The Lords' Day (retail) Read online

  Praise for The Lords’ Day

  ‘A gripping tale which leaves behind deeply uncomfortable thoughts, not only about the vulnerability of our institutions but also about guilt, responsibility and revenge’ Literary Review

  ‘The plot is riveting . . . A first-rate tale – Dobbs’ thrill chamber!’ Sunday Express

  ‘Exciting and unpredictable’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘An entertaining romp’ The Sunday Times

  Further praise for Michael Dobbs

  ‘It kept me up all night. I couldn’t put it down’ BBC Radio 2, Steve Wright in the Afternoon

  ‘Think Die Hard with a stiff upper lip’ Financial Times

  ‘The best kind of British thriller’ Guardian

  ‘Your publisher very kindly sent me a copy of your new novel but there was no need as I have bought and read with enormous pleasure all MD books over the years’ Denis MacShane, M.P.

  ‘Dobbs was clearly put on this earth to write thrillers of the most shamelessly page-turning quality’ Daily Express

  ‘Explosive in every sense. His novels are famously predictive’ Daily Mail

  ‘Fascinating and pretty frightening stuff ’ Freddie Forsyth

  ‘A thriller that is both nightmare vision and timely warning’ Financial Times

  ‘A brilliant drama . . . His reputation as Britain’s foremost exponent of the pacy, shock-inducing thriller is more than maintained’ Press Association

  MICHAEL DOBBS – Baron Dobbs of Wylye – is an active member of the House of Lords and an internationally bestselling author who has never been far from controversy. He worked at the centre of British politics for Margaret Thatcher, John Major and now David Cameron, and was once described as ‘Westminster’s baby-faced hit man’. He is the author of 17 thrillers, including House of Cards which became a hugely successful television drama and will star Kevin Spacey in a forthcoming remake, and three previous Harry Jones thrillers, The Lords’ Day, The Edge of Madness and The Reluctant Hero. He tries to live quietly near a pub and a church in Wiltshire. For more information about his other books, visit his website at www.michaeldobbs.com

  First published in Great Britain by Headline, 2007

  This edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Michael Dobbs, 2007

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Michael Dobbs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London

  WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-85720-806-4

  eBook ISBN 978-1-84983-908-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  To Rob.

  A charming godson and an inspiring young man.

  It was generally accepted as being unthinkable, a proposition to which no one dared give a name.

  Until the day it happened.

  Contents

  Prelude

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Afterword

  Prelude

  HE KNEW HE HAD BEEN wounded, but he felt no pain. He had answered a knock on his door and when he had opened it, unsuspecting, two men had forced their way in.

  He had put up a stern fight. He had once been a top-class athlete, even though confined to a wheelchair, and he had warded off their first blows. His attackers were small in stature, youthful, wiry, and he had been able to hurl one of them back into the other, causing them to stumble while he retreated down the hallway. But after that there was no place to hide. You can’t hide, not on wheels.

  Perhaps they had come to rob him, but he wasn’t worth much, that should have been obvious, living in a dump like this. There were his cups and medals, yet what were they worth? They weren’t real gold or silver, only sentimental value, like the photograph of him shaking hands with the Princess Royal just a couple of years earlier. There was nothing in here for them; they had made a mistake and, as soon as they realised this, they would go.

  Yet they had pursued him – not run, but followed him inexorably, silently, not in anger but with unflinching intent, into his living room.

  ‘Why, why?’ he had screamed when they had produced the knife, ‘we are of the same skin.’ He could tell that their fathers, at very least their grandfathers, must be some sort of cousins to his own, children of the same region with sun and dry dust in their boots; perhaps this was simply a case of mistaken identity, but they wouldn’t listen. And they wouldn’t talk. They stalked him, held him. Then they cut him.

  He hadn’t been able to speak after that, something in his throat wasn’t working properly. And they didn’t ransack the place but stood watching, their dark eyes troubled, almost sorrowful. Everything was so very strange, he thought. Nothing was making much sense any more.

  It was only when he looked down and saw his chest covered in rich, fresh blood, his blood, that he realised his throat had been cut and that he was dying. Like a sheep, slaughtered at festival in the old country, as his father had described to him in a childhood tale. He had always wondered if they felt pain as they bled. Now he knew.

  One

  Before dawn. The 5th of November.

  THE LORDS’ DAY. It was to be a day of atonement, a day of anguish, of terrors that would squeeze the country so tight it came close to expiring, but Harry Jones had no way of foreseeing that. For the moment he was having difficulty seeing anything. He struggled to focus, only gradually becoming aware that the object he was staring at, from very close quarters, was a nipple. Hell, what an evening.

  As a pale, reluctant light seeped through the window and started to unwrap itself in front of his eyes, Harry began taking stock of the damage. The bedroom was a mess, clothes strewn haphazardly in a trail that led like a paperchase across the floor and away beyond the partially opened door, while the duvet was knotted uncompromisingly round his lower limbs, binding him tight. He was sweating; too much alcohol, a bottle of twenty-year-old Islay full of peat and feathers that now lay abandoned somewhere on the other side of the door, near where he’d left his self-respect.

  Beside him, Melanie stirred in her sleep, turning away from him and curling herself up like a hibernating mouse. Harry cursed once again and stretched, as far as the bonds of the duvet would allow, but she didn’t stir, still out of it. Oh, what a night it had been, one to look back on in years to come with a touch of awe. It wasn’t every evening your estranged wife invited you out to dinner then ended up ripping your clothes from you.

  He looked round the bedroom – his bedroom, as had been, until three months ago – and began to spot little changes, the marks of where his presence was gradually being erased. The photograph of him in the jungle of Belize that ha
d once adorned the dresser was gone, and his dressing gown with its frayed cord and gentle memories was no longer on the back of the chair. The table on his side of the bed that he couldn’t remember without its tottering pile of books was now uncomfortably bare, and he searched with growing alarm for his copies of Robert Louis Stevenson. They were the original Cassell’s editions, 1880s. Gone. Damn, he hadn’t taken them; did she realise what she was throwing out? Of course not, any more than she’d done when she threw him out. Not that she had referred to it like that. A trial separation, she had suggested, to get her mind clear. Well, whatever was cluttering up Melanie’s mind, it certainly wasn’t good literature. Yet in spite of it all she had invited him, allowed him back. What did it mean? A knot of curiosity began to grow inside him, competing for elbowroom alongside the part of his brain that was trying to tunnel its way to freedom through the thicker part of his skull. Had she changed her mind? Back into her bed, and back into her life? He couldn’t tell, had always been rubbish at reading her, and now she was stirring, her eyelids fluttering innocently.

  As she saw him, a look of bewilderment crossed her face. It took several moments to fade. ‘Oh, shit,’ she sighed. Then she threw back the duvet and made for the bathroom.

  Didn’t sound much like someone who wanted him back, yet he knew she wasn’t good on her own, she needed a man around. So . . . so who? Had someone else been in his bed, between his sheets and with his wife? It was supposed to be a trial separation, no one else involved, but he began to wonder if she might have been finding it rather less of a trial than he had. No wonder the photo was missing.

  Beads of suspicion began to prickle on his forehead and his eyes wandered round the room looking for clues, telltale signs of someone who didn’t belong there. But Melanie wouldn’t be that stupid. He lay back on his pillow, realising with surprise that what he was feeling was jealousy. He wanted her back, very much. He hadn’t realised that, not until this moment. So much anger and frustration had spilled over between them, but there were still feelings. Last night had daubed his grey life with colour once again and he was surprised how much he missed it all. And her. The laugh, the lilting irreverence, that body. They’d been married more than three years yet still it was like getting laid for the first time, never knowing quite what to expect. Full of surprises was Melanie, that was part of her appeal and he missed it much more than he had realised. But what was she missing?

  From the bathroom came the sound of water splashing as she washed the traces of him away. Curious, and jealous, Harry disentangled himself from his winding sheet and began rummaging through the drawers of the bedside table, but he found nothing, not on his side. No one had yet laid claim to his space, not even Melanie, it seemed, and suddenly he was filled with remorse that he could have suspected her. They’d both agreed that their separation was intended to be a means of refreshing their relationship, to remind themselves all over again how much the other meant – Melanie had emphasised that point to him. So as he ransacked the drawers he chastised himself for his suspicions, but that didn’t stop him, even when he discovered the drawers on her side of the bed were over flowing with little more than tissues and trinkets and . . .

  A one-page leaflet. A flyer, an ordinary handout. He didn’t know it just yet, but it was to be a moment when Harry’s life changed. In the trembling of a single breath his suspicion was smothered by pride, a sense of fulfilment that for an instant grew to unbridled joy before he realised he was being a fool. And it wasn’t often that anyone made a fool of Harry Jones. In another breath he had slipped into the darkness of a very rare anger, the sort of rage that on the last occasion had been put aside only when he’d killed a man, for as he searched through Melanie’s drawer he found himself clutching a pamphlet from the Marie Stopes clinic. The people who dealt with sexual health. Unwanted pregnancy. Abortion. It was also the moment he heard his wife throwing up in the bathroom.

  The house was small, part of a run-down terrace in the middle of Southall, and typical of so many rented properties in western London, ill-painted, unremarkable, shrouded in anonymity. The curtains were tightly drawn to ward off prying eyes, and the windows were closed, too, shutting out the noise. In the back of the house, the bedrooms were stifling.

  ‘Are you awake, Mukhtar?’

  ‘How can a man sleep?’

  ‘It’s time, anyway.’

  For a moment they grew quiet as their eyes adjusted to the first light and they contemplated what lay ahead of them.

  ‘It’s so airless and hot in this place,’ Mukhtar complained. ‘It’s like lying on the doorstep of Hell. How I miss our home.’

  ‘Remember, it is for our homeland that we came here.’

  Mukhtar sighed, a sound of deep sadness. ‘I would like to have seen it – one last time.’

  ‘Don’t weaken, don’t you dare weaken. Not today!’ Masood’s voice grew sharp, betraying his own inner tension. ‘Remember what they have done to us. Remember, Mukhtar, that day when you held your mother’s broken body.’

  ‘I shall have her name on my lips when I die.’

  ‘And hate her killers more with every breath.’ Masood stirred. ‘It is time to wake the others.’

  ‘They will not need it,’ Mukhtar replied, and from elsewhere within the small house they could hear the sounds of movement.

  ‘Remember our pledge, Mukhtar, to go on to the end. To fight them not only in the caves and mountains of our home, but to fight them in their own land, with ever greater courage, no matter what the cost may be. To make war on them, father and son, just as they have done to us, and never give in.’

  ‘You make fine speeches.’

  ‘The words are not mine. I borrowed them, or words like them, from one of their own leaders. It is time for them to feel their own pain.’

  ‘May it rain on them like the winter snows, but –’ Mukhtar hesitated.

  ‘I’m listening, my friend.’

  ‘It is what we did last night, to those men.’

  ‘Does it trouble you?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘That is good, Mukhtar. To care, to have compassion, is good. It sets us apart from our enemies.’

  ‘But, Masood, there is something else you should know.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I think I am scared. Very scared.’

  She came through the bathroom door, still naked, dabbing at her mouth. ‘What the bloody hell’s this?’ Harry demanded, the voice low but filled with menace as he waved the pamphlet.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, Harry, going through my drawers.’

  ‘They’re my drawers, remember. I paid for them.’

  ‘Yes, you did. And now they are my drawers,’ she replied primly, ‘so keep the hell out of them.’ She snatched at the piece of paper but he was too quick for her.

  ‘What are you hiding, Mel?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  He began quoting from the leaflet. ‘Marie Stopes. The country’s leading reproductive healthcare charity. The first choice for those seeking expert help and advice. Help and advice in what, Mel? Well, I don’t see you offering yourself for sterilisation and you scarcely qualify for a vasectomy. So what is it?’

  ‘Harry, I’ve got to say you look ridiculous, sitting there shaking with indignation when you’re stark naked. Even a man with your physique can’t quite get away with it.’ Her voice was light, teasing, attempting humour, and also avoiding his question.

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ he whispered.

  She didn’t answer immediately but reached for her robe, wrapping it carefully around her before sitting down on the end of the bed, keeping her distance. ‘It’s why I invited you last night. One of the things I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘That you’re pregnant. And going to have an abortion.’

  He made it sound like the summing up of a prosecuting lawyer and she blushed, while Harry’s world began to spin slowly out of control, taking him back to a different place. He remembered the last time he’d been told
his wife was pregnant – not Melanie, but Julia, his first wife. It had been so clinical, in a side room of a Swiss hospital, just below the mountain where that early spring morning they’d gone skiing off-piste. His choice, his passion, one in which Julia had tried to follow him, as she had always done. Except they hadn’t made it. Too much fresh, unstable snow. And then he was lying with a drip in his arm and a broken leg and porridge for brains, trying to shake off the effects of a bad concussion as a doctor with a dark brow and exquisitely starched white coat broke the news to him. That Julia had been a couple of months pregnant and in all probability hadn’t even known it.

  ‘You did not know, either? I am so sorry, Herr Jones, we did all we could,’ the doctor had said in his over-precise manner. ‘If it is of any consolation, it is my view that your wife would not have suffered in any way.’

  ‘Suffered?’

  ‘It was instantaneous, you see.’

  ‘What was instantaneous?’

  A look of despair had crossed the doctor’s brow. ‘No one has told you?’ Or had the delayed effects of the concussion wiped it all from his mind? ‘The fall, Herr Jones. It broke her neck. And, of course, the baby . . . My profound regrets.’

  Beautiful, loving, two-months pregnant Julia. After which Harry’s life had never been quite the same, never reached its old heights. It couldn’t, not when he was drenched in so much guilt and with the accusations of Julia’s distraught father ringing in his ears. Yes, it had been his fault, and after fifteen years carving out a career in the British Army, Sandhurst, Life Guards, Pathfinders, MoD, the lot, he was used to taking his share of the responsibility, but not like this. Something had switched off inside Harry, and not all the years his country had invested in teaching him to be one of its most effective killing machines had been able to keep him from suffering more hurt than he ever thought was possible. Until Melanie came along. ‘Time to put Humpty back together again,’ she’d said, covering everything with laughter. She was what he had needed, never took anything too seriously, except her body, of course, and that was worth taking very seriously indeed. Got him back on his feet until he was able to walk again. Yet Harry was never content simply to walk; he was the type of man who always wanted to do things his way, and at a pace that left most in his wake. It wasn’t that Melanie couldn’t keep up; what had begun to hurt was the realisation that she never truly tried. He’d been blinded by pain, too eager to find something and someone to hold on to once more, and it was another thing he’d got wrong. She didn’t want to follow; while Harry rushed off in search of dragons, she was content to sit elegantly beside the large pot of gold that had been left to Harry through his inheritance. Different routes, different destinations, and now different lives.