A Parcel of Fortunes Read online

  As he was pouring his coffee, there was a tap on his shoulder. It was the Headmaster, asking about the previous day’s tour. Matthew wasn’t sure if anything lay behind the question and was unsure whether or not to mention the strange interloper. He decided not to.

  ‘It was fine. Same old same old.’

  ‘Oh. I ask because one of the party popped into my study before leaving.’

  Oh dear. Was this whole business suddenly going to take on a completely new layer of complication? Had Henry Baines caught sight of yesterday’s strange visitor after all? And mentioned something to the Head? Matthew cleared his throat and, attempting nonchalance, said, ‘Was it Tommy Cooper who called in on you?’

  The Headmaster looked momentarily puzzled, and then his face broke into a smile of recognition. ‘Tommy Cooper? Yes!…But without the fez!’ They both laughed.

  ‘What did he want?’ Matthew asked, trying to sound casual and confident, keen to hide the mild apprehension that he actually felt.

  ‘Oh, he just said what an interesting tour it had been, what an excellent chap you were. And how I should be careful not to lose you.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Nice.’ Matthew wondered if the Head would detect the tremor in his voice. ‘Well, make sure you do take care of me, then!’ he said with an unconvincing laugh.

  But the Head was already gone in search of someone else.

  *

  Time to look again at his file on David Chapman, Member of Parliament, Minister of State at the Home Office. He had left it out on his desk for his return after break. Four months in the making and growing, it contained a print-out of a Wikipedia biography, newspaper clippings, and some records from his schooldays. The important documents in the file were the stray page of letter that had launched him on his enquiry in May, a sheet of paper containing the notes he had subsequently made as he had delved into the provenance and significance of this mysterious fragment and, finally, a copy of the letter he had sent to Chapman a fortnight earlier. Would this fateful letter prove the fulcrum of the investigation, the moment when Matthew had flushed his prey from his cover? A grand notion, for sure! But that is what the visit of Tommy Cooper was perhaps suggesting. That Chapman had something to hide.

  As he climbed the seventy-one steps to the Archive Room, Matthew remembered the schoolboy he had taught. A tidy, well-groomed boy with a striking self-possession. A bright, articulate boy with a subtle mind, too subtle for politics, perhaps. A penetrating intelligence, certainly, but one too coldly clinical to study literature with a fully imaginative engagement; to Matthew the intellectual precision of Chapman’s essays seemed unsatisfyingly detached. And his contributions to the Socratean, the invitation-only discussion society for the finer minds at the top of the school, were similarly astringent. He had delivered a memorable paper full of surprising and provocative angles on the philosophical nature of terrorism, but the sharpness of his responses to the papers of others tended to inspire a fearful caution: of his quickness in unpicking flawed arguments, of turning ideas in new and unforeseen directions.

  After leaving the school and before going up to Oxford, he had done a stint as an intern in the House of Commons, dogsbodying for an MP friend of his father’s who had once worked alongside him in the City. His beginnings in politics.

  *

  When Matthew reached his room, he found Mary, the cleaner, finishing her weekly hoovering. She apologised for running a bit late. Matthew told her not to worry and asked after her husband, who had recently had two coronary stents fitted.

  ‘Same grumpy old sod as ever!’ she said. Matthew laughed. She glanced at the desk and pointed at the Chapman file. ‘I’m sorry, Matthew, I knocked that onto the floor while I was dusting. You might need to rearrange the papers. I didn’t know what order they were in.’

  ‘Not to worry.’

  She glanced at the file. ‘David Chapman. Isn’t he that Tory feller? One of them posh Tory lot, eh? All the same, in’t they? Hands in the till, helping theirselves.’ She cackled.

  ‘I don’t know about that, Mary. I’m sure there are lots of honest ones.’ She snorted in response. ‘This chap, David Chapman,’ he continued, ‘is an Old Boy.’

  Another snort. ‘Really? God help us! Another snotty git! Some of these kids just don’t know they bin born. The mess they make in their rooms, just leaving everything to be cleared up after theirselves. And you should hear the way they talk to us sometimes. Like we was something they’d scraped off of their shoes.’ Another cackle.

  A harsh judgement, thought Matthew. A sequence of images flickers through his mind: Chapman with a gaggle of local ladies canvassing with an easy charm the streets and roads and long drives of the constituency. Smiling, nodding faces of householders giving him the thumbs up; quizzical or uninterested faces closing doors politely after the briefest of exchanges; doors being slammed roughly in areas of hostility to the Tory party. The beaming smile on election night and the warm, appreciative kiss of his wife Sarah.

  ‘You’ve been here a while, Mary—’

  ‘Thirty-two years!’

  ‘Perhaps you remember him…here, have a look at this.’

  Matthew took a cutting from the file. It was a story from a local paper announcing his victory in the 2010 General Election, and carried a charming picture of Chapman and his wife, with their two children. It was posed in the large garden of their house, an old rectory that had belonged to his parents. The shadows of trees are playing on the lawn. Chapman and his wife Sarah are standing behind an elaborate stone bench on which the children are seated. The kids are quite smartly dressed. Care has obviously been taken over the choice of their clothes. By Mum? Or by a nanny? Sarah is wearing a flowing, flowery summer dress and has one hand on the back of the bench. She is looking admiringly at her husband, smiling warmth and openness. He is standing a little behind the bench, leaning forward with both hands resting on it. He is the most casually dressed of the foursome. Navy blue polo shirt and sand-coloured chinos. He gazes directly at the camera. It is an honest look. It speaks confidence. It says, ‘I’m comfortable in myself.’ It says, ‘We are part of each other’s lives. You’re welcome. Make me welcome.’

  Mary has been peering at it. ‘No. Don’t recognise the face…Or maybe…Some of the boys is all right. Some quite polite, truth be told. Dunno. But she looks lovely. And the kiddies! Suppose he looks all right. But he has to…for the camera! Tory toffs!’ She cackled again.

  ‘He worked for MI5 before becoming an MP. Anti-terrorist work.’

  ‘Keeping us safe, eh!’ She peered again at the photograph. ‘Now.’ She put a finger to her mouth. ‘I do remember him…I used to clean his study when he was in the Sixth Form. Nice boy. Good manners…Nice, mainly. But I do remember going into his study once. I did knock. And there was him and another boy and a younger boy. And the littlun looked very distressed. He’d been crying. Maybe he’d been roughed up. The older boy looked embarrassed. Like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t of been doing. But Chapman, he just stared at me and said something like “It’s not convenient now. Will you go, please”.’ Mary seemed deep in thought, reliving a long-forgotten memory. ‘So. So he’s a Tory big-wig now! Figures! Always like to be in control, eh!’

  She chuckled and said she must be off. He heard her descending the stairs, clacking the hoover behind her.

  And into his mind now comes the clickety clack of expensive leather-soled shoes as Chapman walks the halls and corridors within the decaying grandeur of Charles Barry’s gothic fantasy. The shoes muffled, of course, when he reaches the green carpeting of the House of Commons. The high ornate ceilings of the main rooms of the building are well suited to Chapman’s vaulting ambition. An ambition that the careful and carefully ambitious Chapman would surely never allow to o’erleap itself. Except. Except.

  …The clickety clack of expensive leather-soled shoes can now be heard echoing across Old Pala
ce Yard as Chapman walks towards the Victoria Tower Gardens. In his breast pocket is a letter from a former teacher of his.

  Just beyond the extravagantly decorative Buxton Memorial Fountain, sitting on a bench overlooking the river, is a man who has made the short walk from Thames House, the headquarters of MI5. Chapman hails the man as he approaches. The man looks round, his square face creasing into a smile, his large blue eyes twinkling a welcome. Chapman sits beside him on the bench.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Tommy’

  ‘And it’s good to see you, sir. Still climbing the greasy pole, eh?…I am assuming you want to see me because you’ve got a bit of bother. No?’ The large blue eyes look curiously innocent.

  ‘A minor irritation.’

  Chapman explains the letter he has received from his former English teacher who has been rootling around in the school archive. ‘It’s nothing particularly serious, but I don’t really want this chap Agnew creating a nuisance of himself.’

  ‘Leave it to me, guv. I’ll put an end to the…er…botheration.’

  Cooper has seen service in Northern Ireland and over the years has developed a spectrum of strategies to put an end to what he calls botheration. The harsher end of the spectrum does not bear thinking about.

  ‘A gentle warning will suffice, Tommy.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’

  *

  Matthew’s notes on Chapman suggest that his career is progressing very nicely; that he has built up an impressive CV with some care. After Oxford he joined the Conservative Research Department – a finishing school for bright, ambitious young Tories seeking to fast-track themselves towards political preferment – where he became a Special Advisor to the Defence Secretary. After eighteen months he took a break from politics and joined MI5, eventually working for the Northern Ireland Counter-Terrorism Unit at the propitious time when the Northern Ireland Peace Process was being forged. Would he have been involved in direct talks with the IRA as the Government worked its way towards the Good Friday Agreement of 1998? Quite possibly.

  He was lured back to party politics by the founding in 2002 of a new Tory think tank, Policy Exchange, fermenting ideas of reform with other notable modernisers of the party. A failed bid for a seat in the West Midlands in the 2005 General Election was followed by the assiduous courting of the local Conservative Association for a safe seat in the Cotwolds. Matthew can imagine the process: the targeting of it shortly after his 2005 defeat, the entertaining, the glad-handing, the cultivating of the local press, the boning up on issues of local concern. And the heady delight of those summer days in 2010 as the Tories led the first coalition government for many decades.

  And now? The most recent press cutting Matthew has added to his file is from The Independent. A profile of the handful of the 2010 intake of MPs tipped for great things. Chapman’s work as a party moderniser is noted, as are his many useful connections. His expertise in counter-terrorism is seen as a key asset; the article is broken up with a large-type block quote with apposite words from a blog he wrote for Policy Exchange in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. There is comment on his excellent relationship with his immediate boss, Home Secretary Theresa May. The article speculates on the outcome of the 2015 election and picks its riders and runners for any subsequent Tory leadership election. George Osborne, with Boris Johnson coming up on the rails, would be favourite in the short term, but David Chapman is included in the larger group of MPs who would be fancied runners in the longer term. A man to watch.

  *

  As Matthew wanders from his desk to open a window, he catches a glimpse below of someone stepping into the entrance hall of the tower. He appears to be wearing army fatigues. He is carrying what looks like a rifle in a long, thin case.

  The narrow, tubular nature of the spiral staircase that leads up to the Archive Room amplifies every tiny sound from the lowest level. Matthew hears a slow, resonant tread ascending the stairs and freezes for a moment. Then rushes for the door. He will leave his room and take refuge in the room above, the top room of the tower.

  Damn. He has forgotten his keys. Rushes back to his desk, fumbles, dropping the keys, picks them up again and hurries up the spiral staircase, another thirty steps. The foot treads are getting louder, but it is impossible to tell how many steps below his pursuer might be. The amplified sound is misleading: the man in army fatigues could be fifty steps below or perhaps a mere ten. Matthew unlocks the door to the top room, then decides he might be safer on the roof of the tower. Fumbles again for his keys. Climbs the last short flight of stairs that spiral within a dusty, cobwebbed wall.

  He unlocks the door. Steps onto the roof one hundred feet above the ground. Below him is the roof of the Grand Hall. In the distance, looking tiny beyond the arboretum, is his house. There is nowhere to hide here. The parapeted roof contains nothing but a flagpole and a huge water tank.

  Matthew has left the door to the roof slightly ajar so that he can hear what is going on below. If the man comes the whole way up, Matthew will slam it shut at the last moment and lock it. Then he will shout down to the ground for help. But he is hoping that the man will find the Archive Room empty and that he will decide on an immediate descent of the stairs, mission aborted. The man. Could it be Tommy Cooper? Doubtful. Cooper would surely send an underling, a henchman.

  The Chapman File! Matthew suddenly remembers that he has left it on the desk. Prize enough for the man, surely. And an end to Matthew’s amateur sleuthing, no doubt.

  But the footsteps continue, a little slower now; and now Matthew can hear heavy breathing. Suddenly a torso appears, grey-haired, army fatigues-clad, a thin long case slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Aaaarrgh!’ The pitches are different, but the strangled sounds of startled surprise are emitted simultaneously by both men.

  ‘Fright you gave me!’ says the man, clutching his chest. ‘Wasn’t expecting anyone to be up here!’

  Matthew is almost speechless. The terror of the man’s sudden appearance and the shock of his unexpected yelp have for a moment sent a paralysing bolt through him. He gulps in a breath of air. Realises this is no assassin. ‘Jeez. And you frightened me, too…I was just…I was just looking down on the roof of the Grand Hall,’ he mutters unconvincingly, adding, as though to add some conviction, ‘I’m…the school archivist.’

  The man has recovered from his surprise, but is still breathless from his long ascent to the roof. He speaks in fractured phrases. ‘Checking the…water tank…clearing…the roof drain.’ He unhitches the long thin bag of plumbing rods from his shoulder and drops it on the floor. ‘Mike Platt…Platoon Plumbers,’ he says, index finger stabbing a logo on his khaki sweatshirt.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it…Sorry to have given you a fright!’ Matthew smiles weakly and leaves. His heart rate is no doubt still raised, but the cold terror he felt as the torso of the plumber appeared around the spiral staircase has been replaced by an embarrassed feeling of sheer foolishness.

  He returns to the Archive Room. The Chapman File is exactly where he left it.

  *

  It is the stray page of a letter to a former headmaster, now in the Chapman file, together with Matthew’s subsequent notes, that are of interest now, especially in the light of Tommy Cooper’s visit.

  In May he had received a routine enquiry into Christopher Harper, former headmaster of the school who had unexpectedly taken early retirement at the end of 1991. To answer the enquiry properly, he had needed to look at Harper’s file, which, along with all staff records, was kept in the school strong room. When he retrieved the file, he was surprised to see that it was much scanter than most of the files of former staff. It appeared to have been culled; there was none of the routine correspondence that most files contained and – most unusually – no letter of resignation.

  But as he flipped through the papers – the CV, the application for the headship, the references – a loose page of
cream-coloured writing paper untucked itself from between the tightly stapled pages of a reference and fluttered to the floor.

  It was the second and final page of a handwritten letter. Without the first page it was impossible to tell its date, and the only clue to the writer was his first name in the subscription. A puzzling extract, for sure:

  no alternative but to follow the course of action we did. It was expedient and, in my opinion, not wrong. An eminent man’s reputation was saved, a promising boy’s future protected, and the school spared from scandal (to say nothing of the generous donation David’s parents have agreed to make).

  I am sure this whole unhappy episode will blow over in time. You must not fret.

  In the meantime, Janet and I wish you a very happy retirement.

  With all good wishes,

  Tony

  The archive had many documents whose full meaning or significance Matthew had failed to discern, but this snippet had intrigued him. He had decided in May that he would investigate further. That he would delve.

  And now, four months later, as he headed down the spiral staircase for some lunch, fragments of a famous line of Eliot’s floated through his mind: fragments indeed. Fragment, at any rate. But ruin? Ruin? Whose?

  CHAPTER 3