The pub was old, and there was history of course, but history in Westminster is something a wise building doesn’t boast of. It did have one tiny unique feature; all public houses had a bell but the Two Chairmen had a second, a bell that rang to warn those of its patrons who were also Honourable Members that their presence was needed in the House. Next to the pub an alley ran straight to Parliament Square. It was known that even a fat and farty MP could manage the dash in time to vote in a division. During dull debates the Two Chairmen became known as the third chamber, as it swiftly filled with Commoners and Lords escaping the tedium. But in September the House was still in summer recess and consequently the bar was half empty.
Veronica sat with a man who was wearing a Scottish Rifles tie and a distinctive eyepatch. As agreed, she was ignoring Jago. Her handbag was at her feet, also as arranged. Her companion had been on a Dunkirk beach when a German bomb had exploded next to him. The shrapnel, in the mysterious way of explosion and blast, had missed him, but the sand hadn’t. Around his missing eye his face had the texture of an Aertex vest.
‘Douglas is harmless,’ Veronica had said of him. ‘Doesn’t try his luck as he thinks his disfigurement puts him out of the running with the ladies. As a man, he’s almost human; just wants, as my guardian would have said, the rustle of silk petticoats.’
This confused Jago. ‘What?’
Veronica shook her head. ‘It means the proximity of a woman, the waft of her scent, someone who doesn’t smell of trench foot. He’s Clem Attlee’s speech writer and personal secretary. Douglas does his work conscientiously and feels a cad that he’s not still with his regiment. It won’t be him, will it? Dougie won’t be your victim, will he?’
The smoke in the bar spiralled up in the lazy, post-work atmosphere of the bar. Jago had been able to assure Veronica that Douglas Strachan, late of the Cameroonians, the Scottish Rifles, would not be his target. Not because Veronica had described him as a baa lamb, but because of his eyepatch and disfigurement; Douglas was just too memorable. Jago remembered his SOE training; his mark had to be anonymous, therefore no one who was disfigured, or even too tall, or fat, or ginger haired, or famous; just a faceless pawn in Britain’s war effort.
A man in a pin-striped suit, with trousers held up by braces, put down his half pint of mild and made his way to the gents’. Veronica picked up her handbag from the floor and started to root in it. Jago now knew the man was an employee of the Palace of Westminster, so he followed him into the lavatory. The man was standing at the urinal so Jago aborted the mission and stood next to him and passed water. Jago followed him back into the bar. Veronica’s bag was back on the floor.
There was one more false alarm at the urinals, and another where Jago didn’t even follow the would-be mark into the gents’ due to an absence of braces, but then the handbag was picked up again as a man with a face like a soft-boiled egg, and necessary braces, had Jago on his feet again. Jago prayed this one was a goer; he couldn’t keep following men into the gents’ without arousing the suspicion of the landlord that Jago was a queer looking for a cottage.
As he entered, Jago heard the bolt on the cubicle door being shot across. Jago took up his place at the urinal but didn’t unbutton. His heart was starting to race. It was now or never; he needed to crack on before another customer entered to use the facilities. He heard the small discharge of gas and echoing splash and Jago turned and acted. He moved quickly and reached over the door. He grabbed the neck of the jacket hanging there. He knew it would be there thanks to the braces. Wearing braces, the mark had to take his jacket off to drop his trousers. What fun they’d had practising this at Beaulieu. Jago hefted the jacket clear of the top of the door and out of the cubicle.
‘What the bloody hell…!’ came from inside the smallest room, but Jago already had his hand in the jacket’s top inside pocket and was lifting the wallet. He dropped the jacket and left the gents’ as he heard the frantic sounds of redressing. Moving quickly, but not in a panicked way that would have drawn attention to him, he crossed the small bar and was outside. He now accelerated and threw himself onto Pristine Christine’s bike, which he’d borrowed without permission, almost a bigger crime than stealing another man’s wallet. He began pedalling furiously and in a few turns he was lost in a maze of small Westminster streets with names like Old Pye Street and Perkin’s Rents. Ten minutes later he was back home in Pimlico. An hour later Veronica joined him.
‘Poor chap’s Adam’s apple was going up and down like a lift on elastic,’ she said.
‘Did he make a fuss?’ Jago said.
Jago was strangely anxious for the victim.
‘That was the extraordinary thing. Having gone outside and ascertained you were nowhere in sight, he went back to his drink and didn’t say a dicky bird to anyone.’
‘The embarrassment of being caught with his trousers down.’
Veronica winced. ‘Too pictorial, Jago. Now, did he have one?’
Jago produced the Palace of Westminster pass.
‘Splendid,’ cooed Veronica. ‘Was that all he had in his wallet?’
Jago showed her the pound notes. ‘Two pounds,’ he said. He felt wretched about the stolen money. ‘I suppose I can donate it to charity?’
‘Nonsense.’ Veronica reached out and took the notes, folded them and put them into her purse. ‘My fee.’
Jago was shocked but not surprised. Like his wife, Veronica had convinced herself that she was hard done by. That life had dealt her a low blow by not creating her rich, and rich in Veronica’s estimation was a wide category that included anyone who had something Veronica hadn’t. Jago sometimes came home to find the whole house a blaze of lights and no one in. It was their way of telling him he could afford it.
They made their way to the Palace of Westminster along the north embankment of the Thames. Behind them were white stucco Georgian houses, twins of Jago’s abode. They stood like more white cliffs looking out across the water at the foreign country that was south London, working-class London with its factories and cranes and derricks and tugs and lighters. The vast Battersea Power Station seemed like a battleship moored in the midst of the city. Its four huge chimneys reached into the sky defiantly, like the battle standards of the men and women who poured into it to work impossible shifts and who weren’t awarded medals. Behind the factories were the countless streets of tiny soot-stained terraced houses where these people lived. Posh north bank, poor south bank; a tale of one city, Jago thought.
A fairy tale appeared before them; the mock-Gothic extravaganza of the Houses of Parliament doing its best to ape the abbey. It was on the north bank, of course.
Veronica and Jago separated at St Stephen’s Porch, with Veronica going in first just ahead of him. Jago was to follow her to her boss’s office. It had been agreed between them they should not appear to be together. Because of the war, security was concentrated at one point, so both Members and staff entered at St Stephen’s Gate. The guard barely glanced at the pass Jago held steadily in his direction. He didn’t do anything that would have upset his old SOE trainers, such as hold his thumb over the name. The guard accepted the pass, and the suit, and the right sort of haircut, and looked at the name through a glaze of indifference. It was why it had been important not to steal the pass of someone memorable, something to jerk the face into focus. Jago was nodded through.
St Stephen’s Hall was a corridor of murals of significant moments in British history, fronted by a twin honour-guard of statues that lurked like dangerous butlers in a horror farce. As the hall led inexorably to the flamboyant entrance to the Central Lobby, Jago’s heart began to pound uncomfortably in time with Veronica’s clacking heels, beating out a tattoo on the tiles underfoot.
Jago entered the Central Lobby, which had that sense of pique all great and momentous spaces have when they are ignored on a daily basis. It was emptier than Jago had hoped; he wanted crowds of bustling politicians surrounded by hordes of circling party bees. Instead the summer recess had decimated the Palace; as in the rest of the country there was the usual selection of uniforms blending with the suits, but far too few. A sprinkling of the Sergeant at Arms’ security men in their ceremonial rig of frock coats and tights were there to frighten the SS if they invaded the Mother of Parliaments, plus of course an overweight policeman whose neck was bigger than his head.
Most of the pedestrian traffic turned right towards the Upper House, because left, to the Commons, was out of bounds, with builders’ scaffolding across the entrance of the Commons corridor. The Lower House had been bombed out of existence three years previously and now awaited the outbreak of peace to be rebuilt. Jago kept six paces behind Veronica and followed her. But then disaster.
‘Ah, Miss Rawling, just the person. I assumed the Viscount would be in the House, but apparently he’s off somewhere hush-hush, and I must have a brief word with him on the telephone – pretty pronto, actually. I have a scrambler line if you could come and dial a number he can be reached at.’
Without a backward glance Veronica was gone with the patrician and Jago was left without a guide, with the maze of Parliament before him. He came to a halt and felt the panic start to brew in his heart. The very design in the mosaic of the stone floor alarmed him, resembling as it did the Star of David, as seen on so many poor Jews, as they were tormented on the streets of Berlin in pre-war newsreels.
Jago knew he should keep moving, he knew he should be striding out with a purpose as if he belonged, not hovering stationary, lurking even, as guilty as sin. He tried to move his feet, to blend in, but he was frozen in a funk. His father would have breezed across the Central Lobby, the way he breezed into clubs he wasn’t a member of, but Jago was a conformist; hopeless at team sports but someone who nonetheless played by the rules. And now he was going to get caught. He even met the eye of one of the Sergeant at Arms’ men who was standing by the small post office in Central Hall. The man looked at Jago with a helpful, questioning face. When he looked again there was more suspicion and he started to walk in Jago’s direction.
The stolen pass felt like a siren going off in Jago’s inside pocket.
He was going to get caught, he thought hopelessly. Yet again Jago Craze was turning out to be pathetic. A coward. How did the military put it? A lack of moral fortitude.