Walking in Darkness

‘Not after what they said about your first novel!’ Greg Blake grinned, and some people laughed briefly before a scowl from Jim Allgood stopped it dead.

‘Can we not talk about your private lives, you two? And listen good, everyone – keep your eyes open for anyone who keeps turning up when you don’t expect them.’

There was a silence; everyone looked sideways at someone else, their faces blank.

‘Steve Colbourne’s around a lot, have you noticed that?’ offered Greg, not altogether seriously but just to say something. He felt compelled to rush in whenever a silence fell; silences embarrassed him. They felt unnatural.

‘Are you crazy?’ snapped Jack Beverley. ‘The guy’s a TV commentator. The more interest he shows, the better. His father’s a friend of Mr Ramsey.’ He looked for confirmation from Don Gowrie who nodded.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’d forgotten that,’ Greg said. ‘And Colbourne is good at his job. Gets good ratings. He writes well, too. Too well. It really gets up my nose. I want to despise the media, not wish I could use words as well as they do.’

‘Careful, Greg, you keep telling the truth this way and your career will be over,’ Jeff said, and got another scowl from Allgood.

‘Not funny, Hardy. One day you’ll say that in front of someone who’ll print it and then it will be you who’s out of a job.’

Jeff flushed and said nothing.

Brushing his untidy hair back from his face, Greg rushed in again to cover his friend’s silence. ‘Who’s the blonde with Colbourne today, anyone know? I noticed her at the press conference, couple of days ago. Well, I guess we all noticed her.’ He grinned round at them and got some uncertain, answering grins. Encouraged he talked on fast, ‘I just love those icy blondes, don’t you? The kind who give you the drop-dead look if you come within a foot of them.’

‘Now what does that tell us about you?’ mused Jeff, having recovered his cool. ‘You’re a sick man, Greg. Masochism stunts your growth, remember. Sadism is the only safe sexual perversion.’

There were stifled snorts among the others.

‘Hitchcock had one in every film he made,’ Jeff said.

‘Perversion?’

‘Icy blonde.’

‘You’re right, I’d forgotten. The icier the better, and it isn’t masochism, Jeff – guys like me and Hitchcock love to fantasize about making the ice melt.’

‘Dream on, buster,’ Jeff drawled, and got a big laugh from some of the team.

Jack Beverley, head of Gowrie’s security people, suddenly snarled, ‘Will you two, for Christ’s sake, shut up? This isn’t vaudeville and you aren’t paid to write patter. We’re supposed to be working.’

Silence fell again. Beverley tilted his bullet head downwards and ran a finger down the typed sheets in front of him. ‘OK. We were talking about the speech for this dinner at the Guildhall – that’s in London, right? You just say the City here, I guess you mean London?’ He glared at them. ‘Why the hell don’t you say so?’

‘Well, it is, and it isn’t,’ Greg said.

‘What does that mean?’ Beverley growled, his rocklike jaw thrust forward in aggression.

‘Well,’ drawled Greg, ‘See, it’s complicated. The City is the oldest part of London, built on the original Roman city; in the beginning it had a wall running right round it. The rest of London grew up outside the wall. That’s gone now, of course, but the original city is still separate from the rest of London. It has its own by-laws and police force and Lord Mayor and Aldermen. It’s the financial centre of the UK, it has the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, all the major financial institutions. The Guildhall was where the trade guilds used to meet in medieval times.’ He paused, seeing the blank faces. ‘That’s kind of trade unions. The old building was bombed in the war, but was rebuilt exactly as it was before, and it’s still where all the big events take place in the City of London. State banquets, that kind of affair.’

‘I didn’t ask for a history lesson!’ Beverley yelled, and Greg flinched. He hated loud aggressive men with parade-ground voices. They reminded him of his soldier father and all the reasons why he had not gone into the army himself; they made his head ache, too.

‘The banquet the senator will be attending is the annual dinner of the Anglo-American Friendship Society; it will make a terrific platform for him and be widely reported back home as well as in the UK,’ Jim Allgood quickly said.

‘Which is why this speech you’ve written had better be good,’ Don Gowrie told them, smiling, in an effort to improve the atmosphere. A team under stress was a team in trouble. He needed good humour and calm around him in Europe. He was already under enough stress from other quarters. ‘Oh, and guys, will you keep your voices down? My wife’s sleeping.’

Elly and her nurse were seated right at the front of the first-c

lass section. Elly had eaten and taken a sleeping pill; he could see her head slumped to one side and even from this distance he could hear her soft, smothered snoring.

Everyone looked round at her. Few of them actually knew her. She no longer got involved in his political life. Luckily Elly was having one of her good days; or rather, she had been heavily sedated before they left for the airport. They could not risk a scene in public. She could be unpredictable, especially when she was with him. If she saw a beautiful woman speak to him, for instance, and got it into her head that there was something going on between him and the other woman, she could turn very nasty. He closed his eyes briefly, shuddering at memories of just how nasty she could be.

‘OK?’ Jim Allgood murmured, watching him uneasily.