Thunder in the Blood Read Online Free

choice of career, the one thing in his life that he wanted to do properly and do well. By nineteen, he was starring on a small Essex weekly. Two years later he moved west, to Bristol, accepting a job on a big provincial daily. He started on the general reporters desk. Within a year, he was business editor, filing copy by the yard, building a reputation for dogged footwork, exhaustive research and a bloody-minded defence of his right to ask the truly awkward questions.
    Colleagues I’ve contacted from that period talk of him with affection and some awe: a driven man in his mid-twenties with an uncertain grip on the world that most of the rest of us inhabit. He had no dress sense, no social life, little time for small talk or gossip. He had few close friends and never forgave anyone who lied to him or let him down. On the other hand, he was utterly loyal and immensely generous. Money, I can vouch, meant nothing to him. If someone else’s need was greater than his, he simply emptied his pockets and gave it all away.
    On 16 October 1985, after nearly a year on Fleet Street, Wesley made an appointment with his editor. The appointment and its aftermath occupy several pages in the loose-leaf ring binder that served at this period in his life as a kind of diary. Sitting down in front of the editor’s desk (‘totally fucking empty – just like his head’), Wesley explained that he was HIV positive. The editor,wrongly thinking Wesley already had AIDS, was shocked. In the interests of the paper, for the sake of his colleagues, he said, he’d have to review the situation. Wesley, appalled, explained the difference between HIV and AIDS. He had the virus, no question. The virus was at large in his body, knocking off the warrior cells. He was infectious, certainly, but he had no plans to screw anybody and it would be a while before the virus got the upper hand. Once it did and his body’s defences were shot to pieces he’d doubtless succumb to something horrible, but until then he was still good for the odd story or two.
    At this, the editor had evidently looked a bit dubious, and although he’d done his best to temper his disgust with a little sympathy, Wesley knew in his heart that his days in the sun were over. The newspaper world thrives on gossip and in his own small way, Wesley himself had become the current news story. ‘So how’s this for a sign-off?’ he confides to his diary.
‘Gay Plague Sweeps Fleet Street. Hack Banned From Newsroom. Bleach Sales Hit New High.’
    I went to London in mid-October. I met Rory in the coffee shop at Paddington Station and we took a cab to a small Malaysian restaurant in Soho. Upstairs, at a discreet table by the window, he introduced me to two colleagues. One of them was in his late fifties, a sombre, jowly man in a dark suit, not Rory’s kind at all. The other was much younger, crop-haired, neat, watchful. Neither, as it turned out, was much interested in small talk.

2
    I joined MI5 in time to attend the Curzon House Christmas party, an awkward, joyless affair that descended from perfunctory conversation and the exchange of witty presents to deep eddies of gossip, vicious and, past midnight, wildly drunken.
    The recruitment process had seemed, to me at least, utterly haphazard. The lunch with Rory and his friends had lasted no more than an hour, me doing most of the talking. Rory filling the occasional silences with a series of badly told stories that he’d dredged up from our social get-togethers in Devon. Several of the stories were pure fiction, designed somehow to convince our hosts that I was on the level, a good sport, heart in the right place, a safe pair of hands, and afterwards, when our hosts had paid the bill and left, I asked him what he’d been up to.
    The atmosphere throughout the meal had been chilly. Neither of the two men had bothered to explain themselves and I’d no idea why I’d been invited, or who or what they represented. If their intention had been to