The Prime Minister's Affair

by Andrew Williams

Genres: Historical Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

London 1929. Very much not a land fit for heroes. Frenchie knows his occasional work for MI5 serves only the ruling classes. But he needs to feed his children. Scruples died in the trenches.

When Ramsay MacDonald, Britain's first Labour Prime Minister, is blackmailed by a former lover, Frenchie must go to Paris to buy her silence.

It is clear there are many people who would see MacDonald fall - the Conservatives, their friends in the press, even some of his own colleagues. But his own secret service? When Frenchie hears the other side of the story, everything changes.

The Prime Minister's Affair is another brilliant historical thriller from the author of Witchfinder, based on a real blackmail plot, hidden in the archives.

'If le Carre needs a successor, Williams has all the equipment for the role' Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: June 23, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

THERE WAS A time before the Great War claimed the lives of millions when Frenchie wanted to be a carpenter like Jesus. There was a time when he was proud to serve his country. Then its politicians broke their pledge to create a land fit for heroes, and Frenchie began to believe those who had done most to rouse the people to service and sacrifice had only been serving themselves. So now Frenchie was simply happy to have a job when so many were without one. Sometimes it was work for Special Branch, sometimes for Mr Maxwell Knight, and tonight it was a shitty little outing to Brecon for both. Mr Knight tried to characterise it as work of ‘national importance’. He must have thought those fine words would appeal to an old soldier and spy who had been decorated in the trenches for his ‘devotion to duty’. Not Frenchie; he kept his Military Medal in a kitchen drawer with the spoons, a scratched and tarnished reminder of wasted years, before the slaughter at the Front gave way to the scrape-a-living peace. Frenchie was a bread-and-butter spy now, no more honourable than the crooks, pimps and hucksters Mr Knight and his fascist pals paid for half-baked gossip and rumour. Principles were for the well-to-do, and duty for those foolish enough to believe they owed their country some – not for old soldiers, not for Frenchie.

But when spies bugger about in bars too long or loiter for hours on the shadow side of the street, they brood, they scratch, and food for the family table can seem like a poor code to live a life by. That was Frenchie as the sun dipped below the hills to the west of Brecon. He was standing on the last corner in a week of corners in dirty little Welsh towns he was unable to pronounce, his chase near its end, and on May Day, Labour Day, when working men and women were expected to demonstrate class solidarity. That was bloody fate for you, and as a working man he felt quite bad about it. During the war they said, ‘if the bullet has your number you’re done for’: May Day in Brecon the number was up for a couple of ordinary blokes called Owen and Eyre; and it was Agent Frenchie’s job to make it so.

Owen and Eyre were across the street in a little boozer called the Dragon. Frenchie had ghosted in and out of the pub and seen Owen at the bar buying beer for tommies; Eyre at a table persuading them to mutiny. How many pints would it take to convince them? And when their glasses were empty, Owen and Eyre were to walk to Brecon barracks to hand out flyers urging the rest of the garrison to do the same.

Frenchie reached behind his right ear for the dog-end he had left there. Desperate times. He would buy some more fags at the station kiosk. He knew it sold cigarettes because he had telephoned Mr Knight from the call box opposite.

‘It’s tonight, M.’

‘I’ll make the arrangements,’ had come the reply. ‘Ring me when the deed is done. Dudley 4832.’

Knight would be at a political meeting. The country was four weeks from a general election that the workers’ party – the Labour Party – was expecting to win. Owen and Eyre were workers – or they would like to be. Owen was an ex-miner, a father of four, Eyre an unemployed furnace man, and the talk at their pints and politics meeting in the Dragon would be of jobs and of workers uniting everywhere. Wrong shade of Red, lads! Poor sods. They were labouring under the misapprehension they lived in a free country: not for communists, boys, not for commies. They wanted to sweep away the old order in a Russian-style revolution – well, the old order was not going to stand for it. Those that had were terrified of those that hadn’t, terrified they would rise up and turn the pyramid upside down, that their grand houses would become hospitals, their estates collective farms, that aristos would be forced to pick up a shovel, and the colonies would revolt. That was why hounding unemployed butties like Owen and Eyre was work of ‘national importance’. Frenchie gave a wry smile. Think! The spark of revolution, lit on a chilly May Day in Brecon. Only, if the country was run well and fairly, how could it happen?

The fag-end burned his fingers and he flicked it into the gutter. ‘Here they come.’ On the pavement in front of the pub: Owen, 43, sturdy as a pit pony, his arm about a Tommy’s shoulders; Eyre, from Essex, 32, tall, sinewy, six feet of colliery winding cable, blathering to two more soldiers, a hessian sack of flyers over his shoulder. Unite to free the heroic workers and peasants of India, Soldier! If you are sent to serve in India, you must refuse to shoot down workers fighting for their freedom. Our guns must be turned on our real enemy – the thieving, robbing, British ruling class.

Their appeal to the soldier-workers of Brecon was printed on thin grey paper. Frenchie had followed the Communist Party’s courier from London to iron and steel Merthyr, and to a meeting of local comrades in a temperance hall. Then to a crowded pub called the Patriot, where he had watched the courier pass the flyers under a table to Eyre.

‘Who are you, butty?’ the barman had enquired.

Union rep and a stevedore from London was Frenchie’s story, and he had shown anyone who asked him a transport workers’ union card. A comradely visit – ‘let me buy you another’ – and he’d talked about the general election and a Labour government, and it was time for the people to seize control of the means of production. Yes, Frenchie had been a bloody bore, but his new Welsh comrades seemed ready to forgive him for being a Londoner and a little la-di-da because he was an old soldier and a worker too, with scars and calluses and money for beer. He had bought Owen a pint and listened to the story of how he was blacklisted for leading a strike. At closing time his new comrades had found him a bed for the night with an old grey woman who lived in a terrace beneath a slag mountain she called her old grey man. That was how the paperchase had begun. Dowlais to Aberdare, Pontypool to Mardy, he had followed the distribution of the flyers up and down the smokestack valleys of Wales, until the train pulled into Brecon, a different sort of town, a town with cow shit in the high street – and a barracks.

The comrades were walking towards the lights at its main gate now, Owen and Eyre on one side, Frenchie covering them on the other. They were taking their time about it too. Sober enough perhaps to recognise it was reckless, even suicidal, like storming a machine gun post without covering smoke, like Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Brecon was home to regiments that were famous for fighting natives with spears. Stitched into their colours were battle honours awarded for actions in hot places. An appeal by the comrades for solidarity with the peasants of India was bound to end badly. With luck the police would break up the ensuing melee before too much blood was spilled.

They crossed to Frenchie’s side of the street, the tall one, Owen, shortening his stride to keep in step with his companion. An old Vulcan lorry grumbled towards them, MR ANTHONY LEWIS, GROCER painted on a board above the cab. The whine and percussion of its engine filled the street with memories: a road through no-man’s-land, a procession of ambulances carrying wounded from a shell-shattered city, the crump of high explosives, and the stop–start roar of a lorry that would carry Frenchie in and out of the line for the rest of his life. A few seconds later, MR ANTHONY LEWIS, GROCER and his Vulcan turned left and the war retreated along the side street with him.

Soldiers were drifting back from the pubs and a score or more were chatting and smoking beneath the tower to the right of the barracks’ gate, enjoying their last minutes of freedom from barked orders and the clatter of the dormitory. Frenchie’s own Tommy years had begun in a grey stone mental hospital very like Brecon barracks. The army had commandeered the place for use as a training camp and its new inmates had charged across its grounds to stick a bag with a bayonet. The recollection of it made him wince. Eyre had missed the war somehow; Owen had done his bit. ‘Made me see the truth,’ he had confided to Frenchie at the Patriot. ‘Workers on both sides was doin’ the dying, see, and for what?’

Eyre handed Owen some flyers and one of them must have shouted a greeting because the soldiers turned towards them. Frenchie staggered like a local with a skinful of beer and came to rest against the rough stone wall of the barracks. Chin on his chest, he gazed beyond his peaked cap at the terrace of shops and houses on the opposite side of the street. Someone was twitching a curtain at an upstairs window, a member of the local constabulary, no doubt.

There was trouble at the gate already. A burly-looking Tommy was trying to wrestle the bag of flyers from Eyre. One of his companions waded in with his fists. Owen tried to haul him away. The soldiers would be under orders to kick up the dust. A tussle in front of the barracks was all the excuse the police needed to scoop up Owen and Eyre and charge them with affray. A crowd was pressing round them and more punches were thrown.

‘Christ!’ Frenchie murmured. ‘Arrest them, why don’t you?’

Perhaps the officer commanding the barracks had decided to teach them a lesson: the shit. His ‘chaps’ were sticking in the boot, in and out like a village hall dance.

‘Bugger it.’ Frenchie looked away.

Owen was a decent bloke, and Eyre didn’t deserve a beating. Flyers were spilling from his bag and scuttering along the street like the leaves of a fabulous tree.

‘Come on now, come on.’ Frenchie was willing it to stop, because the circle was tightening, the soldiers’ dance at fever pitch. One of Owen or Eyre was going to die while he stood there watching. Then with a surge of relief he heard a blast on a whistle and policemen poured from the house opposite and shouldered their way into the ring. Comrade Owen was hauled to his feet; Eyre was lying motionless. A plainclothes copper knelt beside him. They were going to have to carry the poor sod into custody. To add insult to his injury, they would charge him with ‘resisting arrest’.

Frenchie turned away. He felt empty, he felt numb, he felt as he used to feel at times in the big bombardments when he had ceased to care where the next shell would fall.

Knight said, ‘Speak up! You’ll have to speak up.’

For some reason known only to the municipal functionary responsible for planning these things, the public telephone at Dudley Town Hall had been placed on the wall outside its principal assembly room.

‘A second! Will you wait, Frenchie,’ he shouted into the receiver.

Inside the hall eight hundred Labour Party supporters were clapping, cheering, stamping their feet for Mr Ramsay MacDonald. ‘Our next prime minister,’ Sir Oswald Mosley boomed from the stage, and the hall rose as one to greet him. To witness so much passion spent on someone so ordinary was baffling. Hats off to Mosley because the warmth of the reception for Mac owed a good deal to his talent for whipping a crowd into a frenzy. Proof, in Knight’s opinion, that for all their talk of equality and fraternity the socialist comrades were in thrall to the natural authority of a strong and confident fellow like Mosley. An aristocrat, a baronet married to the daughter of a marquis, he was born to play a leading role in society. What a rum lot the ladies and gentlemen of the podium party were, really. First, Mosley, the socialist member for Smethwick; then his dear lady wife, standing in the Potteries, and to cap it all, Oliver Baldwin, the son of the prime minister – a Conservative prime minister – the candidate for the shoo-in Labour seat of Dudley. The communists would call them ‘class enemies,’ and while Knight despised Reds of all shades, he was inclined to acknowledge they had a point.

‘Mr Knight?’

‘Patience, Frenchie, please.’

As Mosley resumed his seat the noise in the hall ebbed to an expectant murmur. The leader of the Labour Party was ready to speak.

‘What do you think of Ramshackle, Frenchie?’

‘Who, Mr Knight?’

‘Never mind.’

‘The coppers were waiting at the barracks, as you said.’ Frenchie paused. ‘Owen and Eyre took a beating.’

‘That was to be expected.’

‘It wasn’t necessary.’

‘Well,’ said Knight, casually, ‘send me your expenses and I’ll leave an envelope at the usual place.’

No reply.

‘Well done, Frenchie,’ he said.

Again, no reply. Bloody man! Frenchie had hung up on him: damned cheek of the fellow. Courageous, clever, resourceful, but not a gentleman. But his ‘casuals’ wouldn’t be of use to him as informers if they were gentlemen. Most of them didn’t give two hoots for the country and the threat it was facing from the Red menace, just as long as they had money for beer and whores. They were scum. Frenchie was different. Frenchie was an old soldier and army spy. Pity he showed no inclination to set an example to the rest.

In the hall Ramshackle Mac was speaking of his recent visit to Canada.

I asked the Canadian people what message I should bring home and the answer was, ‘carry on with your Labour work for Britain and the Empire.’

Knight returned to his seat and in his cheap tweed suit and collarless shirt, newsboy cap in lap, he looked indistinguishable from his neighbours. A foundry man perhaps or a panel beater – he liked to think he had the shoulders – no one would know he bought the Brilliantine he used in his hair at Harrods.

Canada’s great electrical development is being accomplished by socialism. The people have cut out private enterprise. Here in Britain, the Tories depend on private money and in return they hand out contracts to their friends in business. They dip their hands in the public wealth of this country and assets that ought to belong to the community are given away to just a few.

The men on either side of Knight clapped and stamped to wake the dead and there was nothing for it but to join them. That Ramshackle Mac had presence was impossible to deny. The timbre of his voice and his soft Scottish accent, his grey locks and thick ‘your country needs you’ moustache, his fine chiselled features and poetic brow; he was a distinguished-looking fellow, more handsome than a man had a right to be in his sixties. He spoke with passion and apparent sincerity and while Knight abhorred the message, he had to admit to a grudging respect for the figure cut by the messenger. Mosley was a fine speaker but head over heels in love with Mosley, and were the workers going to trust a rich man who needed to do nothing to earn his keep, only profit from the salt of their labour? What was more, he was a turncoat: first a Conservative, then an Independent and now Labour. Where next? Knight had heard a rumour he was unfaithful to Lady Cynthia, too. No, grizzled old Ramshackle was the one to watch. Goodness, he oozed sincerity. A Red Elijah, urging his people to turn away from the false gods of capital and the market.

The nation is rich, he boomed, and yet millions of pounds are squandered each year. Those who have, have not earned their keep, while the multitude who have not, toil all their lives and end them with nothing. This is a moral issue, the greatest of our time. The Labour Party will create a system in which the wealth producers – the working people of this country – may enjoy the rewards of their labours.

The fifty-something man sitting to the right of Knight brushed away a tear. These people … they were lapping it up. The fervour in the hall reminded Knight of a Non-Conformist revivalist meeting. Ramshackle need only give them the order to take to the streets and they would go. Small comfort he was not prepared to, because he was paving the way for more ruthless men who were – communist revolutionaries. Look at them, still on their feet! This was how it had begun in Russia! Ramshackle was paving the way for someone whose politics were a deeper shade of red, one of the wild men in his party – a British Lenin.

Knight rose and eased his way along the row to the aisle. At the door he turned to gaze back at the comrades as they launched into a rendition of their socialist anthem, ‘The Red Flag’. Mosley and Lady Cynthia were singing with gusto too. The podium party was looking very smug, and if newspaper reports of public opinion were correct its members had good reason to be. The public seemed ready to put Ramshackle Mac in Downing Street for a second time. The public! Those people in the hall singing their sentimental song of martyred dead and of raising their scarlet standard high.

A muddy echo of it chased Knight into the street. Major Morton was expecting him to make a report at half past nine. Punctilious, the major, every inch the soldier, war hero, patriot. ‘I have only one enemy in this life,’ he had confided to Knight at their first meeting, ‘and its name is international communism.’ They shared a conviction that the country had to be protected by any means necessary from that insidious foreign creed. Within a few weeks of their first meeting the public had made the mistake of electing a Labour government, the first in the country’s history. Ramsay MacDonald had become prime minister – but for only a matter of months. Major Morton and his associates in the Secret Service had seen to that.

Knight waited for the door of the kiosk to swing to, his pennies on the shelf beneath the telephone.

‘Operator? London Abbey 3624.’

Labour would be harder to dislodge a second time, but it was beginning to look as if those who loved their country and cared about its independence were going to have to try.

‘Abbey? Put me through to 3624 please.’

Major Morton had a dedicated line. ‘Abbey 3624.’

‘Major, it’s Max.’

‘How are you, Max?’ His voice was top-notch, Eton and army. ‘News from Wales?’

‘Just as we planned, only too late to make the morning papers, I fear.’

‘I’ll speak to our friends in the press, see what they can do. We want people to sit up, take notice.’

Knight bit his lip. Reds Urge British Soldiers to Mutiny wasn’t going to swing the election in favour of the Conservatives. The voters expected commies to foment trouble. A couple of Welsh comrades in custody would cause no more than a ripple in the press. No, Ramshackle Mac was the real enemy. Ramshackle was able to make socialism sound like a religious obligation. God forbid the electors return him to government. He would barely have time to plant his big feet beneath the cabinet table before Labour’s wild men, the real Reds, made their move.

‘Knight?’

‘I was at Ramsay MacDonald’s meeting in Dudley tonight.’

‘Ah.’

‘It was impressive, Major.’

‘Those town hall meetings … long on promises. He knows how to whip up a crowd. All passion and prejudice. Did he mention re-establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union? If he wins, the commissars will be back in London.’ He paused. ‘You know, we’re going have to manage things again. It won’t be easy a second time, but we will. Don’t doubt it, Max. For the country.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s hope the Conservatives are able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and surprise us all. Goodnight, Max. Goodnight.’

That’s that then, thought Knight. It was too late for a train to London. He was going to have to spend the night in Dudley. Ramshackle’s people were pouring out of the town hall and washing round the telephone box, laughing, chatting, some still singing, as if they were on a church outing, only their hymn was to equality and the redistribution of wealth. Working men in flat caps and hobnail boots, young women, permitted to vote for the first time, tradesmen, shopkeepers, hurrying for a bus or a pint in a town centre pub. Gazing through the grimy glass of the telephone box, Knight wondered at their ignorance. They could see no further than the bottom of the street. The trouble with democracy was that the many were as capable of making a catastrophic misjudgement as the few. The country needed men of wisdom and experience – guardians – to protect it from public ignorance and alien influences. Guardians you could trust to do what was necessary, even if it meant breaking the law. MacDonald was promising to raise taxes and nationalise entire industries. To what end? A socialist paradise? Another Soviet socialist republic? Putting power into the hands of Labour was to run the risk of a revolution. Trade union Bolshies had done their best to foment one during the general strike; and in the three years since, their ranks had grown. Damn MacDonald for being such a plausible devil: he was wooing voters with an insidious brand of soft pulpit socialism, and he was winning.

But all was not lost: Knight had been wrong to doubt the resolve of the major and his Secret Service associates to do what was necessary. They had moved decisively against the socialists five years ago and if the people were foolish enough to elect another Labour government on the thirtieth of May they would do so again.

SOME EVENINGS THE prime minister counted his freedom from the noisome cares of the nation in the few minutes it took him to walk from parliament to Downing Street alone – on many evenings of late. Days when his troubles seemed to march in battalions. On this particular Wednesday in November, the echo of a stormy sitting of the House of Commons pursued him from the lobby to the members’ entrance and into the cobbled yard below Big Ben. Shares falling; investment falling; production falling; unemployment rising. ‘Do something, prime minister,’ Conservative backbenchers had shouted across the floor at him, because ‘something’ was the privilege of opposition. He needed no reminder from the party of the well-to-do that working men and women who had trusted him and voted Labour were suffering. My God, he felt it deeply. They had invested prodigious hope in his government and after only six months their faith was faltering. Mr Ramsay MacDonald had put the cup to their lips and the cup was empty.

A fresh breeze was stripping the yellow memory of summer from the trees in New Palace Yard and chasing him to the gate. He paused to turn up the collar of his coat. An easterly wind always reminded him of home and, oh, how he longed to be there. In the night hours to come the wind would purge filthy London of its smoke, if only for a while.

A cab carrying an honourable member he did not recognise – there were so many – swept past him into Parliament Square. Before him as he turned out of the gate, the imposing white stone government building that was shared by Trade, Education and Health. There were lights on in no more than a dozen of its windows. Most of the servants of an empire where the sun never set had left their posts hours ago, most of his ministers too.

A motorcar honked its horn at him as he scuttled across the square into Parliament Street. The doorman at the Ministry of Health tipped the brim of his bowler hat and wished him a good evening. On the pavement outside the Foreign Office, three young men in evening dress were flapping at a taxi. One of them noticed him and whispered to his companions, ‘Alone and carrying his own case!’ Well of course! He was the leader of the Labour Party: what did they expect? Goodness, they must have read his story, the papers were constantly dredging it up: bastard son of a ploughboy and a girl in service; born in a but and ben cottage north of nowhere; and not too high and mighty to labour in a field or as a warehouse clerk. Now that ‘faitherless bairn’ was the tenant of 10 Downing Street – although not an entirely happy one. He missed his home, his corners, their ghosts, and his wife most of all. He was still grieving for her after eighteen years – he always would be.

The wind was ruffling the poppies at the foot of the Cenotaph, where a fortnight before he had helped to lead the country in mourning for those lost in the Great War. The newspapers had accused him of being a ‘traitor’ – he had been against the war from the start – but people respected him now for taking a stand and because he knew what it was to lose a loved one and soldier on with an aching heart. Turning into Downing Street, his pace quickened, driven unconsciously after years of campaigning by the need to appear vigorous and purposeful in a public place.

Duty porter Barnes opened the door. ‘Good evening, Prime Minister.’

‘Good evening, Barnes.’

‘Will you be going out again, sir?’

‘No, no.’ The porter helped him with his coat. ‘Miss Rosenberg, is she still here?’

‘I believe so, sir. Shall I tell her you’re back?’

Rosa would know because nothing passed her by. She would be answering correspondence and screening visitors to his private office at a time when most women her age were ministering to children and a husband, or making it their business to find one. Rosa of Number 10, the newspaper correspondents called her: she had them wrapped around her little finger.

‘And Ishbel?’

‘Miss MacDonald is home, yes, sir.’

‘Then would you ask her to join me?’

There was work to be done but first he would spend time with his daughter and his son, Malcolm. They lived with him on the second floor of the house. The grand rooms with crystal chandeliers, magnificent plaster ceilings, polished floors with Persian rugs, the paintings of his predecessors and of lords and ladies he didn’t recognise and didn’t care to, were on the ground and first floors. They were state rooms for the foreign dignitaries and visitors from the empire he received every day. The second floor was for the family and some of his own things, a place for quiet moments and memories. Step by step up the elegant cantilever staircase from glittering state to private felt like climbing from one part of his personality to another. Because there were times when he revelled in the company of grand society ladies and gentlemen, in wearing fine clothes and flirting, but more often he craved the quiet intimacy of his family life. He was the tenant of the entire house.

‘You look exhausted, Father.’ Ishbel was waiting for him at the door of the family’s drawing room.

‘Is Malcolm home, dear?’

‘Yes,’ said Malcolm, appearing at her shoulder.

‘You were in the Chamber?’

‘You spoke very well, Father.’

Malcolm was on the backbenches behind him in the House, and still only 28, while Ishbel was his housekeeper and hostess, as capable as her mother and just as bonny.

‘Would you fetch me a whisky, dear?’

‘The unions are up in arms about the Unemployment Bill.’

‘Leave Father alone, Malcolm.’

Feet to the fire, he let his head fall back, his gaze settling naturally on a landscape by Turner over the chimneypiece.

‘There’s a letter from Sheila,’ said Ishbel, setting the whisky on the table beside his chair. ‘She’s having a ball.’

Sheila was the baby of the family and in her first term at Oxford University. Middle daughter, Joan, was training to be a doctor in London. Three independent young women; his wife would have been proud of them all.

‘I have the auction house catalogue you requested, Father.’ Malcolm was moving behind his chair.

‘Later.’

‘And something from Lady Londonderry. At least, it has her husband’s crest on the envelope.’

‘Her crest too.’ He picked up his whisky. ‘Show me.’

Malcom was trying to suppress a smile, because he knew they were close. ‘Here, Father.’

‘I’ll read it later. We have cigars, don’t we? On the desk, in the Egyptian box.’ The box his wife had used for things their children counted precious, like first teeth and fossils and party ribbons.

‘Cigars but no matches,’ said Ishbel.

‘It’s not just the unions, Father, members of the parliamentary party are unhappy with the wording of the Unemployment Bill too.’

‘Yes, Malcolm, I do know that.’

‘Malcolm, would you please tell me where you’ve hidden the matches.’

‘What are you going to do, Father?’

He closed his eyes. ‘Wheesht, Malcolm, not now.’

His secretary was at the drawing room door. He knew it was Rosa because she made a point of tapping lightly, then more firmly to be sure. ‘Would you, my boy?’

‘Good evening, Rosa,’ he heard his son say.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, Prime Minister,’ she replied.

‘Coming, coming,’ and, gripping the arms of his chair, he rose stiffly and turned to smile at her. Petite, swarthy, dark-brown hair in a bob and dark eyes, she was dressed as always in something fashionable, even exotic: Rosa was Jewish, unmistakably so, at least to his mind.

‘I haven’t come about the papers you wanted, Prime Minister.’ She was ill at ease. He could tell because the East End of London had slipped into her voice. ‘A lady wishes to speak with you. She’s very insistent. Her card …’ Rosa produced it from the folds of a sleeve, like a music hall magician. ‘I told her to speak to your parliamentary office, but she says it’s personal. She’s refusing to leave, Prime Minister.’

The card was duck-egg blue and bore the name KRISTINA M. FORSTER in Gothic type. No address, no note or explanation: KRISTINA M. FORSTER clearly believed none was necessary. He frowned. Goodness. How embarrassing. His family knew nothing of his friendship with Kristina M. Forster. What was she thinking? Really, it was too bad. He was angry with her for presenting herself at the door of Number 10 at half past ten at night, and he was angry with himself for the poor. . .