The Lords' Day (retail) (3 page)

Inside the ornate Gothic gingerbread Palace of Westminster, the members of the Works Department were making last-minute adjustments to the chamber of the House of Lords, where the red leather
benches had been rearranged to permit the largest possible number of peers and guests to be seated. Behind the chamber, in the Robing Room that the Monarch would use as her private chambers, the
Head Housemaid was making one last sweep while the Staff Commander himself gave the dainty toilet with its ancient blue-porcelain bowl one final discreet check. Flowers bloomed on all sides.
Elsewhere, employees from the tailor Ede and Ravenscroft, the oldest tailoring firm in London, stood by to assist peers into their ermine robes, while seamstresses were at hand to help those in
need. No stitch would be left unsewn, no corner left undusted or unsecured.

The ceremonial was as old as time itself, but all was not as it once had been. Standards were changing, and some would say slipping. What had once been a close-knit, almost family affair had
been slowly squeezed dry in the vice of equal opportunities and Exchequer meanness. Posts were opened up to all comers, even part-timers. The magnificent doorkeepers who kept order throughout the
place had once been drawn exclusively from the ranks of the military and conducted themselves as though still on parade, yet now they found their jobs offered to all and sundry, even women. Black
Rod himself, the Lords’ most senior official, was always a knight and, typically, at least a Lieutenant-General or Air Vice-Marshal, yet even his job was advertised in the pages of the
Evening Standard
. New times, new manners. Traditions came and went, and so did the cleaners, ever since the contract had been put out to tender. Lowest cost, and often lowest common
denominator. Some cleaners had been busy inside the palace since five that morning, and many more arrived in the ensuing hours. Three of them came through the underpass that led from Westminster
tube station. It wasn’t an entrance open to the public, only those who were authorised, and they came forward, small bags in their hands, their photo IDs strung round their necks. As he stood
before the revolving glass security door and passed his swipe card through the electronic reader, one of the men smiled faint-heartedly at the policeman on duty. The constable barely acknowledged
the greeting.

‘What’s in the bag, sunshine?’

‘Only lunch,’ the man replied in a thick accent, as the other man also passed through. Although they had not been asked, the three competed in their eagerness to open their cheap
holdalls for inspection, revealing little more than sandwiches, a couple of chocolate bars and several cans of Coca-Cola each. ‘We hold a little party with other cleaners. After Her Majesty
has left. When our work is done,’ the first explained.

‘Coca-Cola, eh? The dear old Queen Mum’ll be rolling in her grave just to hear of it.’

His little joke was met with the blankest of expressions; the policeman sighed and nodded them through. He nudged his colleague as they passed.

‘And where d’you think those little teetotallers crawled in from, then?’

‘Dunno,’ the other replied. ‘Could be Pakis. There again, might be African, Sudanese, Ethiopian. Bleedin’ Iranian, for all I know.’ He sighed, the deep, distracted
sigh of an unreconstructed Englishman. ‘So many asylum seekers clogging up the works these past years.’

‘Yet you don’t dare say it.’

‘But it’s true. They do,’ the other man insisted.

‘Can’t argue the point.’

‘Extraordinary, ain’t it?’

‘How they all look the ruddy same.’

‘Makes you feel nostalgic for the Irish.’

Their attention was soon diverted by a parliamentary secretary who had struggled through the security door with an armful of papers, only to spill them on the pavement and reveal a quite
unnecessary length of thigh as she bent to retrieve them. The dark skinned cleaners walked on. One, Mukhtar, had beads of sweat gathering below his hairline; he wiped his brow with his palm,
Jehanzeb gripped his arm in reproof. Their eyes met, exchanging a private prayer. Mukhtar’s fingers searched for the
tehwiz
at his neck, a small square of fabric into which was sewn a
verse from the Quran.
Inshallah
. Already he felt better. It was remarkable how nervous a man could grow, even when he had volunteered to die.

7.30 a.m.

Robert Treat Paine, the US Ambassador to what is formally known as the Court of St James’s, had also risen early that day; indeed, he had been awake since four and had
barely slept. It had become something of an uncomfortable habit with the tall, angular Bostonian ever since his wife had died suddenly two years earlier from a brain haemorrhage. She might have
been saved, had they not been miles from help on a walking holiday in the Lake District where mobile phones don’t work and passing shepherds were nowadays as scarce as undiseased elms.
‘She died in one of the most beautiful spots on earth,’ he told her memorial service, ‘and facing up to God.’ Their only son, also named Robert T, hadn’t attended; he
had been away serving with the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. He was never to come home. A roadside bomb. And there were no saccharined words of comfort that could soothe that particular death. It
hadn’t been a good year for the ambassador.

Slowly he climbed from the bed that he now shared only with his red setter and stood at the window of his cavernous bedroom. Winfield House, the US ambassador’s official residence, looked
out over Regent’s Park and the ambassador spent some time watching a young urban fox stalk the grounds looking for breakfast, scratching at roots, sniffing at the fungi that had sprouted
beneath the birch trees. Strange, and sad, the ambassador thought, that this garden would probably be as close as the animal ever made it to real countryside. Everything in this turbulent world
seemed to have been snatched from its proper place. His eyes, as so often, were drawn towards the photograph on his dresser. It showed his son in his Marine captain’s uniform, a young man so
full of confidence, brimming with ambition, yet . . . he was gone, another thing taken from its rightful place. And now the name of Robert Treat Paine would be no more. That noble line had come to
its end, a story closed.

Oh, but what a magnificent story it had been! The first Robt. Treat Paine had been one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, signing it with a bold flourish that would forever
mark his name in history. Now he lay buried beside the likes of Sam Adams and Paul Revere in the Granary Burial Ground in Boston, a hallowed place, a spot reserved for American heroes. Old Robt.
had left a clear trail and the ambassador had followed in his ancestor’s footsteps, through Harvard and law school before embarking on a sparkling career that had left successive presidents
in his debt. The Paine family had always played its part, but now the wheel of family life had turned full circle. The youngest and brightest of all the Robert T. Paines had gone off to war and got
himself killed. The wheel had stopped.

For the father, there were few consolations. He buried himself in his work and was excellent at his job, everyone said that, including the President when she had called him after his son’s
death to tell him that the post was his as long as he wanted it. She understood the ties of blood, being the third member of her own family to have won the White House. And he should have been
happy with this posting in a country that had given him his Old English roots, yet there was something missing in this New Britain. They knew what they used to be, but couldn’t decide what
they had become. They’d allowed their culture, and with it their self-confidence, to slip through their fingers, leaving them clutching at little but empty air. It was a modern sickness, and
Paine had come to the conclusion that they would never find a cure. Sometimes, it seemed to him, he cared more for their customs than they did.

He reached for the phone and pressed the button. His steward answered it.

‘Breakfast in half an hour, I think, O’Malley.’ He stretched his vowels in the slow, New England manner.

‘The usual, Ambassador Paine?’ That would be easy. Fresh grapefruit, muesli and sweet black coffee. Paine did little more than peck when he had to eat on his own.

‘No, this is a special day, O’Malley.’

‘You mean Guy Fawkes and all the bonfires.’

‘You really are a totally unrepentant Irish rebel, aren’t you?’

‘I hope so, sir.’

‘I’m talking about the State Opening of Parliament. I’m going to rub shoulders with the Queen.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be having a wonderful time, sir,’ the steward responded, his voice hoarse with irony and nicotine.

‘It’ll be a long day, O’Malley, and we’ll need more than prune juice to get through it. I think we’ll celebrate the occasion with something a little more
substantial. The Full English.’

‘The Full Irish, it’ll be, sir.’

Paine replaced the phone. He tolerated O’Malley, was even amused by him. At least the fellow knew who he was.

Yet in a bedroom in a different part of town, matters were progressing less smoothly with another of the actors who would play a significant part in the events that were to mark this day. It was
by no means such an expansive bedroom as that in Winfield House, but Tricia Willcocks had done pretty well for herself by any measure. It had taken three marriages and a fair bit of swallowing of
male smugness during her earlier years in government circles, but she had ended up as Home Secretary. At times, even she had to pinch herself. Not bad for a woman who had been forced to struggle
mightily through these meritocratic times to live down her expensive convent-based education. Girls from St Trinian’s had long been out of fashion. Yet still it wasn’t enough for
Tricia. She’d built her career on an adroit mixture of tokenism and toe sucking, and it had left her with a disagreeable taste in her mouth. She knew men, knew their ample shortcomings, and
also knew she was as able as most, yet, in spite of these qualities, she was forced to live off their finances and upon their favours. That made her irritable, while age had made her a little
menopausal, and the combination was not always a happy one.

She had spent the last hour in bed going through the papers in her ministerial box. Normally she liked to finish off her boxes at night but she had been out late at an official dinner and her
schedule had been kicked out of kilter. Now, reading by lamplight, she was getting a headache – oh, God, not one of those migraines, she prayed. And her husband was proving more than normally
useless.

‘Colin, what do you call this?’ she demanded as she looked at the tray he had placed beside her on the bed.

‘Breakfast,’ he shouted back from the bathroom.

‘You run a hugely successful commercial law practice, yet somehow can’t even manage to boil an egg properly.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s raw.’

‘Like your humour, my darling.’

‘Colin, I’ve got a million things on today . . .’

‘And, as you say, I’ve got a law practice to run,’ he said, emerging from the bathroom fully groomed and suited. ‘So I’m off. Put the dishwasher on before you go,
will you? And have a wonderful day, dear.’ He didn’t even glance at her as he left.

She pushed aside the tray in exasperation and returned to the paper. It was a complex, closely argued brief about the legal implications of putting on trial Daud Gul. He was but one wretched
man, yet he had managed to leave the combined legal minds of Whitehall twisting like wind chimes. It had been such a glorious coup when the British had hauled him out of his mountain hidey-hole
along the Afghan-Pakistan border, like something out of an old black and white film with Cary Grant in the lead; half the American Army had been trying to find the bugger for ten years while a
ten-man SAS team had done the job in little more than forty minutes. He was now settled, hopefully uncomfortably, in a cell on Diego Garcia. They’d snatched him because Daud Gul led one of
the most notorious terrorist organisations in the region, responsible for untold numbers of outrages against Western interests in that part of the world. At least, that was his reputation. Yet as
they had begun to build the detail of the case against him, large flakes kept falling off it. Sure, he hated the Americans and the British, the Russians too, come to that, any one of the many
white-faced tribes that had set their imperious feet upon his land over the last two hundred years, but that wasn’t enough to convict him. Disliking Americans wasn’t of itself a crime,
not since George Bush had left the White House. There was certainly much wickedness for which Daud Gul was blamed, yet acts that had been done in his name were not, perhaps, done by him, or so the
lawyers were arguing. Put him on trial for most of the outrages of which he’d been accused and they’d have trouble finding a single scrap of incriminating paper to prove his
involvement, and he’d left no fingerprints on the bombs – ‘it would be like charging Christ with responsibility for the Inquisition,’ one of her senior civil servants had
said. Idiot. They were all the same, those lawyers, like a wicker fence with a broken back, flopping first one way, then the other, as the wind blew. Willcocks knew what they had to do, they had to
hang Daud Gul out to dry, but how? They couldn’t simply lock him up and beat the crap out of him; Guantanamo had given those devices such a bad name, and handing him over to local warlords
would be like throwing a side of beef to a pack of starving dogs. So there was no other option, they had to put him on trial, but how – and where? Those pathetic ridiculous lawyers had been
shuffling back and forth about it for months.

Then she cried out. It
was
a migraine. Her legs had turned to ice, her head was beginning to feel as though it was being operated on without anaesthetic. And it was the State Opening, all
those television lights and military barking. She knew she’d never get through it. She’d faint or do something foolish, get all flushed up and show some feminine weakness, and
they’d never allow her to forget it. She couldn’t let that happen. They’d barely miss her in the crowd, her private secretary could compose some suitable excuse. As the pain began
to take hold of her, Tricia Willcocks made up her mind; she wouldn’t go, couldn’t go.