Ten Days. Gillian Slovo

when it was possible just to be, and not to act, this same weariness would wash over him. He could feel it in his bones, as if he had just run the marathon, although the truth was he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done any exercise. The swimming pool at Chequers two weekends ago might have been his chance – especially in the heat – but the hosepipe ban and the resulting surface of green slime that no amount of straining seemed to shift had put him off. Another yawn. The strain of preparing to launch a leadership challenge – even though he was convinced that it had to be done – was telling on him.

      ‘Tired, sir?’

      Although he pretended he hadn’t heard the question, it did break his reverie.

      He glanced at the boxes, thinking of the heap of briefing and official papers they contained. He’d gone through the lot the previous evening: glancing at the ‘to see’; reading more carefully through the summaries of the ‘to decide’ papers and then deciding; and after that he had spent some considerable time pondering the ones that had been specially marked as having potential presentational problems. These – the problems that the press might seize on – he couldn’t risk. Not now when the stakes were about to go sky high.

      This thought carried him back to Yares, whose appointment the Prime Minister had bludgeoned through. Why had such an adept politician, whose deviousness included giving his ministers their heads (along with rope to hang themselves), interfered in Peter’s choice? Sure, Yares looked good on paper, but the other candidate, Anil Chahda, was already Deputy Commissioner. Having served under the last bod, Chahda knew the ropes, and given he was also Britain’s highest-ranking ethnic officer his promotion would have been a coup not only for Peter but also for the whole government. Never mind that Chahda was the kind of policeman that a Home Secretary could do business with.

      Yet the PM had been so intent on seeing Yares in the job he’d left Peter with no choice other than to concede. It was all too odd. The Prime Minister was far too ruthless to do anything for the sake of friendship, so his actions could not be explained by his connection to Yares.

      Something else was going on, although Peter couldn’t figure out what. He must set somebody to solving the mystery, somebody he could trust, which thought sunk him into the soup of wondering, at this, the most decisive moment of his career, who he could and couldn’t trust. This led him in turn on to the things he knew and the things he didn’t know, and then to facts and figures and questions he hadn’t answered, and questions he might be asked at the dispatch box, all of them piling up one against the other, so that it was as if he were being sucked under a particularly boggy marsh, the gluey waters closing over his head about to suffocate him and . . .

      ‘In the marsh,’ he heard.

      He came to with a start. ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Your offices in Marsham Street? Is that where you want to go?’

      He glanced at his watch: 5.53.

      He could picture the fuss that would ensue if he pitched up at Marsham Street at such an early hour. Private secretaries, diary secretaries, and their secretaries, researchers and the tea makers who lubricated them all would be rousted from their beds and made to taxi in, and all because their Secretary of State was having trouble sleeping. Not the kind of reputation he wanted and, anyway, he needed time to think and calm to do it in. Where better than in his office behind the Speaker’s Chair? ‘If you wouldn’t mind dropping me at the House.’

      ‘Of course, sir.’

      ‘St Stephen’s entrance.’

      He caught the surprised flicker of the driver’s eyes.

      ‘I like to, every now and then,’ he said. Because it reminded him, although he didn’t say this, of his first time walking in as an MP. And of the time before as well, the very first in his life, when he was the boy on a school trip who’d said out loud what he was thinking – that one day he would belong to this place – and then had to endure the mocking hilarity of his peers. ‘Is that a problem?’

      ‘I’m fond of St Stephen’s myself,’ the driver said. ‘We all are. But it only opens at eight.’

      ‘Drop me by Carriage Gates, then. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

       5.57 a.m.

      The car carrying Met Commissioner Joshua Yares swept round Parliament Square and before it turned into Bridge Street Joshua’s gaze was snagged by the sight of a Jaguar that had stopped by Carriage Gates. That any car had been allowed to stop there rather than being waved away or through was what first attracted his attention, but what kept him looking was the sight of the door of the Jaguar being opened by a waiting policeman to allow the disgorgement of the portly figure of Home Secretary Peter Whiteley.

      ‘Strange.’

      ‘It’s early,’ the driver said. ‘And he is the Home Secretary. They wouldn’t normally stop there.’

      ‘Hmm.’ No point in telling his driver that the oddity Joshua had been pondering was not this random act of hubris but the sight of Peter Whiteley choosing to walk anywhere and so early. Wonder what he’s up to, he thought, as his car rounded the corner and Big Ben began to toll the hour.

       6 a.m.

       ‘It’s 6 o’clock, and, as the countdown for next year’s election begins, the heatwave continues.’

      As if anybody needed to be told that the temperature and humidity were breaking all records and had been for weeks. Cathy flung herself across the bed, banging on the radio to cut it off.

      She was boiling. Picking up the sheet she had thrown to the floor, she wrapped it round herself and went over to the window.

      Just as she thought: the bloody radiator was on. Those bastards in the housing department. They’d promised they’d solve the problem – the way they’d talked had led her to believe they had already solved the problem – but for the fifth day in a row the central boiler, which barely functioned in winter, had switched the whole estate on at five. The crazy logic of a council: too mean to hire a proper engineer to fix the glitch but prepared to pay the enormous electricity bills that would fall to them when the Lovelace came down.

      It’s like a microcosm for the world, she thought: burning before final destruction.

      A shower. Cold. That’s what was required.

      She prolonged the shower’s beneficial effects by letting the water evaporate as she moved into the lounge.

      With its heaters blaring, this room was also unbearably hot. If they don’t fix it soon, she thought, I’ll pull the radiators off the wall: that’d force their hands.

      Catching the fury behind that intention, she thought maybe Lyndall was right: maybe they should cut their losses and move before the estate breathed its last.

      The bedroom had to be cooler than this. She made her way back and, having opened the curtains, settled herself on top of the bed. And there she lay, letting her thoughts drift as she watched the night edged out by a bloodied dawn that washed the dirty white walls with pink. Soon after, bands of crimson and purple and deep dark red began to streak the sky in defiance of the rising sun.

      Such a ferocious sight. Red sky in the morning: an omen.

      For days now she’d had a feeling of something not being right. It wasn’t just Banji’s recent reappearance, or the impending closure of the estate; it was a feeling that something awful was about to happen. To her. To Lyndall. Or to somebody they knew. Banji perhaps.

      She seemed to see again that vision of him, dwarfed by the helicopter, and then the lonely slope of his back as he had walked away.

      She should have kept him with her, should not have let him go.

      A crazy thought. She couldn’t have stopped him. Never could.

      It’s the heat, she thought, it’s playing with my mind. Except this was not the first time that a similar foreboding had