A Scandalous Man. Gavin Esler
call them back if you wish. Save you the trouble. They were suggesting around ten tomorrow morning?’
Harry felt relief. Someone was looking out for him, for the first time in years. A place of safety.
‘Yes, Sidney, around ten. And Sidney …’
‘Yes?’
He hesitated.
‘Thank you for being so kind.’
‘Don’t mention it. It’s all part of the service. The least I could do for Robin Burnett’s family.’
Harry put the phone down, relieved. If the police were not racing across London to meet him, then presumably they did not think Harry himself had anything important to say about whatever had happened to his father. Good. They were right about that, at least. Harry took his shoes and socks off. He walked barefoot through the apartment, taking a quick mental inventory of his inheritance. Walnut dining table. Nice. Three thousand pounds. Plus eight chairs. Five thousand? Baby grand piano. Very nice. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? He wasn’t sure. He touched the keys. Beautiful tone. Modern flatscreen TV and DVD player. Leather sofa and chairs. Shiny table tops. The master bedroom overlooked the heath. Another bedroom set up as a study. Harry looked out and noticed a bench at the side of the heath facing towards him. A young woman with spiky hair was sitting on the bench, gazing towards the apartment, lost in thought. There was something – he could not think of the right word – cheeky, perhaps, or defiant – about the way that she looked up towards him. Harry pressed his face to the glass.
Suddenly, as if alarmed, the woman snatched at a rucksack on the bench beside her and turned away, moving quickly out of sight behind the trees towards the heath ponds. Harry stepped back, puzzled. He had caught her doing something wrong, this strange spiky woman. She was guilty, though he could not guess the crime. How odd. Harry returned to the main room and spotted a tray of malt whiskies, six or seven good ones. Oban, Bowmore. Glen Moray. Macallan. Plus a couple in the distinctive green-labelled bottles of the Scotch Whisky Society. At last. Signs of his father in residence. Gin. Vodka. A crystal ice bucket. Beside the tray of liquor, a big black and white photograph in a silver frame caught his eye. He snatched it up. It was of the father he remembered, taken in his prime about twenty years ago. Big shouldered, athletic build, tall, with a shock of black hair. Wearing a dinner jacket. But it was his father’s companion who really startled Harry. She was strikingly beautiful. She was younger, in her early thirties. She had thick dark hair, tied in a chignon, and she was bedecked in a glittering ball-gown, her eyes brimful of intelligence. And there was something else. The woman and his father were laughing. The photographer had caught them at precisely the moment their eyes engaged. There was no doubting the expressions on their faces. Harry looked again at the face of the woman, and at his father. Then he called his sister.
‘Leila Rajar?’ Amanda’s voice rose to high pitch.
‘Yes.’
‘You are sure it’s her?’
‘Absolutely. Yes. It’s Leila Rajar.’
‘But how could he be with Leila Rajar?’
Harry did not know.
‘The American TV news woman?’
There was only one Leila Rajar.
‘Yes, the American TV news woman. I’m holding the picture in my hand right now,’ Harry insisted. ‘This is either Leila Rajar or it’s her body double.’
‘But how can you be sure, Aitch?’
Harry grew exasperated.
‘How can I be sure of anything?’
Harry watched Leila Rajar read the news most nights on satellite TV. Leila Rajar had just been signed up by CBS News for a contract reported to be worth $22 million a year, making her the best-paid newsreader in history.
‘How can I be sure I am talking to you? It’s her, Amanda. She’s got darker hair in the photo than she has now, and she must have been about thirty when it was taken. She’d be fifty-something now. But it’s her all right. And she is heart-stoppingly beautiful.’
‘What about him?’
‘He looks as he did in those photographs from after the Falklands War, when he was promoted to Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The cat that got the cream. Except for one thing.’
‘What one thing?’
Harry looked at the picture and tried to sum it up.
‘He is glowing.’
‘Glowing?’ Amanda scoffed. ‘Aitch, have you been drinking?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Then what do you mean by …’
‘I have never seen him look so … happy. Amanda, she is in love with him, and he is quite definitely in love with her. It’s as if there is something warming them both from within.’
Harry took a deep breath. Until he said the words, it had never occurred to him that his father might love anyone other than himself.
‘What?’ She sounded shocked.
‘Love, Amanda. It makes him look … younger.’
‘Younger?’
‘And nicer.’
She raised her voice. ‘Nicer?’
‘Vulnerable.’
There was a long pause.
‘But Leila Rajar!’ Amanda broke in eventually. ‘How would he know Leila Rajar?’
Harry shrugged.
‘All I’m doing is looking at one moment between two people captured at one two-fiftieth of a second twenty years ago in black and white.’
‘Exactly my point, and …’
‘It’s enough. Really it is. They love each other.’
Amanda went silent.
‘Fuck,’ she said.
ROBIN BURNETT’S STORY
Middleburg is fox-hunting country. It’s about thirty miles from Washington in the rolling Virginia hills, but it’s a different world. The day I arrived was a Friday. The Washington Post that day reported that the murder rate in the District of Columbia was going to hit 500 deaths in a year – in a city of 600,000 people. Fifteen times the murder rate in Northern Ireland, where we thought we had a problem big enough to send in troops. Some of the liberal commentators in the US were blaming the socially divisive policies of the Reagan administration. They criticized the President for designating tomato ketchup as a vegetable in school meals as a cost-saving device. How any of this was linked to the murder rate, I never understood, except that it was the usual liberal media elite sociological mumbo-jumbo, where you began with tomato ketchup and ended with blood on the streets, and it was always the government’s fault. The Reaganauts blamed individual human wickedness for the crime rate, though that did not entirely explain why more people were more wicked under Reagan either. It looked to me like simple market forces. Drug dealers were competing for customers and eliminating their rivals. As the cocaine market matured, things would settle down. Supply, demand. Gunfire to settle market share, the emergence of a monopoly supplier. Peace on the streets. Eventually.
Anyway, the next day, the Saturday, the British embassy driver picked me up at my hotel and whisked me away from the war zone that Washington had become to spend the weekend at Don Hall’s stud farm on the outskirts of Middleburg. We drove through a huge white arch inscribed with the words ‘Hall Estate’. The driveway must be about a mile long, cutting through deep-green fields with white picket fences in between.