Crocodile Tears Read Online Free Page A

untangling her iPod. Alex was in the front. It was the first time he had been alone with Edward Pleasure since the south of France, and he felt a little uncomfortable. The journalist must have known about his involvement with MI6. Sabina would have told him everything that had happened. But the two of them had never discussed it, as if it was somehow impolite.
    “It’s good to have you with us, Alex,” Edward muttered. He was deliberately keeping his voice down so that Sabina, plugged into Coldplay, wouldn’t hear. “I know Sab was really glad you could tag along.”
    “I’ve had a great time,” Alex said. He thought for a moment, then added, “I’m not sure about tonight, though.”
    Edward smiled. “We don’t have to stay too long if you don’t want to. But what Liz said was right. Nobody celebrates New Year like the Scottish. And Kilmore Castle is quite a place. Dates back to the thirteenth century. It was torn down in the Jacobite rising and stayed more or less in ruins until it was bought by Desmond McCain.”
    “Isn’t he the man you’re writing about?”
    “That’s right. He’s the main reason we’re going. The Reverend Desmond McCain.” Edward reached down and flicked a switch, blowing hot air over the window. The windshield wipers were doing their best, but snow was still sticking to the glass. It was warm and cozy inside the car, in marked contrast with the world outside. “He’s an interesting man, Alex. Do you want to hear about him?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Well, you’ve probably read a bit about him in the papers. He was brought up in an orphanage in east London. No parents. No family. Nothing. He’d been abandoned in a shopping cart, wrapped in a plastic bag . . . McCain Frozen Fries. That’s how he got his name. He was fostered by a couple in Hackney, and from that moment things started going better for him. He did well at school . . . particularly at sports. By the time he was eighteen, he had become a famous boxer. He won the WBO world middleweight title twice, and everyone thought he’d make it a hat trick before he got knocked out in the first round by Buddy Sangster in Madison Square Garden in 1983.”
    “What happened to Buddy Sangster?” Alex asked. He’d heard the name somewhere before.
    “It’s funny you should ask. He died a year later. He fell under a train in the New York subway. They showed his funeral on TV. One of his fans even sent a hundred black tulips to the funeral. I remember hearing that . . .” Edward shook his head. “Anyway, Desmond McCain wasn’t boxing anymore. His jaw had been smashed up pretty badly. He went to some plastic surgeon in Las Vegas, but it was a botch job and it never healed properly. To this day he eats only soft food. He can’t chew. But it wasn’t the end of his career. He went into business . . . property development, and he was very good at it. There were a dozen tenants in Rotherhithe, down on the River Thames, and somehow he persuaded them to sell cheaply to him, and then he knocked down their houses and put up a bunch of skyscrapers and made a fortune.
    “That was about the time that he became interested in politics. He’d given thousands of dollars to the Conservative party, and suddenly he announced he wanted to be a member of Parliament. Of course, they welcomed him with open arms. He was rich, he was successful—and he was black. That was part of it too. And the next thing you know, he managed to get himself elected in a corner of London that hadn’t voted Conservative since the nineteenth century, and even then it had only been by mistake. People liked him. It was the typical rags-to-riches story . . . you could say plastic bag to riches in his case. He got a big majority, and a year later he was a minister in the department of sport. There was even talk that he could become our first black prime minister.”
    “So what went wrong?”
    Edward sighed. “Everything! It turned out that his business hadn’t been