Stella Rimington: At Risk

Anne Lakeby woke to see Perry standing in front of the open bed room window, looking out over the garden towards the sea. The day was a clear one, sharpened by the suggestion of a salt breeze, and her husband looked almost priestly in his long Chinese dressing gown. His hair was damp, and had been smoothed to a dull gleam by the twin ivory-backed hairbrushes in the dressing room. He also appeared to have shaved.

The old bugger certainly brushed up well, she thought, but it was unlike him to take quite this much trouble so early in the day. Squinting at the alarm clock she saw that it was barely 7 a.m. Perry might have been a passionate admirer of Margaret Thatcher, but he had never shared her predilection for early rising.

As Perry pulled the window shut, Anne closed her eyes, feigning sleep. The door closed, and five minutes later her husband reappeared with two coffee cups and saucers on a tray. This was truly alarming. What on earth had he got up to in London the day before to prompt a gesture like this?

Placing the tray on the carpet with a faint rattle, Perry touched his wife’s shoulder.

Anne mimed her own awakening. “This is a… nice surprise.” She blinked drowsily, reaching for the glass of water on the bedside table. “To what do I owe…”

“Put it down to global warming,” said Perry expansively. “I was expecting a titanic hangover after last night, but a benign deity has stayed his hand. The sun, moreover, is shining. It is a day for gratitude. And possibly for burning the last of the autumn leaves.”

Anne pulled herself into a sitting position against the pillows and struggled to collect her thoughts. She was not sure that she quite believed in this considerate, coffee-making version of her spouse. He was definitely up to something. His bullish manner reminded her of the time when he had got her to buy those Corliss Defence Systems shares. The breezier his demeanour, in her experience, the closer to the wind he was sailing.

“They really are the bloody end though, aren’t they?” Perry continued.

“Who? Dorgie and Diane?” Dorgie was Anne’s nickname for Sir Ralph Munday, whose snouty features reminded her of one of the Queen’s corgi-dachshund crosses. Inasmuch as the Lakebys and the Mundays owned the two largest and most consequential properties in Marsh Creake, they considered themselves “neighbours,” although in reality their houses were a good half-mile apart.

“Who else? All that awful shooting talk. High cocks… full choke at fifty yards… he sounds as if he’s learned the whole thing from a book. And she’s worse, with her-”

“Where does he shoot?”

“Some pop-star syndicate near Houghton. One of the members, Dorgs was telling me, made his money out of internet porn.”

“Well, you shoot with an arms dealer,” said Anne mildly, stirring her coffee.

“True, but that’s all very ethical these days. You can’t just flog the stuff to African dictators off the back of a lorry.”

“Johnny Fortescue paid for the restoration of the library ceiling at Holt by selling electronic riot batons to the Iraqi secret police. I know, because Sophie told me.”

“Well, I’m sure it was all completely tickety-boo and DTI-approved at the time.”

They drank their coffee in silence for a few moments.

“Tell me something,” said Anne, her tone exploratory. “You know Ray?”

Perry looked at her. Ray Gunter was a fisherman who lived in the village and who kept a couple of boats and a tangle of lobster-nets on the two-hundred-yard stretch of private beach at the end of the Hall’s grounds. “I ought to, after all these years. What about him?”

“Do we absolutely have to keep up this business of him coming and going through the grounds? To be perfectly honest, he rather gives me the creeps.”

Perry frowned. “In what way?”

“He’s just… sinister. You turn a corner and there he is. The dogs don’t like him, either.”

“The Gunters have had boats there since my grandfather’s time, at least. Ray’s father-”

“I know, but Ray’s father is dead. And where Ben Gunter was the nicest old boy you could hope to meet, Ray is frankly…”

“Yobbish?”

“No, worse than that. He’s sinister, like I said.”

“I don’t agree. He may not be the world’s most sparkling conversationalist, and he probably niffs a bit, but that’s fishing for you. I think we might get into all sorts of trouble if we tried to run him off the place. The local press would have a field day.”

“At least let’s find out what our legal position is.”

“Why go to the expense?”

“Why not? Why are you so…” She placed her coffee cup on the bedside table, and reached for her glasses. “I’ll tell you something else Sophie told me. You know the sister?”

“The Gunter sister? Kayleigh?”

“Yes, Kayleigh. Apparently the girl who does the Fortescues’ garden was at school with her, and told Sophie that she-Kayleigh, that is-works a couple of nights a week in a club in King’s Lynn as a stripper.”

“Really?” Perry raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know King’s Lynn offered such lurid temptations. Did she mention the name of the club?”

“Perry, stop it. The point I’m making is that the present generation of Gunters are not quite the simple fisherfolk their parents were.”

Perry shrugged. “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

He walked back to the window. Looked out over the shining expanse of Norfolk coastline to the east and west of them. “Times change,” he murmured, “and we change with them. Ray Gunter’s doing us no harm at all.”

Anne removed her glasses and placed them on the side table with an exasperated snap. Perry could be wilfully obtuse when he wanted to be. She was worried, too. After thirty-five years of marriage she could tell when he was up to something-and he was up to something now.

N u-Celeb Publications of Chelmsford, Essex, occupied a low modular building on the Writtle Industrial Estate to the southwest of the town. The premises were spare and utilitarian, but they were warm, even at nine in the morning. Melvin Eastman hated to be cold, and in his glass-walled office overlooking the shop floor the thermostat was set to 20° Centigrade. At his desk, still wearing the camel-hair overcoat in which he had arrived ten minutes earlier, Eastman was examining the front page of the Sun newspaper. A smallish man with neatly dressed hair of a slightly unnatural blackness, his features remained expressionless as he read. Finally, leaning forward, he reached for one of the telephones on the desk. His voice was quiet, but his enunciation precise.

“Ken, how many of those Mink Parfait calendars have we had printed up?”

On the floor below, his foreman looked up at him. “ ‘Bout forty thou, boss. Should be the big Christmas seller. Why?”

“Because, Ken, Mink Parfait are splitting up.” Taking the newspaper, he held it up so that it was visible to the foreman.

“You sure it’s kosher, boss? Not some publicity…”

Eastman laid the paper down on his desk. “ ‘Citing personal and musical differences,’ ” he read, “ ‘Foxy Deacon confirmed that the four-strong girl group would be going their separate ways. “We know that this’ll come as a shock to the fans,” says FHM cover girl Foxy, 22, “but we wanted to end things on a high.” Insiders claim that tensions within the group date from…’ etcetera. We’re not going to be able to give those calendars away.”

“I’m sorry, boss. I dunno what to say.”

Eastman replaced the phone and admitted a frown to the pallid moonscape of his face. It was an unpromising start to the day. Nu-Celeb was not the only iron that he had in the fire-the celebrity calendar business had been created as cover for a raft of other, less legal activities that had made him a millionaire many times over. But it still irked him that he could take a bath to the tune of twenty large on the whim of a bunch of scrubbers like Mink Parfait. Half-caste scrubbers at that. Melvin Eastman did not subscribe to the dream of a multicultural Britain.