Michael Dobbs - To play the king

'Oh, I say,' Stamper said once more as he rifled through the other shots.

'It was the equerry's bad luck,' Urquhart continued, 'that he should try to encash the policy with the wrong man, an investigative journalist who also happens to be a former operative for the security services. And so the photographs finished up in my drawer while the unfortunate lovesick boy has been told in no uncertain terms that his testicles will be ripped from his body should any copies find their way around Fleet Street.' He took back the photographs, which Stamper had been clinging to perhaps a moment too long. 'Something tells me, Timothy, that I wouldn't wish to be in his predicament in a few days' time.'

The two men laughed bawdily, but Urquhart noticed that Sally seemed not to be enjoying the moment. 'Something bothering you, Sally?' 'It doesn't feel right. It's the King who is doing the damage to you, not Mycroft or the Princess.' 'The limbs first…' 'But she's done nothing. She's not involved.' 'Bloody soon will be,' snorted Stamper.

'Call it an occupational hazard,' Urquhart added. His smile was stretching more thinly.

'I can't help thinking of her family. The effect on her children.' An edge of stubbornness was beginning to creep into her voice and her full, expressive lips pouted in defiance.

His response was slow and stonily firm. 'War breeds misery. There are many unfortunate victims.'

'Her only sin, Francis, is to be saddled with a healthy sex drive and an inbred English wimp for a husband.' 'Her sin is getting caught.' 'Only because she's a woman!'

'Spare me the collective feminism,' Urquhart snapped in exasperation. 'She's spent a lifetime living off the fat served at the Royal table, and the time has come for her to pay the bill.'

She was about to respond but she saw his eyes flare and pulled herself back. She wasn't going to win this argument and, in pursuing it, she might lose much more. She told herself not to be so naive. Hadn't she always known that a woman's sex was no more than a tool, a weapon, which as often as not fell into the hands of men? She turned away, conceding.

'Tim, make sure these get a good airing, will you? Just a couple for the moment. Leave the rest.'

Stamper nodded and took the opportunity to bend over the desk and rifle once more through the photographs. 'Now, Tim. There's a good fellow.'

Stamper's head came up sharply, his eyes flickering as he looked first at Urquhart, then at Sally, then back to Urquhart. The ember of understanding began to glow in his eyes, and with it rivalry. She was muscling in on his relationship with the boss, and had an advantage not even Stamper with all his guile and gamescraft could match.

'I'll get right to it, Francis.' He gathered up two of the images and looked sharply at Sally. 'Night, one and all.' Then he was gone.

Neither of them spoke for some time. Urquhart tried to appear nonchalant, taking great care to adjust the razor-sharp creases of his trousers, but the softness of the words when eventually they came belied their menace. 'Don't go coy on me now, O Gypsy.' 'She's going to get a very raw deal out of this one.' 'It's them or me.' 'I know.' 'Still on side?'

In answer, she crossed slowly to him and kissed him passionately, forcing her body up against his and her tongue into his mouth. Within seconds his hands were fondling, bruising. She knew his instincts were angry, animal. Roughly he bent her forward across his desk, sweeping his pen tray and telephone to one side and knocking over a framed photograph of his wife. Her skirt was lifted over her back and he was at her, tearing at her underwear, forcing himself inside, kneading the flesh of her buttocks with such intensity that she winced at the bite of his nails. She was prostrate across the desk, her nose and cheek forced flat into the leather top. And she remembered. As a young girl of perhaps thirteen she had taken a short cut through the back alleys of Dorchester on her way to the cinema and there had come face to face with a woman, bent low across the hood of a car. She was black, with bright crimson lips and gaudy eyes which were hard, impatient, bored. The man behind her was fat and white and had sworn at Sally, foul, disgusting words, but he had not stopped. The memory crowded back in all its chilling clarity, as Urquhart's nails dug ever more deeply into her skin and her face was pressed painfully into the scattering of photographs across the desktop. She felt like crying, not in ecstasy but in pain and degradation. Instead, she simply bit her lip.

Mycroft found him on the moors above Balmoral, where he often went when troubled and wanting to be alone, even in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and an easterly wind which had found nothing to obstruct or deflect it since it had gathered strength in the shadows of the Urals two thousand miles away. There were ageless spirits up there, he had once said, which lurked in the crannies of the granite outcrops and sang as they ran with the wind through the rough heather, long after the deer had sought the shelter of lower pastures. The King had seen him coming, but had not offered any greeting. 'I had no choice. We had no choice.'

'We? Since when was I consulted?' The regal tone betrayed a sense of insult and personal hurt. The anger – or was it solely the wind? – brought a bucolic flush to his cheeks and his words came slowly. 'I would have stuck by you.'

'You think I didn't realize that?' It was Mycroft's turn for exasperation. 'That's why I had to take the decision out of your hands. It's time to start following your head rather than your heart.' 'You have committed no offence, David, broken no law.' 'Since when did such things matter? I would have become a monumental distraction. Instead of listening to you they would have been sniggering behind their hands at me. You've taken such personal risks to carry your message across without interference and I would simply have got in the way, another excuse for them to sidetrack and confuse. Don't you see? I didn't resign in spite of you. I resigned because of you.' He paused, searching the mists which clung to the moorland around them and burying himself deeper inside the borrowed ski jacket. 'And, of course, there's someone else. I had to think of him, too. Protect him.' 'I feel almost jealous.'

'That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.' Mycroft's hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away. 'What's his name?' 'Kenny.' 'He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.'

The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.

'Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,' Mycroft explained.

'Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.'

'I'm very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.'

The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land. 'It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.' 'Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.' 'Meaning?' 'I'm not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.' 'By whom?'

'By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.' 'It would require someone who could sink very low.' 'The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of you, have no doubts. There will be more.' 'Then I hope I can find your courage.'