Chapter 14 Richard #2
He’s recently employed a personal stylist called Cody.
Cody says Richard’s neckline is suited to a Nehru collar.
He has, up until this point, agreed with her but now he worries his three-quarter-length linen number, purchased at considerable expense from a high-end department store might look a bit silly.
‘It’s an Indian designer,’ Richard says, unwrapping his chopsticks.
‘Well, sorry, British-Indian, I should say. His parents came over in the seventies. Immigrants. Hardworking, decent people. British born and bred. The designer, I mean, not the parents. They came over from … uh … somewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. With coming over, I mean.’
‘I never said there was.’
‘No, no, of course you didn’t.’ Richard spears a clump of noodles with his chopsticks. ‘Christ, you have to be so careful with what you say these days, don’t you? Hahahahaha.’
Martin Gilmour makes him nervous. Perhaps it’s his coolly assessing stare or the fact that his reactions seem delayed.
Perhaps it’s what Ben and Jarvis have intimated about his murky past and his sexual inclinations.
Perhaps it’s the facial twitches Richard has noticed – every so often, a slight but noticeable judder of the jaw, like a cat ridding itself of fleas.
Or perhaps it’s simply that Richard can’t get a grip on what Martin might be thinking at any given time.
His emotions don’t show on his face like normal people’s.
‘Anyway, the jacket pays tribute to his heritage – hence, you know, the collar,’ Richard concludes, feebly.
‘Mm. I suppose one could say that wearing it is a form of cultural appropriation,’ Martin says.
A piece of duck becomes lodged in Richard’s throat.
‘Do you think so?’
He immediately wants to take the jacket off and set fire to it underneath the itsu table.
The edges of Martin’s mouth curl.
‘No, no, don’t worry. It was a joke.’
‘Oh, hahahahaha. Yes. Very good. Ha.’
Richard shifts on his stool. He scans Martin’s face, which has reassumed its usual blankness.
‘But you’re right that we have to be careful what we say,’ Martin says. ‘I know that only too well.’
Richard has read about Martin’s skirmish with Jacob Malik-Edwards and the university authorities – it’s one of the first things that comes up when you google him. But surely he didn’t arrange this meeting to talk about cultural semantics?
‘How can I help, Martin?’
‘Well, it’s not so much how you can help me. It’s more a question of how I believe I might be able to help you.’
‘Me?’
Richard pushes the empty duck salad box aside, mopping up spilled dots of soy sauce from the table with a thin paper napkin.
He scrunches up the napkin and puts it in the box.
His fingers feel sticky so he fishes out the miniature bottle of sanitiser he carries with him (politicians never know where the hands they’re shaking have been) and squeezes a globule into his palms, rubbing them together until the stickiness has gone. Martin stares at him.
‘Sorry, bit of a hygiene freak,’ Richard says, gabbling again. ‘Bit OCD. Like David Beckham. Have you seen the Beckham documentary …? It’s very good.’
Martin doesn’t answer. Instead, he pushes the brown folder across the table.
‘What’s this?’
‘Everything you need to bring Ben Fitzmaurice down.’
Against the noisy backdrop of the afternoon itsu rush, Richard isn’t quite sure he …
‘You heard,’ Martin says.
Richard takes the folder and starts leafing through it.
The first page is a police report, stamped with the insignia of the Gloucestershire Constabulary.
‘Statement of …’ is typed at the top and he has to hold the sheet of paper at an angle to make out the handwritten name: Felicity Fitzmaurice.
It is signed and dated from a year ago. Under paragraph A, ‘Details of the Incident’, the word ‘RAPE’ is written in the capital letters of officialese.
Richard looks at Martin.
‘Rape?’ he asks, voice hoarse.
Martin nods.
‘Carry on.’
Richard turns the page. He skims through the witness statement.
Rape. Spiked mug of tea. A flat with the doors closed.
Pain. Confusion. Fear. He imagines the police officer who would have listened to this story.
Was he attentive? Kind? Bored? Dismissive?
Then he imagines Felicity Fitzmaurice sitting in an anonymous interview room having to explain what she’d been through and he wants to run away.
It is unlike Richard to suffer from a surfeit of empathy, but Hannah once told him about her own experience of sexual aggression at the hands of a lecherous male partner at a leading law firm and it shocked him that his wife – his strong, assertive, no-nonsense wife – had been made to feel so worthless.
It knocked Richard’s sense of how the world operated, and he had never entirely recovered his equilibrium when it came to matters of sexual assault.
It was partly why he watched so much porn.
He hated the idea that his own predilections for sexual fantasies involving figures of male dominance – doctors, businessmen, gym instructors, the usual – would make Hannah uncomfortable or make her think less of him.
So he repressed these urges in real life, preferring to indulge them on his own, in front of the flickering blue light of a computer screen.
Richard keeps scanning the police report. Another name leaps out from the page. He blinks to make sure he’s read it correctly. But there it is, in black and white: Andrew Jarvis.
‘What the …?’
Martin raises his eyebrows, as if to say, ‘Well, are you really surprised?’
But he is. Richard is aghast.
‘Jarvis?’
‘One and the same,’ Martin says.
‘I don’t know what you expect me to do with this.’
Martin crosses his legs, taking great care to lift the crease of each trouser leg in the pinch of his thumb and his index finger as he does so. Richard finds this air of studied nonchalance – so at odds with the sheaf of papers he has been confronted with – irritating.
‘You seem remarkably unconcerned,’ Richard says, heat rising.
‘I don’t know what seedy little game you’re trying to play with me, but I’m not a fool.
I can see when I’m being used as a …’ He searches for the word.
He knows he knows it but for some reason he can only think of sushi and prawns.
It’s not a prawn. He’s not being used as a prawn but …
‘I’m not using you as a pawn.’
‘That’s it!’ Richard exclaims, relieved in spite of himself.
‘If I seem unruffled, I suppose it’s because I’ve known what Ben Fitzmaurice and Andrew Jarvis are capable of for years.’
‘I don’t see how Ben’s involved. I mean, clearly his poor sister was the victim of this awful attack and I’m sure he’s still grieving her death, which was a terrible thing.
Just terrible.’ Richard gets lost, momentarily, in his own expressions of sympathy.
‘But surely this is all Jarvis? I mean, what a bastard.’ He is working himself up now, thinking of Hannah.
‘Spiking her drink and raping her? When she was already in such a bad way? Disgusting. I knew I didn’t like him.
Knew it. You know, Martin, I’m a pretty good judge of character. Always have been.’
There is no time to examine the truth of this (if he did, he would find it wanting) because he’s interrupted by a woman in a black trouser suit, wearing a lanyard around her neck and carrying a pot of heated dumplings.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ She points to the empty stool next to Richard who, reflexively, shakes his head.
‘No, please,’ he says, gesturing to the seat.
Just as the woman begins to sit down, Martin says, ‘Actually, would you mind giving us some space?’
He says it calmly but in a way that makes it clear there is only one acceptable answer.
The woman, sensing this, moves away and Richard understands that Martin’s lack of emotion, his inability to read social cues or experience normal levels of embarrassment is what gives him a curious kind of power.
After all, you can’t win a game against someone who ignores the rules, or who isn’t aware of them in the first place.
‘It’s not just Jarvis,’ Martin says, lowering his voice. ‘It’s Ben who covered it up.’
Richard opens his mouth to speak but finds he has nothing to say. Martin reaches across the table to retrieve the folder. He flicks through the pieces of paper, then retrieves a scribbled sheet of foolscap and passes it back over to Richard.
‘You’ll see here’ – Martin points at the relevant passage – ‘a memo written by a very senior member of the Metropolitan Police, detailing a meeting he had with the Rt Hon Ben Fitzmaurice in which he was told to hush things up.’
‘But why would he write a memo?’
‘One can only assume the officer in question had a crisis of conscience. As much as I despise the police, I suppose it can occasionally be the case that there is a good apple in the barrel of rotten ones.’
‘And how did you get this?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘Sorry, but it is. I barely know you, Martin. If I’m meant to trust you on this, I need to be told where it’s from.’
Martin sighs, then glances around quickly to check he’s not being overheard.
‘A contact of mine knows an undercover police officer who has access at the highest levels. I’ve checked it all out. It’s real. If you use this – and I highly recommend that you do, given your own political ambitions – it has the capacity to destroy them; Ben, Jarvis, the lot of them.’
‘My political ambitions?’
‘Well, I assume you want to be PM? All politicians do.’
Richard is taken aback. Does he want to be prime minister?
He used to. But when he got to Parliament and saw how it was run like a fusty Oxbridge college, he began to understand the impossibility of it for someone like him, who didn’t have the right kind of connections or scratch the right kind of backs.
The British wanted to believe their democracy was meritocratic in the same way children wanted to believe Father Christmas was real.
Richard picks at a hangnail. A thin line of red appears at his cuticle as it starts to bleed. He wipes it with one of the paper napkins.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says. ‘I thought you and Ben were friends. Why would you want to do this?’
‘“Friends” is a loose term when it comes to Ben,’ Martin says.
‘I’ve known where I stand with the Fitzmaurices for a long time.
They think I don’t see it, but I do. I know they laugh at me.
I know they think I’m a pliant little lapdog, but I despise them as much as they despise the rest of us for not being them. ’
Richard thinks back to all those occasions when Ben and Jarvis said something cruel or demeaning or arrogant.
The time Jarvis called by-election voters in Staffordshire ‘flat-capped wankers’ or the time Ben laughed at an elderly woman for her Cockney accent when she stopped and asked him for a selfie.
He thinks of the casualness with which Ben and Jarvis assume power is theirs for the taking, and the sadness he feels when he realises they’re correct.
He thinks of his grammar school and how hard he worked and how his history teacher gave him extra tuition for his Oxford interview because ‘the poshos have it all sewn up otherwise’.
He thinks of Durham University and the rugby crowd who once forced him to drink down a pint of urine and vomit simply because he wore the wrong kind of tie.
He thinks of the Houses of Parliament, designed to resemble the stately homes and public schools and Oxbridge colleges of those chosen to rule from birth.
He thinks of hereditary peerages and Masonic handshakes and private members clubs.
He thinks of being left out of all the important campaign decisions and of Ben and Jarvis talking over him as if he were mere furniture.
‘Why are you giving this to me?’ Richard asks. ‘You don’t even like me.’
‘I don’t know you enough to like you. But I see some similarities between us, in our backgrounds, our outlook, the way we’re treated. We’re both outsiders, aren’t we? I’d rather have you in power than Ben. And Jarvis belongs behind bars. Quite frankly, they both do.’
Richard looks around, fearful they will be overheard. But the crowd has thinned. There are only a couple of customers left, sitting in the corner, too far away to listen in.
‘You don’t need to know what motivates me,’ Martin continues. ‘You need to know what motivates you. Do you really want someone who did this to his own sister running the country? He protected Jarvis because he needs his money. They always have each other’s backs and they always will.’
Martin pauses, then adds: ‘You know Fliss left a suicide note?’
Richard shakes his head.
‘She did. In Bali. That’s in the folder too. She killed herself. It wasn’t an accident, like the Fitzmaurices say. She killed herself because of what they did to her.’
‘God, how awful,’ Richard says.
‘And that’s not all,’ Martin continues. ‘When we were at university, Ben killed a woman. He was drunk at the wheel of a car. I took the blame and they paid me off and hushed it up with the police like they always do. But that’s not going to happen again, Richard.
I’m just … not going to let it happen again. ’
Martin breaks off. He re-adjusts his pocket square, pulling it half a millimetre to the right. He takes one long breath in through the nose before he speaks again. When he does so, his voice is low and urgent.
‘Fliss was the only one of them who was kind to me,’ he says. His face softens for the briefest instant before switching back to its lacquered neutrality. But Richard notices it. There is real feeling there. He reaches across the table and takes the folder.
He walks into the afternoon swathe of Piccadilly traffic with the folder tucked into his briefcase. There are grey clouds in the sky and a light drizzle settles across his face like a veil. He buttons up his Nehru jacket and asks himself, for at least the fifth time that day: what would Hannah do?