‘Just one final question.’
Simpson smiled even harder, nodding expectantly.
‘Have you spoken to the mayor about this?’
Simpson’s smile faded as a look of confusion spread across her face. ‘I’m sorry…’ Instinctively, she reached for the microphone, but stopped herself before she pulled it off her lapel.
‘That’s OK,’ said Snowdon, goading gently. ‘Let me ask that one again… The mayor was a close friend of the victim, so how did he take the news?’
Simpson looked blank. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Fine,’ Snowdon glanced at the cameraman. ‘We’ll leave it there.’ She smiled at Simpson. ‘Thank you, that was great. Don’t worry about that last answer. I’ll take one from the top.’
A rather crestfallen Simpson nodded and shuffled off, carefully avoiding eye contact with Carlyle as she headed out of the room.
The Mayor of London, Carlyle thought. That’s the second time he’s come up, so far, in this investigation. That meant he had got to be part of the investigation. That means, John old son, you are going to have to tread carefully here. Very carefully indeed.
THIRTEEN
Cambridge University, March 1985
Robert Ashton closed his copy of The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 and stood up from the desk. He felt a fierce thirst, but ignored the tall, narrow glass of water that stood on the corner of the table, next to a pile of textbooks and papers. A dull pain was building slowly behind his eyes. It mingled with the numbness that he still felt after all these months.
A pale shaft of sunlight struggled through the curtains, illuminating a small patch of the worn rug on the floor. Outside was a beautiful spring day: England as it was supposed to be, bright, fresh, almost warm in the sun. Laughter rose from the courtyard outside.
Room 12 was situated on the third floor of Darwin Hall, one of the halls of residence for undergraduate students at Cambridge University. It was basically a large, dark space that Ashton shared with another student, a French waster called Nicolas who had already left for Easter even though there were still ten days until the end of term. That suited Robert just fine, as he liked having the place to himself. Reaching across the table, he picked up the glass of water and stepped cautiously into the middle of the room, careful to avoid stepping on any of the books strewn across the floor. Having picked his spot, he gazed up at the oversized mirror that had been placed above the fireplace. His head cocked to one side, like a concerned fawn, he contemplated a face that he no longer recognised. Then, slowly, deliberately, he threw the glass into his reflection, smashing it to pieces. His heart racing, he stood there for a second, concentrating hard, making sure that the image was gone. After a moment, he realised that his cheek was stinging. Carefully, he extracted a small shard of glass from just below his left eye and dropped it in the fireplace, before wiping away the smallest drop of blood.
From down the hall, he could hear the strains of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 coming from the room of a seriously disturbed German theology student, who had been playing the same music almost non-stop since September. Turning back to the desk, Ashton extracted three envelopes from under his pile of books and placed them in a row, aligning their edges carefully with those of the table. The brown A4 manila envelope addressed to Professor Box contained his essay on the causes of World War One. It was a day late – the first time he had ever missed a deadline – but, still, he knew it was a good effort, probably deserving of an A, or an A – at the very least. A stickler for deadlines, Box would doubtless even refuse to look at it, but Ashton had finished it, so he might as well send it.
The other two envelopes were smaller, just big enough to contain a couple of the Howard Hodgkin postcards he had bought at the Fitzwilliam Museum a week before. The first envelope, containing an image of Hodgkin’s painting entitled Bleeding, was addressed to his shrink, a nervous woman who seemed even more disturbed about what had happened to him than he was himself. The envelope containing the second card, Mourning, was simply addressed to ‘Suzy’. Both cards had been left blank, and both were apologies of a sort. Both, he knew, were pitifully inadequate, not that he cared. They could decipher them or not.
Satisfied that everything was finally in place, Robert Ashton stepped through some curtains and opened the door that led on to the small balcony overlooking the quadrangle. He was wearing just a thin black T-shirt the chill in the air made him shiver. The sun was rapidly sinking in the sky, and already beginning to disappear behind the buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. Squinting, he held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. The stone parapet in front of him was about four feet high and maybe ten inches wide. Yawning, he pulled himself up on to it and stood shakily surveying his domain. Forty feet below, people were going about their business, still heading to and from lectures. In the middle of the square was a large oak tree. Near the tree, a fantastically pretty girl was sitting on the grass, lapping up the attention she was getting from two would-be suitors competing for her attention.
For what seemed like an eternity, Ashton waited for the girl to look up and catch his eye. When she finally did so, he pulled back his shoulders and held his arms outstretched. Overwhelmed by a huge sense of relief, he listened to her scream of alarm fade away on the breeze.
Then he stepped off the wall and into space.
FOURTEEN
Carlyle prided himself on not paying much attention to politicians, but even he knew chapter and verse on Christian Holyrod. Known as ‘the Holy Rod’, ‘the Rod’, ‘Hot Rod’ or ‘the hero of Helmand’, depending on the mood of the tabloid newspapers on any given day, Holyrod had been enjoying the kind of press that other politicians could only dream of. Two years earlier, he had been Major Holyrod, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (motto: Virtutis Fortuna Comes, or ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’). It was one of the first British battle groups to go into Helmand in south-west Afghanistan, with a mandate to give ‘Terry Taliban’ hell.
Holyrod’s journey from unsung hero to big-time politician began when an American documentary crew arrived to film the story of Operation Clockwork Orange, a mission to capture a terrorist commander inside his mud compound in the middle of nowhere. The mission was a total fiasco, Holyrod’s boys were ambushed and a swift retreat followed, but the firefights and general chaos that followed made for great television. Shaky, hand-held pictures of the Major shouting, ‘Contact, contact, contact!’, while squeezing off rounds from his SA80-A2 assault rifle and trying to drag a wounded squaddie back to his truck, were as gripping as anything that Hollywood could have come up with. They made all the major news bulletins back home in Britain even before the programme was aired in the USA. For almost two days it was the most watched video on YouTube, with more than forty-five million hits around the world. Holyrod became an instant celebrity. He was offered his own radio talk show, signed up to do a newspaper column, acquired an agent and received more than one hundred offers of marriage.
For its part, the Ministry of Defence was, initially, more than happy to let a stream of journalists beat a path to the Major’s door, given their desperation for any kind of ‘good news’ out of a story that had been a complete disaster from day one. Holyrod quite enjoyed the attention, but he was increasingly worried that the MoD had seriously underestimated the task in hand, i.e. fighting the enemy. The tone of his interviews became more and more downbeat as he contemplated ‘the big picture’. After telling a very nice girl from the Sunday Express that ‘the whole thing’s gone to rats’, he was hauled back to London ‘for discussions’. His return to the front line was then cut short after he was caught, on camera, berating the Foreign Secretary, who was in the middle of a four-hour ‘tour’ of the troops, about Her Majesty’s Government’s lack of support for ‘his boys’.
Of course, the media lapped it all up. So did the public. Opinion polls suggested that Holyrod’s approval rating had reached the high eighties. No politician could compete with him. The Major’s window of opportunity had arrived, and now he had to decide what to do with it.
