lurched his way inside. For once he was not looking for another drink, free or otherwise. He was here, as usual, to send a message.
When pursuing a woman, or dealing with a particularly private source of information, McBryde avoided all the modern communications systems, which were vulnerable to being spied on by everyone from spotty youths in the pay of rival newspapers to, so the Guardian said, GCHQ, the Americans and probably the Chinese as well. He passed his most sensitive messages on by simply texting its recipient the title and author of a particular book, and leaving an old-fashioned handwritten note inside the London Library’s copy of it. All the girl, or civil servant, or junior minister, had to do then was to go to the narrow, metal-grilled stacks, pull out the book and retrieve the message. They would then repeat the process, texting him the location of his own ‘book-note’. So far, all parties had found this method entirely secure.
Others cottoned on, of course, and the waiting list for membership of the London Library had jumped remarkably. The venerable stacks began to reek of passion and secret liaisons. Many of those apparent bibliophiles fingering a history of the early French kings with an affectedly vague expression, or rubbing their palms along an anatomical sketchbook, were in reality trying to hunt down a passionate letter from a married man or woman, or a proposition for an indecent or politically sensitive rendezvous.
The crucial thing about the London Library postal service was that the messages had to be left in books which were in no danger of being taken out by the wrong person – some wandering visitor who was unaware of the system. They had to be secreted in books about thoroughly dull topics, books no one in their right mind would ever want to open. McBryde had experimented with obscure Swedish philologists, unknown Victorian novelists, and dense tomes of twentieth-century structural Marxism, but had finally settled on the works of the journalist and sometime historian Dominic Sandbrook. Sandbrook had been the unwitting Pandar for McBryde’s life-changing love affair; at last, flickers of energy had pulsed between his pages.
Tonight Lucien was on his way to deliver a message to Jennifer, but one that had little to do with romance, although just writing her name had given his heart a sickening lurch. He swiped his membership card and entered the library, then went upstairs to the History of England section, where he took down the latest of Sandbrook’s tomes, an eight-hundred-page history of Britain from 1982 to 1983. Into it, he slipped his note.
He felt clammy and weak as he made his way back out into St James’s Square, shouldering past the party guests – Sir Tom Stoppard was deep in conversation with Andrew Wilson. Once he was outside he checked his phone, which was full of increasingly terse messages from the office. He scrolled through them. Then deleted them. There was absolutely no point in being a reporter if you had to attend meetings or communicate with your bosses.
McBryde was planning a long – a very long – night. Even so, he remained just slightly more journalist than dipsomaniac. The tip he was passing on to Jennifer had come from Alois Haydn, the notorious Svengali of Number 10. Haydn knew everyone in London. He was London. His deepest secret was McBryde’s last romantic gift to Jen. Passing it on to her was a stroke of genius … Or so McBryde thought. But ever since their meeting a question had been nagging away at him. Why had that famously manipulative little man sought him out? He owed him no favours. Haydn?
A good journalist does not simply receive what is given; he always asks why he was given it. Loitering in a nearby pub over a whisky and soda, McBryde concentrated hard as he began to look his gift horse closely in the mouth. Alois Haydn only ever looked out for Alois Haydn. Everyone knew that. But the story he’d told him was one that put Haydn himself in a bad light – or would, one day. So if it wasn’t about power, what else could it be about? Was it money?
For all the wrong reasons – involving Soho clubs and drug dealers – Lucien had made some quite good connections in the murkier fringes of the City. He texted Charmian Locke, a school friend from many years ago who he had heard was currently working at one of the larger merchant banks, and arranged a clandestine meeting for the following evening. Both would probably be pretty pissed by then, Lucien thought, but he prided himself on being able to hold his drink. He would remember everything that was said.
The cool of the Monday morning had lifted. A cloudless sky, and eye-scorching brightness, reflected from top-floor windows across the capital. A body had been deposited in the mortuary reserved for suspicious deaths. The pavement had already been cleaned, the police tape removed, and commuters were now passing heedlessly over the spot at which a young journalist had died. A mile or so to the west, almost equally invisible, a perfectly groomed little man was gliding purposefully along Piccadilly, his tiny feet barely touching the pavement.
It was once said of Josef Stalin, no less, that during his rise to power he was like a grey blur, always in the background, never quite in focus. Alois Haydn had the same talent. Somehow, one never looked at him closely. No matter how hard you tried, you could never remember his face, even after a difficult meeting. If he ever threw a shadow, it was a thin, vaporous one. This morning he was on his way to an important meeting with the executive members of a somewhat mysterious company, Professional Logistical Services, or ‘PLS’.
Alois Haydn’s name had been on the lists of the Most Influential Britons for more than a decade. All the political parties paid him court. His summer parties in Oxfordshire attracted ministers, celebrities and intellectuals alike. By the lake and in the marquee, prize-winning novelists and rising politicians mingled: the Lucasian professor could be found deep in conversation with the Eton-educated star of a hit American TV series; Prince Andrew and the crop-haired, boyish editor of the Guardian might be seen sitting at the same table. To receive one’s invitation, a month ahead of the event, had become part of Britain’s unofficial honours system, on a par with appearing on Desert Island Discs, being lampooned on the cover of Private Eye or speaking at Davos. Ordinary snappers clustered at the gate to capture the arrivals; a royal-connected fashion photographer took informal pictures inside the grounds.
Yet the host, Alois Haydn, was rarely photographed. Gatsby-like, he was little more than a linen suit glimpsed in the background shadows. And this year, to widespread disappointment, the party had been cancelled. Haydn had moved his home from the Cotswolds, rural heartland of the English establishment, to the Essex coast, on the edge of the island, where he was building a new house. The symbolism was much commented on.
Having bought Rocks Point, an elegant Victorian seaside mansion perched on a spit of sandy soil, Haydn had caused local uproar by demolishing the whole building, from its brick turrets and fancy battlements to its sprawling stables and wrought-iron greenhouses. In its place there had arisen a bleak outcrop of cubes, pyramids and mushrooms, as if a shoddily constructed alien spacecraft had crash landed on the site. Intriguingly, it was just a few miles from Olivia Kite’s Danskin House.
There was a lot of snooping. Mini-drones, tiny helicopters equipped with cameras and microphones, had just begun to be used by the mainstream media. Wildfowling in the marshes had long been a local tradition, so Haydn invited friends from London, county types and shadowy Eastern Europeans alike, for the shooting. Again and again they brought down the drones. Website owners were outraged. Lawyers rubbed their hands.
He could afford that: Haydn Communications had smashed through the old world of gentlemanly corporate public relations back in the 1980s, not long after Nigel Lawson had smashed up the cosy old world of the City: one of Alois’s big breaks had come from the privatisation of British Gas. His early years were lost in mystery, but he appeared to be a member of a famous family. His much older sister Camille Haydn had won the Turner Prize with her installation on the history of female
