One Of Our Ministers Is Missing

by Alan Johnson

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Another fast-paced and warm-hearted thriller from award-winning writer, and former MP, Alan Johnson.

A government minister in the Foreign Office has vanished into thin air.

On holiday in Crete, Lord Bellingham had been solo trekking in the White Mountains when he mysteriously disappeared. After a vast search and rescue operation, the local police have no leads, save for a mobile phone discarded on a cliff edge.

Assistant Commissioner Louise Mangan of the Met Police is sent to assist in the investigation but soon discovers that there are more layers to this case than the local police realise.

Lady Bellingham is less than forthcoming, the family nanny is hiding something, and a scandal is brewing back in London that could destroy the minister's reputation for good.

Under pressure from the powers that be, can Louise find the missing minister, or will she discover something much more sinister at play?

(P) 2022 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: September 1, 2022

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Brady walked with the swagger of a man who considered himself invincible. Over six feet tall, with strong features and a full head of dark hair flecked with grey, his weight was the same in middle age as it had been when he was twenty. On this lovely spring day, the first good weather of the year, he cut an impressive figure sauntering along Stoke Newington High Street towards Stamford Hill, on his way to confirm a business transaction – one of only two he’d need to make in 2017.

At a hundred grand a time, Brady could live comfortably on a couple of jobs a year. It helped that his earnings were untaxed, and that he operated at the expensive end of the market – because he was good, very good, at what he did. In a sector filled with novices, blowhards and psychopaths, Brady was the supreme professional.

Raised in west Belfast during the Troubles, he’d been recruited by republican paramilitaries as a sixteen-year-old. They’d trained him well, soon discovering that Brady had all the qualities required of an expert sniper: discipline, concentration, sound judgement and an inexhaustible reserve of patience.

He and his wife had been living in this opulent part of north London for fifteen years. Cathleen had no idea how her husband earned his money. She thought he was an international trader in gilts and bonds, who worked from home except when he had to attend meetings or conferences – a couple of times a year.

Discipline, concentration, sound judgement and an inexhaustible reserve of patience; characteristics essential to the success of a contract killer.

The swagger was a mannerism that Brady had never quite managed to eliminate. While his profession demanded that he attract as little attention as possible, his height made that difficult. The way he walked was a product of his physique, enhanced by the need to look menacing in the tough district in which he’d been raised. He’d acquired a gum-chewing habit in his youth, finding that it aided concentration, but had never taken to smoking or drinking. Chewing was his only vice – apart from killing.

His destination on this fine spring morning was Clissold Park. He always finalised business deals there, in the open air, immune to any covert listening devices. His services were advertised on the dark web, along with those of hundreds of self-styled hitmen, enforcers and eliminators. He knew that all but a handful of the ads were put up by fantasists. Of that handful, most were likely to have been posted by criminal gangs with dubious credentials – Serbian knuckleheads, as he thought of them – or by the police posing as hitmen in entrapment operations.

In almost twenty years, most of that time in London, Brady had never come close to getting caught. In the early days, his engagements would come by word-of-mouth, through former colleagues in Northern Ireland decommissioned from the paramilitary struggle by the peace process. As Brady’s skills were honed and his reputation grew in Northern Ireland, he realised he couldn’t risk staying in the vicinity of his former activities. He needed a bigger stage. That was when he’d moved from Belfast to London. The only thing that came with him was the false identity his former comrades had provided; the birth certificate of an infant who’d died in a car crash in Enniskillen forty years ago. Once in London, he’d met Cathleen, and used his new identity to get married, buy a house and acquire a passport. Having an alter ego didn’t completely separate Brady’s peaceful domestic existence from his far from peaceful professional life, but it helped.

He knew that his crimes evaded detection because of the absence of motive, and because he was careful. As for the morality of it (and Brady considered himself to be a moral person), he had his rules. He only killed adults, never children, would have nothing to do with torture, and avoided killing priests and peace activists. Any job that involved the Middle East was refused (Mossad was too ruthless; Palestinian terrorists too fanatical), and while he occasionally contracted with organised crime, he insisted on remaining completely independent. Brady was an elite maestro, not a mob hitman.

As for method, he preferred the bullet to the blade, marksmanship being his particular area of expertise. But he wasn’t averse to other means of disposal – explosives, strangulation, falls from a great height. Once, he’d even slipped a lethal poison into a hospital meal to fulfil a contract against a man who’d survived a near-fatal shooting – near-fatal was not good enough for Brady. He’d also used poison when a contractor stipulated that no violence was to be used against the victim – a curious consideration, but it was not for him to question why. On that occasion, he’d hijacked a pizza outlet’s scooter to deliver a Hawaiian with extra pineapple and added strychnine.

His most recent job had been late last year – on Christmas Day, in fact. He’d been contracted to kill a married couple, Mr and Mrs Furnell, who ran a boarding house in Lincoln. Brady had no idea why he’d been paid to eliminate the Furnells. His customers had no requirement to provide a motive. Neither was it necessary for him to dislike the people he was about to kill. He’d grown fond of Mrs Furnell in particular, having lived beneath her roof for a week planning the operation.

She was a small, plump woman in her forties who laughed easily and seemed to take a maternal interest in the welfare of her guests. Brady had told her he was a stonemason hired to advise on the restoration of the stone carvings in the roof of Lincoln Cathedral, and that for some unspecified reason, this necessitated him being in the city over Christmas.

On Christmas morning, he was the only guest, and Mrs Furnell had put a little wrapped present on the dining table when he came in for breakfast.

He never did unwrap that gift. He killed the husband first, the Glock 19 pistol with silencer attached placed against Mr Furnell’s right temple as the man tucked into his sausages and bacon, having wished Brady a Happy Christmas. When Mrs Furnell bustled in with Brady’s poached egg on toast, she let out a little cry of what seemed more like exasperation than horror as she saw her husband’s body slumped sideways off the chair. She hardly noticed Brady until he placed the gun nozzle against her forehead.

Knowing that the murders were unlikely to be discovered for a couple of days, he departed at a leisurely pace, with a double fee secured as a Christmas bonus.

As he walked past the cafés and patisseries, the trendy trinket shops, hipster pubs and avant-garde clothing stores of Stoke Newington, Brady felt the familiar tingle of excitement; the thrill he always felt at the prospect of a new assignment.

He carried a satellite phone in a bag loosely draped across his shoulder. An encrypted algorithm allowed him to talk to clients with no fear of eavesdropping and, because the phone bypassed local telecoms systems, no risk of wiretapping. There was a spot in Clissold Park where reception was consistently good. He already had one job in hand this year for which he would receive a substantial amount, his usual six-figure charge doubled to reflect the status of his prey. The one he was on his way to discuss now would be even more lucrative, and the two together would allow him to retire undefeated with enough money to live on for the rest of his life. All he needed now was the victim’s name. Most of the necessary information had already been conveyed over the dark web. He knew, for instance, where this job was to be carried out. Brady’s parameters were international, although most of his work took place in the UK. There would be further details to be sorted out, but this most crucial piece of information, the name, needed to be delivered verbally, via the satellite phone. The call was timed for twelve noon.

As he entered the park, Brady saw a crowd of young men playing football – big lads in their street clothes, representatives of the ethnic diversity of the neighbourhood. There didn’t seem to be any touchline, with the pitch extending to cover whatever area the ball was kicked into. If there were proxy goalposts, Brady couldn’t see them. As he walked to the spot near the tennis courts where satellite connection worked best, the ball, kicked with venomous ferocity, thudded against the back of his head. Brady felt a tide of anger rise within him. The blow was painful and, he suspected, deliberate. Having ricocheted between his head and a park bench, the football landed at Brady’s feet. He picked it up and held it defiantly as a muscular young man with razor lines cut through his hair in several directions confronted him. The young man wore a red T-shirt, was almost as tall as Brady and seemed, from the way his fellow footballers fanned out behind him, to be the leader. The gang stared at the man who’d picked up their ball as if he’d defiled some sacred object.

‘Give me the ball, man,’ Razor Parting said softly, his accent confirming Brady’s initial assessment that he was part of the Turkish community prominent in this area of London.

‘Aren’t you going to say sorry?’ Brady asked, chewing hard on his gum and looking directly into the young man’s eyes.

‘Just give me the ball.’ The order was repeated.

The park seemed stilled by the sudden inactivity of this twenty-strong crowd gathered around Brady. A couple of dog walkers ambled along in the distance; a few mothers were taking advantage of the spring weather to push their toddlers on swings by the park entrance. But essentially, it was just Brady and this bunch of teenagers. The situation reminded him of how he’d felt as a twelve-year-old, straying into a loyalist neighbourhood of Belfast and finding himself confronted by boys of a similar age but a different religion. On that occasion, two women on their way to the shops had intervened. Nobody was going to intervene now.

Still smarting from the smack of the football against his skull, Brady’s anger was exacerbated by the cocksure attitude of his antagonist, who was possibly one of the Stokey Mob or the Hoxton Boys, gangs who were notorious in the area but were usually a danger only to others in their age group. Brady was old enough to be their father, but they now posed a real and present danger to him. However, he was disinclined to hand over the ball without some sign of contrition from those responsible for the blow to his head – and his dignity.

As usual, he carried no weapons. Brady always left the tools of his trade securely hidden from the world and (literally) his wife. If he’d had his long-bladed dagger, he’d have been tempted to use it to destroy the ball, right there in front of this arrogant punk, and then fling the tattered remains back in his face. If he’d had his Barrett M82 rifle with him, just the sight of it would have sent this rabble running. If he’d produced his Glock 19 and fired in the air, it would have loosened their bowels. But he had nothing, just his fists, which he’d never been that good with, and his demeanour, with which he tried to convey how dangerous he could be.

The stand-off was about to enter its second minute when one of the lads behind Razor Parting stepped forward. ‘Sorry we hit you, dude, that was my bad – kickin’ wild as usual. Can we have our ball back, please?’

The tension snapped. Brady threw the ball to this peacemaker while continuing to lock eyes with Razor Parting, who stared back for several seconds before turning to join his friends, who were running off to continue their match.

Brady walked on, relieved to have avoided a more serious confrontation, but concerned about how close he’d come to one. Everything he’d achieved depended on anonymity, and anonymity depended on passivity. He’d thought he was programmed to avoid the kind of rush of anger he’d just experienced. The images of revenge disturbed him. Nothing must jeopardise the inconsequential life he led. Looking across at the chaotic game of football that had resumed, the players moving en masse towards the other side of the park, he could see the bright red T-shirt of Razor Parting. It may have been his imagination, but he had the distinct impression that the guy’s air of resentful malevolence was being directed towards him.

A few moments later, Brady reached the spot where reception was optimal, just inside the eastern perimeter of the park. At twelve noon precisely, his satellite phone rang. The client gave a name and waited for Brady to confirm. The phone had a voice distortion device fitted so that his real voice was never heard, although in truth he never said much anyway. On this occasion, Brady paused, realising how significant this killing would be. After a momentary hesitation, all he said was ‘Yes,’ before finishing the call.

The best time to visit Crete, according to most of those who know the island well, is in May, before the intense heat of summer tightens its grip. The temperate spring air carries a scent of herbaceous wildflowers – peonies, crocus and chamomile. Although sea temperature is a comfortable twenty-one degrees Centigrade, the beaches, rarely full even at the height of the season, are almost empty.

The Bellinghams certainly preferred Crete in spring rather than summer. They’d purchased a holiday home on the island in 2012, when villas were going cheap in the wake of the Greek financial crash, and had plumped for one on the south coast, where the hot, North African winds blow in across the Libyan Sea.

Edward Bellingham had just been ennobled when they’d made the purchase. Now, Lord Bellingham of South Ormsby (the place in Lincolnshire where he’d been born into wealth and privilege) was a junior minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and felt an increasing need for this Cretan sanctuary away from the pressures of Whitehall. In his early fifties, he was one of the youngest members of the House of Lords, where the average age was seventy-four. His fortune had been made in property development, but his passion had always been for politics. Indeed, Bellingham’s ambition had been to achieve ministerial office as a Conservative Member of Parliament, but he’d become so immersed in business that the opportunities for constituency nominations had passed him by. However, he had served as a Wandsworth councillor and this, together with his charitable donations, had earned him a peerage, accepted as a sort of political consolation prize. At least it provided the status he’d always craved without the botheration of having to represent a constituency.

Sitting on the terrace of his villa in the hills above Agia Galini, he could feel the stresses and tensions of London drain from his system. His wife, Miranda, and the twins lived out here from April to September every year, and Bellingham had been able to join them for this spring break a couple of days ago. If he’d been an MP, taking a break like this would have been unthinkable. The Prime Minister had called a snap election for 8 June, and Bellingham would have been immersed in the campaign to keep his seat. As a lord, with no constituency to retain, the Foreign Secretary had allowed him to slip away for a week, as long as he kept in close touch with the department, where his ministerial duties included responsibility for Britain’s overseas territories.

His workload was hardly overwhelming. While this wasn’t the political pinnacle Edward Bellingham had set out to reach, it was a less demanding and very comfortable alternative. As he mused on this and other aspects of his fortunate existence, he was joined on the terrace by his wife, who was carrying two stubby glasses of gin and tonic, the ice cubes clunking like dice in a cup.

‘Here you are, darling,’ she said sweetly. ‘Something to remind you of home.’

‘I don’t wish to be reminded of home, thanks very much.’

‘If you’re not careful, I’ll replace it with a glass of warm retsina.’

Lady Miranda Bellingham wore a loose blouse over a swimming costume. Ten years younger than her husband, she had a good figure and an abundance of dark auburn hair swept back into a ponytail, which swayed from side to side in rhythm with her hips as she stepped gracefully across the wide terrace to where her husband was sitting. The contrast between them was stark, and wasn’t confined to age. Against her cool sophistication, he seemed drab and awkward. Of average height and with thick grey hair, his belly extended across the waistband of the unflattering khaki shorts he wore below an unbuttoned white shirt. His most distinctive feature was the thin moustache, of which he was inordinately proud, and which he insisted on maintaining despite his wife’s objections.

They’d met in circumstances that could hardly have been less conducive to a sustained relationship. For a start, the as-yet un-ennobled Edward Bellingham was already married. As for Miranda, she was a lawyer on the legal team that was trying to stop his company, Bellingham Developments, from demolishing several attractive old buildings in Norwich in order to construct a block of expensive apartments. Edward, seeing her across the courtroom, had been immediately smitten by her pellucid beauty. A couple of months after winning the court case, he’d been at a party organised by Bellingham Development’s legal representatives, and was delighted to see Miranda there. One of the partners at Chesterton, Kane and Palfrey, his friend Quentin Kane, wanted to poach her for the practice, hence the party invitation. Edward, while transfixed, felt awkward in Miranda’s presence, but persevered in trying to tempt her out for dinner. By the end of the evening, both Bellingham and Kane had achieved their objectives. Chesterton, Kane and Palfrey had a new solicitor, and Edward Bellingham had a date.

Bellingham’s divorce had been messy and expensive, but within two years Miranda had become the second Mrs Bellingham. A year later, the twins were born, and now, four years after that, Lord and Lady Bellingham sat on the terrace of their Cretan home contemplating the evening ahead.

It was five o’clock and the sun cast its angled light across the cypress grove that stretched for half a mile behind the villa.

‘Where are the kids?’ Bellingham asked.

‘Nanny is winding them down towards bedtime,’ his wife said, nonchalantly swirling her glass to redistribute the melting ice.

Bellingham’s first marriage had been childless, and in truth he would have been perfectly happy for things to remain that way in his second. But Miranda had wanted children – two, to be precise, and both, rather conveniently, had arrived together. She’d given birth to twins at the age of thirty-nine. ‘Nanny’ had been recruited three years ago, when Tyrone and Tess were a year old. Sharron Fuller, an energetic eighteen-year-old Geordie with a BTEC in childcare, wasn’t paid much, but had full board with the Bellinghams, and considered the five months spent in Crete every year as a considerable perk of the job. Miranda was determined to ensure that she and the twins spent as much time together on the island as possible before the restrictions of formal education descended.

‘Shall we go to Dimitri’s tonight?’ Miranda asked.

‘Of course. He’ll have only just reopened for the season, so it may be best to give him a call.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there’ll be a table for Lord and Lady Bellingham,’ Miranda said, tucking her legs up beneath her on the wicker chair. ‘We can hear all the local gossip and you can get Dimitri’s suggestions for your next hike.’

Edward loved walking on the island and was always keen to find new routes. He favoured ones that weren’t in the guidebooks or online: the ones only locals knew about. It was his favourite form of exercise. Indeed, it was practically the only one, save for an occasional slow jog round Putney Heath, near where they lived in London.

He longed to find a more adventurous challenge on Crete, to go higher into the mountains in pursuit of peace and solitude, although he fully understood the perils of simply wandering off unprepared into the unknown. There were ditches and ravines even on the shorter walks (which were all he could manage). His great ambition was to get up into the Lefka Ori – the White Mountains – and Dimitri, a walker himself, had promised to map out a route that would be as safe as possible and well within Bellingham’s limited range.

‘I don’t think I can risk a hike on this visit,’ Edward said. ‘Being incommunicado while my ministerial colleagues are engaged in the mucky business of democracy wouldn’t be good form. But Dimitri can give me a route for when we’re back in August.’

By eight-thirty, the Bellinghams had showered, dressed (casually), kissed the twins goodnight and were in Miranda’s Mercedes convertible, ready to drive away. ‘Nanny’ came outside to wave them off.

‘Be back around eleven-thirty,’ Miranda shouted as she reversed the car noisily down the drive.

‘Farewell, Nanny,’ Edward called as they drove away.

Sharron waved cheerfully before reaching for her phone to send a text. Being called ‘Nanny’ was just one of the many things she disliked about the Bellinghams. Now, for a few hours, the villa would belong to her – and her lover, who she knew would soon be tapping gently on the kitchen window, even as the Bellinghams’ car disappeared down the road to Agia Galini.

When Brady had left Belfast, he didn’t leave much behind. Both his parents were dead. His father had been killed on the Shankill Road by a bullet that could have been fired by a British soldier or by a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the notorious loyalist paramilitary group. As the eldest child, Brady remembered that, along with the sorrow, there came a sense of something being expected of him. Not yet thirteen years of age, he’d assumed a responsibility that nobody articulated but everyone – neighbours, uncles, aunts, cousins, the boys at his school – silently conveyed.

His mother had collapsed under the weight of her grief. Brady could still hear her awful cry of anguish after she’d gone to answer the knock at the door. It was said by relatives that the cancer that killed her two years later began then, on her doorstep, as two RUC officers, part of a heavily armed convoy, broke the terrible news. It was claimed by the aunts and uncles and cousins that the Shankill bullet had killed both his parents, one immediately, the other eventually. The military denied any involvement and the UVF never claimed responsibility. The only thing anyone knew for sure was that Brady’s father was the victim of an unknown sniper.

His four younger siblings were all girls. Nothing was expected of them. The obligation to avenge fell on his shoulders alone. His sisters married and moved away, one by one – to the South, mainly, with one going to Montreal having wed a Canadian.

In a sense, his own life had ended with the death of his father. It was as if a different person had emerged when the ice entered his soul, a man insensitive to the suffering of others, immune to feelings of guilt and regret. Just as some boys enter their teens wanting to be footballers or rock stars or airline pilots, Brady knew he only had one purpose in life: to avenge his father’s death. By the time he’d arrived in north London after ten years of avenging, he had become a different person. He was Brady, who continued to seek revenge with each lucrative agreement made to end the life of someone who had no connection whatsoever to the death of his father.

The easiest jobs were those where he’d simply be given the victim’s name and allowed to complete the task in his own way and at a time of his choosing. On this occasion, though, there were stipulations and he needed to meet the person the deal had been made with – the one who Brady always thought of as the actual murderer. In his distorted logic, he was merely a weapon, an unthinking, inanimate object. Expecting him to feel guilt at the death of a victim was like expecting the iceberg to feel bad about the sinking of the Titanic.

Sometimes, meetings like this would be arranged at Brady’s own insistence, so he could be doubly sure he wasn’t being led into a trap devised by a rival or even the police; although with the boys in blue, the methods of entrapment were so obvious that only the most inexperienced amateur would be fooled. This job was too elaborate and well-thought-out to be a hoax.

When contact was necessary, Brady always dictated the venue, usually a specific park bench in a remote corner of Hyde Park, which he could keep under observation from the high terrace of a hotel on Kensington Gore. On this day in early June, he was finalising the details for one of his two jobs this year. Combined with the one he’d accepted in . . .