Sing Like You Know the Words (50 page)

-I see all of a sudden it’s a
matter of integrity and you’re a professional journalist: not a
cheap scribbler on a local rag who took a weekend break at my
expense.

Matthew looked at him,
astonished by this outburst.

-Matt, I’m sorry I didn’t mean
that. I am under a lot of pressure at the moment, nothing to do
with this case. But remember you weren’t there as a journalist, you
were there to help me help my constituent, so let’s be
sensible.

-But there is a story, even so.
There are some other things; things he told me about this
mysterious Mr Hawkins, that I should follow up.

-Hawkins might be dangerous for
you.

-Why do you say that? Anyway my
guess is the story doesn’t stop with Hawkins, he sounds like a man
who does things that another man decides. I’ve done some digging
around already. For instance do you know what titadyn is?

-A secret society?

-It’s a sort of explosive, used
a lot in mining, common in mines in southern France, which means
the Basque separatists can easily get hold of it and have made it
their favourite bomb ingredient. According to Walcott, Hawkins told
him that the mysterious policeman tried to buy this stuff from
them, at a meeting that Walcott attended more or less accidentally.
He really has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Why Hawkins would say anything to him about it, I have no
idea. Anyway, Walcott thinks that the policeman was trying to see
if Hawkins had links with ETA.

-And what do you think?

-Doesn’t explain all the facts,
or at least what I think I know. But I don’t know enough to think
anything yet.

-Certainly you don’t have enough
for any story that you could print

-Agreed, not yet anyway.

-And it’s a bit far off the
beaten track for the Examiner, in any case.

-I know

For a while they sat, silently.
David had again started to fidget. Matthew sprang to his feet in
exasperation

-For God’s sake David, we are
supposed to be friends. Just tell me.

-Tell you what?

-Tell me what is the matter? Why
should any of this matter to you?

-I know Hawkins

-How could that be?

-He’s an unusual man, maybe not
quite stable. From these parts originally, but I think he left for
good a long time ago. One of the things he does for a living is
selling arms, in a small way; not in a strictly legal way. He’s the
one to make deals with the sort of people that others don’t
particularly want to talk to. Works on commission mostly. Sometimes
he might help out with other problems too, for people who don’t
have any other way to get things done.

-Are you telling me you were
dealing weapons through this man?

-God no, we were never involved
in anything illegal like that. But it’s guilt by association isn’t
it? Something like this comes out and the hacks from the nationals
don’t have to accuse you to your face of anything. They just hint
and imply. If you say nothing, they note that no explanations have
been given: if you try to explain they take everything the wrong
way on purpose and tear you to pieces. If a Hawkins connection
comes out, it damages me: just when I’m looking at a ministerial
portfolio.

-You should tell me exactly how
much you know about Ray Hawkins.

-Not much to tell. I was
introduced through Albert. You probably guessed that Albert’s
people were my backers when I took Cromwell over. You didn’t think
I had the kind of money to do it on my own? Poor Albert had friends
based in Switzerland.

-Zurich

-Yes. You remember the
visit.

-But the company was yours. You
had all the shares. You’re the one who got rich. What was in it for
them?

-They took a slice along the
way. They needed to have someone they could trust so that they
could remain anonymous. That was me. But to be truthful, there was
probably more to it than a cut of the profits. I’ve been careful
never to look at it too carefully, and you know I’m no accountant,
but there are some numbers that don’t seem to add up. I think it
may have been useful to them that we had contracts that were
classified as defence contracts even though ours was not sensitive
procurement. It meant we could trade legally in lots of
countries.

-You always swore to me that all
your exports were fully licensed. You said it was just machinery
and spares.

-And that’s true Matt, I swear
it now. We never broke the law. You know I never wanted to sell any
kind of defence goods in the first place. I only wanted to save the
company. And things were so hard, and I had so many people
depending on me. I’d told all of them, no redundancies here, your
jobs are safe; we’re in this together. I couldn’t go back to them
and say, sorry, I got it wrong, all the profitable contracts have a
military application so I’m shutting us down.

-Go on.

-All our contracts were legal,
and what we shipped was legal, but looking at the paperwork, some
of the quantities don’t make sense. If we’ve shipped goods to the
value of a hundred thousand, you might see invoicing that suggests
we’ve shipped a lot more than that.

-But what you sell is pretty
bulky. If there was a shortfall on the delivery it would be obvious
to the customer.

-Pretty bulky, exactly. So it
could happen that by the time they arrived, there might be other
things in the containers, besides what we shipped. Less bulky
things, more nasty things, things that people were prepared to pay
good money for but which shouldn’t have been there.

-You mean smuggled goods

-All duly invoiced and paid for,
making the money clean.

-When did you find out?

-I never did find out. I’m only
guessing. I’ve only just admitted to myself that the reason I
didn’t look into it more closely was because I preferred not to
know. I’ve been turning a lot of old stuff over in my head
lately.

Matthew agreed with David that
they both needed a drink. David sloshed whisky into the tumblers.
His hands were not steady. They sat down again, facing each other
in the armchairs, as they had done so many times over the
years.

-What does Harold say about
this?

-I haven’t told Harold what I’ve
told you, but maybe he knows anyway.

-It’s true he is pretty quick to
sniff out dirt. It’s his natural habitat.

-This isn’t about Harold. You’ve
always been hard on him. Someone has to do his job. Do you think
the other side doesn’t have their own Harold’s? They have whole
teams of them.

-As you say, this is not about
him. You tell me often enough I’m not prepared to get my hands
dirty, and how useless that makes me.

-I’m sorry if I’ve put it like
that

-It doesn’t matter.

-It all matters. It matters to
me when I think about the questionable things I’ve had to do to get
this far, and the good I’ve been able to do as a result. I balance
it all the time, the good I’ve done and might still do, against the
compromises, and what you would call the dishonesty. I weigh the
scale in my mind every day.

-Which way is it tipping
now?

-I can live with anything I’ve
done. I know you’re a sceptic, but we have done good work, me and
my team; yes Harold as well. We’ve made some things better and
fairer than they would have been, even though you tell me it’s
impossible to prove that kind of claim. And what’s more important,
we can do more; we really can.

-It’s such a hard climb to get
to the point where you can make a difference. You have to do some
bad things on the way up, to get there; and all the time you have
to hang on to the state of grace; the pure intention; so that when
you do have the chance, it is still someone with the right values
and ideals who makes the big decisions. You must hold on to the
good in yourself even when you’re dealing with the most corrosive
realities. That’s why you need family and friends around you.

-You’ve thought about it a
lot.

-Of course. And I’m on the verge
of reaching that point, of having power. Soon it’ll be a seat in
the cabinet and then who knows?

-I thought they were only
offering you a junior minister position

-That’s only the start.

-I’m sorry David, it doesn’t
persuade me. We don’t see the world in the same way. In my world,
your future holds as much compromise and shabbiness if you sit on
the front bench as if you sit at the back, probably more. Everyone
has to take shit. The president in Washington has got to wade
through more of it than you do.

David shrugged.

-You think like that because
you’re resigned to nothing ever changing and the wrong people
always getting power, in a world getting a little worse every day.
I’m not prepared to give in like that.

-Let’s talk about Walcott.

-Give me his address, we’ll find
him, bring him back to the UK, where he’s safe, and persuade him to
keep quiet about the whole thing. You said yourself he’s got no
money, no connections and no curiosity. No-one would listen to his
wild stories and he knows it. He’s just looking for an out.

-Tell me first what Hawkins did
for you.

-You remember when that little
bastard Foster tried to take over the company?

-Of course

-It was a carefully planned
ambush. We didn’t have anywhere to go. He’d spent months gently
steering the business to be just where he wanted it. He bought the
American company to get us into debt. So when he made his move, the
clock was ticking and we only had hours to respond. He was sure we
had no way to raise extra cash. In any case he was in league with
the weasels at the bank.

-Albert’s friends agreed to
invest some more money in the company, privately, to get us over
the hump, but there was still Foster himself to deal with. And he
wanted to grind my face in the dirt as much as he wanted anything
else. He wasn’t satisfied with just money. Hawkins persuaded him
that it would be a better idea to take a very generous payout and
go.

-I never saw or heard about
Foster after that, what became of him?

-He walked away with a suitcase
full of cash. Probably more than he would have netted from his
dirty little scam. He was still disappointed of course; would have
liked to have seen it played through. There’s something about a rat
like him that takes as much pleasure in dishonesty for its own sake
as what he can get from it.

-Suppose he hadn’t agreed to
back off?

-The question didn’t arise,
because he agreed. Are you going to give me these details or
not?

Matthew was sitting on the edge
of the chair, back arched over, head in his hands; one arm trailing
an almost empty glass.

-I can’t tell you just at this
moment. I’ll ring you later tonight. Do you mind if I refill
this?

He sloshed more whisky into the
glass.

-So that was you and Albert
then, he continued. I’ve often wondered. I miss him a lot you know.
I suppose a bad thing happened.

-I couldn’t say. He just
disappeared.

Matthew thought about that.

-But it’s like if your cat goes
missing. After a while you know that you won’t see him again.

-You know I was thinking just
the other day, about a story Albert told me, from when he was in
North Africa, doing a deal with someone he only called the Major.
He wouldn’t say more than that about the business, but I suppose I
can guess now. Anyway, he explained to me in some detail this visit
that the Major had organized to a local brothel, and Albert and
everyone else was obliged to be there. I suppose they were proud of
the facility and the hospitality was compulsory. He was amusing in
the way he talked about it; he didn’t let his own feelings show:
but I was thinking, why is he telling me this about himself? I was
a little disgusted to be honest.

-I can see now that it would be
helpful for him to have a sin on his mind that he could actually
confess. I’m sure that the other things, all the secrets that he
couldn’t mention, made him feel worse.

-I think that what he was trying
to let me know was that it disgusted him too; this episode and all
the other bad things he did. But he refused to turn away from them
or pretend they hadn’t happened. He’d look at them without
blinking. He would have liked to say, I am better than these things
I’ve done, only he couldn’t, because he was honest and he believed
that you were no more or less than what you did. I hope he found a
way through all that anguish in the end. He was more troubled than
we realized.

David swirled the contents of
his glass, without drinking. He appeared to be making a big effort
to control a powerful emotion; whether of fear, impatience or anger
was difficult to say.

-I don’t know about any of that,
he said, but I can tell you the last thing that Albert said to me.
He said that the English had begun to terrify him.

-He never did like it here
much.

-You’re wrong. He loved this
country. You know how he was always going on about Joseph Conrad?
He used to say, let me get it right, that Conrad was a Pole who
felt privileged to be a part of the British Empire at a time when
it was a civilising principle as much as a collection of
territories, even though he could see that it was based on robbery
as much as idealism. He said he felt a little the same, that he was
an outsider who felt privileged to witness the same nation in the
vanguard of civilisation’s decline.

-That doesn’t sound so
complimentary. Why did we scare him?

David tried to find words to
explain. It was hard. The drink had affected him more than he
expected and his mind was on other things. He saw Albert, occupying
the chair that Matthew now sat in. The only one left from the old
days. He tried to remember the exact words.