support this assessment and action. Our intelligence services are tasked to uphold democracy and clearly stopping acts of political violence – in essence: domestic terrorism – is vitally important.

We can clearly not allow this to happen again. As the Birmingham Police do, the intelligence services have my humble backing.”

“Thank you, Mister Williams. That is really all I have to ask of you today.”

“It was my pleasure.” It hadn’t been; Williams wasn’t happy with how the interview had gone. “If you have any queries, any follow-up questions, contact me here today or if you cannot reach me my secretary will find me.”

Williams knew that Allen would write up his piece later and only parts of what he’d said would be included. The journalists might have questions with regard to clarifications, though Williams actually hadn’t said much in the short interview.

He stood up so that he could shake Allen’s hand before the man left.

*

“What’s wrong, John?”

“I overreacted to what he said.”

“Don’t fret over that. I think that was what he wanted.”

“Explain…?” Williams didn’t understand what Snyder meant.

“I said that you should speak to him in particular for a certain reason.” Snyder hadn’t arranged the interview with The Times, though when Williams had been talking to his friend on the phone last night Snyder had stated firmly that he believed Williams should do it. “He was angry about what some people were saying. He didn’t like the silly speculation and was waiting for someone to speak out against it.

Which you did quite well too.”

“That whole thing is rather odd, don’t you think? Why would people like Peterson, Smith and Weston make up things like that?” Williams referred to a trio of MPs who’d been giving anonymous briefings to the media about the political murders in Birmingham.

“They have nothing better to do: silly little people.” Snyder dismissed them with an offhand remark.

“Do you have any plans for the rest of the day, Michael?” Done with the matter and trying to move on, Williams changed the subject.

Before he could answer, Snyder’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and Williams watched his friend seemingly read a text message. As he did so, Snyder’s face gave an odd expression.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing really, just gossip.”

“Oh…?” The success of Williams’ political career was heavily built on gossip.

“Just a friend telling me that Emma Cartwright has been released from police custody.”

“Who is Emma Cartwright?” Williams had heard the name, but couldn’t place it.

“The domestic partner of Chris Young: the former Labour spin-doctor.”

“I see.” That gossip wasn’t anything worthy of attention. “So, as I asked, what are you doing for the rest of the day, Michael?”





Chapter Twelve – A Tedious Man
Notting Hill, London – November 19th 2013


Lauren Carter was someone who could honestly say that she enjoyed her job. She worked hard and was often under much stress, all for little immediate reward too, yet Lauren found herself satisfied by her work. Her whole adult life had been about politics and she now had a position right at the top of the pyramid of British politics.

Home at her place in London’s Notting Hill this evening, with her feet up in front of the television, Lauren had left her office only an hour ago. It was eight o’clock now and on weekdays, she usually left the office around Seven after getting there eleven or even twelve hours beforehand. To survive her long days, Lauren survived on caffeine-laced coffee during the week and a lot of sleep at the weekend.

The pressures of working in Downing Street directly for the incumbent Prime Minister had forced many of her co-workers to quit for less demanding roles, but Lauren revelled in it. Every day was different; there was always something going on. She was there when important decisions were being made and even, at times, had a hand in influencing them.

Lauren was the deputy to Daniel Lincoln, the Chief-of-Staff to the Prime Minister. Daniel enjoyed the prestige of being in charge of the PM’s office a little too much as far as she was concerned, yet Lauren knew that she did the real hard work there. She worked well with Daniel but was hoping that one day soon she would get the chance to replace him and take his position. It was only natural, she would tell herself often, to want the top job.

The Conservative Party paid Lauren’s salary, despite her working for the Government at No. 10 Downing Street. She had a little office next to Daniel’s slightly larger one and both were within shouting distance of that of the PM himself. On a normal working day, she and Daniel would work extensively with the PM in his day-to-day tasks. Their enemies were civil servants who sought to curtail what they were trying to do: make sure that the country was governed in the right way and that everyone was aware that the PM was doing a superb job.

Special Advisors to Ministers reported to Lauren and Daniel and that was an important part of their job. So too was acting as gatekeepers to the PM; his diary was arranged by them. Many people wanted the attention of the PM but they decided who and what was important. There were policy decisions that needed to be made and the PM relied upon his two principle advisors for this.

The stress of Lauren’s job came from everything that could and would go wrong. Unexpected events occurred every day, things didn’t go as planned with Government actions and people messed up. Problems would need a quick fix and responsibility for dealing with these would often fall on Lauren’s shoulders. Sometimes there were days that nearly drove her insane, yet she knew that it would all be worth it in the end. As far as she was concerned, the job that she was doing kept the Government on track and the PM in office. As number two to his principle aide, she reaped the benefits of it all.

Even though she was at home at the minute, with dinner in her lap, Lauren was still working. She had BBC News 24 on the screen and was paying more attention to that than she was the dinner that she'd hurriedly cooked for herself. There was no time in her life for entertainment on the television and she only watched it for the news. She preferred the rolling news channel for the subjects that it covered and she could leave it on while she ate and then turned to doing some ironing.

Lauren watched and listened as the news covered several different stories, many of which she paid more than cursory attention to. There was a piece on the upcoming by-election in Norwich that concerned visits being made to the Norwich South constituency by senior Conservative & Labour Party officials. She gave an unconscious nod of approval when the reporter there casually mentioned that the Parliamentary seat was expected to be held by the Conservative Party. A sports story came on next and Lauren took that moment to take her plate to the kitchen where it joined the rest of the washing up that needed to be done. She came back into the living room of her basement flat and sat down again to continue watching the television.

The news had moved onto another story, this one concerning the latest national political polling figures. She saw at once that these were different to the ones that she had seen and which had been discussed today at work. BBC News 24 had more optimistic figures than she and the others at Downing Street had seen. The television said that her party was polling five points behind the Labour opposition; she’d been told earlier today that they were eight, maybe nine points behind. Again, she gave her approval to what was on the television. The PM had other people working for him who were effective at muddying the waters in public so that things didn’t look as bad as they were.

For the millionth time, Lauren told herself that she was smart. Politics were her main interest in life, yet she had never wanted to be a politician. She worked for politicians though wouldn’t want to be one. To put your future in the hands of thousands of nameless and disloyal voters was crazy! She couldn’t lie like politicians did nor could she pretend to be loyal to principles. It just wasn’t her. Though she wouldn’t admit it out loud, she didn’t like politicians either: they were untrustworthy.

Lauren kept these feelings to herself though.

A politician appeared on the television screen just as she was thinking this. She tried to recall the man’s name, but it escaped her. Thankfully, a caption appeared to help her with that: John Williams, M.P. (Con., Camb. S).

Lauren gave his image a sneer. She’d never met the man personally, though she didn’t like him. He was one of the people that made an effort to make her life a little difficult. Despite being a Conservative Party MP like her boss, he acted in a rather ‘independent’ manner. He was critical of the Government and had even had the nerve to turn down a post within it. Daniel had submitted the idea to the PM a few weeks ago, one which she’d supported, to make him a junior minister to silence his rather effective criticism of the Government by bringing him aboard. He’d turned that down though and that had reflected just a little badly on the judgement of not only Daniel, but her too.

The man was a pain in the behind.

She listened to him now as BBC News 24 broadcast a short segment of speech that he’d given today in Birmingham. Lauren asked herself what he was doing there (he was a backbench MP from Cambridge after all) before she actually listened to the rubbish he was sprouting. He was talking about that murder there at the weekend of the council leader. He made her want to yawn; he was so damn boring.

Lauren had been with the PM yesterday when he’d been given a briefing on that whole thing by the Home Secretary (another grade one bore) and the Director-General of the Security Service (a self-important little man). In her opinion, the whole thing was overblown. Yet, the Birmingham Incident, as people were now calling it, had gained national importance because the woman who was killed there – a Labour politician, not even a Conservative! – had been killed to make some sort of political statement. No one could say what that political statement was, as Daniel had quietly pointed out, yet that didn’t seem to matter.

Lauren wished that the whole thing would go away; the Government and the media needed to focus on more important things, like what a great job the PM was doing even with the country in the dire economic straits that it was.

The annoying Cambridgeshire MP was soon off the screen and the news moved on: she was glad of that and hoped that she wouldn’t hear any more of the tedious man.





Chapter Thirteen – We Have A Problem
Richmond, North Yorkshire – November 21st 2013


Lord North had had a very busy past few days.

He had completed the final negotiations needed in a long-term attempt to take control of a small general aviation company based up here in the North-East. It had cost him far more money than he’d planned, as well as more effort than he’d intended, though the Newcastle-based ‘Durham Air-Systems’ now belonged to him. His new enterprise would continue providing technical support to private airlines and civil authorities that operated aircraft.

In addition, Durham Air-Systems would continue to train people on the use of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs).

While in Newcastle, Lord North had been gaining control of another organisation too. For several years, he’d been on the board of the ‘Centre for Democracy’. This was a policy institute – a think-tank – that had its origins in the North-East. The think-tank was headquartered in London, yet this group of right-wing political theorists had started out on the Tyne before moving to the capital. He’d only ever had a passing interest in the work that the think-tank did until recently. Lord North had come to see that it could be important in aiding his future vision and so set about trying to replace board members with those who shared his interests. This had been finally done and in the future, when the think-tank commissioned and then issued scholarly political reports, those would represent the views that he wished to have put across to the right people.

Other recent travels of Lord North’s had seen him go down to Norfolk. The Conservative Party candidate standing there in the upcoming by-election was someone that he knew and who shared many of Lord North’s political views. The Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Norwich South was getting a lot of support from the national organisation, though he was remaining loyal to his long-term backer despite that. Lord North had shown his face there in Norfolk and made nice with other Conservative activists. He was certain that they had no idea of his own intentions nor while he was putting so much effort – and, more importantly, money – into the soon to be held election there.

Back here in North Yorkshire, Lord North had been holding meetings within the town of Richmond. He had many political connections to the town and had put a lot of money into local businesses there.

Richmond was one of the locations across North Yorkshire that would play host to an official royal visit early next month. The notable castle and the historic Georgian Theatre Royal would be graced by Her Majesty’s presence. With him being a well-respected local dignitary, Lord North was on the organising committee for the visit and this meant liaising with another Yorkshire native: George Tate, the Private Secretary to the Sovereign.

Throughout the year, Lord North had been making a great effort to get close to Tate. Tate was the principle adviser to the Monarch – a very modern courtier – and someone that Lord North wished to influence. However, Tate was no fool and wasn’t someone who could easily be persuaded to fall into Lord North’s camp.

“The theatre is…”

“… small but an important local institution.” Lord North interrupted his guest as the two of them sat within view of the Eighteenth Century listed building.

“Quaint was the word I was going to use, Edward.”

“That it is too.” Seated across from Tate inside a small restaurant within Richmond as the two of them had a light afternoon lunch, Lord North gave an agreeable nod.

“The visit by Her Majesty will bring about much public interest in the theatre and hopefully attract more patrons. Is that not what you would like to see, Edward?”

“It certainly is. The theatre needs more patronage that either I or other concerned locals can give it. Personally, making a visit there is one of my favourite pastimes. I would be unhappy to see it closed down.”

Lord North didn’t mean anything that he was saying. He was no fan of the theatre, this one or fancy ones down in London, yet he understood that many people were fans of the stage; many of which were important people too. Tate was one of those and Lord North had chosen this approach to gain the man’s favour. Next year, when Lord North would want something further from the man, then Tate would (hopefully) recall this meeting and all the rubbish that Lord North spewed about it. More would have to come to strengthen their relationship, yet this was the initial building block.

They would continue to sit here and talk about the theatre for the next hour as Lord North made as much effort as possible into keeping his visitor happy.

*

Later that evening, after his London visitor had left and before he himself could, Lord North had another (this time unexpected) guest come to see him. Michael Snyder had come all the way up from London and wouldn’t wait until Lord North arrived home; Snyder had come to a solicitor’s office in Richmond that Lord North occasionally used to conduct meetings.

“Edward, we have a problem.”

“Close the door.” Lord North didn’t like the fact that Snyder was talking with the door open to anyone who might be listening outside. He watched as Snyder did as commanded and then as the younger man came across the room to him with his concerned look back. “Couldn’t this wait, Michael?”

“No, it could not. Damn…” Snyder paused in what he was saying and let out a groan of apparent frustration as he sat down beside Lord North. “I’m not sure where to start…”

“Tell me what the problem is.”

“Okay, there is a policeman named Mark Clarke…”

Lord North listened with a growing sense of unease as Snyder related his tale. Clarke, he was told, was an officer with the Metropolitan Police and an old friend of Kevin Nye; the latter being a former policeman that Lord North knew well because the man had been in his employ in various functions for the past few years. Nye had been using Clarke to check information that Stevens & Co. had been receiving and the relationship between them had been cash based.

Snyder wasn’t sure what Clarke had exactly done, and why he had done it too, but it appeared that the policeman had been tampering with the police national computer. He explained to Lord North that he had changed some information there concerning Chris Young, a man that Baxter had gone and killed. Moreover, he tipped off a journalist with this false information so that the newspapers had declared that Young had been murdered by his girlfriend.

There had been an immediate internal police investigation – Snyder didn’t know why this had occurred so quickly – into Clarke and this false data in the police national computer. The Metropolitan Police had gone looking for Clarke, but he’d disappeared. Even worse, the police had been joined by MI-5 in looking for him as well. Snyder had no idea too how MI-5 had become involved, and to what end, but they were looking into Clarke and his activities.

“What does Nye say?” Lord North spoke up after Snyder finished with what he had to tell.

“He doesn’t know what Clarke was doing messing around with the police computer, or why his colleagues got onto him so quick either. He’s heard nothing from Clarke and doesn’t think that it would be a good idea for him to go looking either.”

“And Liz? You brought her in because of her service at Thames House: what does she think her former colleagues there will do?” Lord North had always been impressed with Liz Jackson: her intelligence, her insight and her investigative skills.

“She has no contact with anyone working there, yet she has theories on how they would get involved in a situation like this and possibly what they might do as part of an investigation.

Chris Young was a major political figure and once the Met. Police realised that someone had done what Clarke had, they would have seen some sort of conspiracy taking place. Add his position and that together, and someone high up at Scotland Yard decides to call in the spooks.

They have been looking for Clarke for the last week. Liz believes that if he hasn’t been found yet, then he’s either in hiding using a plan to run that he had long ago arranged, or he’s dead. Nye said that Clarke had a lot of personal problems and he might have killed himself.”

“Really?” Lord North could never understand suicide.

“The man’s world has come apart, so it is a possibility. In fact, from what Liz says, that would be most beneficial. He could tell M. I. Five many, many things – even lie to them – to get himself out of trouble. They’ll then come after Nye.”

“But, Nye is dead.” Lord North had long ago learnt to always cover his bases.

“Officially he is, yes. Like Liz is as well, they both have death certificates and graves.”

“Can we have our people find Clarke and silence him, if he is still alive?”

“I can look into having that done.”

“Do it. We’re doing something that is too important to risk exposure, Michael.”





Chapter Fourteen – A Night Out
Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire – November 22nd 2013


Patrick hadn’t known where Tewkesbury was. Harriet was amused at this; she had no idea where the town was, but it had been great to hear him admit that he didn’t know something. He fancied himself as some sort of walking encyclopaedia, yet he’d let himself down this morning.

The two of them had come out to Gloucestershire following the M-4 and M-5 motorways from London while driving a plain, unremarkable Ford Fiesta. Patrick had been at the wheel while Harriet had brought herself up to speed on the YOUNG investigation as they came here.

BBC Crimewatch had last night televised a brief appeal for information on the whereabouts of the missing Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke. The Metropolitan Police had put in this request, yet it was one originally made by Harriet and Patrick acting on behalf of the Security Service. Clarke’s name, age and occupation had been broadcast along with his picture. The programme stated that he was suspected in participating in ‘misconduct while in public office’ and for attempting to ‘pervert the course of justice’.

All sorts of calls had come into the programme itself, Crimestoppers and the national 999 service. Harriet had been amazed at what people rang up to say about the appeal for information on Clarke. There had been nutters and the misguided, as well as people who had called to give all sorts of information on Clarke’s long time spent with the police. Three particular calls though had been of value and all of them had pointed towards northern Gloucestershire.

*

A trio of Metropolitan Police officers (in their own vehicle) had come with Harriet and Patrick and they all met up at the Gloucestershire Constabulary headquarters building in Quedgeley. Quedgeley was located on the outskirts of Gloucester and not that far from Tewkesbury: a location where those three phone calls from ‘concerned citizens’ had pointed to Clarke being seen in recently.

“From what we know of Clarke, he likes a drink at the weekend whether he’s working or not. On Friday and Saturday nights in Walthamstow, he would pub crawl around several bars and often times he would be all on his lonesome too.” The lead policeman from London, Detective Inspector Lavelle, had spent the past week and a half learning as much as he could about the missing Clarke.

“Tewkesbury has more than a few pubs for him to choose from.” Harriet looked over at the Gloucestershire policeman who made this remark. He was a plain-clothes detective who sat when everyone else stood and gave off an uninterested attitude.

“He was apparently in the Golden Lion there last Friday night. The call came from a public payphone down the road from there saying he made a scene of himself and was remembered because of his London accent.”

“He said he was a policeman, but got into a fist fight.” A tut came with that. “It made him more than memorable.”

Two other Gloucestershire policemen seemed keener on helping their London colleagues – and the two people from ‘the Government’, as Harriet and Patrick had been introduced as – than the first one who’d spoke.

“The two other phone calls mentioned another pub: the Two Bells. If what I’m reading is correct, this one doubles as a bed-and-breakfast.” Patrick had thrown himself into the YOUNG investigation and had shown more interest in it than Harriet had expected. “If he was staying there, surely that might have been mentioned. Still, I reckon that that is another place we should check tonight.”

“There’s eight pubs in the town and we’ll have people visit each one tonight and tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Inspector Lavelle.”

“What is Clarke’s connection with Tewkesbury, if I may ask?” The first Gloucestershire policeman had a question. From what Harriet could gather, it was clear from his tone that he didn’t like the man being in his county.

“His mother originally comes from Ashchurch. It’s a little town…”

“Rather a village, to be honest.”

“A little village then, outside of the town and beside the motorway.” Patrick got back to what he was saying following the minor interruption. “He visited his grandmother there when he was a child and following his mother’s death too. Clarke probably has fond childhood memories and thought he would escape out here.”

Inspector Lavelle lifted a file folder as he spoke up: “We still have no idea what he’s doing for money. His debit card and bank account haven’t been touched. His phone hasn’t been active since he left his home the other week and we’ve had a monitor on his wife’s communications: phone and email.

Clarke has cut himself off from the world he had in London.”

“He’s starting anew here. I’d guess that he is trying to make friends – hence the pub crawls – and possibly try to begin a new life here. What we need to look into, if we don’t pick him up tonight,” Patrick, Harriet realised, was eager to get on with things, “is where he is staying. We should call, or even better, pay a visit to as many B-and-Bs in the area as possible. We’ll show his photo around because he won’t be using his real name. I doubt that he rented a car because you need valid I.D. and a debit card for that, so he probably paid cash for a second-hand one – that’ll be hard to check.”

“You’ve done this before, Mister Cole.” One of the other Gloucestershire policeman gave his acknowledgement to Patrick’s investigative skills using his alias.

*

The market town of Tewkesbury was just as busy as anywhere else on a Friday night in Twenty-First Century Britain. The pubs and restaurants in the town centre started to get busy after seven o’clock and within the hour many were full of patrons. Many youngsters went down to Gloucester and Cheltenham for a night out, yet still many locals chose to have a night out in their home town.

If Clarke had decided to come for into the town to drink tonight, Harriet knew that there wouldn’t be many places that he could be nor that many people around that he could hide among.

Patrick had made the decision for the two of them that he and Harriet would go to the Two Bells. They drove up to the small pub from Quedgeley and went into there just before eight o’clock. Patrick got himself a pint of bitter than he kept sipping at, while Harriet purposely made a comment at the bar about not drinking so she could drive and thus had a glass of cola. The young, but round and tattooed barmaid seemed to pay little notice to them apart from when they were at the bar. When they sat down at a corner table, Harriet noted that no one else directed their attention to them.

Harriet sat with her back against the wall and looked around. The pub had low ceilings and was dimly lit. There were small groups of people and a few lonesome drinkers in here. She spotted groups of work-friends, couples and married men out on their own. Most were seated at tables or standing in the open bar area, yet there were a few at the bar itself. There was a borderline drunk leaning against the bar who seemed to want to make conversations with anyone that he could; Harriet decided that when she went back to the bar she would humour him so as to not draw too much attention to herself.

Patrick took his pint outside with him when he went to smoke. There was a beer garden out there and they’d agreed on the way here that he would go out when he thought there were people out there, he could engage in conversation with. She knew that Patrick could pass for an easy-going, friendly chatterbox when he wanted to – he would gossip out there and make an attempt to bring up the recent presence of a passing outsider from London who might have been in here the week before.

A young, good-looking guy gave Harriet several glances after Patrick had temporarily left her alone. He was with two of his friends and stared at her while laughing with his friends. Harriet averted her gaze when she saw him looking in a manner that she hoped was interpreted as she not being interested. The young guy didn’t make an attempt to come over to her, and she guessed that it was down to Patrick only being outside.

Just as Patrick came back in from the beer garden, and a gust of cold air momentarily filled the inside of the pub, someone else came in through the front door.

It was Detective Sergeant Mark Clarke.

Harriet had looked at the man’s picture enough times in the past week to know it was him. She saw Patrick do a double-take as he sat down, yet she had no need to check. She recognised him past the moustache that he’d grown and the reading glasses he wore. His dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and pointy chin gave him away. He’d combed his hair different and possibly had it lightened in colour in another effort to change how he looked, yet that was him now going to the bar.

There was no music in the pub, only the noise of people talking, so she couldn’t clearly hear him order a drink at the bar despite straining her ears to do so. That final confirmation of a London accent wasn’t needed though.

“That’s him!” Patrick had leaned closer and hissed the remark to her.

“I know!”

“Get on the phone to Lavelle, Harriet. He’s at one of those other pubs up the High Street.”

Harriet took out her phone on Patrick’s command and instantly searched through her contact list for Inspector Lavelle. She found his number and pushed the call button as she raised the phone to her ear.

At the same time Patrick stood up from the table that he’d just sat back down at and went over towards the bar and Clarke.

The phone rang five times before Inspector Lavelle answered: “Hello?”

“This is Bishop,” like Patrick, Harriet had a simple-to-remember alias, “we have eyes on our London friend here in the Two Bells.”

“Give me a few minutes. Don’t do anything rash, will you?”

“We know what we’re doing.”

Harriet killed the connection and the put the phone back into her handbag. Her hand searched her bag for something afterwards though she kept her eyes upon Patrick and Clarke at the bar. Harriet soon found what she was looking for and slid it out while keeping it within her palm.

Meanwhile, Patrick had stood at the bar like Clarke was. They were separated by the drunk man that appeared to live in that position. Her partner from the Security Service was getting another drink from the barmaid (despite having a glass still a third full on the table where she was), while Clarke stood waiting for a barman to finish pouring his pint of Guinness.

What Harriet currently had in her hand was technically illegal to carry. It was miniature cattle-prod type device that would deliver an electrical charge from its end if utilised. She carried it for her own protection on the exceedingly rare occasions when she thought that she might need it to prevent harm coming to her. She had it out of her handbag now because she was a little bit nervous. Clarke was standing just before her with apparently no idea that either she or Patrick over there were here to assist in his arrest. They had no powers of arrest and the Gloucestershire Constabulary officers that should be hurrying their way here now along with Inspector Lavelle would do that.

Clarke might do something to stop that from happening and she wanted to be ready to protect herself should she find herself accidently in his way if he fled.

At the exact moment that she thought this, Clarke decided to do what she feared he would.

For a long time afterwards, Harriet would wonder what exactly caused Clarke to do what he did. She would be denied knowledge of what caused him to turn to the drunk man beside him and shove that man straight at Patrick. Both fell to the ground with arms and legs everywhere… and booze soaking each of them too. The later assumption would be that he saw Patrick looking at him the wrong way and overreacted. All she saw was him do that and then flee towards the back of the pub among the uproar that that caused.

Many people reacted to the sudden intrusion in their night out.

Harriet unconsciously stood up and went forwards as she lost sight of Clarke. There were shouts of annoyance – even some laughter that she would find odd – in the commotion that was caused by Clarke’s action. People got in the way of her moving towards Patrick as he tried to get up off the floor and they also tripped over each other.

Maybe someone watching from a distance in a detached manner would have found the whole scene amusing.

“The garden!” Patrick screamed in her direction and Harriet turned her head that way as she saw that the back door leading to the beer garden was open.

Moments later, four policemen including Inspector Lavelle walked into the hubbub inside the Two Bells. Clarke was long gone though.

[James G]

Chapter Fifteen – It Doesn’t Matter
Heeley, Sheffield, West Yorkshire – November 24th 2013


“You don’t know me, do you?” It wouldn’t do either of them any good, but Baxter couldn’t help but talk to the man.

“No… but surely we can talk. We can work this out!” Wearing only his dressing gown and slippers, the man before Baxter had tears streaming down his face as he spoke. He would have said anything to get out of this situation.

“You wrote about me once. You didn’t use my name, but you said some very unkind things about me.” Baxter spoke as if the man whose garage they were inside hadn’t.

“I’m sorry! I have money you know, lots of money!”

“That’s blood money, Dominic.” Baxter wouldn’t touch the money, for lots of reasons. “Attach the loop around the hook, will you?” It was time to get back to what he was here for.

“I won’t do it!”

There hadn’t been any defiance from Dominic Hodges beforehand. Baxter had managed to wake him up in the night and get him all the way out here into the garage without any issues. He’d got the man to stand on the chair beneath the light-fitting without any trouble too.

The length of cabling that Baxter had given him was causing a problem though.

“I won’t do it.” Hodges repeated himself while Baxter stared him down gun in hand.

Baxter remained standing where he was as Hodges started to cry again. Tears streamed down the man’s face and fell off him before hitting the floor below.

Hodges didn’t look as he usually did.

*

Baxter had read through all of the intelligence files that they’d got on him from the pair of private investigators who’d looked into his personal life. In those he saw the man away from the camera as he was seeing now. Yet, the man had spent almost his entire adult life in the newspapers and on the television. He was someone who courted publicity; Hodges was a media personality.

Back in the Eighties, Hodges had been a local councillor here in Sheffield. He’d been a leading star of the so-called ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’: the famous, but now-dead Trotskyist movement in the city. He’d later become an MP for one of Sheffield’s constituencies and spent the rest of that decade, plus most of the Nineties, ‘fighting for the workers’ whether they wanted him to or not. As the Labour Party had moved to the centre ground, Hodges had stayed on the left and been very vocal with it too.

If there was a left-wing cause about, Hodges had attempted to be its spokesman. He hadn’t minded who he had antagonised in doing so, all the while letting the media know what he was up do.

Hodges had tried to keep this up going into the new millennium, yet the political landscape of the country had changed. He could still get attention for himself, yet his supporters (similarly-minded politicians and media friends) were getting older and retiring. The national party had little interest in him despite his strong base of local support back in Sheffield.

Hodges had left Parliament in 2005, but that hadn’t silenced him. He’d put more interest in his ‘media career’: Hodges started to appear on political talk and debate shows. He got himself positions working for both The Daily Mirror and The Guardian too; he wrote political commentary pieces for each one. Many people wouldn’t agree with what he said on television nor what he wrote in the newspapers, but they listened to him. Hodges had excellent communication skills.

In addition to his media work in both London and in nearby Manchester, Hodges had interests in Sheffield too. One of the city’s two universities – the prestigious University of Sheffield – had employed him to be what amounted to a consultant with their politics department. Hodges was able to reach and influence a whole new generation of youngsters with his political views on a personal level while keeping on talking to the wider public through the media.

*

“I mean it, I won’t do it!” Hodges was talking again and Baxter snapped his attention back to the man that he was here to kill. “You can’t make me do this!”

“We discussed this back in the house, Dominic. If you don’t do as I ask,” Baxter kept his voice calm and purposely spoke in a conversational manner, “I’ll be forced to shoot you here and now.

Then, afterwards, I’ll drive to your ex-wife’s house and go inside to murder your young son. He’s eight, isn’t he? I’m surprised that you managed it at your age.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No, I never had the time. Dominic, put the smaller loop around that hook.”

Surprisingly, this time Hodges did as he was asked. Though he spoke as he did so: “No one will ever believe this. Everyone knows that I have everything to live for. I have a child, why would I top myself?”

“Dominic, no one will truly care.” Baxter didn’t know if he believed what he himself was saying, yet he knew that it was something necessary to say to get Hodges to do what he wanted. “Put the other loop over your head.”

Hodges stopped crying and followed the second instruction.

“Aren’t you going to tell me who you are?”

“It doesn’t matter, Dominic.”

Before Hodges could say anything in reply, Baxter took a step forwards and kicked away the chair that the man before him had been standing on.

He set about waiting the few minutes for Hodges to die.





Chapter Sixteen – Dinner & A Movie
Knightsbridge, London – November 25th 2013


Lisa got to their London flat just after eight o’clock. She came through the door into the third-floor property with rain water still dripping off her coat. Williams came out into the corridor to greet his wife after hearing the commotion of her arrival.

“What’s wrong?” The question was unnecessary because he could see why she was so upset.

“I got soaked!” She shook her head in a dramatic fashion as she spoke and seemingly a tidal wave of water flicked off her hair.

“You should have taken a cab, Lisa.”

Before she’d set off from work, Lisa had sent him a text saying that she was on her way and was going to take the Underground and then walk; he’d told her at the time to get a taxi on this wet evening. She had refused though, citing the cost of one the short distance from The Daily Telegraph offices near Victoria Station.

“I know.” She huffed and puffed for a minute while her husband stood just a few feet away as he conspicuously made an attempt to make sure that he didn’t share her wet discomfort. “Take this, will you, Hun?”

Before he could answer, Lisa had handed over her coat to him. Williams kept it at arms-length as he hung it up on the peg and then turned back to look at his wife. She was still standing inside the door, though now balancing carefully on one leg; the other was raised off the door-mat so she could take off one of her boots.

Lisa was amazing to stare at. He had six years on his wife, but she looked damn good for thirty-six. She worked hard on her figure and always knew how to dress well. Her damp hair at the minute, which was upsetting to her, was attractive to him. He felt a momentary pulse in his loins for her.

“What are you staring at?” The playful accusation came when her eyes met his.

“You.”

“Get out of here with that, will you?” She arched her eyebrows in a mocking manner. “I need to dry off then I’ll join you: dinner and a movie?”

*

Lisa was another Cambridgeshire native whose family came from a village only a few miles up the road from where they had made their home. Living so close to Sawston, her sister and brother-in-law, childless as they were, often looked after Nathan when his parents were away working in London. That was where their son was staying tonight as his parents spent the night together at their other home.

For Lisa to be here on a Monday night was something rare. Williams would often be alone on a weeknight when he remained in London rather than commuting back up to Cambridgeshire as Lisa would normally do. He didn’t mind sleeping alone yet… he would sometimes get lonely for her company.

Today was their fifteenth wedding anniversary though.

They both had extremely busy schedules and couldn’t get away properly to do something, so they had decided to spend the evening together. Williams had been home since four after purposely cutting short his working day. Lisa had promised to do the same, yet she had been unexpectedly busy and had been late.

She’d told him she’d been up in Sheffield this morning.

*

There was a restaurant nearby that the two of them had been to several times and enjoyed their visits there. At first, they had planned to go there tonight, but in the end, Lisa had said that she would prefer to stay in for the night and just be together. That restaurant did an ‘eat-at-home’ menu (certainly not a take-away) that they delivered to local patrons. Selected and ordered by Lisa during the day when she was on the go, it was delivered just after nine along with two bottles of wine.

Williams almost did a double take at the price, especially when Lisa casually mentioned that he was paying for it as his anniversary treat to her.

“Did you find a film?” They were in the kitchen together. Lisa spoke to him as she got their food onto plates and he opened the wine.

“I have several choices, but it’s up to you to pick one: whatever you want.”

“You little sweet-talker!” He didn’t think that he had been ‘sweet-talking’ to her, yet he smiled and nodded anyway.

When they went back into the living room, Williams pulled the coffee table closer to the sofa so that they could rest their dinner trays and wine glasses on there. Eating dinner in front of the television was something that he knew they both did when they were alone, but rarely when they were together. Both their house up in Sawston and the flat here had dining rooms – though the one here in Knightsbridge was very small and part of the kitchen to be honest – that they would normally use, yet tonight was different.

Using the internet connection through the television, Williams had selected four films for Lisa to choose from. Each of these were favourites of hers that he didn’t mind watching again if it meant making her happy.

“We’re ready for dinner and a movie…”

*

Later in the evening, after they’d eaten and watched the film, Williams popped out to the kitchen and got the second bottle of wine. Neither of them were big drinkers and so only had sipped at their drinks earlier. When he came back, he snuggled up to his wife on the sofa.

“Busy day?” Williams’ question came in reaction to Lisa’s yawning.

“I didn’t think I was going to get back to London tonight! We got held up on the M-One coming back from Sheffield for more than an hour.”

“Why were you in Sheffield?” Lisa rarely left London for work matters. She was still a journalist, though she had the title of Assistant Political Editor at her newspaper. That semi-managerial role meant she usually supervised the work of other reporters and stayed at her desk most of the time.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“About?” Williams had had a busy day and couldn’t recall any political news relating to South Yorkshire.

“Dominic Hodges took his own life late last night.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.” Williams couldn’t think of anything else to say to that. He’d never met the man nor could he ever claimed to have liked anything that the man said or did.

“That’s a bit heartless, John.” Lisa gently jabbed an elbow into his side. “He left a young kid behind.”

“I’m sorry.” The vast majority of political journalists that Williams knew were extremely cynical bastards without an ounce of compassion in them; Lisa was different… and that was why he’d been happily married to her for the past decade and a half.

“Anyway… so, we’re doing a big piece on his political career tomorrow. You’ll like it: very fair and very balanced.”

“I see…” He was eager to get off the conversation now less he say something else that she didn’t agree with and Lisa took the opportunity to give him another jab in the side. There was something that he had been wanting to talk about with her for the past few days and now seemed the right time to do that: “There’s something on my mind, Lisa…”

“Spill then, I haven’t got all night” The years that they’d been together gave Lisa the license to talk to him this way.

“I’m going to be busy working all through Christmas and New Year. I won’t have much family time as I do most years.”

“Oh, right.” She had heard him, yet she didn’t appear to be as interested in what he had to say as he wanted her to be.

“The House will close for business as it always does, but I intend to keep working full-time. I’ll mainly be here in London rather than up at home.”

“Why?” There was a little more interest now: Lisa had always been big on ‘family time’ at Christmas, including the dreaded (for him) Boxing Day dinner with her parents.

“I want to move forward with some things that I’ve been working on recently. I don’t want to remain near silent and just another voice among hundreds. I have things that I want to say for many people to here.” As often happened when talking with Lisa, Williams couldn’t say exactly what he wanted to.

“You turned down that Cabinet post though.”

“It wasn’t in the Cabinet, Lisa.” She should have known that with her job.

“Okay, but my point is still that you didn’t want to join the Government. You said that you were happy with your committee chairmanship and staying on the backbenches too.

Now you want to do something ‘different’?” She misquoted him. “I don’t understand.”

“Michael and I have been…”

“Michael… always Michael.” She interrupted him using a harsh tone when he spoke of Michael Snyder.

“Yes, Michael. The two of us have been talking a lot more in the past few weeks about things. He’s linked with a few organisations that I want to speak for.”

“The democracy ones, am I right?” Williams knew that his wife might not have liked Snyder, but she took an active interest in many of the political campaigns the man was involved in.

“Yes.”

“I always thought that you never had any time for the ‘representative democracy’ people. John, you always said that anything like that was a breeding ground for extremists and fascists.” She had that tone now, that talking-down to him tone that she could sometimes, at the wrong time, bring forth. Lisa would use it when the two of them would differ on political matters.

“There’s anyways good points to be found among the bad. I’m taking a new look at the idea and giving it due consideration.” Because she had said what she had, in the way that she had, Williams cut short his reply because he didn’t want this conversation to go bad.

“We’ll talk about it another time, Hun.”

Lisa let out another yawn; an action that her husband wouldn’t help but copy a few moments later.

“I’m tired too. Shall we go to bed?”

Before she replied, Lisa brought a hand round from her side and into his lap. She ran it over his crouch.

“Only if you give me an anniversary present.”





Chapter Seventeen – True Believers
Downing Street, Central London – November 28th 2013


The atmosphere in Downing Street was always different when the PM wasn’t present. Lauren would notice how people relaxed a little. Almost everyone was on edge when he was in residence as they tried to portray a serious and professional manner at all times in the hope that they would catch his eye and be noticed.

She would always find that amusing. The PM knew who was important enough here and also who was just trying to impress him.

Lauren was in the former category, not the latter.

With the PM away at an EU conference in Brussels, his staff wasn’t idle with him not here. There was much work still to do. There were dealings with the media to be undertaken, administration issues to be dealt with and meetings to take place. Daniel had flown off to Belgium with the PM and so Lauren had been left in-charge at Downing Street.

*

This afternoon, Lauren was in a meeting that she had quickly become bored with. There were three others who’d joined her in her cramped little office and neither of them looked comfortable being in here. Their presence and the matter that they were discussing was important, but Lauren would have preferred if they’d done this over the phone or via email.

Her visitors were all senior political advisers like she was. Mike and Ross were both important people from the party who were titled as Special Advisors to the Secretaries of State at both the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). Meanwhile, Donna worked as the PM’s official spokesperson. Like Lauren, none of this trio had ever wanted to go into politics through public office; rather they were behind-the-scenes people who sought power and influence there. She had worked with each of them long enough to have a good working relationship with them and also knew that they thinking on political matters was generally in sync with hers.

Neither had any real loyalty to the ideas that their political masters would profess in public; they knew what was right and what was wrong. They held their positions because of their capabilities and the fact that the senior politicians that they worked for knew how valuable that they were.

Mike was currently briefing Lauren and the other two on what his boss – the Secretary of State for Defence – and the media people at the MOD were doing with regards to the latest round of defence cuts that had been recently implemented. These cuts had been announced in May during the Queen’s Speech when Parliament was opened and they were now in effect. There were sweeping savings being made across the board in the defence arena. These cuts had attracted extreme negative publicity when they had first been announced and were still facing hostile reaction from certain quarters even now. The MOD media relations staff was working hard to counter that criticism and Mike was supervising all of that as best as he could.

When Mike had finished with what he was saying, Ross added what he had to the meeting. The FCO media team was assisting their Whitehall colleagues in their efforts to put a negative spin on those denunciations being made that the cuts were too severe. Ross assured those here in Lauren’s office that the FCO was telling the media that there was no current or foreseeable danger to the UK ahead that would need the thousands of troops that were losing their jobs. Everything was fine and dandy and Britain could defend herself and fulfil her international commitments with even less service personnel that she currently had.

Mike butted in to mention that the MOD had lined up friendly ex service personnel to further rebut the claims that detractors were making.

Lauren was then treated to Donna making sure that everyone knew how involved she and her Downing Street media relations people were involved in this effort too. There was no need to worry; she had her staff on it too with them providing negative counter-comments to those criticising the Government. Donna knew how to ‘spin’ in the right way and she had a couple of efforts going to prepare to smear any of those critics who got too much air-time to broadcast their anti-Government views.

Everything that she heard sounded satisfactory. Lauren thanked her three guests for attending, told them to keep up the good work and then dismissed them. She’d heard all that she’d expected to from them.

The PM might have been away and meeting with his fellow European leaders, but his people left behind here in London were still working hard on his agenda.

*

Not long after her meeting, Lauren got on the phone to one of her key staff members who’d gone up to Norfolk today to be Downing Street’s eyes and ears on the ground during the Norwich South by-election. Kenny Timmons reported that things were going as expected there with the Conservative vote holding up and victory looking certain for the selected Parliamentary candidate. Lauren questioned him on this: how sure was he of this? She was soon told that Timmons had spoken to local party officials who were conducting unofficial exit polls across the constituency.

Those were showing that the seat would be held.

Just before Lauren was about to end the call, Timmons asked her if she’d spoken to Rachel Gallagher. Lauren knew the name, but couldn’t recall who exactly that woman was. Timmons told her that she was from the Conservative Party central office: Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) down at the Millbank complex. She asked him what Gallagher wanted and Timmons replied that the other woman had been trying to speak to his boss all morning but hadn’t been able to get past Lauren’s secretary; he also didn’t know what Gallagher wanted.

Lauren told Timmons that she’d find out what Gallagher wanted and then she ended the call.

An email was then sent by Lauren off to Daniel. She knew that he would be on the move in Brussels as the PM went through several meetings and conferences, yet he would pick it up on his phone. Lauren relayed the news from Norwich South and asked how everything was going there.

Afterwards, Lauren spoke to her secretary about Rachel Gallagher. Yes, she was told, the woman had tried several times this morning to speak to Lauren, but, following long-standing instructions, her calls were not to be put throw unless they were urgent. When she was told that, Lauren remembered why. Several months before, the two women had verbally clashed over some or another (Lauren couldn’t remember what it was, but Gallagher had really aggravated her) and so Lauren had decreed that she didn’t wish to deal with her anymore.

From what she recalled about the woman, Gallagher was one of those ‘true-believers’. She was a right-wing nutter who had deep political ideological conservative opinions that were out of sync with those of the PM, much of the Government and people like Lauren who worked at the heart of Downing Street in supporting the PM. She’d long ago risen high in the Conservative Party hierarchy and was a constant nagging pain. She truly believed in her causes and wanted everyone else to go along with her.

Lauren’s opinions on politics (which matched those of the PM and his people) differed from Gallagher’s even though they paid lip service to them. Gallagher and her ilk never understood that the PM and others had only joined the party to get to where the positions of power and influence that they had, not because they believed in its centuries old principles… whatever they were.

All Lauren’s secretary could tell her was that Gallagher had been calling to talk to Lauren because she wanted to tell the PM’s deputy Chief-of-Staff something ‘really important’ concerning the party candidate up in Norwich South.

If Lauren remembered correctly, what Gallagher thought was ‘really important’ never was such. The other woman considered the raising of the national debt by extra Government borrowing to be something ‘really important’ and needing to be discussed. Gallagher considered everything with regards to public policy to be ‘really important’ – i.e. something that she should have a say in.

Yet, today her ‘really important’ apparently concerned the man standing for election up in Norfolk.

Lauren went and got herself a cup of coffee while she decided how to act. The only thing that she would consider ‘really important’ about the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate about to be elected to the House of Commons would be the revelation either that he had a secret penchant for internet child porn or that he was the anti-Christ here on earth. There wouldn’t be anything else about him that wasn’t already known.

She recalled reading through (on the PM’s behalf) the background checks on the man that had been done in the past few weeks. Though he’d been selected at a local level, both Downing Street and Gallagher’s people at CCHQ had signed off on his campaign. Money had been spent to aid him and there had been visits by Cabinet members to Norwich too. The PM wouldn’t have lent his own support – through a public statement and instructions to his Ministers – had there been a problem with the candidate.

When she came back to her desk, Lauren was going to send an email to Gallagher to query what the issue was. She composed most of it in her head before she sat back down, yet decided not to send it before she started typing. Gallagher could be dealt with head-on, she decided, and Lauren would try to pretend what had happened before (whatever it was) just hadn’t.

She instructed her secretary to put a call through to CCHQ.

*

“Good afternoon, Lauren.”

“Hello, Rachel.” Lauren put all of her effort into sounding business-like and professional.

“We’ve got a problem up in Norwich.”

“So I hear. Do tell…?” Lauren noticed the ‘we’. Her and Gallagher, Downing Street and CCHQ, hadn’t been a ‘we’ in a long time.

“He’s Lord North’s boy.”

“Sorry?” Lauren didn’t understand what that meant at all.

“Our candidate in Norwich South is a protégée of Lord Edward North.”

“How so? What do you mean?” Gallagher’s apparent revelation came as a complete surprise to Lauren and she spoke before she thought.

“I only found out this morning, Lauren. For a while now, Lord North has been providing moral support and political guidance to him. They’ve kept it hush-hush, but my information on this is solid.”

“And you’re telling us this only now?” Lauren let her guard down and her anger showed over the phone connection. She told herself that in a moment she’d think about the consequences, but for now she wasn’t happy that Gallagher was bringing this to her at this late stage.

“I found out at eleven this morning.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, Rachel. I’ll be sure to pass this onto the P.M. Goodbye.”

Lauren hung up before Gallagher could reply; she actually slammed the phone receiver back into the cradle with enough force that she had a momentary concern that it might have been broken.

Lord North…

That was someone who Lauren truly didn’t like. Gallagher, she could remember now, was just an annoying little woman who was on a power trip. In direct contrast to her, Lord North was a dangerous (politically-wise) man who posed a threat to the PM and his Government.

He and Gallagher were of the same ilk, yet the two of them were mortal enemies. They were both old-fashioned, right-wing conservatives who had political views that were based on their experiences in the Eighties under the Thatcher Government. Those were the ‘good old days’ as far as each of them were concerned. They didn’t like the way that the party had moved in recent years, away from the right-wing direction that it had previously had into the centre ground of political discourse that it now occupied. They were opposed to politicians like the PM and most of the Cabinet, whose actions that they held in contempt.

Lauren could never understand why the two of them weren’t allies. Lord North was an influential figure in the House of Lords and also had connections up and down the country with local party organisations. He had money and he was also friendly to others who had money… and money was the lifeblood of politics. Meanwhile, Gallagher effectively ran the CCHQ and that organisation (in theory) controlled the party on a local level nationwide. She recollected asking Daniel about this once, why the two of them didn’t get on, but he hadn’t had an answer to that mystery.

Lord North was another true believer too. He had some strange ideas on how the country should be governed, especially how the Government should interact with the people, and spouted those insane ideas as often as he could. The man was a constant pain in the behind as he sought to spread these ideas and gain influence. While Gallagher made an effort so that the CCHQ and Downing Street could work together, Lord North was a master of subterfuge in his opposition to the PM and the Government.

He was forever making underhand moves like the one that he’d apparently just pulled off in Norwich.

If what Gallagher was saying was true, this new ‘conquest’ of his was just the latest of his moves to oppose the Government. The man had gone and put another true believer in Parliament.

“Fuck.” Lauren swore as she set about getting in contact with Daniel in Brussels once again. She was certain that he – and the PM – wouldn’t be pleased with this news. Despite neither usually being of the mind to shoot the messenger, she still wasn’t happy at the idea of being the one to deliver the bad news to the two of them.





Chapter Eighteen – Waiting For A Lucky Break
Thames House, Central London – November 28th 2013


Losing their ever-so-near grasp of Clarke out in Gloucestershire last week had been a blow to the YOUNG investigation, of that there was no doubt, but it was still on-going. Harriet was still very annoyed that he’d gotten free and apparently fled Tewkesbury that night, yet there was still much work to be done with the enquiry into what he’d done, why he’d done that and his subsequent disappearance too.

Following Clarke’s escape on the Friday night, Harriet had come back to London the following morning. She’d taken a ride with Inspector Lavelle because Patrick had stayed in Tewkesbury for the weekend in an effort to track down where Clarke had been staying and hopefully get a lead on where he might have headed to afterwards. During that journey back to London, Harriet had found herself asked out on a date by the senior policeman; an offer which she had pondered for a respectable amount of time before accepting.

Subject to work, she would allow Inspector Lavelle – Martin – to take her out tomorrow night.

All week, she had allowed herself to be pleasantly distracted by the thought of the upcoming evening that she would spend with Inspector Lavelle. That didn’t mean that she had slacked off with her work though: there was so much to the YOUNG investigation that needed attention.

When Patrick had returned to Thames House on Monday, they had held a post-mortem with Trent. Their supervisor listened patiently to their explanations of what had occurred out in Gloucestershire and then had asked them what they intended to do next. Harriet had been a bit thunderstruck by that question, yet, thankfully, Patrick had appeared to have been expecting such a thing.

Harriet had at once agreed with what Patrick had told Trent that the two of them were moving on to.

For the past four days, they had continued with the YOUNG investigation.

*

The appeal for information on Crimewatch had taken Harriet and Patrick out to Tewkesbury, yet before that they had been looking into Clarke’s behaviour before he had fled from London: they had returned to that.

When working at Scotland Yard with the HOLMES computer, as far as they could tell, Clarke had only made changes to the files concerning Christopher Young and his girlfriend. However, he had spent much time reviewing files on many other people and illegally transferring some of those records to his own personal computer. Those files on his laptop had been deleted, but the Security Service had people with the right technical skills to recover them no matter how much effort had been put into purging them.

Three of the police national computer files on individuals had been sent by email from Clarke to one of those email addresses that had previously been listed on his work computer. One file related to the president of the Muslim Association of Britain (MOB), another concerned the chief press officer from the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), while the third referred to a recently-deceased MP named Robert Mayfield.

Neither of these three people had ever had much contact with the police, so there was clearly little information that Clarke had sent onwards to person/s unknown. The president of the MOB had had his car stolen earlier in the year in London, the spokeswoman from the SWP had been a witness to an aggravated assault at an anti-fascist rally and the MP had received a few threatening letters that he’d shown to his local police force.

That was it.

Harriet and Patrick had taken what they’d learnt about this activity of Clarke’s and held it up to what he’d done with Christopher Young. They weighted up the connections between the four.

Each was a public figure (of sorts with the last of them) whose police records should have been of no concern to Clarke. Two of them were dead – the MP having suffered a heart attack, they learned – while the other pair were very much alive. The member of the troublesome SWP was a woman and the other three were men. One lived in Bradford, the other live one resided in West London and the two deceased had had their homes in Norwich and South London.

Their political activities and the fact that Clarke seemed to have been interested in passing on their details to someone were the only things that they had in common.

The email address that Clarke had sent the details of three of them onto was something that Harriet and her partner had looked at. They knew how easy it was for someone, anyone to create an email account and found out when it had been done along with the near zero activity that it had had before it had been closed down. What they were able to locate though – what anyone else, including Inspector Lavelle’s people at the Met. Police couldn’t – was where exactly the account had been created. Public bodies like the police, even private ones if they paid for it, could track an IP address that belonged to a computer using the internet, but they would only get a ‘geo-location’ from this – i.e. it was created and used in the UK or in America. Thames House had the legal right and the capabilities to track down the registered computer that was used for an email account to a specific location though.

Patrick had told Harriet this beforehand: customers were asked their name and address when they brought a computer at a retail outlet. Even if they chose to lie to this seemingly innocuous question that a retailer asked (for marketing purposes), the value of a computer made sure that most people used a debit or credit card to buy one. The Security Service could access those records that shops and online retailers kept and track down the buyer of a computer and thus get the IP address that was used in creating an email account.

They’d used this method to find out the computer that the particular email account that they were interested in. Unfortunately, they hit a problem with this. They found the computer and the purchaser, but the records showed that they had found an internet café located in suburban St. Albans.

Internet cafés were a source of annoyance to the Security Service. Colleagues of Harriet and Patrick in the Anti-Terrorist Directorate often swore when they were confronted with information linking back to such places. People up and down the country used such anonymous places. The vast majority of customers didn’t have internet access or even a printer at home and so frequented such places, yet others with nefarious aims went to them because they were so anonymous.

Trying to track someone who’d used a computer at such a place was an exercise in futility.

The internet café that they found in St. Albans was like all the others nationwide: it had no records of usage, was generally cash-based and had no CCTV cameras. It was a dead end.

Harriet and Patrick couldn’t find out who had opened the email account there on August 19th nor who had been there again on September 22nd to receive the emailed file transfer that Clark had sent.

*

After running into a dead end with that, they had gone back to looking at Clarke himself. Inspector Lavelle’s people hadn’t given up trying to track down Clarke and they were still looking into his activities before he left his job, home and family. They were conducting an anti-corruption enquiry and so had a lot of assets at their disposal. Again and again they spoke to people who knew him to try to find out everything that there was to know about him that they didn’t already know.

Friends, neighbours, colleagues and ex-colleagues were spoken with. Clues were sought as to whose behalf he had been acting upon and where he might be hiding out.

Harriet found out that that the police had located a girlfriend that he had on the side. She was thoroughly questioned and then also put under surveillance in case she had lied about having no knowledge of his current whereabouts.

The same was still being done with his immediate family too so that if he tried to make contact with them, Clarke could be quickly located.

Nevertheless, nothing came of all of this. Harriet herself was a tad put out at the lack of any break, but she knew that the policeman hunting their corrupt colleague were extremely frustrated at failing to find Clarke.

*

Patrick had suggested that they go back to where the whole YOUNG investigation had started: the killing of Christopher Young.

Harriet met with the Met. Police murder investigators in Wandsworth and then watched the video recordings that they had of the interviews that they’d done with Emma Cartwright.

The interviews were a strange thing to watch. In the first two, Cartwright had been in a terrible emotional state and the policemen talking to her had been quite hostile. She had been cajoled and intimidated by everything that had been happening. The third interview was different: this one had taken place after the anti-corruption investigation into Clarke had begun and the thinking on the part of the police had been that maybe Cartwright hadn’t killed her boyfriend after all. They had tried to solicit information about the prowler she’d reported in that one, but to little avail because Cartwright was still affected by how she’d been treated beforehand.

The fourth recorded interview was very different. The pair of police officers asking the questions of Cartwright were different from the ones beforehand and so too was her solicitor. Moreover, Cartwright had changed much. She had been a lot less traumatised and also had been trying to be as helpful as she could.

Everything Cartwright could remember about the prowler – which, honestly, wasn’t that much really – had been related to the police officers and the recording camera.

When Harriet had discussed this with Patrick, the two of them had agreed that if they could find out who that prowler was then much progress could be made with the YOUNG investigation. He (probably) was the man who had killed Christopher Young and there had to be a connection between him and Clarke. Finding him and talking to him might help give them a clue as to where Clarke was.

The Met. Police had had no luck identifying this suspected killer though, nor pinning down a motive for his murder: he was nothing more than a nameless ghost.

There wasn’t any luck to this whole investigation on either the part of the police or the Security Service.

*

Harriet was beginning to wonder if the YOUNG investigation was ever going to get anywhere. She knew that other enquiries had been closed before when those working on them had run out of leads that they could follow. The Security Service had a lot of resources, but those were finite. Trent was also someone who had limited patience: he didn’t want two of his investigators doing nothing apart from waiting for a lucky break.

The failure to move forward with their enquiry grinded Harriet too. She didn’t like not being able to get to the bottom of things and saw the inability to do so as a personal failure no matter how many times Patrick tried to reassure her that there was nothing that they could do.

She looked over at him now as he sat behind his desk within the open-plan work area where the X-Files people like the two of them worked. He was on the phone to someone as he sat on the other side of the room while also looking at his computer screen. She couldn’t think of which particular aspect of the YOUNG investigation he was working on at the minute and who he’d be calling about that. She herself had file-folders open on her desk that concerned details of Clarke’s police service and there was nothing there.

As Harriet tried her hardest to overhear what he was saying, the phone on her own desk rang: “Byrne here…?”

“Hello, Harriet Byrne a.k.a. Bishop.” There was a chuckle that she recognised. “This is Martin Lavelle.”

“Good afternoon, Inspector.” She was at work and so she strove to be profession just in case someone could overhear her.

“I’m afraid that it looks like I’m going to have to cancel tomorrow night.”

“Oh…” Harriet hadn’t known what else to say. She hadn’t expected him to say that. Moreover, for him to call her work to talk about something personal didn’t seem like him either.

“We’ll have to make it the following week because it looks like I’m going to be busy all weekend… so too will you be, probably.”

“Why?” Harriet was more than confused by what he was saying.

“I just got a call from Quedgeley, Harriet. Gloucestershire Constabulary have pulled a body out of the River Severn, at a point pretty close to Quedgeley itself actually. They’ve preliminary identified it as our missing man Mark Clarke.”

“Oh, shit!” She swore without thinking.

“Language, young lady, language.” The good-natured admonishment came across the phone connection. “They say he has a bullet wound to the back of the head and a police doctor on-scene reckons that he’s been in the water since the weekend.”

“How firm is all of this?”

“None of it is official yet, but Quedgeley believes this is our man. I presume that you and your Irish friend,” Harriet assumed that Inspector Lavelle meant Patrick, “will want to come with me back to Gloucestershire again?”

“Yes, I should think so.”





Chapter Nineteen – Bill Of Rights
Portcullis House, Westminster, London – November 29th 2013


Williams hadn’t chosen to leave work late today. The decision had been made by others: certain members of his committee who had spent the afternoon arguing before business could be finished for the day. It was a Friday and the weekend was soon to begin. Usually, any work on Friday was finished up early so members could return to their constituencies, yet today had been different.

When the Home Affairs Select Committee had met (in closed session) in the early afternoon, one of their number had reminded them that there was ‘less than a month’ before Christmas and thus ‘only four shopping Saturdays left’ too. That member, Sarah Hargreaves, a Labour MP from Manchester, had clearly said such a thing to hurry them along as well as to set a collegial atmosphere before they had begun, but she had clearly failed in that.

The meeting afterwards had descended into heated arguments over the latest Crime & Policing Bill that the Home Office had submitted before Parliament and which had gone to Williams’ committee after its second reading. This legislation had been bouncing backwards and forwards between the committee and the Home Office for the past few months as both sides sought to get the wording right so that each could agree on it. Amendments were added at each point while other passages dropped. As it was with all legislation, this had been a time consuming business.

The arguments that had caused a delay to Williams today – he had expected the meeting to run from one o’clock to three, yet it had gone on for almost an extra two hours! – had come from three particular members of the committee. There were ten members that made up its number, including him as Chair, though one had been missing today due to illness. Five of the ten were from the Conservative Party, four were Labour members and the final one was a Lib–Dem. Generally, most of them got on well, yet there were three in particular who would often disturb the meetings as they let their passionate political ideologies get in the way of committee business – those three had done the same thing today whilst Williams had been constantly checking his watch as well as trying to bring order to the closed session.

The first, and most vocal, of the trio was Alan Murray. He was an MP from a Labour stronghold in central Scotland. Murray’s personal agenda on the committee was always to cause disruption to the Home Office and thus the Home Secretary. He would make every attempt to forestall what she and her civil servants were trying to do to therefore cause the Government problems. He did this to serve the agenda of his party though, not for any benevolent reason. If he had acted in the disruptive manner that he had in the public interest, Williams would have respected the man for he believed that monitoring what the Government was doing and making sure that it was acting in the best interests of democracy was the right thing to do. Yet, Murray wasn’t someone to consider doing anything for the right reasons.

Another member that made Williams feel like he was acting the role of an undervalued child–minder was his fellow Conservative Craig Smith. Smith was a Government stooge. A former Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Foreign Secretary, the Welsh–born MP had no place here on the committee. The work that was done here was for back–benchers who worked for the interests of their Parliamentary colleagues and the voting public out there. The Government often needed to be held to account less it do something detrimental to the country and a select committee was one of the best places for that to be done. Yet, Smith had stepped down from his previous role as a PPS – a passport to a future as a junior minister – to join this committee (which he’d entered though a little bit of cunning and subterfuge on the part of the Government) to continue supporting the Government from within one of the constitutional checks and balances that was placed on it. Like Murray, Smith was here to cause as many problems as possible while going about that mission from an entirely different approach that the one undertaken by his Scottish colleague.

Then there was Duncan Coates, the Labour MP from Hull who was an Aunt Sally.

Coates had a long political career back from his student days and through more than twenty years in Parliament. Dismissed by many as a loud and boorish fool, Williams was never one to dismiss or underrate him. The man knew how to play his particular game in politics. Throughout much of his career, his party had used him as a straw man, a false adversary. Coates had gone along with this and when he did it, it was with his full cooperation. He would vocalise opinions that would bring attention towards them and him. This was done so that similar, but better worded political issues would be raised by others and supported because they were not his. If his party wished to do something unpopular (particularly when they had been in power) Coates would make a speech calling for something far more dramatic than what his party wanted to do so that political support went to the lesser of the two. This age-old political manoeuvre was well-known in political circles and so too was Coates’ mastery at it, yet he’d built his career on getting away with it. The general public found it hard to understand that this could be done as often and as successfully as it was.

Coates had been having metaphorical rocks thrown at him all afternoon, from Smith in particular, with Murray jumping to support him. Williams and other committee members – notably the Conservative Susan Norton and Claire Talbot–Brown the Lib–Dem – had wished to move on with the Crime & Policing Bill in the face of this. They had been unable to though because the other three had wished to argue as they did. Coates had compared a Home Office wish to have police powers expanded to allowing them to act ‘like the Gestapo’. Smith had jumped to defend the Home Secretary’s proposals and then along had come Murray ‘helpful suggestions’ – the latter of which had been designed to embarrass and weaken the Government.

Much effort was thus spent going against what Coates had wanted rather than countering the more dangerous Murray.

Throughout this, other members, like the two remaining Conservatives Gidden and Mann, as well as the feeble-minded Hargreaves, had tried not to take sides. The meeting had achieved nothing overall and been a thorough waste of four hours. The committee had other matters that it should have moved onto but it had been unable to do so today.

*

When finally Williams had been able to close the meeting, he had been late in getting to the next one on his agenda for the day. He was present there now and it was being held in the same building, yet he rued the waste of his time earlier in the day. There were preliminary portions of this second meeting that he’d missed and he had also been left with a sore throat from all of the shouting that he’d been forced to do to restore order in the first.

However, he was here now and this gathering was something that he had much interest in and wished to play a major part in.

Williams’ committee had been meeting across in the Clement Attlee Room on official Parliamentary business, yet this get-together was within the Betty Boothroyd Room and was unofficial. These two locations were both on the first floor of Portcullis House and were primarily designed to house public and closed sessions of select committees. Neither was needed at all times for such practices though and their usage could be granted for other politically related matters that MPs wanted them for.

As was the case today in the Betty Boothroyd Room.

Four of Williams’ Parliamentary colleagues had jointly invited other MPs as well as the assembled media to the public launch of a political campaign. There was a selection of Lords there too, many of which Williams could place the face to but not the name. He himself had been invited to be a central part of this by Michael Snyder, though being one of the public faces behind the launch of the Bill Of Rights Movement (BORM) hadn’t directly appealed to him. He had promised his full support to it, a pledge that he intended to uphold, though today was the turn of others to be in the public eye.

The quartet of MPs was known by Williams to be associates of Snyder. Three of them were back-bench Conservatives and one was an Independent – something rare in this current Parliament. Each wasn’t well-known to the general public at large, yet their colleagues all knew of them and their often-spoken views on ‘true democracy’.

True Democracy was a rather new political ideology slowly gaining traction within Britain. For a long time, Snyder had been one of the key players in promoting this set of ideas into the public arena. He hadn’t always met with success, and sometimes with outright hostility, so today he was trying his hardest to push it forward into the public thinking through the media gathered here.

What Snyder and the committed proponents here this evening wanted to convince people of was that they were not living under a democratic system. There was only a pretence of such a thing, so they wanted to bring about True Democracy. This would be done by a complete overall of the system that elected representatives to Parliament, a root–and–branch modernisation of Parliament itself and a wholesale reorganisation of the whole Government system. This would be done at the ballot box – how this was to be done to be determined with time – and could only be done with the full support of the voting public.

Williams entered the media launch as those at the front of the room were talking about the proposed series of referendums that would be available under their system of True Democracy. People would be able to vote on almost anything that an interest could be brought about in. This would take away law and policy making powers away from politicians and into the hands of the public. Only once the public had decided what it wanted, would politicians guide that public will into law and make sure that it was correctly applied.

Of course, fewer politicians would be needed to allow this system to work.

The meeting moved onwards to explaining the benefits for the general public that this would begin. Williams could hear Snyder’s words and phrases being mouthed by those at the front of the room. His friend had many flaws, but working with politicians to make their ideas more ‘sell-able’ was one of his many talents. Snyder was a master at such things.

Over in the corner of the room, just out of the graze of publicity being centred upon those MPs talking about the BORM, Williams spotted Snyder. He was beside one of those Lords that was here, independently-minded people of similar vein to the MPs. Williams had to search his memory for a moment for the name, but then that elder man’s identity came to him: Lord Edward North. Knowing the man’s previous political dealings, but not him personally, Williams was sure that this whole thing today was the work of Lord North’s.

Williams wondered how close the two of them actually were. Lord North and Snyder had collaborated on many political projects in the past with this being the biggest one of theirs if it worked all of the wonders that they two of them were apparently hoping for. They were an odd pairing though: the stern-faced old businessman who was known to throw his money around and the younger and much polished, wheeler-dealer political campaign organiser.

As he mentally tried to calculate all the campaigns that there pair of them had been involved with over the past few years, many of which Williams had had an outsiders role in, he noticed that the talkative MPs at the front had moved onto their Bill of Rights.

Their whole campaign had this name and only now as he listened did Williams understand why it hadn’t been called ‘The True Democracy Campaign’ (or such like) as he’d first thought it should have been.

The Bill of Rights was to be a legally-enshrined document of which a draft the BORM had already written and sought to have the media publicise for them. This was a statement of the rights that would be automatically given to the country’s citizens with regard to (the proposed) new system of Government that would rule in their name. It differed much from similar modern political civil and human rights legislation – the MPs were keen to point this out – because it pointed to what the public were entitled to in a Government that led the nation.

They would have the right to choose candidates to a reorganised Parliament from open fields. The Bill of Rights would guarantee that those representatives could be easily removed if they failed to live up the will of the voting public. The law that the document would be would assure the public that everything done in their name was transparent.

Away from the political representation aspects, the Bill of Rights would reaffirm the ordinary rights of citizens of the country in a clear and easily-understandable manner. The BORM pointed out that much of this section of the document was still up for debate. They didn’t want it to be constructed by professional lawyers who would later make money from pulling holes in it and finding loopholes for the unscrupulous to exploit.

It was all up to the voting public.

Listening as he was, Williams could see that there were many flaws in all of what the BORM was trying to bring about. He told himself that maybe he should have been as involved in the start of all of this as Snyder had wanted him to be. Still… he was in general agreement with what the BORM had stated it was out to achieve.

That feeling of support was quickly something that he didn’t seen expressed across the room though among others present. Other MPs, from the interested to the curious to the already hostile, inside the room where the media event was taking place gave away their feelings in reactions that he could read. Williams saw a few nods of support given followed by applause as the BORM launch came to a conclusion, but these reactions were rare. Several MPs made noises of disgust and left the room; others sought out their colleagues promoting the BORM for what would certainly be an ear-bashing. Then there was the media. Williams knew how much of the media would react to something like this: they would turn against it and its advocates…

… maybe it had been the best idea to have an initial back-seat in things as he had.

Another thought struck him too: how were Lord North, Snyder and the other leading BORM advocates going to bring people who were so thoroughly opposed to this around to allowing this to move from a lofty idea to reality?

He couldn’t see that happening.

[stevep]

   James G ,

   Well things are progressing slowly. Clarke is dead and wondering now if he ran when he did because he suspected Patrick or because he recognised Baxter and why he was there and the drunk and Patrick just happened to be useful barriers while he tried to get away. 

  They haven't looked into the other sudden death yet but suspect they will when one of the two living people on Clarke's list has a sudden accident.

  So the Tories have taken a shift towards the centre here rather than remained Thatcherite as they did under Cameron - albeit he made a few attempts to disguise that until he got into power.

  I assume the basis of BORM is that North is confident he will be able to manipulate or simply fabricate 'public opinion' to get whatever demands he wants through.  Guessing also that the heated meeting that Williams attended was deliberated so long and stressful to either keep him away from something else on the agenda or to delay his attendance at the BORM meeting.

  Steve