LITMIR.BIZ

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Baroness Tessie Fremantle, the Miss Marple-featured former permanent secretary at the Treasury, would be among her colleagues. As would Dickie Greene, the hairy-eared, scarlet-jerseyed former director of the Secret Intelligence Service and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

      Every one of those now assembled in the room had done things in their past that they would prefer didn’t become public – cooked figures, spread deceptions, strangled careers, and in Dame Cecily’s case looked the other way while enemies of Britain were tortured, even killed. All of them were lined and creased by years of responsibility and hard choices. None of them had many years left. They were all ‘comfortable’ in the narrow financial sense, but they had all been uncomfortable, itchy and uneasy in the constricted world of retirement. One last adventure mattered much more to each of them than any paycheque that might be involved.

      Despite the high average age of its senior board and their general air of languor, PLS was a comparatively recent organisation. It had been founded in 1988 by some former members of the intelligence services, senior military officers and a few financial eagles to bring ‘advanced research techniques’ to British companies that found themselves in some sort of trouble. In the letters of association and early discussions about contracts, nothing remotely illegal was ever mentioned. ‘No guns, no bugs, no break-ins. Except as a last resort’ was PLS’s unofficial motto, and the company prided itself on maintaining a façade of utter respectability.

      Much of its work was simply about reaching the right people, and putting the right people in touch with each other. You wanted to build a power station in Turkey? PLS would find the minister whose approval was essential. You had failed to win a major contract in Russia? PLS would find out why, and would even be prepared to sell you the most confidential details of the winning bid. If a major bank was in trouble with the FSA over allegations of money-laundering in South America or the Caribbean, PLS could find out exactly who had opened certain accounts, who had been paid to do so, and quietly negotiate with the appropriate law-enforcement agencies in the US to smooth things over.

      Ex-ambassadors would pick up the phone to call State Department officials they used to play golf with, or former SIS officers would drop in on old contacts in Florida or Mexico City. If there were difficulties over some necessary but discreet payments being made to a Saudi prince in connection with a contract for a turboprop training aircraft upon which many hundreds of jobs in Walsall depended, Professional Logistical Services soon came to expect a call. Everything would be explained in due course: the no-doubt-necessary but not-discreet-enough payments had been ‘misunderstood’ – the prince, who was a humanitarian as well as a patriot and a businessman, intended to use the money to improve the working conditions of Bangladeshis in the Kingdom. The money was not baksheesh, but aid. And so the world turned, and the client book grew thicker. PLS opened doors most people didn’t even know existed. It was virtually unknown in the wider world. But its success rate was very high.

      The company’s offices were in a cul de sac by Green Park, a hundred yards north of Clarence House, sandwiched between a boutique hotel and the headquarters of a hedge fund. Analysts, number-crunchers and secretarial staff worked long hours in the small, cream stucco building’s quiet, wood-panelled rooms.

      In the hot, smoky room in Shepherd’s Market, Dame Cecily turned to Admiral Dalgety.

      ‘Really, Jock. Where is the little cunt?’

       The Romance of Fleet Street

      Every senior member of Professional Logistical Services had a file devoted to them in the offices of the National Courier. There were blurred old photographs, articles about long-forgotten defence-spending rows and minor departmental scandals, queen’s birthday honours lists from the old days, and obituaries waiting to go. But there was nothing that connected the names to each other, and not a single reference, even from the business pages, to PLS. And this, by the standards of the day, was a decent enough newspaper, still just about hanging on.

      All newspaper offices are much the same – the filthy beige walls, the desolate expanse of cluttered desks behind which wise old sacks of human indolence order the young and stupid about. Ken Cooper was the editor here, the commander of his own poop deck, not because he was the oldest, or the cleverest, or the most frightening – though he was fairly old, and very sharp, and borderline scary – but because he was more alive than anybody else in the office. His heart pumped richer blood. His lungs sucked in more of the sparse, air-conditioned oxygen. He laughed louder. His rages were more extreme. Even between the desks, even in the narrow corridor leading to the lifts, he didn’t walk so much as romp. He bounced and roared and flung his arms about when everybody else was catatonic with exhaustion; and so he raised up the cynical and made them care, he roused the bored and made them curious. He was the model of a newspaper editor, and his Anglo-Saxon was famously fluent.

      ‘Quintfuckingessence of fuck, in twelve-fucking-point bold fucking Bodoni. Fuck in eleven fucking dimensions.’

      ‘Well, fair point, boss.’

      ‘Fuck this fucking paper and all who fucking sail in her. We’re all fucking drowning. Fuck you. Fuck me. In fact, fuck me sideways with an Atex machine and a lot of fucking enthusiasm. And fuck my fucking wife while you’re at it.’

      ‘Didn’t know you’d remarried, boss.’

      ‘I haven’t. Fuck off … you … you …’

      ‘Fuck?’

      ‘Fu … fu … fu …’

      But by now a small smile was creeping across Ken Cooper’s face. He started to laugh. Eddie Fitt, the news editor, was laughing too. The pair had known each other since they had both started out as down-table subs on the Newcastle Chronicle. Fitt had made it to London first, and found himself hired by the great Harry Evans, before hopping over to little Donald Trelford’s Observer. By then he was ‘out’ in the great gay city, and having fun for the first time in his cramped, nervous life. Cooper had come down a year later, stayed on Fitt’s sofa, had his eyes opened about various people in the public eye, and worked his way through the Murdoch papers before the flit to Wapping, staying on after they’d made the move, surviving the siege and surviving Charlie Wilson, the Glaswegian editor he partly modelled himself on, who had called him ‘Fingers’. (‘Why Fingers, by the way, Mr Wilson?’ ‘Because that’s all you’re fucking hanging on by, sonny.’)

      In time he’d tired of life in Andrew Neil’s considerable and growing shadow, and had migrated to the Mail. There it was said that the fabled Paul Dacre called him a cunt ‘more affectionately than he had ever called anyone a cunt before’. He’d had enough bad relationships and gabby colleagues, and a salty enough tongue, to be a regular in Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’ column, but his experiment in marriage had turned him darker. It left him with a slouching, angry son and explosive weekly confrontations with his former spouse, who was then working for the rival Correspondent. When he got the call to go to the Courier, he’d rung Eddie Fitt, whom he’d long since outpaced, and asked him to come aboard (‘Poisoned fucking chalice, Eddie. Just your cup of tea’).

      ‘But Jesus, Eddie,’ continued Cooper, who had calmed down a bit by now. ‘What the fuck? Where the fuck is fucking McBryde?’

      ‘Dunno, boss. It’s very odd. He’s a bloody good reporter, but a bloody messed-up guy. I’ve left dozens of messages, voice and text. I’ve told him the headless corpse is our splash whatever happens, whatever he gets. I’ve thrown my bread. But from across the great black pond of Soho dissipation there comes back no response, no echo at all.’

      ‘OK. Well … he’ll show eventually. Meanwhile, here’s this to be getting on with.’ Cooper slung across the heavily marked and annotated wad of newspapers he’d been working on during his car ride to the office. ‘Tell McBryde to call me as soon as he turns up. And ask Carole, would you, to cancel my lunch with Lord fucking Fauntleroy. No reason. Oh yes, and get Scadding to come to my office pronto.’

      Lucy Scadding,

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