Charmian’s first thought was that Lucien hadn’t changed much in twenty-five years. At the age of nine he had already been tall, raffish and handsome, a boy equally quick to attract admiring glances and to pick a fight. Charmian, by contrast, had been pudgy and awkward. He was slow with words because he was embarrassed by his speech impediment, and the other boys said he smelled. Break time was hell on asphalt. Charmian would linger in the classroom for as long as he could, and then skulk at the edge of the playground, where the dusty plane trees gave some protection, watching the other boys run and laugh and throw things, or just stand in easy circles, their hands in their pockets, talking like adults.
Charmian had tried to approach them, offering to share chocolate and the football coins everyone was collecting. The occasional shin-kicks and kidney-punches did not hurt nearly as much as the cold, averted faces. Indifference, though he didn’t yet know the word, was the hardest thing to endure. After a while he targeted other unpopular boys, and actually made one unkempt, dwarfish friend for a while. But eventually even the other outcasts would form little circles or new boy-colonies, turning their backs on him, and Charmian would be left by himself again, a grey bundle of misery at the edge of human noise. Lucien McBryde had not persecuted him or singled him out. He had simply ignored him.
Charmian came to believe that the other boys were right, and that some original disaster must have cursed him from birth; he was an outcast because he was disgusting and pitiful, and there was nothing more to be said about it. His parents were oblivious. He never spoke of it, never cried.
So when, years later, as they were toiling up the lower slopes of A-levels and Lucien came to him for help – Charmian was no more popular than before, but he had discovered hitherto unsuspected talents for maths and science – he felt emotions he had never felt before. He was even, once, invited round to Lucien’s house, where his father, a journalist, treated him with apparent respect, and Lucien himself was affable in a lordly kind of way. For the first time Charmian’s world sparkled a little. Sometimes it even glowed.
The two boys never became close friends – that would have been impossible – but Charmian continued to hero-worship Lucien from a distance. They went to the same university, where Lucien was as popular and glamorous as ever. If he almost stopped acknowledging Charmian Locke, Charmian understood why. What he could never understand was Lucien’s failure to live up to his brilliant promise after he left university – the stories of drunken and scandalous misbehaviour, the succession of disappointing, mediocre jobs. Charmian felt personally affronted, almost like a spurned lover. The two men did meet up very occasionally for a curry or a beer, but afterwards both would find themselves wondering why they bothered.
At 9 o’clock on this Sunday evening McBryde was back at Gordon’s wine bar, at an outside table this time, finishing a bottle of claret and smoking a cigarette, with Charmian Locke sitting opposite him. When McBryde told him about his conversation with Alois Haydn just along the road in Whitehall, Charmian put out a long grey tongue and licked his large yellow teeth with it. He smiled. McBryde tried not to look.
‘Shhh … assshh … tonishing. The old man’sh no more? And the world doesn’t know? Ooh, Lucien, you’re going to be a famous man. What’sh keeping you from writing about thish in your paper, old friend?’
‘Charmian, think it through. Think like a hack. Why was that lying bastard Haydn telling that story to me? What’s in it for him? It doesn’t add up. I’ve told Jen about it, so even if I’m wrong, at least something will come out. But until I’ve worked out what Haydn’s really up to, I won’t sleep. I suppose it could be power – if he thinks he’s been backing the wrong horse in the referendum. But my hunch is that it’s money. We’re talking about some pretty serious inside information here, aren’t we?’
Locke found it hard not to blurt out that he knew Alois Haydn very well. But he realised that he had to stay close. If the PM really was dead, then some great game was surely in play; Haydn would have had his reasons. But this blabbering wreck of the boy he’d once almost loved was now a very loose cannon indeed. Once before, long ago, Charmian had confided in McBryde. He’d been led on to boast – in this very wine bar, in fact – about some inside information he’d received. He’d read a ridiculous account of it in the Courier two days later, and an hour after that he’d lost his job. McBryde disclaimed all responsibility, but when Charmian had checked out the byline of the financial reporter who’d ruined him the man had turned out not to exist, and he’d never discovered who’d hidden behind the pseudonym. Now, as he listened to McBryde grandstanding, it was all so obvious. Sprawled in a chair before him was someone who’d do anything for a story.
Charmian had a motto: ‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’ Now he had a name, and he was feeling increasingly thin on the forgiveness side. The more he thought about it, the more it felt like a peculiarly personal betrayal. So he talked on, flattering McBryde with jargon-laced theories, his pebble eyes growing stonier as he enjoyed the journalist’s rapt attention.
McBryde, in truth, understood very little of the financial jargon and the percentages, but he did grasp the essential point – advance knowledge of a change in the likely outcome of the referendum could make someone very rich indeed – and jotted down a few notes.
What he had told Jen in his London Library note was meaningless, he realised, without this last piece of the jigsaw. He felt he now understood Haydn’s motive.
Two Courier colleagues were finishing up at another table. As soon as Charmian headed for the gents McBryde went over to them, with his note carefully folded over.
‘Fenton. Price. Not your normal hangout. But a piece of luck for me. I’m on a story, guys, not just on the piss. Could you take this to the London Library? Whack it into the latest Dominic Sandbrook?’
‘Lucien. Greetings, you dirty fucker. No prob. Girl trouble?’
‘Something like that.’
Jammed in a queue in the gents, waiting his turn, Charmian thought back to his childhood and the infuriating, charming figure of Lucien McBryde. He had no intention of angering Sir Solomon Dundas, or bringing down Alois Haydn. And he certainly saw no reason why he shouldn’t make a little money himself. But Lucien was in danger of getting in his way.
So when he returned upstairs, instead of saying goodnight he suggested that they move on to the American Bar at the Savoy, just around the corner. There he drank tonic water while McBryde sank one whisky sour after another. Then they went for cocktails at Christopher’s. Charmian drank tonic water. McBryde drank cocktails. After this they headed east, McBryde walking like a man recovering unsuccessfully from a stroke. By the time they arrived at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street he was becoming sentimental.
‘Wrgg. Gaaah … aabbia. Nnnn. ’nifer. ’ucked up. Gaagh,’ he said.
‘I think we need something solid inside us, don’t you old friend?’ said Charmian, leading McBryde by the elbow into the Golden Cockerel. He got them a table outside, on the smoking terrace – McBryde was loudly grateful – where they sat alone in the cool late-evening air. Charmian ordered steaks for both of them, and another bottle of red wine. McBryde, he noticed, was well beyond taking any notice of the food, though he managed most of the bottle.
McBryde clearly thought he was talking, since his mouth was moving, but only a thin, incoherent trickle of sound came out. By the time Charmian’s prodigious teeth had devoured his steak, his friend had laid his head on his plate and was fast asleep.
Charmian, who knew the restaurant well, quickly went inside, dodged behind the bar and removed a key labelled ‘Terrace’. He returned to their table, undid McBryde’s trousers and yanked them down to his ankles. Then he went back into the main restaurant, locking the door behind him. From inside McBryde was invisible, concealed behind a row of yew bushes. Charmian paid the bill and left.
‘Goodbye, old pal,’ he said. ‘I wish I could say good luck.’ Strangely, there was no hint of his famous lisp.
This was, Charmian thought, in no real sense murder. He believed that those who raised themselves did so by climbing, while those who destroyed themselves did so by flinging themselves off the ladders – or the restaurant terraces – squandering their gifts and embracing destruction. Should it happen that McBryde was left alone and unnoticed when the restaurant closed, and should it further happen that, with several litres of alcohol inside him, he woke up at some time of the night in urgent need of relief, and should it further happen that in the dark, with his trousers around his ankles, he should stumble and topple over the low railing that was the only barrier between the terrace and the street below – if all of this should happen, who would be to blame but McBryde himself?
Lying with his face on his plate, Lucien McBryde was dreaming of Jen, her pale arms around him and her tongue in his mouth. Then the dream faded, and he began to shudder with the night’s chill. He needed a piss. Christ, it was dark …