Urquhart watched silently as the industrialist, damp shirt sticking closely to his broad back, shuffled across the crowded room and disappeared through the door.
Across the other side of the room beyond the dignitaries, journalists and hangers-on who were squashed together, Roger O'Neill was huddled on a small sofa with a young and attractive conference-goer. O'Neill was in an excited and very nervous state. He fidgeted incessantly and his words rattled out at an alarming pace. The young girl from Rotherham had already been overwhelmed with the names O'Neill had skilfully dropped and the passion of his words, and she looked on with wide-eyed astonishment, an innocent bystander in a one-way conversation.
The Prime Minister's under constant surveillance by our security men. There's always a threat. Irish. Arabs. Black Militants. One of them's trying to get me, too. They've been trying for months, and the Special Branch boys insisted on giving me protection throughout the election. Apparently, they'd found a hit list; if the PM were too well protected they might turn to targets close to the PM like me. So they gave me twenty-four-hour cover. It's not public knowledge, of course, but all the journos know.'
He dragged furiously at a cigarette and started coughing. He took out a soiled handkerchief and blew his nose loudly, inspecting it before returning it to his pocket.
'But why you, Roger?' his companion ventured.
'Soft target. Easy access. High publicity hit,' he rattled. If they can't get the PM, they'll go for someone like me.'
He looked around nervously, his eyes fluttering wildly.
'Can you keep a confidence? A real secret?' He took another deep drag. They think I've been followed all week. And this morning I found my car had been tampered with, so the Bomb Squad boys went over it with a fine tooth comb. They found the wheel nuts on one of the front wheels had been all but removed. Straight home on the motorway, the wheel comes off at eighty miles an hour and - more work for the road sweepers! They think it was deliberate. The Murder Squad are on their way over to interview me right now.'
'Roger, that's awful’ she gasped.
'Mustn't tell anyone. The SB don't want to frighten them off if there's a chance of catching them unawares.'
‘I hadn't realised you were so close to the Prime Minister’ she said with growing awe. 'What a terrible time for...' She suddenly gasped. 'Are you all right, Roger? You are looking very upset. Your, your eyes...' she stammered.
O'Neill's eyes were flickering wildly, flashing still further lurid hallucinations into his brain. His attention seemed to have strayed elsewhere; he was no longer with her but in some other world, with some other conversation. His eyes wavered back to her, but they were gone again in an instant. They were bloodshot and watering, and were having difficulty in finding something on which to focus. His nose was dribbling like an old man in winter, and he gave it a cursory and unsuccessful wipe with the back of his hand.
As she watched, his face turned to an ashen grey, his body twitched and he stood up sharply. He appeared terrified, as if the walls were falling in on him. She looked round helplessly, unsure what he needed, too embarrassed to make a public scene. She moved to take his arm and support him, but as she did so he turned on her and lost his balance. He grabbed at her to steady himself, caught her blouse and a button popped.
'Get out of my way, get out of my way’ he snarled.
He thrust her violently backwards, and she fell heavily into a table laden with glasses before sprawling back onto the sofa. The crash of glass onto the floor stopped all conversation in the room as everyone looked round. Three more buttons had gone, and her left breast stood exposed amidst the torn silk.
There was absolute silence as O'Neill stumbled towards the door, pushing still more people out of the way as he tumbled into the night. The young girl clutched at her tattered clothing and was fighting back the tears of humiliation as he disappeared. An elderly guest was helping her rearrange herself and shepherding her towards the bathroom and, as the bathroom door shut behind the two women, a ripple of speculation began which quickly grew into a broad sea of gossip, washing backwards and forwards over the gathering. It would go on all evening. - Penny Guy did not join in the gossip. A moment before she had been laughing merrily, thoroughly enjoying the engaging wit and Merseyside charm of Patrick Woolton. Urquhart had introduced them more than an hour earlier, and had ensured that the champagne flowed as easily as their conversation. But the magic had been smashed with the uproar. As Penny had taken in O'Neill's stumbling departure, the sobbing girl's dishevelled clothing and the ensuing speculation and chatter, her face had dissolved into a picture of misery. She fought a losing battle to control the tears which had welled up and spilled down her cheeks and, although Woolton provided a large handkerchief and considerable support, the pain in Penny's face was all too real.
He really is kind. Very considerate,' she explained. 'But sometimes it all seems to get too much for him and he goes a little crazy. It's so out of character.' She pleaded for him, and the tears flowed still faster.
'Penny. I'm so sorry, dear. Look, you need to get out of this party. My bungalow's next door. Let's go and dry you off there, OK?'
She nodded in gratitude, and the couple squeezed their way through the crowd. No one seemed to notice as they eased their way out of the room, except Urquhart. His cold blue eyes followed them through the door where Landless and O'Neill had gone before. This was certainly going to be a party to remember, he told himself.
‘You're not going to make a bloody habit of getting me out of bed every morning, are you?' Even down the telephone line, Preston made it clear that this was an instruction, not a question.
Mattie felt even worse than she had the previous morning after several hours of alcoholic flagellation with Charles Collingridge who was clearly determined to prove his doctor hopelessly wrong. Now she was having great difficulty grasping what on earth was going on.
Hell, Grev. I go to bed thinking I want to kill you because you won't run the story, and I wake up this morning and find a bastardised version all over the front page with a by-line by someone called "Our Political Staff". Now I know I want to kill you, but first I want to find out why you are screwing around with my story. Why did you change your mind? Who's rewritten my story, and who the hell is "Our Political Staff" if it's not me?'
'Steady on, Mattie. Just take a breath and let me explain. If only you had been around when I tried to call you last night and not flashing your eyes at some eligible peer or whatever it is you were doing, then you would have known all about it before it happened.'
Mattie began vaguely to recall the events of last night through the haze, and her pause to persuade her memory to catch up with itself gave Preston time to continue. He began to search for his words carefully.
'As I think Krajewski may have told you, last night some of the editorial staff here didn't believe there was enough substantiation of your piece on the opinion polls for it to run today.'
He heard Mattie snort at the clumsy twisting of the tale, but knew he must press on or he would never get the chance to finish the justification.
'Frankly, I liked the piece and wanted to make it work, but I thought we needed more corroboration before we tore the country's Prime Minister apart on the day of an important by-election. A single anonymous piece of paper wasn't enough.'
'I didn't tear the Prime Minister apart, you did!' Mattie wanted to interject, but Preston rode through her objections.
'So I had a chat with some of my senior contacts in the Party, and late last night we got the corroboration we wanted just before our deadline. The copy needed to be adapted to take account of the new material and I tried to reach you but couldn't, so I rewrote it myself. I refused to let anyone else touch it, your material is too good. So "Our Political Staff" in this instance is me.'
'But that's not the story I sent in. I wrote a piece about a terrible opinion poll and the difficult days the Party was facing. You've turned it into the outright crucifixion of Collingridge. These quotes from "leading party sources", these criticisms and condemnations. Who else do you have working in Bournemouth apart from me?'
'My sources are my own business,' snapped Preston.
'Bullshit, Grev. I'm supposed to be your political correspondent at this bloody conference, you can't keep me in the dark like this. The paper's done a complete somersault over my story and another complete somersault over Collingridge. A few weeks ago he was the saviour of the nation as far as you were concerned, now he's - what does it say? - "a catastrophe threatening to engulf the Government at any moment". I shall be about as popular as a witch's armpit around the conference hall this morning. You've got to tell me what's going on!'
Preston, his carefully prepared explanation already in tatters, retreated into aggression and pomposity.
'As editor I am not in the dubious position of having to justify myself to every cub reporter stuck out in the provinces. You do as you're told, I do as I'm told, and we both get on with the job. All right?'
Mattie was just about to ask him who the hell it was who could tell the editor what to do when she heard the line go dead. She shook her head in amazement and fury. She couldn't and wouldn't take much more of this. Far from having new doors open up to her, she was finding her fingers getting caught as her editor kept slamming the doors shut. And who else had he got ferreting away at the conference?
It was a good thirty minutes later as she was trying to clear her thoughts and calm her temper with yet another cup of coffee in the breakfast room when she saw the vast bulk of Benjamin Landless lumbering across to a Window table for a chat with Lord Peterson, the party treasurer. As the proprietor settled his girth into a completely inadequate chair, Mattie wrinkled her nose. She didn't care for what she smelt.
The Prime Minister's political secretary winced. For the third time the press secretary had thrust the morning newspaper across the table at him, for the third time he tried to thrust it away. He knew how St Peter must have felt.
'For God's sake, Grahame.' The press secretary was raising his voice now; the game of ping-pong with the newspaper was irritating him. 'We can't hide every damned copy of the Telegraph in Bournemouth. He's got to know, and you've got to show it to him. Now!'
'Why did it have to be today?' he groaned. 'A by-election just down the road, and we've been up all night finishing his speech for tomorrow. Now hell want to rewrite the whole thing and where are we going to find the time? He’ll blow a bloody gasket, and that won't help the by-election or the speech either.'
He slammed his briefcase shut in uncharacteristic frustration. 'All the pressure of the last few weeks, and now this. There just, doesn't seem to be any break, does there?'
His companion chose not to answer, preferring to study the view out of the hotel window across the bay. It was raining again.
The political secretary picked up the newspaper, rolled it up tight, and threw it across the room. It landed with a crash in the waste bin, overturning it and strewing the contents across the carpet. The discarded pages of speech draft mixed with cigarette ash and several empty cans of beer and tomato juice.
I’ll tell him after breakfast.'
It was not to be his best decision.