It didn’t much matter whether this meant the entire Cabinet had offered one sympathetic ear apiece, or half the Cabinet both. Either way, the PM was beleaguered: the referendum voting the UK out of the European Union meant he had to steer a course he’d openly campaigned against, whatever his private views on the subject, and only the lack of a strong contender within the party – the most obvious candidates having been brought low by a frenzy of backstabbing, treachery and double-dealing on a scale not seen since the Spice Girls’ reunion – had allowed him to hang on to power this long. But if Dennis Gimball had indicated that he might be tempted back into a fold he’d left ‘with supreme reluctance’ some years previously, in order to join a one-issue party spearheading the Brexit campaign, a whole new ball game was in the offing. And few believed the PM’s balls would see him through the current game, let alone a new one. Apart from anything else, he had a terrorist atrocity to deal with.
But all Whelan found himself able to say was, ‘Rejoining? That’s not terribly likely, surely.’
‘Not likely? Have you been paying attention? Not likely is the new normal. He’s got a wife writing a twice-weekly column that amounts to a press release for the sack-the-PM brigade, and when he’s ready to make the jump he’ll expect to be warming his arse on my seat within two months. And this new-found taste for democracy’ – which he made sound like a synonym for paedophilia – ‘means he’ll have fifty-two per cent of the population scattering rose petals at his feet while he does. And it’s not just me they’ve got in their sights, either. The main reason he’s appointed himself scourge of the Secret Service, ably abetted by his tabloid totty, is that I’ve given you my full backing. One hundred per cent confidence, remember? An actual hundred, rather than a hundred and ten, or even, God forbid, a hundred and twenty, which I like to think speaks to the absolute fucking sincerity of the gamble I’m taking here. What I’m saying, Claude, is, we stand and fall together. So I’m going to ask you again, without my oh-so-honourable chums taking notes on your answer, how close are you to rounding up these trigger-happy bastards? Because if we don’t see closure on this soon, the second highest-profile casualty is going to be you. Maybe they’ll stick our heads on adjacent spikes. Won’t that be cosy?’
It occurred to Whelan that if the PM showed half as much fervour when addressing the nation as he did when contemplating his job security, he wouldn’t be regarded as such a lightweight.
Whelan said, ‘I held nothing back from the report I just delivered. Arrests aren’t imminent, but they will take place. As for guarantees that another attack of the kind can’t happen, I’m not able to give that. Whoever these people are—’
‘ISIS,’ the PM spat.
‘Well, they’ve claimed credit, yes. But whoever the individuals are, they’re currently under the radar. They could be anywhere, and they could be planning anything. We’re not in a position to deliver certainties. But I’d repeat that I don’t think door-to-door searches in areas with a high Muslim population would be useful at this stage.’
‘Well, that’s where we differ. Because anything to show that we’re actually doing something would,
‘I understand that, Prime Minister, but I’d urge caution. Provoking resistance from the radicalised segments of the community would be playing into their hands.’
It was an argument Whelan had made three times already that morning, and he was prepared to make it again but was distracted by an alteration in the offstage atmosphere. The background noise from the nearest corridor, the hum people make when they want everyone else to know they’re busy, had subsided over the last ten seconds, to be replaced by the lesser but far more ominous sound of the same people reading news alerts on their phones.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ the PM said.
‘Nor I,’ said Whelan. ‘That’s what worries me.’
They emerged as someone was turning up the volume on a rolling news channel, which was screening amateur footage of a violent aftermath.
There was blood, there was panic, there was debris.
Closure, it appeared, wasn’t happening any time soon.
‘It’s been brought to my attention that you arsewipes are not happy bunnies.’
This was Jackson Lamb. The arsewipes were his team.
‘So I’ve convened this meeting so you can air your grievances.’
‘Well—’ River began.
‘Sorry, did I say “you”? I meant me.’
They were in Lamb’s office, which had the advantage, for Lamb, that he didn’t have to move anywhere, and the disadvantage, for everyone else, that it was Lamb’s office. Lamb smoked in his office, and drank, and ate, and there were those who suspected that if he kept a bucket there, he’d never leave. Not that its attractions were obvious. On the other hand, bears’ caves weren’t famously well appointed either, and bears seemed to like them fine.
