The Image in the Water Read online

  ‘Nothing yet. The Grampian police want to keep it quiet for as long as they can. They think publicity will confuse their investigations.’

  ‘That won’t be long. I’ve never known the police keep a secret more than an hour or two. There’s always a sergeant somewhere with a hot line to the News of the World.’

  ‘That’s as may be.’ David sounded disapproving. Julia remembered that, despite his hardness, David was inexperienced about some practicalities of life at the top, which she had known, willy-nilly, through all the years with her parents.

  ‘And McGovern?’

  That pause again. There was some justification since neither of them could be sure how much English was known by the driver or the inspector of police in the front seat of the car. David spoke in a low voice; now in the idiom of a lawyer presenting facts to a court. ‘It’s reasonable to assume, though not certain, that Simon has been kidnapped by the SLA, that’s the far-out Nationalist group that snatched the lawyer, Cameron. McGovern is an old Labour MP who is in touch with these people. In turn Clive Wilson is in touch with McGovern. He has been for several weeks. Nothing to do with Simon, of course, or with Cameron, just politics. They’ve been in touch again today. McGovern believes the SLA want a political declaration out of me. I don’t know what grounds he has for this. He’s a foolish man, but well connected. Anyway, I’ve decided to make such a declaration. In five minutes, from Nice airport.’

  The car was down from the hills now, and the signs directing to this or that outpost of the airport were multiplying along the roadside.

  Julia was afraid that he would begin to tell her about the content of his coming declaration, a matter in which she had little interest compared with the main question. ‘And if you do this they will let Simon go?’

  ‘I can’t tell. I really can’t tell. But it’s the only line we have. Do you know a better?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She subsided, dead tired at different levels from the sun on the beach, her flurried walk to La Croisette, and the crushing anxiety. She had no will to challenge her husband and, as he said, no alternative plan. She recognised in him the pleasure that comes to a man who has taken a difficult decision, a pleasure that provides able men with one of the main motives for entering politics. She hoped that beneath this she could find a real anxiety for Simon, and perhaps also, though of this she was less sure, a few particles of affection for herself.

  Clive Wilson’s telephone calls to London editors had produced only a scanty presence of reporters in the airport press room. The editors had done David proud with their coverage of his speech at the conclave in Cannes the day before. A couple of columnists in Conservative papers had, with insular exaggeration, described him as taking a lead for the first time in discussion among fellow party leaders.

  But the indication, portentously conveyed from Conservative Central Office, that the leader of the Party wanted to impart an important modification of his policy on Scotland had created little excitement. Two men and a girl were present in the press room at the airport. They were stringers, who normally hung about the terminal for a lucky glimpse and quick, shouted interview with some Riviera celebrity: a plump divorced millionaire, a group of pop stars haggard with drugs, an ancient princess with her latest toy-boy. With these they were familiar. But to them David Alcester on a hot summer evening was a mystery and a bore, and as for his wife – she had a good figure but who was she and where on earth did she get her hair done?

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said David. ‘I apologise for the short notice.’ His manners were always better in public than in private. He had done up the loose button. Air France would hold the flight a little longer, but he had to be quick. No time for elaborate introduction or explanation. ‘I have decided to advance Conservative policy on Scotland in one important respect. We have been by tradition a Unionist party. We have always hoped that the majority of the Scottish people would stay loyal to the United Kingdom. We have not wished to desert those Scots who were genuinely loyal. We have wanted to redress the balance of the Union, to remove the obvious injustice to England of the existing system whether in money or in political power. As you know, that has been my main theme since I became leader. But there comes a time when one has to face facts, however unpalatable. The Union is no longer functioning in a manner acceptable to either English or Scots. It should therefore be brought to an end as soon as possible. I am calling a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in London tomorrow and with their authority shall write to the Prime Minister Mr Turnbull demanding the immediate introduction before the summer recess of a Dissolution Bill conferring full independence on Scotland.’

  This was big stuff. They realised it as soon as they heard him. But they did not know how to exploit their opportunity. There was a long pause.

  ‘What has led you to make this U-turn?’ was the best the old man from Reuters could manage.

  ‘No U-turn. It’s a development of policy. A fair deal for England – I’ve always stood for that. A fair deal for England now means independence for Scotland.’

  A usable soundbite at last. They scribbled happily. An agitated Air France official appeared in the doorway. Within ten minutes David and Julia were airborne.

  Despite herself she had been impressed by the size of the gamble.

  ‘Colleagues?’ she said. They had both refused the trays of plastic food. Why was the food in Air France, of all companies, noticeably nastier than anyone else’s?

  ‘The colleagues will follow. They have no one else.’

  ‘Even when they discover …?’

  ‘Discover?’

  ‘Your motive … Simon.’

  ‘Particularly then.’ For the first time David smiled. ‘You’ll see.’

  Then he slept.

  *

  ‘You’ll see,’ David had said, in the Air France plane. And what Julia saw in the days that followed was exactly what David had predicted. Not that this made them any easier to bear. They were the most unusual days of her life. A few hours after they reached the Cambridge Street flat on Monday night the chief constable of the Grampian police telephoned to say that the Daily Record had heard of Simon’s disappearance and would publish next morning. The police were therefore making a simple announcement of the facts. When pressed by Julia on the progress of their investigations the chief constable proffered satisfaction. Mrs Mackintosh’s Renault had been found in a pub car park at Musselburgh, just outside Edinburgh. Forensics had established that there had been a fifth car up the entrance to Craigarran that morning, probably a Japanese four-wheel drive. So now that the news was out, the police would smother Scotland with photographs of Simon and Mrs Mackintosh, using prints, if Julia agreed, which Louise had lent them from the sitting room at Craigarran.

  ‘I’m hopeful, Mrs Alcester, very hopeful,’ the chief constable had ended, without giving any grounds for that hope.

  Julia feared that at this stage David might make her appear in some joint televised display of anxiety and appeal for help. Over the years she had seen so many couples, egged on by the cameras, sobbing and stuttering their fears for their vanished children. As the days passed the appearances would be repeated on evening bulletins, the sobs louder, the fears greater, until the moment when the little body was found in a gravel pit or lay-by, then a final explosion of grief and anger by parents for whom, after a week or a fortnight, the exploiting cameras had become a way of life. Julia, by views a democrat, by nature patrician, would have none of those awful platitudes of grief.

  The hopeless twentieth century had opened everything up and spilled it on the ground, but that century had gone. People were rediscovering boxes and containers in their own minds. The colleges and courses for counsellors were closing one by one. People were reinventing the brake between mind and tongue. They were coming back to the belief, so Julia thought, that most suffering is best borne in private.

  But, to her surprise, David never mentioned the idea of a joint appearance, and firmly turned down all bids from the medi
a. She knew, however, that this was not because he shared her disgust. She had heard him answer one particularly insistent editor: ‘Wait, wait. You’ll see, it’ll be much better later.’

  So David and Julia simply issued through the Press Association a third-person statement expressing confidence in the police and requesting privacy. This led to the arrival of an army of press and cameras, which camped in the narrow Pimlico street on which they lived.

  There was absolutely nothing to do. David cancelled his engagements, including the Shadow Cabinet meeting he had announced at Nice airport. He spent much time on the telephone, but receiving calls rather than making them. ‘Some of the colleagues are being troublesome,’ was all he reported to Julia, though she read in the newspapers the whole awkward argument in the Conservative Party as it built up over the week. She gave her Filipina cleaning lady the shopping list, and Rosetta, with her carrier-bag, smiled her way silently through the cameramen each day. It had not rained in London for a fortnight, and Julia busied herself watering the tubs of blue and white agapanthus that were the pride of the roof garden above the flat. She read novels, watched tennis and athletics on television, listened to The Archers on radio and talked to her mother on the telephone. Louise and Peter, also besieged by the media, had decided to stay at Craigarran for the time being. When he was not telephoning, David spent most of his time reading and writing in his study. He and Julia met for brief meals and sat together watching television in the evenings. There was neither tension between them nor communication, except on trivial questions of food, drink or television programmes. They were both waiting for an event that would change everything, including their marriage, but for which they did not know how to prepare.

  WAITING FOR SIMON

  By Alice Thomson, in the Daily Telegraph More than a baby was kidnapped last Monday. We all wait to hear news of David Alcester’s little son, Simon. But to an extraordinary extent his fate is now tangled up with the future of the United Kingdom. Rarely if ever have a private tragedy and public policy been so closely connected. This connection is acutely embarrassing for politicians of all parties, and indeed for commentators like myself. But I do not think it is right any longer to avoid the subject just because of its unique awkwardness.

  This awkwardness arises because of the way in which David Alcester reacted to the news of Simon’s kidnapping. He at once, even before the news broke, drove to Nice airport and announced a new Conservative policy, namely independence for Scotland. He must have done this for purely private reasons, judging that Simon, like James Cameron, had been kidnapped by extreme Scottish Nationalists who would be likely to relent and release him after this announcement. What evidence the Leader of the Opposition had for this judgement none of us knows. There are rumours of earlier abortive discussions between Central Office and the Scottish Liberation Army, but nothing definite.

  While David Alcester himself remains wholly and understandably silent, some of his friends are arguing that he has not changed Conservative policy, just advanced it a step along the road the Party was travelling anyway. The Party, it is argued, has found no response from the Government or the official Scottish National Party to their plea for a just balance inside the Union for the English majority, by which they mean less tax money for Scotland and fewer Scottish MPs at Westminster. That being so, they say, it is entirely logical for the Party leader to press for the abolition of a Union which is so manifestly unfair. But the Shadow Cabinet has still not been consulted and at least four of them, led by the Education spokesperson Sarah Tunstall, disagree in private with the leap forward their leader announced at Nice airport. In private only, for none of them is ready to say anything in public that might endanger the life of baby Simon. The two grandees of the party outside the Shadow Cabinet, Roger Courtauld and Peter Makewell, are in the same position, made more poignant for Peter Makewell because he is married to the baby’s grandmother. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet worry themselves sick about the effect of all this on English opinion, but they, too, are tongue-tied. Once the baby is found, whether happily or tragically, these arguments will break out into the open. We are used to debate how far politics should invade personal privacy. This will be a debate the other way round. How far should private happenings be exploited for political purposes? But that debate has not yet been joined. The crowd, gathered day and night, outside the Alcesters’ flat in Cambridge Street remains silent.

  Mrs Mackintosh took the shuttle tourist bus down from Waverley Bridge to Leith. It was a dour day, the euro was high against the dollar, and the bus was almost empty except for a group of Australian tourists who took no notice of the quiet grey-haired Scottish woman with the baby in her lap. The conductor warned all his passengers in turn not to dally on the foreshore because the sale of visitors’ tickets to the former Royal Yacht Britannia terminated at 4.30 p.m. precisely. ‘They’re wanting their tea, and they don’t hang around.’ Mrs Mackintosh knew this already from the reconnaissance that two SLA members had undertaken three days earlier. It was obviously important that she should be almost the last visitor on board that day. But it was also important that she should leave the Britannia in a group of others so that she was as inconspicuous as possible. The reconnaissance team had established that there was no difficulty in bringing the baby aboard, but there was a risk of someone noticing that the woman who had boarded the Royal Yacht with a baby disembarked without one.

  Mrs Mackintosh worried that Simon would wake during the video show in the visitor centre, which included some loud loyal moments from the band of the Royal Marines, but she had given him his bottle with a mild sedative in the bus and he lay in her arms as good as gold. Mrs Mackintosh approved the style of the state apartments on Britannia, spacious and comfortable in a chintzy way, old-fashioned without being grand. Rather Scottish, she thought; it reminded her of Craigarran. Mrs Mackintosh had no difficulty in reconciling her fierce nationalism with affection for the Royal Family, which she regarded as essentially Scots.

  The Queen’s cabin was particularly charming. She knew that because of a glass partition she would not be able to leave Simon and his bottle actually on the Queen’s bed as had originally been intended. But there was a comfortable sofa nearby in the equerries’ sitting room. She imagined the courtiers gathering there in the old days, ladies-in-waiting sipping a cup of tea with a scone or slice of fruit cake, the equerries poised for an early dram. Simon did not stir in these august surroundings and she left him sound asleep on the sofa, a second bottle ready prepared by his side, this one without the sedative.

  Mrs Mackintosh tagged on to a group of Scots ladies not unlike herself and went down the gangway with them. The car waiting for her beside the new Ocean Terminal was a different car with a different driver. The SLA liked knowledge to be spread as thinly as possible. For a minute, unusually, Mrs Mackintosh thought about the country for which she had just taken such great personal risk. Around her she was vaguely aware of a contrast with her own spotless cottage back in Pitlochry. It being Saturday afternoon all the bleak little shops of Leith were closed, with a smug ‘I could have told you so’ expression on their shutters, except for a couple of newsagents with Pakistanis standing in the entrance. The Ocean Terminal was new and magnificent, but behind it Leith had not renounced the ancient blight of paper bags blowing down each street and litter everywhere. Willowherb and thistle, the national emblem, flourished untidily where decades ago the council had pulled down the traditional stone terraces but so far built nothing. At present they were busy taking down the street names and replacing them with new signs in Gaelic as well as English. The man drove her fast into the centre of Edinburgh, then out on the Glasgow road. Precisely ten minutes away from Leith she telephoned to report that everything had gone to plan. The SLA official then made the calls to the Lothian police and the BBC, which had been planned as the culminating point of the operation.

  Though they had talked of little during the awful cloistered days of waiting in Cambridge Street, David Alceste
r had tried to convince his wife of one thing, namely that the news of Simon, good or bad, would reach them from the police or the Scottish Executive rather than from the media. This assurance proved accurate by a margin of about two minutes. That Friday the seven o’clock morning bulletin led with the news that Simon was safe in Leith police station, taking his bottle. David was still on the telephone to the Lothian chief constable. He had given Julia a quick kiss when he passed on the immediate message, but his priorities were elsewhere.

  ‘We are very grateful, Chief Constable. I will call Lady Makewell at once. She will be with you within a couple of hours. Can you guide her in from the southern exit of the Forth Bridge? She may not know the exact geography and every minute counts. Where exactly is the First Minister’s helicopter? … I really don’t think you need confirm availability, I checked with him myself yesterday that it would be available for my mother-in-law if necessary … Yes, I’ll warn the Battersea heliport. Please make sure the pilot communicates with them direct before take-off … I’m sure you understand we want no photographs, no interviews with any of your officers, nothing whatever until my son is safe back here. You’ll understand our concern for privacy. My wife is particularly insistent on that …’ and then, quickly following a call to Clive Wilson, ‘Yes, indeed, excellent news. Your press man should make it clear we are not making any statement or giving any interviews until Simon is back under this roof. Then, of course, plenty. Who’s your best man now in the press department? … Not him, he’s hopeless. Who else? … Don’t know her but if she’s good send her round at once, and I’ll brief her. She’ll have to keep them in order and organise a queue. But first we’ll have a balcony photograph. It’s a small balcony, but it’ll just take the four of us – parents, grandmother, Simon … Didn’t I tell you? Louise is bringing the baby down. A good touch that, I thought…’