Under Orders

heart.

Yes, he should have bloody listened.

CHAPTER 4

Archie Kirk called me at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning as Marina and I were still sitting in bed in our robes, surrounded by the newspapers.

‘Thought you were meant to be a private detective.’ He emphasised the word private. ‘Not very private to be splashed across the front pages.’

The Sundays had taken up where the Saturdays had left off, with hundreds of column inches bemoaning the death of Oven Cleaner. One red-top rag even called for a national day of mourning and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.

However, I assumed Archie was referring to the front-page banner headline in The Pump that read ‘Sid Halley in Cheltenham Murder Mystery’ above a three-column photograph of me looking extremely furtive. At first glance, anyone would have thought that it was me who had been murdered. The Pump and I had crossed swords in the past and maybe the headline was just wishful thinking by the editor.

Someone in their newsroom clearly had a source in the Cheltenham police who had reported that ‘Sid Halley, ex-champion steeplechase jockey, has been interviewed by senior officers and is helping the police with their enquiries into the murder of jockey Huw Walker at Cheltenham races on Friday. No arrest has been made at this time.’

Clearly The Pump expected me to be hung, drawn and quartered by lunchtime. The piece went on to imply that all of the world’s ills could be placed at my door. ‘Sid Halley, crippled ex-jockey, is now searching the gutters for rats as a minor private dick. He should feel nicely at home amongst the low-life…’

‘Ridiculous,’ I said. ‘They’re fishing.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Archie, ‘enough people will believe it.’

Archie was always concerned for my welfare and now, it appeared, he wanted to protect my reputation as well.

He was some sort of civil servant but he didn’t belong to any specific department. Nominally, he answered to the Cabinet Office, but he appeared to work in his own way with little contact or regard for his superiors. He was the chairman of a small group who were tasked with attempting to foretell the future. Their remit was to try and work out the consequences of proposed legislation, to try and ensure that it would actually do what it was intended without any unpleasant side effects that had been overlooked. Officially they were called the Standing Cabinet Sub-Committee on Legislative Outcomes but they were referred to by the few who knew of their existence as the Crystal Ball Club. Archie tended to label them the Cassandra Committee after the Greek mythological heroine who was both blessed and cursed by the god Apollo with the ability to correctly predict the future whilst no one believed her.

‘Any publicity is good publicity,’ I quipped.

‘Tell that to Gerald Ratner.’

I respected Archie and had grown to like him more and more as, over the past four years, I had become his very private ears and eyes.

Legislation in a democracy is, by its very nature, a compromise, a negotiated settlement somewhere in the middle ground. Whether it be a government-backed initiative or a private member’s bill, there is usually some horse-trading to be done. Some amendments may be accepted, others declined, paragraphs may be removed, word orders may be changed. Laws passed by Parliament are often substantially different from those drafted.

Archie and his Crystal Ball Club tried to look at legislation from the perspective of the end user, the members of the general public who would be affected. History is littered with examples where law makers had grossly misjudged the reaction that their well-intentioned deeds would produce.

After World War I, no less than forty-five of the then forty-eight states of the US voted to amend the American Constitution to prohibit the importation, manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the hope and expectation of reducing crime and corruption. Only the state of Rhode Island voted against. Fourteen murderous years later, during which time the federal prison inmate population increased by more than 350 %, the same state legislators voted another amendment to the Constitution repealing their blunder, again in the hope and expectation of reducing crime and corruption.

In 1990, the United Kingdom Government of the day decided that in order to make local taxes fairer they would introduce a single flat charge, equal for all. What could be fairer, they thought? The Community Charge, as they called it, was soon dubbed the Poll Tax and resulted in violent demonstrations across the country. The law was repealed in 1993 but the damage had been done. The Government’s reputation was terminally wounded. They lost the next election in a landslide.

Archie’s team was set up to try and foresee just such problems. They spent much of their time on private member’s bills, providing their political chiefs with a best guess at the effect that would be produced if a specific bill were to be passed into law. Many such proposed bills were the direct result of single-issue pressure groups that could be very persuasive without necessarily revealing the whole truth behind their argument. The chance of a private member’s bill reaching the statute book was largely dependent on whether the government of the day supported the measure and hence provided the parliamentary time. The grounds for such support were a combination of politics, practicality and expediency. Archie’s job was to advise as to the practicality and expediency. However, political considerations sometimes outweighed everything else.

Over the years, I had quietly and discreetly investigated many pressure groups and their individual members. I tended to look for links to big business or organised crime, or both.

Never mind statistics, there were lies, damn lies and the spouting forth from single-issue pressure groups. Blinkered, fanatical and blind to counter-argument and reason. Facts they didn’t like, they ignored or dismissed as lies. Sometimes they were just the foot soldiers in a bigger game, being used and manipulated by puppet masters working silently in the dark. Some were misguided and wrong. Others were plain crazy. A few had valid points but these were often lost in rhetoric and fury. Ask an animal rights supporter if he would rather have a new cancer drug tested on him first and he will say ‘that’s not the point’. But it’s exactly the point. If his mother were diagnosed with cancer, he would demand treatment to cure her. He’d be the first to blame the government and the health services if it didn’t exist.

‘Are you still there?’ Archie asked.

‘Sorry,’ I replied, ‘miles away.’

‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

‘About what?’

‘About The Pump.’

‘Oh.’ I paused to think. ‘Nothing. Their lawyers will have made sure they haven’t libelled me, it’s just absurd speculation.’

Laced with loathing, I assumed, but I didn’t like them much either.

‘Why don’t you rant and rave like any normal man?’ Archie asked.

‘You wouldn’t,’ I replied. Archie was one of the most even-tempered men I had ever met. ‘What good would it do? The Pump seem to have it in for me again and complaining will only make it worse.’

I had once shown The Pump to be completely wrong about someone who they claimed to be a saint but who turned out to be a bigger sinner than even I had realised. The Press doesn’t like to be shown to be foolish. Stoking the fire in their belly would do nothing to make it go out.

‘It’s so unfair.’ I rarely heard such anger in Archie’s voice.

‘Look, Archie,’ I said, ‘this is not worth getting upset about. Let it blow over.’ Let the police find the killer, I thought.

‘Can you come and see me tomorrow?’ Archie asked, abruptly changing the subject.

‘At home or in the office?’ I asked.