Chapter Fifteen
Lucas had been brought up in a vicarage, albeit a ramshackle, draughty, creaking one in a small Cumbrian village. His mother's early death had left him and his father reliant on a series of housekeepers, most of whom left in exasperated despair at the vicar's cheerful disregard for any recognised concept of domestic order. Lucas remembered the house as being chaotically cluttered, draped in a permanent veil of dust, and teeth-chatteringly cold in winter, the chill offset by the warmth of Joshua North's welcome to the constant stream of parishoners who seemed to consider the place their second home. Economic crisis notwithstanding, Hersham in the second millennium was a long way from rural Cumbria in the seventies. St Christopher's vicarage was well-kept and even bore the requisite ivy clambering over its red brick facade. As Lucas followed the women in, a wave of warm air and murmuring voices rolled out to meet them, and he saw Ben and Alice Ryder standing just inside, waving.
That's a relief. Penny had found Alice sympathetic immediately, while Miranda Callaghan, who had a far more dominant personality, tended to patronise her. So far, Penny had accepted that with a humility that Lucas knew was totally alien to Ros Myers, but he knew that, even in character, her patience had limits. As Alice led Penny deeper into the house, which was more spacious than it looked from the outside, Ben extended his hand.
"Good to see you, James." He had a disarming smile, and James returned the smile as he shook. "How'd you get on at the Job Centre?"
"The usual," James answered wearily. "Questions, forms, all the usual ra-ra 'must be positive' babble. Files of crap to read, and not a sniff of a decent job. Enough to drive you to drink."
Ryder grimaced sympathetically and guided him towards the murmur of voices. "Let's get you one, then. Go and join the girls; I'll load you up a plate."
"Thanks." James followed in Penny's wake as Ben diverted to a table on which food and drink were laid out. Miranda Callaghan had vanished, and there was no sign of Alex either, although there were around thirty other people in the room. James looked around.
"I thought there'd be more of a turn-out," he observed.
Alice rolled her eyes dramatically. "This is Bible Study, you know, James, not a local derby at Stamford Bridge."
"Bible Study?" Lucas didn't have to work very hard at making James's confusion convincing. Alice laughed, but it was Ben who spoke as he joined them.
"Officially, yeah. Cover, mate. Strategy. Lenin didn't call a full Central Committee meeting every time he had a bright idea. If ever the police or those bloody spooks try and poke their noses in, we're just a nice, well-behaved little bunch of Christians doing Revelation, not revolution." He handed them a full plate and glass apiece, but Penny demurred.
"I - I'm not really supposed to drink … the tablets, you know."
"This'll do you more good," Ben said firmly. "How's your dad? And the kids?"
Immediately, Penny's eyes filled, but with James's hand gently rubbing her shoulders, she managed to tell them. It was amazing, Lucas thought as he listened, how well his colleague could play the part of a distressed and vulnerable mother separated from her children. He couldn't imagine a scenario less suited to Ros Myers. He hadn't thought she had a maternal bone in her body; a bored indifference was her standard reaction to colleagues who brought pictures of children or grandchildren into work. He knew that she was an aunt three times over, but because of her family estrangement she hadn't seen her brother Philip's son for seven years, and she had never set eyes on her sister Sally's three year old twins. When Lucas had tried to commiserate with her over it she had dismissed him with a flat, disinterested, 'Forget it. I don't do kids, anyway '. Yet here was Penny was talking almost eagerly about how Tim and Abby were doing at their new ('temporary, of course, it's just temporary') school. Lucas smiled inwardly; Ruth's maddening, pernickerty insistence on getting both of them word perfect on their legends may have driven Ros to teeth-grinding distraction, but it was paying off. James took a few steps out of earshot.
"Sorry," said quietly to Ben."I know Pen goes on a bit, but I think it helps her - you know, to talk about the kids." He he took a sip of wine. It was thin, with a slightly vinegary after-taste that Lucas recognised from past experience; his father's diocese was fairly stingy with the Communion wine budget, too. "Where's Alex?"
"Probably closeted with Father Martin." Ben raised a casual hand in greeting to a young man Lucas recognised as Oliver Vine, the former Occupy activist Callum had identified from Waterloo Station's CCTV. Ben introduced him and then, with an amiable nod, moved away. Vine swallowed a mouthful of tuna sandwich.
"Your wife's here too?"
"Er - yeah. Yes, she …" James looked around. Penny and Alice were talking to a woman whose face was instantly familiar. Suzanne Anderson/Curran. The military officer's wife who was the leading light of the hospital protests; the woman who had apparently serviced a dead-drop left by the missing Thomas Laverne's wife. "Over there."
Vine's gaze followed his pointing finger, and then flicked back to him. "They said you're from Matlock?"
Who's ' they' ? "Pen's family is," James agreed. "Do you know it?"
"Bit. Used to go walking in the Peak District when I was a student at Manchester. Got an uncle still lives there. Malpas Road. How about you?"
"Acorn Ridge," James answered promptly, as Lucas silently blessed Ruth's relentless grilling. "Our kids are there are the moment - with Pen's parents."
"Yeah, I heard. Rough luck." Vine didn't sound particularly sympathetic, and Lucas's conviction grew that he was being given the low-tech Crisis Crusade version of a lie detector test. "Decent schools up there, though. Which one are yours at?"
Lucas could have answered - he had that memorised along with everything else - but as Penny was approaching, he took the more natural-looking route. "Sweetheart, what school is it again Tim and Abby are at?"
Penny blinked in surprise. "All Saints Juniors." She flicked a timid glance at Oliver Vine. "Jamie, they're about to start. Have you got the phone with you in case Tim or Abby ring? Mum's bound to tell them we talked earlier, and I don't want to miss a call."
"Course." He pulled it from his pocket as Alex Callaghan, flanked by Martin Cowley and Patrick Alastair, appeared through what looked like some kind of a communicating door in the back wall. "Here. Pop it on vibrate, though. We don't want One Direction going off in the middle." He winked at Vine. "My daughter's favourite."
"No accounting for taste," Vine said dryly. "Even in Matlock."
"Friendly." For a second, the steely glare of Ros Myers followed him across the room. Hurriedly, Lucas slipped an arm round Penny's waist.
"Maybe he's like us, sweetheart, been through the mill. Look, I'm just going to the er -" he gestured vaguely towards the hall as Alice Ryder joined them. "Save me a seat?"
"Course." Penny smiled faintly, and flicked a stray lock of hair from his eyes. "You need a haircut, Jamie." Alice laughed.
James grimaced. "Well, you'll have to do it. We -"
"Can't afford it, I know," Penny finished with immense weariness. "By the time we pay off our debts - if you get a job, and if we ever do - you'll look like a Neanderthal caveman."
Alice patted her shoulder. "Come on, let's bag a seat. There's a guest speaker first tonight. Miranda says he's really good. Used to be a government debt counsellor before he went freelance. He says he got fed up always being sent to sort out drunken layabouts who couldn't hold down a job if they were given one."
"That figures," James said sourly. "Austerity be damned, they still fall over themselves to help cases like that; good for nothing but living off benefits and producing kids on a conveyor belt. They put the wind right up the politicians - afraid they'll riot and grab what they can't buy. Look how they smashed up Walton the other night."
"Jamie," Penny hissed, looking in embarrassed apology towards Alice. "Sorry."
Alice shrugged. "He's right though, Penny. Squeaky hinges getting the oil, and all that. We're the ones – people like us who've studied and worked for years to make something of ourselves – we're the ones who get discarded like a dog with distemper." Her eyes and voice were hard. "Never taken a penny from the state, most of us, kept the layabouts in luxury with our taxes for years. I agree with him, and you have nothing to apologise for - none of us do."
She urged Penny towards a seat as James squeezed his way out. There was a toilet at the end of the hall, and perched uncomfortably on the very edge of the seat, Lucas peered covertly through the lock. Once he was as sure as he could be that the coast was clear, he prised the listening device from the back pocket of his jeans, slipped the bolt, and emerged into the hall. He could hear Martin Cowley introducing the debt counsellor in the main room. Ros had emphasised the bug's sensitivity, but he didn't want to commit the error of planting it out of range. He glanced swiftly around him, knowing that every second's hesitation increased the risk of his absence being noticed.
There. Noiselessly he crossed the hall and slid in through the gap in a half-open door next to the sitting-room. A paper-strewn desk, filing cabinets and a painting of the Resurrection on the wall confirmed his guess that this was Reverend Cowley's study, but to Lucas's concern, the connecting door was wide open, spilling a wedge-shaped beam of light across the study carpet.
Mentally cursing the Church of England and all its works in terms that would have had him banned for life from his childhood home, he edged forward with infinite caution, avoiding the light like a child skipping over cracks on the pavement. The back of the painting was what he had hoped it would be - an old-fashioned, stretch canvas frame, and within seconds he had secured the listening device. Just as he swiftly checked that it was completely invisible to anyone who didn't know that it was there, he heard a creak from the hall.
Shit. Without thinking, he moved quickly forward and through the connecting door. Alex Callaghan turned sharply, frowning, and James raised his hands, palms upward, in apology.
"Sorry, sorry. Stomach. Sorry." He scrambled over jutting knees and outstretched legs to join Penny.
"Is it your tummy again?" she whispered, loud enough for people to hear. Several smiled in sympathetic amusement. " Oh Jamie, I told you what the doctor said about your digestion - "
"Sshh, sweetheart." Lucas felt himself flush in what he hoped would pass for embarrassment rather than the relief he felt at Ros's uncanny ability to adjust instantly to any developing situation. Penny bent over the bag at her feet.
"So?" The word barely stirred the air before dropping into its leather depths.
"On the wall behind the Resurrection," he murmured under cover of her 'here you are, darling' as she handed him a mint.
Only the very slightest twitch of Ros's lips showed that she had heard him, and when she sat up again, Penny's face was impassive. She flicked open a dog-eared notebook, and joined in the polite smattering of applause as the counsellor took centre stage. From time to time she took a few scribbled notes, but both Ros and Lucas took on board less what the man was saying than the way in which he said it. The pent-up, savage anger that most members of the team had sensed in their previous encounters with Crisis Crusade permeated every word. After he had provided advice on debt rescheduling, bridging loans, house re-possessions, and taken questions from the floor, he paused for a moment, scanning his audience.
"No more? Right, then. Well, what I've just told you will help in practical terms – steer you towards whatever paltry assistance the banking sharks are prepared to give in order to help you out of the pit they've thrown us all into." The smooth veneer was splintering now, revealing the seething fury underneath. "What I'm afraid it won't do is get what you deserve – justice. Or a chance to restore the dignity we've all had torn from us." A murmur of reaction ran through the group like a soft breeze, but it was the sort, Lucas thought, that presaged a storm; that could be suddenly whipped up into a gusting fury. He felt Ros shift next to him and wondered if she too had felt the sudden expectant tension. "The opportunity to show them that the trampled-on, abused, silent majority in this country isn't going to continue to sit passively any longer while it's derided, ignored, deceived and robbed wholesale." Now, one or two people clapped their approval. Lucas glanced at Ros out of the corner of his eye. There was an alertness about her now that reminded him of a cat stalking its prey. "I can't give you that. I wish I could. But Alex can. Alex can offer you that opportunity."
The applause swelled in volume, and as Ros joined in, the notebook slid from her lap to the floor. She and Lucas stooped simultaneously to retrieve it.
"Here it comes," Ros whispered, scrabbling for the pen.
"Get that guy's name down." Lucas picked up the notebook. "And a description."
Her eyes glinted. "Already done." As they straightened, Penny managed an embarrassed smile for Ben Ryder, who was watching them, and wriggled closer to her husband. James dropped a kiss on the crown of her head, noticing as he did the slight scent of coconut lingering in her hair from its last wash. He recollected himself quickly.
"Listen, darling, we don't want to miss this." He patted her hand. "Listen."
"Roger is right," Alex Callaghan said quietly. "I've talked to many of you. We all know how and why we've come to be members of the Crusade. Not out of choice, but necessity. Necessity forced upon us by people we trusted; people whose word we accepted as something real, and which turned out to be worth less than the paper it was written on. We put our faith in them and kept our side of the bargain. There are people here tonight who've been forced from their homes. Dismissed from jobs to which they've devoted most of their working lives – without warning or compensation. In some cases without even a word of thanks." Again there was a muttered ripple of agreement. No shouting or abuse, but then, Lucas thought, this was a conservative, educated, cultured group of people. Knowing that, and listening to Callaghan's quiet, well-modulated voice speaking so reasonably in his eloquent, polished English almost made the situation more chilling. He suspected Ros Myers felt the same; she was very still, and her fingers dug into his sleeve.
"One or two people we know have been pushed onto the streets," Callaghan continued. "Compelled to find shelter with the dregs whom your taxes have supported all these years – the drug addicts, the drunks, the unemployable. You know who I mean – the ones who make it a point of honour to spit in contempt on you even as they collect their benefit – the benefit paid for by you, to which you – because you had savings, assets, a pension once, before it was stolen from you – aren't entitled." He swept on regardless of the growing hubbub of support from the floor. "Some of our friends here tonight have been separated from their children." He looked straight at Ros and Lucas; on cue, and to Lucas's relief, tears welled into Penny's eyes, and she buried her face in his shoulder. He wrapped his arm round her and started murmuring appropriate words of comfort. "Kids who don't understand why they suddenly have no home, and why Mum and Dad can't be with them. No Government handout, no cosmetic 'relief scheme' will ever heal the scars inflicted by having to try and explain that. Or restore the dignity of the pensioners whose safe, 'guaranteed' pension has suddenly, inexplicably, criminally shrunk to a pittance hardly enough to fill the weekly shopping basket." He paused. "We've all heard of fuel poverty. It's a phrase to the bankers, and the hedge fund operators, and the multinational CEOs. But how many of them have been cold at home this last winter? Had their heating cut off for unpaid bills? Faced that infamous, intolerable choice of 'heat or eat '?"
Ros wrote something on her pad - GOEBBELS - and then erased it. She was biting her lip, and he could feel her unease. He would have thought Ros Myers proof against something like this, but she too was finding it hard to counter the almost mesmeric effect of Alex Callaghan's slow and expert manipulation of his audience. And they were only play-acting; living this way temporarily. Most of the people around them – some jobless, some, as they were supposed to be, homeless, and a few close to penniless – would be easy prey for his charisma.
"As I say, we kept our side of the bargain. But the bankers, the hedge fund managers, the politicians who make the law and the regulators who are meant to ensure it's obeyed – they haven't. They've failed us. Worse, they've betrayed us - us and the trust we placed in them." He picked up a folded newspaper and shook it out. "You've all seen this headline." It revealed that the former director of a bank propped up by a huge injection of state money had received a golden handshake on his departure, part of which had apparently been funded from the bail-out. "Don't believe he's the only one. This is just the tip of the iceberg; the infinitesimal fraction of the grand larceny these people have perpetrated that our government-muzzled, servile press are willing to let you see. And they won't be stopped just by indignant letters to the papers." Scorn crept into his voice. "Empty, illiterate threats on Twitter." He glanced towards the two priests. "Or a well-meaning sermon. However eloquent."
"Then what will stop them?" a woman's voice called out.
"We will," he answered. "We can. The Crusade can - if you're willing." There was a chorus of 'yes' and 'we are!'
"It won't be easy," Alex Callaghan said. He paused. "We've made progress. Substantial progress. But we need to go further. We need to make more impact. We need to break the status quo. It's the status quo that's protected these people and concealed their abuses for so long. And breaking it, my friends, means breaking the law." He overrode the gasp that gusted around the room. "I know that doesn't come easily to you. Believe me, I share your feelings. We are law-abiding people."
"Yes, and being law-abiding is what's got us this far!" an elderly male voice protested. Several more voices backed him, but they clashed with jeers and derisive comments. Martin Cowley lifted his hands and patted the air gently, trying to quieten the room. Lucas looked around, trying to assess whether there was a clear division of opinion on the grounds of sex or age. Penny was now dividing her attention between Alex Callaghan and the mobile phone, lifting it again and again to check whether one of the children had called. The gesture fitted in completely with her anxious personality, but all the same, it made Lucas's stomach churn. He told himself sternly that there was no reason why anyone would suspect her of taking happy snaps with such an ancient model of phone, but all the same, he leaned towards her, gently lowered her hand, and, under cover of the hubbub, whispered into her ear.
"Darling, please try and stop worrying. Your mum said TIm and Abby are coping just fine. Enough's enough."
A spark of anger flashed in Ros's eyes, but Penny put the phone down and returned her gaze to Alex Callaghan. He had smiled in response to the objection, but both could see the anger lurking behind the smile as he replied.
"But laws should be there to protect law-abiding people, shouldn't they, Max? People who work - when they have work - pay their taxes and live their lives with respect for those laws. That's what the laws of the land should do. But when the laws are used to oppress, to cheat, to steal from and to lie to exactly those people - you and I, us - then I believe we are no longer morally and legally bound by them."
"That's all very well, Alex, but where do you draw the line?" It was a smartly-dressed, grey-haired woman who spoke. "Civil disobedience is one thing. I don't think any of us have any problem with that, and it works - we have the authorities on the run all over the country. Support's been rising steadily, you've told us that yourself. People who've never dreamed of actually doing anything before have been joining us. But they won't continue if we start breaking the law!"
"Do you know that for sure?" Penny jumped violently as the challenge came from a turbanned Sikh right behind her. "Perhaps the time is right to break a few laws! I abhor violence, as do we all, but I regret to say that I think Mr Callaghan has it right. in my surgery, every day, I see evidence of how the law is breaking people. People to whom I give prescriptions that I know they cannot afford to purchase. People to whom I give hospital appointments that I know they will have to wait weeks, perhaps months to obtain, thanks to NHS cuts. Perhaps in obeying such draconian laws we are becoming complicit to all this!"
"I thought Ghandi advocated non-violence, Dr Singh?" someone countered. "Passive resistance?"
Lucas half-turned in his seat. "He did. But passive resistance wasn't what got us out of India. Ordinary people ready to stand up and be counted did that, people who weren't afraid any more, just fed up with being pushed from pillar to post and wanted to be treated with respect. Don't you?"
"Damned good point!" someone piped up. "You hear enough about it on the estates and in the schools, even on the bloody football terraces. Don't see much of it coming our way!" James and several others clapped their agreement.
"Alex." The quiet voice was Patrick Alastair's. "I think we need to keep our ultimate goal in mind here."
Callaghan glanced down at him. "Which is to bring about a change - a radical change - in Government policy," he said. There was the tiniest hint of disdain in his tone; Ros was watching both intently.
"Indeed." Alastair nodded vigorously. "But we need to think about the consequences, too. Every act, even the most insignificant, carries them. It's especially important to remember that in a society as badly divided as ours is. We all agree that 'business as usual' can't continue, but we need to be sure that what we do doesn't contribute to exacerbating a tense and unstable situation rather than alleviating it."
"Plain English, Rev!" an exasperated voice groaned, and Lucas noticed a condescending sneer cross Alex Callaghan's features. Alastair coloured slightly, but he got to his feet.
"If you need it. The increasing violence on the streets around us. The splintering and fragmentation among groups that shared our agenda - our peaceful, lawful agenda - not so long ago. The danger that people will take the law into their own hands. That road leads not to dialogue and persuasion, but to vigilante groups and persecution. And at worst it leads to the horror of civil war -"
"Patrick, come, you exaggerate." Callaghan's voice was as smooth as the silk of his tie. "No violence has been caused by Crisis Crusade. No," as Alastair would have broken in. "No, let me finish, please." The priest subsided. "When there has been the occasional rumpus, we haven't been responsible. In fact, in many cases, we have been victims of it."
"As usual," Ben Ryder snorted. "Comes a time when people run out of cheeks to turn, Patrick."
"Quite right!" A young woman got to her feet. "And I say we've come to it. You say we've got the government on the run, Jean. I say it hasn't run far enough!"
"Hold it." The voice was loud, commanding, and the cheers to which the previous comment had given rise stopped abruptly. Heads craned towards the back of the room, and Lucas realised that the speaker was the man Khalida had mentioned, Clive Curran. "There's something else we need to bear in mind here."
"Go on," Callagan invited.
"It seems to me we're assuming that the government will just obligingly panic and keep running. What if it doesn't? Are we prepared for that?"
"They can't just send in the police," someone objected. "Not any more; they're as sick of austerity as anyone else."
You're telling me, Lucas thought grimly. He noticed that Ros was fiddling with the phone again.
"Yeah, but Clive's right," Oliver Vine chimed in. "They did it to us with Occupy. Infiltrated us, divided us, smeared us through the press. And this lot's still got their hands up the rears of their little glove-puppets in MI-5. Even bloody posh-boy wimps can fight very dirty if somebody looks like derailing their gravy train. Nationwide support or no, they'll cut our throats unless we can somehow find out what they intend to do and how."
There was a confident smugness about Alex Callaghan's smile that set Lucas's teeth on edge. He wagged an admonitory finger.
"That's one thing we don't need to worry about," he said. "I assure you that we have, and will continue to have more than ample notice of MI-5's slightest move." As a subdued murmur of excitement mixed with doubt ran through the room, he added: "You'll have to take my word for that." He directed a smile that was almost a smirk at Martin Cowley and Patrick Alastair. " 'Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a mass'. Malcolm Muggeridge, if I remember correctly."
"Then what the hell are we waiting for?" Ben Ryder demanded. "Let's strike while the iron's hot!"
"He's right!" a second man called out. "Tell us what we can do, Alex!" Several other voices joined a rapidly swelling chorus which James joined in. The atmosphere in the room had changed; Callaghan had succeeded in swaying the majority opinion to his side. There were still a few dubious faces and dissenting voices, and both Alastair and Cowley wore expressions of dismay, but he was close to carrying the day. A sudden sharp jab in Lucas's side made him swivel in his seat. Ros was holding out the vibrating mobile. "Jamie, it's Tim! Timmy's calling!"
Tim means contact the Grid urgently. Lucas's mouth went dry, but before he could speak, Callaghan did.
"We can make them realise they aren't invulnerable any longer. Make them realise we can breach their citadel and bring down its walls. We can target the bastards whose duty it was to have prevented all this." Callaghan paused again, and for a moment his eyes rested on James and Penny. "And I'll tell you exactly how I suggest we go about doing it."
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After my last few long delays between chapters I thought I'd better publish this one before going off for a month! Please review if you have the time!