The resulting melange of glutinous sentimentality when disputants were reconciled, and blood on the carpet when they weren’t, was so much to the depraved taste of twenty-first-century Britain that Shandy had now joined the crowded ranks of those minutely talented, monstrously ego’d ‘media personalities’ whose contracts were worth millions.
Maggie knew that today he was spending some of his loose change on a luncheon party on the Shah-Boat, the former Shah of Persia’s luxury yacht, found rusting in a remote backwater of the Black Sea by a Russian oil millionaire, restored to its previous opulence, and towed to its present location on Victoria Embankment where it had rapidly become the location of choice for those who liked to combine the maximum of privacy for their parties with the maximum of publicity for their personal wealth.
Anybody with pretensions to being somebody would have been invited. Beanie the Bitch certainly fell into that category, and presumably, as her current server, Gwyn Jones too.
So whatever it was that had brought the journalist to the Centre opening had been worth missing the party of the week for, as well as presumably pissing off the Bitch.
If something was brewing that might affect her employer, Maggie Pinchbeck wanted to know. The potentially most fruitful line of enquiry had to be via Beanie Sample. Of course she might know nothing, but if she did, there were two reasons why she might be persuaded to share it.
The first was that Jones’s defection had probably left her feeling seriously irritated, and the Bitch was famous for not getting mad but getting even.
The second was that she owed Maggie Pinchbeck.
At an early age Maggie had looked at herself, accepted that she was insignificant and turned insignificance into an art form. Raising funds for ChildSave had been her training ground. ‘She’s like a bloody pickpocket,’ one Captain of Industry had said wonderingly. ‘You hardly notice she’s around, then a bit later on, you realize your wallet’s disappeared!’ Working for Dave in that twilight zone where politics meets the media, she’d soon discovered that shadowiness got you places that brashness couldn’t reach. Thus it was that Maggie, seated unnoticed in the corner of a Fleet Street pub much favoured by the press before the great migration south, found herself listening to an alcoholic conversation between three old journalists haunting the place where whatever honour they’d ever possessed had probably died.
Their subject was the Bitch, who had clearly trodden on each of them at some point with more than usual violence. Their theme was revenge. Their proposed method was to put in her way a young man possessing all those attributes guaranteed to set her juices flowing. He, armed with the very latest surveillance gear, would make a detailed audio-visual record of their encounters. No journal with any sense would touch this stuff, but the Internet has neither fears nor loyalties, and the knowledge that everyone she knew was revelling in these images must, the trio felt, pierce even the Bitch’s famous defences.
Stage One, Maggie gathered, had been successful. The bait was on display. The Bitch was showing interest. But she was a wily old tigress who knew better than to pounce on any tethered goat. She would do a lot of checking first and the merry threesome were congratulating themselves on the thoroughness of their preparation, which they were sure would soothe even the most suppurating doubts.
Maggie debated what to do, but not for long. She knew Beanie Sample only by reputation and didn’t much like what she’d heard. But she’d been fostered in infancy, and though treated by her foster parents with much kindness, her two foster sisters had never let her forget her status. The result had been a sensitivity to injustice on a par with Jane Eyre’s.
She rang the Bitch at home. Getting through to her at work, though not impossible, would have taken a lot of time and effort. It was easier to extract her unlisted number from a common acquaintance who also owed Maggie a big favour.
To start with, Beanie’s sole concern was to discover how Maggie had come by her home number, which she dispensed like an oenophile sharing a 2001 Yquem. Ignoring this, Maggie stated the facts baldly as she had overheard them and rang off.
She then dropped the matter from her consciousness until it resurfaced a week later when the Bitch appeared at her flat with a huge bouquet of roses and a magnum of Mumm. They talked, but not for long. Both were too realistic not to face the fact that they didn’t warm to each other. But as the Bitch left, she’d said, ‘Remember, I owe you.’
‘You’ve paid me,’ said Maggie.
But that wasn’t really true. Being pollen allergic, she’d passed the bouquet on to the ancient lady who lived next door. As for champagne, the bubbles gave her hiccoughs and the magnum was still in her fridge.
Now as she drove back to her modest flat in Southwark, Maggie contemplated her next move.
She could ring Beanie at her apartment again, but when she would return from the party was anybody’s guess. Also she’d probably changed her number. Anyway, getting was different from giving information. For getting you wanted face-to-face.
She parked the car and climbed the stairs to her flat.
In the corner of her living room was a filing cabinet in which she kept anything she didn’t want her employer to have access to. From this she took an envelope, and out of the envelope she took an invitation to Tris Shandy’s party.
David Gidman the Third was definitely a somebody. Also, he’d appeared on Truce! to be confronted by a couple of angry constituents whom he had placated with considerable aplomb. The whole event had of course been carefully stage-managed, otherwise Maggie wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Shandy.
But the Shah-Boat party was something different. No way was Maggie going to risk seeing Dave head off from the Centre opening to such a potentially scandalous event, so she’d simply hidden the invitation.
Now it could come in useful.
She thought of changing her clothes, decided nothing in her wardrobe was going to make her look more like one of the Shandy crowd, and contented herself with adding an a to David on the invitation.
The security guards by the gangplank had clearly been chosen for their muscle rather than their political awareness. They checked her invitation against the guest list, showed no surprise that Davida should have been misprinted there as David, and even less that a female Member of Parliament should be plain and drably dressed.
On the boat the party was in such full swing that probably no one would have noticed if Captain Jack Sparrow himself had come mincing up the gangplank at the head of his band of cutthroats, but this did not stop her from taking precautions as she went in search of Beanie Sample. Moving unnoticed among crowds of people whose sole desire was to be noticed might seem an easy option, but there were dangers. She was long practised in the art of scia-mimicry, but the sight of Gidman’s shadow moving independently of Gidman might provoke someone to draw attention to her presence in order to draw attention to himself.
At one point in the main saloon she passed close to Tris Shandy and felt those shrewd Irish eyes register her. Happily before he could rummage through the bran tub of his memory for her identity, one of the three bimbos competing for his attention upped the ante by letting her left boob loose from the confines of its halter with all the subtlety of a cannon ball bursting out of a paper bag.
As Shandy, with the scholarly wit for which he was justly famous, called, ‘Fetch a warm spoon someone-better make that a shovel!’ Maggie slipped out of the saloon and found herself on a narrow walkway on the seaward side of the boat. Her luck was in, for there was the Bitch in all her flesh-flaunting finery, talking to a pretty black man Maggie recognized as a premiere league star. Coming between the goddess and her prey was not a good idea, and Maggie was preparing herself for a long wait when from the other direction arrived a young woman who clearly had no such inhibitions. Bearing all the episematic markings of the WAG, she shouldered Beanie aside with the gentle courtesy of Wayne Rooney on a bad day and bore her man along the walkway, filling his ear with the sedimentary vowels of estuary-speak from which Maggie, who could interpret whispers at fifty paces in a gale, excavated the phrases old enough to be your gran and fuck knows where she’s been.