The Storytellers (5 page)

C
HAPTER

“C
ALLAGHAN SHOULD HAVE gone for it in September, when he had a chance.”

It was the first Monday morning of the new year and
The Sentinel's
editor was firing up his team for the week ahead.

“Serves him right for opposing In Place of Strife,” Georgina gloated.

“Wilson could see the problem,” Pete interjected. “Labour law needed reform, but the union diehards in the government just couldn't stomach it. His white paper was DOA.”

“DOA?”

Porter, the social correspondent, disliked letters.

“Dead on arrival,” Pete informed him.

“You've been watching too much American television,” Porter carped.

“There is a world outwith Her Majesty's diary you know!”

“Children!”

George Gilder quite liked it when his reporters had a go at each other. It showed they were not asleep. But there were limits.

“Now, Mudd,” he said, “what's on the horizon?”

“Blizzards!” Harvey answered. “At least that's what the Met Office is forecasting.”

He'd come to think of his editor's preference for his surname as a sign of special favour. In part this was the case. But it was also because George Gilder liked saying ‘Mudd', especially in a loud voice.

“So not great for the economy,” Georgina concluded, seeing the point immediately.

“Not great for the pickets either,” observed Pete who'd followed the Grunwick dispute in which a film-processing company in North London had been used as a stalking horse to test how far unions, sympathetic to a worker's plight, could legally obstruct a company's business, whether the company's workers were members of a union or not.

“Her Majesty has not missed a day yet,” announced Porter.

“I can't see her sitting next to a coal-fired brazier in front of Buck House on a cold winter's day, just to stop Prince Philip attending an engagement,” chortled Pete.

“No, she'd probably just send all his trousers to the laundry,” quipped Georgina.

“We're wandering,” chastened their editor. And then fixing on Harvey asked, “What mischief have the unions in store for us?”

“The big one is the tanker drivers' dispute. It's been rumbling for months. But with the Ford settlement it looks as though they are going for it. All members of the Transport and General Workers' Union are out, although at the moment it's unofficial. With fuel supplies drying up, the effects will spread everywhere–”

“Eighty percent of the nation's goods goes by road,” interjected Georgina.

“Hospitals, schools, factories, farms, not to mention Joe Public and his blessed automobile.”

A broad grin spread across George Gilder's face. “Now let's watch Callaghan's opinion poll lead get flushed down the toilet,” he all but
rhapsodized. “I want you to get out there and tell the story – no, the stories, as many as you can lay your hands on, about how this is affecting ordinary men and women – and who is doing this to them.”

“Is it true that the ports are being picketed?” Pete asked.

“That's what I've heard,” Harvey told him.

“The unions are just not in control any more, and neither is the government,” concluded Pete. “It's all with the shop stewards now.”

“And a fair few of them are taking their orders from the KGB, I wouldn't wonder,” growled their editor.

“Quite possibly,” agreed Harvey. “Although it seems to me more like a highly contagious virus affecting everyone it touches with madness.”

“Ah, but it is only out of chaos that a new phoenix can arise,” opined George. “That madness may embody more method than any of us realize.”

“I suppose I might be able to find something that has inconvenienced Her Majesty,” conceded Porter, torn between being left out and not wishing to dip his hands into such unseemly goings on.

However the meeting was over and Porter's indulgence fell on largely deaf ears. Harvey, for one, knew well enough what kind of phoenix his editor wanted to see rise from the ashes.

C
HAPTER

T
HE MAN WHOSE WIFE imagined her husband was a well-paid analyst in a merchant bank became Peter Betsworth and slipped into Hyde Park. He'd had a call from ‘Marx', one of his agents. Not the most original alias, but it appealed to him.

* * *

Marx enjoyed his trips to London. Partly this was because it meant he was earning his keep. He only visited the capital when he had something useful to give his handler. But mostly it was because he was given an overnight allowance for such trips and could meet up with Stacy in the Edgware Road boarding house where he stayed and she worked.

There was also something about the city that liberated him. Factory life, even a factory life punctuated by union meetings at which plans to bring about a new order were discussed with surreal intensity, could become downright claustrophobic, especially as the brotherly love that bound them was shot through with hatred, insecurity and suspicion. No sooner had he stepped off the train at
Paddington Station and melted into the crowd with its strangers of different shapes, sizes and nationalities, than the straitjacket of his other life fell away and he could wear a fresh skin.

There were times when he felt like waving two fingers at it all. He and Stacy often fantasized about a new life. But even though he'd never met the lady, he sensed that when it came to it, his friend wouldn't leave the mother she appeared to live with down in Barnes. He, on the other hand, had no ties. He supposed his own mother would miss him but he and his old man had long since ceased to talk, and his parents were close. He had avoided marriage like a poison. The prospect of being locked into a world he wanted to escape was not for him. Part of him admired his father's dogged attachment to the union movement. There was a certain nobility to it, for sure. But the man's blindness to the motives of the young firebrands who had hijacked the shop floor seemed pitifully romantic.

The approach from the security services had been so bloody brazen: an advertisement in the
Morning Star
seeking recruits ‘to protect the nation'. ‘To protect the effing capitalist class' more like, had been the dismissive reaction from the members of his cell. They'd even suggested he put himself forward as a double agent.

He'd replied anonymously to the box number provided, suggesting a meeting two weeks hence in the Dog and Whistle, a boozer on the outskirts of Birmingham he knew none of his mates frequented. On the appointed day and time he had gone there with little expectation, wearing the leather jacket he had described, hopeful that his demonstration of what he imagined were the black arts of the trade he hoped to join would impress.

There had been no other leather-jacket wearers in the Dog and Whistle that day and the meeting had passed without a hitch and even been an anti-climax. He was invited to attend some evening classes and assessments in Crawley, which had continued for several weeks. Only at the end, when he had presumably cleared some threshold of
acceptability, had it been put to him that he inform on his colleagues at Longbridge.

For a year now, he had been coming up to London, seeing Stacy and handing over his reports. And if it hadn't been for her, whom he had met the first time he stayed in Edgware Road, he might have stopped. His reports seemed mundane, often embodying little more than tittle-tattle and a description of his workmates' daft notions. His clandestine work's connection to his nation's security seemed far from obvious. Also he'd been hoping for more excitement and so far, trying to imagine what knickers Stacy would be wearing next time he met her had been about the sum of it. At least his handler said money was being paid into an account he could access when his ‘mission' was complete. But what was his mission and when would it be?

* * *

The man from MI5 walked with a light step. At last, he felt, things were shifting into a higher gear. Even though the brutal winter weather belied it, change was in the air. After over a decade in power, with only one brief interruption, the Labour party was losing its grip on the reins of government. He could sense it. The civil service, of which he supposed he was a part, was beginning to reposition itself for the possibility of new masters, or a new mistress as now seemed likely.

He and a number of his colleagues and friends outside the service had been watching the disintegration of the United Kingdom with growing alarm. There had even been talk amongst some of an interim authority taking over if democracy failed to deliver a stable government capable of taking firm action. This was uncharted territory. Like him, a majority of those concerned still wanted a democratic solution if at all possible, and he intended to move heaven and earth to bring this about. The alternative hardly bore thinking about.

Peter Betsworth had been keeping a close watch on his recruit. The handler was now as confident as he could be that the young man was not a plant and was ready for a more active role. Agents were a particular breed. Loners by nature, they appeared to be more detached from their roots than most people. If they had an ideology it was a passion for their own freedom to act, often for a cause but a cause defined in terms of the destruction of a world they had come to hate. As a child of the unions, Marx was now a twenty-five-year-old in revolt, exactly the profile he needed.

* * *

“Sugar?”

“Naa.”

Marx stirred his coffee anyway. He always felt nervous in the presence of his handler. The man's nondescript manner could as easily have concealed a killer, he thought, as a favourite uncle. The Serpentine café was congenial and he was relieved not to be outside on a bench, Peter Betsworth's preferred venue.

“Everything all right at the boarding house?”

Marx said it was. The place Peter Betsworth had told him to use on his visits to London – ‘We get a good rate' – had become a home from home. That said, his home in Longbridge, which he shared with flatmate Mad Max, a professional agitator whose convictions stretched no further than his love for a good ‘whack-around', was a pit compared to the neat room on the Edgware Road, lovingly prepared by Stacy, so it was really the other way around.

“Seeing anyone?”

Peter Betsworth's question caught him off guard. But he tried to sound casual. He'd been warned against entanglements.

“Naa, not really.”

To his relief, his handler didn't press the point.

“Now we want you to start playing a more active role,” he said instead.

“In what woy?”

“Following the Ford settlement our sense is the unions want to let rip and blow the government's pay policy to kingdom come. We'd like you to push this in any way you can.”

“You mean you want mower strikes, not less?”

“Exactly.”

He knew that after a champion good year, the Ford Motor Corporation had settled with its unions on an inflation-busting pay rise which other workers were now drooling for. This had skewered the government, whose public sector wage bill was already daft. And now here was one branch of government actively siding with the workers against the official government policy of pay restraint.

“What bleeden side am we on then?” Marx asked.

“Right now, the union's,” Peter Betsworth answered, without a hint of irony.

“Well that's 'un rowad I'll not be guin down. I thought it was the unions that 'ad got us into this codge and it was the unions we were tryen ter break.”

“And how do you propose the unions be made more accountable?” the MI5 man asked.

“Change the bloody law,” Marx snapped back, “so that these shop-floor crazoys can't bottle production whenever they fancy an' spread their scabby notions ter every other industry in the country whenever they ployz.”

For the first time since Marx had known him, his handler just laughed. Not a mocking laugh, but an indulgent one.

“So?” Marx pressed, feeling embarrassed, certain that he must be missing something obvious.

Peter Betsworth felt hugely encouraged. If a young man from a working-class background could see the problem and its solution so
clearly, then surely a majority of the electorate could too.

“Every time this government has sidled up to a change in the law,” he explained, “it has been forced back on account of the Labour Party's deep roots within the labour movement. Even Heath's ill-fated conservative government of '70 to '74 wasn't willing to go for the jugular, at least without a mandate, which it didn't get.”

Marx paused to organize his thoughts. “You're sayen we need a government that
'as
a mandate an'
wull
goo fer the jugular, roight?”

“Exactly.”

Suddenly the laughter was gone and Peter Betsworth's crisp answer seemed cold and calculating.

For what seemed like a long time the two didn't speak, but just sat there, surrounded by the noisy comings and goings inside the café. A young mother struggled to get her pushchair and baby between the chairs and was helped by an elderly Jamaican man who rose from his seat to assist her. A boy, in too much of a hurry, dropped his ice cream, just missing a lady's handbag. He stared at the white mess on the floor in disbelief. Outside the glass walls, a row of ducks huddled in the cold, overlooking the water, waiting for any scraps that might come their way. Inside was not for them. Inside was for humans, upwards of fifty, happy to be warm, to be together, to be unaware – for a time at least – of the forces shaping their lives.

“So we're aimen ter topple this government an' put another in its place, that it?”

Peter Betsworth simply shrugged. Such treasonable thoughts were never to be expressed. He knew the history of Tyburn, even if his agent did not.

“Democracy only works,” he said eventually, “if people know what is really going on. And as importantly, or perhaps even more so, understand the consequences of what is going on. Strikes they can see. The consequences of strikes they can feel.”

“If there is a change,” Marx asked, “what makes you fink a noo
lot would do anny be'ah?”

“That depends on how steely they are, how angry the electorate has become and how big a majority they get.”

“Three ‘depends'!”

“Life is a succession of ‘depends'.”

Marx looked concerned.

Seeing that his companion was unimpressed by the odds, Peter Betsworth added, “I'm told that the lady who now heads up the Conservative Party is nothing if not steely, so that is one down.”

“Fatcher?”

“Yes, Margaret Thatcher.”

“I'm worken fer a skirt then?”

“Indirectly, I suppose you are – a skirt with an idea.”

One of the few things Marx had remembered from school was the story of Joan of Arc. He even remembered having a fancy for her, so the idea of helping a woman fight for her nation's honour against weak, self-interested countrymen rubbed him the right way.

“Fair enough,” he acknowledged, to his handler's evident relief, and reaching inside the slim satchel he had brought along, extracted five handwritten pages.

“Here's me report. The brothers believe they yav capitalism on the run.”

“One can but hope!”

“That they does or that they fink they does?”

Once again Peter Betsworth allowed himself to laugh. He was definitely warming to this agent.

“Now turning from theory to practice,” he said, “there is someone we are interested in. You've mentioned him in your intelligence, Jack Pugh. Get close to him. Encourage him. Be his friend. I want to know every little thing about him.”

* * *

Marx left the Serpentine café energized. Matters had at last become clear. His mighty mission was to bring down a government – how about that? – and pave the way for a new style of management: everything the Trots, Commies and their assorted agitators were working for. He was on their side. The thought of it! He might even be able to talk to his dad again. As he boarded the train, he could hardly wait to file another report – and to fuck Stacy.