The Bell Ringers Read Online Free Page A

thin-lipped smile that seemed to solicit something at the same time as suggesting postponement. She recognised that look: the steadiness of the gaze and the tiny pulse of energy in the eyes – the freemason’s handshake of the intelligence services – and she wondered about Mr Kilmartin with his smell of bonfires, his academic journals and well-thumbed pamphlets, which she now saw were seed catalogues. What was he doing there? Checking that nothing inconvenient was being alleged in open court? Making sure the government was not being accused of anything low or underhand? The former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee – even if only for areluctant and brief period – being blown up in a terrorist attack was after all something that must still concern the Secret Intelligence Service. She nodded to him and left the court, dodging the television cameras outside.

2
The Centre of Things
    Just three people were working in the Downing Street communications centre when the prime minister, John Temple, slipped in and sat down to watch a TV permanently tuned to a news channel. The lights had been turned off at that end of the room as part of the energy-saving fervour that periodically swept the heart of government and Temple remained in the shadows. He was in evening dress, having recently left a private dinner at the embassy for the American secretary of state, but even after a long day he looked his usual dapper and contained self. One of the garden girls – the secretaries that run the prime minister’s office – had pursued him into the communications department with a folder and now hovered about ten feet away wondering if she should disturb him. It was her presence that attracted Philip Cannon, the director of communications, who stirred from his screen, stood up and stretched, then moved slowly towards the prime minister and gave a cough by way of announcement.
    Temple looked up. ‘Ah, Sarah, what have I forgotten to do?’ That was the prime minister all over – blaming himself rather than the people who worked for him. He turned on a desk light and took the folder with a smile that involved squeezing his eyes shut and nodding. She pointed to a passage in the foreign secretary’s statement on the Middle East. Temple read it with the warmth still lingering in his expression then handed it to her. She beamed back at him and almost bobbed a curtsy. Temple’s manners, his inexhaustible consideration whatever the pressures of office, were such a contrast to his recent predecessors: one addicted to a dangerous informality where no one was sure what decisions had been taken until they read it in the next day’s papers;another given to sulks and rages and epic rudeness, in one famous instance turfing a young woman from her chair so he could use her screen.
    Cannon nodded to her as she left and moved to the prime minister’s side. ‘Is there anything that particularly interests you?’ he asked, turning up the volume of the TV a little.
    The prime minister shook his head. ‘Just thought I’d look in. How’s it going, Philip?’ Cannon didn’t answer because Temple’s attention had moved to the bulletin and a reporter who addressed the camera while trying to control her hair in the wind. ‘A coroner’s court in the picturesque market town of High Castle on the English-Welsh border was this morning shown dramatic footage of the moment a former senior civil servant was killed in an explosion in Cartagena, Colombia.
    â€˜David Eyam, once acting head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and confidante of the prime minister, was holidaying in the Colombian port where there has been a long-running campaign by the drug cartels against union power and the political establishment. Mr Eyam, who was forty-three years of age and single, was killed instantly by the blast. After it was discovered that Mr Eyam was a likely victim, the prime