To Play the King. Michael Dobbs

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СКАЧАТЬ stray hair from her sweater. When she was sure she had his full attention she stopped toying with him and hid once again inside the folds of her silk-cotton jacket. ‘So what is it you are going to suggest I do?’

      He sat down beside her on the sofa. No jacket, only a swathe of tailored shirt, now at close quarters. His physical presence was, surprisingly to her fashion-conscious eye, indeed impressive.

      ‘I’m going to suggest you stop being an also-ran, a woman who may strive for years to make it to the top yet never succeed. I’m suggesting a partnership. With me. Your expertise’ – they both knew he meant inside information – ‘backed by my financial clout. It would be a formidable combination.’

      ‘But what’s in it for me?’

      ‘A guarantee of survival. A chance to make a lot of money, to get where you want to go, to the top of the pile. To show your former husband that not only can you survive without him but even succeed. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

      ‘And how is all this supposed to happen?’

      ‘We pool our resources. Your information and my money. If there’s any action going on in the City, I want to be part of it. Get in there ahead of the pack and the potential rewards are huge. You and I split any profit right down the middle.’

      She brought her forefinger and thumb together in front of her face. Her nose offered an emphatic bob. ‘Excuse me, but if I understand you right, isn’t that just the tiniest bit illegal?’

      He responded with silence and a look of unquenchable boredom.

      ‘And it sounds as if you would be taking all the risk,’ she continued.

      ‘Risk is a fact of life. I don’t mind taking the risk with a partner I know and trust. I’m sure we could get to trust each other very closely.’

      He reached out and brushed the back of her hand; a glaze of distrust flashed into her eyes.

      ‘Before you ask, getting you into bed is not an essential part of the deal – no, don’t look so damned innocent and offended. You’ve been flashing your tits at me from the moment you sat down so let us, as you say, cut through it all and get down to basics. Getting you on your back would be a pleasure but this is business and in my book business comes first. I’ve no intention of cocking up what could be a first-class deal by letting my brains slip between my legs. We’re here to screw the competition, not each other. So…what’s it to be? Are you interested?’

      As if on cue a phone began to warble in a distant part of the room. With a grunt of exasperation, he levered himself up, but as he crossed the room to answer the call there was also anticipation; his office had the strictest instruction not to bother him unless…He barked briefly into the phone before returning to his guest, his hands spread wide.

      ‘Extraordinary. My cup runs over. That was a message from Downing Street. Apparently our new Prime Minister wishes me to call on him as soon as he’s back from the Palace, so I’m afraid I must rush off. Wouldn’t do to keep him waiting.’ His candle-wax face was contorted in what passed for a grin. She would be the focus of his attention for only a few moments longer: another place, another partner beckoned. He was already climbing into his coat. ‘So make it a very special day for me. Accept.’

      She stretched for her handbag on the sofa but he was there also, his huge labourer’s hand completely encasing her own. They were very close and she could feel the heat from his body, smell him, sense the power beneath the bulk which was capable of crushing her instantly if he so chose. But there was no threat in his manner, his touch was surprisingly gentle. For a moment she caught herself feeling disarmed, almost aroused. Her nose twitched.

      ‘You go sort out the nation’s balance of payments. I’ll think about mine.’

      ‘Think carefully, Sally, and not too long.’

      ‘I’ll consult my horoscope. I’ll be in touch.’

      At that moment the seagull made another screeching attack, hurling insults as it pounded against the window, leaving it dripping with guano. He cursed.

      ‘It’s supposed to be a lucky omen,’ she laughed lightly.

      ‘Lucky?’ he growled as he led her out of the door. ‘Tell that to the bloody window cleaner!’

       CHAPTER TWO

       A man should sleep uneasy in his palace if he wishes to keep it.

      It hadn’t been as he had expected. The crowds had been much thinner than in years gone by; indeed, fewer than two dozen people standing outside the Palace gates, skulking tortoise-like beneath umbrellas and plastic raincoats, could scarcely be counted as a crowd at all. Maybe the great British public simply didn’t give a damn any more who their Prime Minister was.

      He sat back in the car, a man of bearing and distinction amidst the leather, his tired smile implying a casual, almost reluctant acceptance of his lot. He had a long face, the skin ageing but still taut beneath the chin, austere like a Roman bust with lank silver-sandy hair carefully combed away from the face. He was dressed in his habitual charcoal-grey suit with two buttons and a brightly coloured, almost foppish silk handkerchief which erupted out of the breast pocket, an affectation he had adopted to distance himself from the Westminster hordes in their banal Christmas-stocking ties and Marks & Spencer suits. Every few seconds he would bend low, stretching down behind the seat to suck at the cigarette he kept hidden below the window line, the only outward show of the tension and excitement which bubbled within. He took a deep lungful of nicotine and for a while didn’t move, feeling his throat go dry as he waited for his heart to slow.

      The Right Honourable Francis Ewan Urquhart, MP, gave a perfunctory wave to the huddled group of onlookers from the rear seat of his new ministerial Jaguar as it passed into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. His wife Mortima had wanted to lower the window in order for the assorted cameramen to obtain a better view of them both, but discovered that the windows on the official car were more than an inch thick and cemented in place. She had been assured by the driver that nothing less than a direct hit from a mortar with armour-piercing shells would open them.

      The last few hours had seemed all but comic. After the result of the leadership ballot had been announced at six o’clock the previous evening, he had rushed back to his house in Cambridge Street and waited there with his wife. For what, they hadn’t quite known. What was he supposed to do now? There had been no one to tell him. He had hovered beside the phone but it stubbornly refused to ring. He’d rather expected a call of congratulation from some of his parliamentary colleagues, perhaps from the President of the United States or at the very least his aunt, but already the new caution of his colleagues towards a man formerly their equal and now their master was beginning to exert itself; the President wouldn’t call until he’d been confirmed as Prime Minister and his aged aunt apparently thought his telephone would be permanently engaged for days. In desperation for someone with whom to share their joy, he and Mortima took to posing for photo calls at the front door and chatting with the journalists on the pavement outside.

      Urquhart, or FU as he was often known, was not naturally gregarious, a childhood spent roaming alone with no more than a dog and a satchelful of books across the heathers of the family estates in Scotland had attuned him well to his own company, but it was never enough. He needed others, not simply to mix with but against whom to measure himself. It was what had driven him South, СКАЧАТЬ