The Perfect Sinner

The revolving door took her into a crowded lobby and heads turned towards her. A photographer took her picture and suddenly there were people approaching her, breaking off their conversations and pushing through the crowd to greet her from all sides.

Beth had learnt to hate that certain sort of male smile that was aimed entirely at her face and not at the mind behind it. In most fields of human endeavour it helped to be a good-looking young woman but in the cynical world of the British political system, dominated by battered bruisers, it could count against you. Four years ago, they’d thought Beth too pretty to take seriously but then her tough message had started to chime with the shocking events of the times. She needed to be sure it was those ideas, not the way she looked, that had helped her up the political ladder. This crowded tour of the power-souks of America was her reward and it had already showed her just how good life could get. Her aide, her very own aide, had met her at the airport. Her schedule had been presented to her in the latest and tiniest of electronic notebooks along with the gift of the notebook itself. When she realised just how inappropriate her wardrobe seemed, so carefully chosen in London and so deeply provincial here, Marianne, her aide, had sensed her doubts and conjured a selection of New York’s best, brought by smiling women to her hotel room for her to try. They assumed payment would be no problem and so Beth had handed over her credit card and crossed her fingers.

The whole swirling melee of a Manhattan evening in spring was intoxicating. For a year, she had been the silent voice of her master, doing just what the chief adviser to a government minister should, breathing cues into his ear, drafting his speeches, stiffening his resolve. In these last few days, she had come out from her master’s shadow. People all along the East Coast had come to hear her, Beth Battock. Those people had risen to their feet and applauded her. Journalists had interviewed her, quoted her because what she had to say was just what they wanted to hear. She was no longer invisible. Her star was on the rise, the people now converging on her the proof of that, and tonight was the high point of her journey.

This time Beth had come to listen, not to speak. Tonight she would finally be in the physical presence of the woman who had been her inspiration and whose every word she had studied, borrowed and adjusted to fit the contours of British politics.

She checked the lobby quickly with her eyes but could see no sign of the woman she sought and then there was a man in front of her shaking her by the hand.

‘So glad you made it, Beth,’ he said. ‘It’s our great pleasure to have you here with us tonight. Athan Tallis, Vice President of External Affairs for the Institute.’ He let go of her hand and swept an arm towards the back of the room. ‘There are some members of our committee over here who are just dying to meet with you.’

She followed him through the crowd to a small, expectant semi-circle of older men and women and tried her best to catch all their names as a cold glass of white wine was pressed into her hand.

‘Miss Battock,’ said a gaunt woman in a long silver gown. ‘We’ve been reading your views with great interest and, if I might say so, with enormous approval. It’s been reassuring to see that some people in your country appreciate what our President is doing for the security of all of us.’

Beth nodded and was about to answer when another man joined the circle. Athan Tallis broke in. ‘Beth, this is Senator Packhurst. We’ve asked him to be your host for the evening.’

She turned to shake hands and the group broke up, leaving the two of them together. He was fifty-ish, tanned, attractively grizzled and decidedly predatory. ‘Forget the Senator crap,’ he said. ‘Call me Don.’

‘Beth Battock.’

‘Oh, I know that. I’ve been reading all about you, young Beth, and it makes a very interesting story. Hey, maybe we should go through and get our seats and then you can tell me how we get back all those British hearts and minds.’

She took a sip of the wine and looked around for somewhere to leave the glass.

‘Bring it in with you,’ he suggested. ‘We might need some refreshment.’

‘I don’t think I will,’ Beth replied a little sharply, and he raised an eyebrow.

‘I see you’re true believer,’ he said.

They went into the auditorium and sat down in the seats reserved for them right at the front. Don Packhurst started on a long anecdote about the last visit of the British Prime Minister as the other seats filled up but Beth was only half listening, her gaze fixed on the empty dais, eager for the event to start. She was more excited than she had ever been waiting for a play to start.

The speaker was announced by a former Vice-President. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said after an introduction hinting that he was responsible for many of the ideas they were about to hear, ‘I give you our inspiration, Christie Kilfillan,’ and Beth was on her feet, clapping with all the rest.

‘And so in conclusion,’ said Christie Kilfillan ninety minutes later, ‘I would ask you all to keep this idea firmly in your minds through the difficult months ahead. This country, this administration, this President, our brave men and women of the armed forces, they have all acted as they have done for the very best of motives and they deserve our continuing support. It has become fashionable to insist that democracy calls for a slower and more muddled approach to international affairs but I have this to say to you.’ She hunched nearer the microphone and narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t mess around with a cobra.’ Waiting until the eruption of applause faded away, she wagged a declamatory finger in time with her words. ‘You don’t call in the United Nations. You don’t put down a motion. You don’t set up an inquiry. You don’t consult the people. You take out your sword and you cut off its head.’

This time, the applause went on and on and on.

As the crowd filed out again, buzzing with the reaffirmation of their beliefs, Don Packhurst took Beth firmly by the arm and led her to the side of the stage where the star of the evening was holding court. She went up to Christie Kilfillan with all the thrilling trepidation of a pilgrim approaching a saint. Kilfillan stood there as the crowd swirled around her, fifty looking like forty, her face in profile as fine and fierce as a goshawk, tolerating the adulation as people manoeuvred to shake her hand, congratulating her on her speech and seeking to engage her in unsuitably long exchanges. Beth waited until Senator Packhurst, standing just behind her, urged her forward.

‘Just get in there,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand in queues like you Brits.’

Still Beth held back, watching for the right moment. She had waited seven years for this, more than two and a half thousand days since she had first read Kilfillan’s books and fallen under the spell of her argument. The strength of Kilfillan’s principles, the realisation of the complete and utter rightness of her stance on the world, had been as overwhelming as falling in love. Taking those principles, bending them to fit the softer politics of old England, arguing for a new form of the special relationship between America and Britain at the head of a new world order, had put Beth where she was now.

There was a second when a gap appeared and Kilfillan’s eyes focused on her through it, narrowing, considering. She knows who I am, Beth thought with delight. She’s read about me, been told about me. Maybe she’s even been to hear me speak. In the smaller Washington meetings at the State Department, at the Pentagon and the like, she had scanned the private audiences, hoping for a glimpse of Kilfillan, and she had been disappointed. The New York and Boston meetings which followed had been much larger, public events and anyone could have been there, lost in the haze of faces. Someone else wanting Kilfillan’s papal blessing filled the gap before she had taken more than a step, then Don Packhurst seized her by the arm and pushed her in front of her idol, so that there they were together, shockingly together.

‘Christie,’ he said.’This is our new British friend, Beth Battock. You’ve been hearing about her, I’m sure.’

Beth waited for her response, for the slightest sign of approval.

‘I can’t say I have,’ said Kilfillan with her characteristic rasp, failing to take Beth’s outstretched hand, giving her no more than a quick and supercilious glance.

‘You haven’t read the Post? “Message of support from Britain’s bright hope”? This kid’s the future of the old alliance and by the way, she’s also your greatest fan.’

Beth studied Kilfillan’s face while Kilfillan looked at the Senator with no hint of interest. Beth waited, mute, still certain that at any moment the woman in front of her would begin to engage, would smile, would reach out.

Kilfillan did look at her then, just for a moment, just long enough to say, ‘Right. That one. Yes, I caught it.’ Then she narrowed her eyes again. ‘You’ve got a way to go, little girl. A cute face won’t do it. You got backbone? I don’t think so,’ and turned away into the crowd.

Packhurst grimaced. That’s our Christie,’ he said. ‘Come on, I booked us a table at a place I know you’re going to love.’

Over the meal he did his best to persuade her it meant nothing.

‘She’s a tricky bitch, always has been,’ he said. ‘You’re the future. She sees that, you bet she sees that. The green-eyed monster was riding her back.’

‘Maybe she was right,’ Beth had said, not believing that for a moment as she chased seared scallops round her plate. She wished she’d picked something else which didn’t drip butter on the way to the mouth.

‘She was not. Listen, so far as we’re concerned, you’re Miss Great Britain. It’s all been music to our ears. Remember what they called you on CBS? Winston Churchill’s brain in Jennifer Lopez’s body? We thought our old allies were going cold on us until we heard you. Back to back, the Yanks and the Brits. Together we fear no one. That’s the stuff to give the troops.’

In another ten minutes they’d covered the full range of agreement on that one then he asked her, inevitably, to tell him all about herself.

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘I want to know how you got so smart. Your parents must have been something special.’

‘My mother died when I was born,’ Beth answered, slowly. ‘My father was a historian.’

‘Oh really? What’s his first name?’

‘Guy, Guy Battock.’

‘What’s he written?’

‘Nothing you would have come across. English medieval social history.’

‘I’ll look out for it.’

‘Oh, it was mostly academic monographs. Regional stuff. You won’t find it in the bookshops.’

‘Is he still writing?’

‘No, he’s dead too. Died a few years ago.’

‘OK. That’s tough. So you’re a poor little orphan.’ He reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘Are you a Londoner?’

‘Yes, born and bred there.’

‘And where did you study?’

‘The London School of Economics. I did my doctorate there.’

‘And then?’

‘I did the usual thing, I suppose. I got a job in television. I was a researcher on one of the political shows. And then I met Alan Livesay.’

‘A good man to meet.’

‘It was just after they made him a minister. I went to see him about a programme we were planning. You can guess the sort of thing, “the new hawk in the dovecote”. We got talking over lunch and I suppose he must have liked my ideas. He offered me a job.’

‘Every politician needs someone behind him with good ideas,’ said Packhurst. ‘You have to shake so many hands there’s never enough time for thinking. You’ve sure got the ideas. Your Mr. Livesay can count himself a very lucky man.’

‘It was lucky for me,’ Beth said. ‘No one took his ideas seriously enough until the war on terror started. He’s the right man at the right time.’

‘Well, I guess we’re all very happy that he sent you to us. Remind me, why exactly was it that he couldn’t come?’

The international situation. You know, after the Embassy bombs. He just couldn’t leave the Foreign Office at a time like that.’

Packhurst gave her a slow smile. ‘Oh sure. Even a junior minister has to feel indispensable. We’re all glad you came in his place. I guess you’re a star now.’

It was only then, trying to guess what lay behind that smile, that Beth first wondered if this trip had been wise. Advisers were meant to be invisible. They weren’t meant to step into the limelight and articulate the truths their masters didn’t dare utter.

When the check had been paid and the limo door was held open for her, Packhurst took her hand.

‘You’ve had a pretty full evening. If you want a little company and a chance to relax, I have a nice, quiet apartment nearby.’

It had a horrible inevitability about it and a few weeks earlier Beth might have said yes to a night with a US senator who combined power and good looks, but now her life was too complicated.

‘Sweet of you,’ she said, ‘but I have some work to do.’

Flying back to London the following day didn’t help her mood. First Class was full. There were no upgrades and the man next to her in Business Class wanted to tell her in detail all about the range of flashing jewellery he had just sold to a US mail-order giant. She closed her eyes and thought about the future.

At twenty-seven, Beth was on the young side for a British government minister’s political adviser. All advisers live in the grey area between politics and public service and are mistrusted by all sides. There was a food-chain at work and many other hungry mouths were clamouring for a bite of her master’s favour. Alan Livesay, junior minister in the Foreign Office, was busy climbing his own ladder while all those around him clung to his coat-tails, trying to hitch a free ride. Beth was good at getting noticed, and that was the key. She needed to catch the attention of Livesay’s boss, the Foreign Secretary. She had to get to the point where they needed her views to shape their speeches, their policies. It had been dog eat dog and she had lost a lot of flesh before she learnt to bite first.

Then, six months ago, she had played an accidental trump card and got ahead of the game. Six months ago she had widened her sphere of influence from Livesay’s private office to Livesay’s private bed. It hadn’t been a calculated decision. Beth had found out for herself how well power and desire cohabit and, being a new experience, it had not seemed at all like a cliché. Recently, lying together in the soft afternoon sheets, she had nearly let out the love word. He had forestalled her, for which she was grateful afterwards, fearing it would have proved a fatally mistaken kind of intimacy. Just as it was forming on her lips he had turned his head.

‘What planet do you really come from, Wonderwoman?’ he had asked. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

‘You’ve read my CV.’

He traced the shape of her mouth with one finger. That was for your job. This is for me. You don’t need a Cambridge degree for what we’ve just done.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Fluid Mechanics might help.’

‘Don’t be flippant. I want to know.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. My parents are dead. No brothers or sisters. No family at all,’ she said and thought, but did not add, unlike you.

‘But you must come from somewhere?’

‘Not really, just London.’ Then she had blocked his mouth with her own to shut him up, because it was all lies. When they’d done it all again, in a hurry this time because both were aware of their alibis trickling to a halt, he had forgotten about it. As they were finding their scattered clothes, he had told her she was going to take his place for his American speaking trip. Even then, she had wondered if it represented a reward or simply funk on his part, putting her in the line of fire, a stand-in to replace a master who found it politically expedient to have his views expressed in a way he could disown if he had to. Perhaps he even wanted her to go too far, so he could get her out of his life. The career risk was enormous.

That thought had made no difference at all to the line she knew she must take. In her student days and in the doctoral dissertation that followed and which got her to the Foreign Office, Beth had developed the academic ideas that backed up her conviction, held since childhood, that to beat an attacker, you should always strike first. At school it had often got her into trouble. In the early twenty-first century, it got her into power, and Beth was starting to adore power. She decided she would take the chance with both hands and it had worked.

She woke from a short sleep to find the brief, uncomfortable night had passed and a stewardess was heralding their unpalatable return to English airspace with a tray of breakfast. All the glamour had evaporated somewhere over the Atlantic. London looked low, grey and drab as the plane sank slowly towards Heathrow. Beth switched her mobile on in the baggage claim then switched it quickly off again when the voice told her she had twenty new messages. She walked out through Customs, then stood in the arrivals hall wondering why there wasn’t a driver holding a sign saying ‘Ms Battock’. There was one likely-looking potential chauffeur but he was immersed in the Mail on Sunday. She walked closer and as the headline caught her eye, she suddenly understood why there were so many messages and no car waiting for her. ‘Love-Rat Minister Quits’, it said and the photograph was of Alan Livesay.

She walked quickly to the book shop, grabbed a Sunday Times and there it all was in banner headlines.

A cold wash of dread ran out to her fingers and all the way down to her toes. Her first thought wasn’t that her prized job had just gone down the pan. It was even less creditable than that. Her first thought was that Helen Livesay, patient, supportive Helen Livesay, who invited her down to Sunday lunch when she thought Beth needed feeding up, who sent her Vitamin C tablets and bottles of herbal cures when she heard her sneeze, had just found out that she, Beth Battock, had been sharing her husband’s bed in his afternoons and on his nights away from home. Then she looked further down the page to the blonde caught on a hotel step, kissing Livesay goodbye, and it all got even worse because the woman Livesay had resigned over was someone she had never seen before and not her at all. ‘His long-term mistress’, the story said.

The taxi took her to Clapham and she told the driver to drop her at the far end of her street just in case, but there was no one waiting for her outside. They arrived the following morning, when she went downstairs and found two men in her kitchen.

CHAPTER FOUR

The larger of the two men said, ‘Hello Miss Battock,’ as if this were a normal social occasion. His nose and mouth were submerged in pale cheeks as if his head had been over-inflated. ‘Sorry to walk in but the door was open. Thought we ought to check you were all right.’

‘The door? Which door?’ she said stupidly.

‘This one,’ he said.

The door to Beth’s flat was on the second floor. ‘What about downstairs?’

‘Someone was coming out. We walked straight up.’

She was absolutely sure her door had been firmly closed. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to walk in.’ Who were they? Not police.

‘Derek Milverton,’ said the first man, putting out his hand, ‘from the CPA. This is Phil.’ Phil was hiding behind him, taking in the room in jerky gulps of his eyes.

CPA? ‘Do you mean the Child Protection Agency?’ They must be in the wrong place.

‘No, Cunningham Press Associates.’

‘Which is?’

‘A news agency.’

She’d heard of. Specialists in sleaze. Always somebody else’s problem, until now.

‘We just wanted to know if you might like to say anything about your boss and his…’

‘Reporters? You’re reporters and you come busting in to my flat?’

‘No, no. Like I said, the door was open.’

‘Bullshit. You can open it again and go straight back out.’

‘Look it’s in your interests. You’ll be under siege here in half an hour. Talk to us and we’ll help keep the reptiles off your back, see?’

‘What do you mean? You are the reptiles. Why am I going to be under siege?’

The phone rang and all their eyes switched to the machine on the side table. She didn’t want to answer, not while they were still here. It rang three times, then the answering machine cut in and she realised, as she heard the caller’s voice, that it was switched on to ‘monitor’.

‘Hello, Beth my darling,’ said Alan Livesay’s unmistakable voice, ‘I’m so, so very sorry about…’ She hit the button and killed the call but it was far, far too late and the balance of power in the room had changed irrevocably.

‘Well, how about that, darling,’ said the larger man. ‘Isn’t that just our lucky day?’

‘He calls everyone that,’ she said, but she could feel the heat in her cheeks and she knew they could see it. The smaller man produced the camera he had been holding behind his back and something in her snapped. She reached for the closest object she could find, her kitchen fire extinguisher, pressed down the lever and sprayed foam all over both of them.

She propelled them out of her flat, downstairs and through the front door on a wave of sheer fury, then went back up and looked out of her window to see them stopping on the pavement for the larger one to use his mobile phone and the smaller one to take pictures of the front of her house. It was still only half past seven in the morning.

After a long time the phone rang again. In the intervening hour, she hadn’t moved from the kitchen chair where she sat staring at the table and her unopened pile of mail. The room already seemed to belong to a time line which had come to an end.

‘Beth, pick up the phone,’ said a familiar male voice, the voice of authority, of tradition, of the way things are meant to be done in the Civil Service. Sir Robert Greenaway, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, was not somebody you could ever ignore. She picked up the receiver as if it were a landmine.

‘Is that you, Beth?’

‘Yes, Sir Robert.’

He dispensed with courtesies. ‘There’s a story starting to run on the wires. It’s linking you and Livesay.’

‘Two men broke into my flat this morning. They said they were from a news agency.’

‘They were. Be quiet and listen please. I’m not going to ask you if it’s true. That can come later. We have quite enough on our plate here already thanks to your friend the late minister. Now, understand me clearly. I don’t want you anywhere near this place until further notice. I strongly advise that you leave your house in the next ten minutes if not sooner. After that you’ll have the whole of Fleet Street camping on your step. Go away somewhere they can’t find you. My office will call you on your mobile in a day or two. Don’t talk to anybody and get going now. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘Officially you are on sick leave. Pack what you need and get going.’

That was that. He had put the phone down.

The first of them arrived as she was leaving. He was very young and, as she came out of the gate, he was running down the street from a taxi stuck behind a truck a hundred yards down the street.

‘Elizabeth Battock?’ he called as he ran towards her.

‘No mate,’ she said in the best Australian accent she could muster. ‘She’s up on the second floor,’ and she left him ringing the bell as she got in her car and drove away.

West seemed the best direction, west out of London by the quickest route. She drove down the M4 for an hour and then the full irony of what she was doing struck her as she realised she had absolutely nowhere to go. Hotels were out of the question. She’d have to pay by credit card and after her New York shopping spree there was a double risk, identification and credit refusal. Friends? She could stay with a friend. No one in London, that wouldn’t do, anyway they were all in the politics business, people to share your triumphs with, not your crises. She wouldn’t trust any of them at a time like this, not when there were useful points to be banked by helping out a journalist or two. There was Maggie. Where did Maggie live now? She hadn’t seen her since graduation. Her address was somewhere, probably on the Christmas card list in her kitchen drawer. Beth could see the list in her mind’s eye. It was just the start of a list really.