Maxwell: The Final Verdict. Tom Bower

loneliness was aggravated by the absence of Andrea Martin, his small, demure personal assistant whose unexpected promotion from receptionist had been won after she spoke impressive French during a trip to Paris. For nearly four years until May 1990, the blonde Martin had uncomplainingly worked arduous hours, travelled extraordinary distances and loyally kept those secrets which Maxwell divulged. At the end of the working day, when he retired to his bedroom in the penthouse, Martin would enter, kick off her shoes and sit on the sofa while her boss ordered refreshments from Douglas Harrod, his entertainment manager: ‘Let’s have never ending champagne, Douglas, and smoked salmon and caviar.’ The tall, benign, well-dressed butler, whom Maxwell had gleefully poached from Rupert Murdoch, would oblige with an obedient smile. After supervising the delivery of his master’s order, he would close the heavy double doors. Maxwell, he realized, was ‘besotted by Andrea’. Harrod was less clear what Andrea Martin ‘could see in someone like Robert Maxwell except a high salary’. But he had noticed a special relationship of ‘endearments and those sort of things’. However, those days had sadly passed. In the aftermath, Andrea Martin always insisted that their relationship had been strictly professional.

      A few months earlier, Maxwell had summoned John Pole, his head of security. A former detective chief superintendent employed for thirty years at Scotland Yard, where he had earned sixteen commendations, Pole had become accustomed, like all Maxwell’s staff, to responding unquestioningly to the summons day and night, regardless of the inconvenience. ‘We need to talk,’ growled Maxwell as he replaced the telephone receiver. Minutes later Pole was sitting erect and attentive opposite his employer, ‘I’m concerned about Andrea Martin’s loyalty,’ sighed Maxwell. Pole had noticed the millionaire’s infatuation with the young woman. ‘She knows a lot of confidential information and I fear she’s having an affair with Nick Davies. She has promised me that it’s over, but I don’t trust him and she might be telling him more than is healthy.’

      Davies was the snappy foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, a journalist generally disliked by his colleagues, who had given him the sobriquet ‘Sneaky’. Maxwell suspected Davies’s loyalty, but was uncharacteristically unsure how best to neutralize an employee who had invaded the heart of his private territory. He then uttered the phrase which preceded his most intimate instructions to Pole: ‘I need to know if this person is being loyal to me.’ It was Maxwell’s euphemism for instructing that he wanted Andrea Martin’s telephone tapped.

      Maxwell had long enjoyed the use of listening devices or bugs. His black briefcase contained a concealed tape recorder operated by a turn of the lock, and a bug had been inserted into a table lamp in his home. During the 1984 negotiations with the Mirror Group’s trade unions, he had used crude tape recorders to monitor his adversaries’ negotiating position. In later years, another former police officer in his employ was regularly to bring him cassettes of taped telephone conversations among his own executives. Sitting in his apartment at the end of the day, the congenital eavesdropper would race through the tapes listening for clues to disloyalty, weaknesses or hidden mistakes. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Stalin’s Kremlin, Pole had supervised in 1988 the concealment of two microphones in Maxwell’s own office – activated by a switch under his desk – and one in the conference room in the Mirror building. A microphone was also secreted in Kevin’s office in Maxwell House. This followed the disappearance of the banker’s draft worth £4.7 million (see p. 10), Telephone taps on the suspect revealed nothing. The draft had never been cashed.

      Maxwell’s ruse was to invite guests to remain in Kevin’s room or the conference room while he excused himself briefly to tend another chore. Lumbering along to his own office, he would unlock the cupboard behind his desk and activate the recording machines, which Pole had rendered foolproof to accommodate his ‘banana fingers’. Having eavesdropped on the conversations to glean his competitors’ secrets, he would return at the appropriate moment to exploit his advantage. The subterfuge had won him undeserved acclaim as an outstanding negotiator, Pole’s tap on Andrea Martin’s telephone produced different results.

      At the end of the week, Pole returned with a tape: ‘You’d better listen to this, Mr Maxwell.’ For twenty minutes Maxwell sat motionless as the recognizable voices of Andrea and Davies giggled over their previous night’s romps in a car. When Davies mentioned details of Andrea’s underwear, Maxwell flinched. Pole noticed his hurt: ‘Heartbroken, even shattered.’ The woman with whom he was in love had lied. Despite her promise that her affair with Davies had ceased, it was in full flow. Emotionally, Maxwell was vulnerable. Estranged from his family, he had lost the one person upon whom he felt he could rely. He had paid for her loyalty with an annual contract worth £36,000, a considerable sum for a secretary, but after that betrayal there was no alternative but her dismissal, which followed in July 1990, Douglas Harrod noticed the result. ‘Maxwell went down in the dumps. He was a very unhappy man.’

      Ever since, there had been no one with whom Maxwell could relax at the end of the day. Besides that emotional deprivation, he was also losing control of his private office. Having failed to replace Peter Jay, his self-styled chief of staff in the years 1986–9, he no longer employed anyone as competent to arrange his papers and organize his diary. As his moods and sympathies oscillated violently, secretaries and personal assistants in his private office changed with damaging regularity. Gradually, despite his roared demands for efficiency, his private office was becoming chaotic.

      By contrast, the management of his tenth-floor penthouse was immaculate. Normally waking at 6.30 after fitful sleep, Maxwell would find his staff ready to fulfil his every whim, especially the most unreasonable. Deprived of his family’s company and support, he had thrown himself into a routine which had moved from hectic into frenetic. Increasingly cancelling invitations at the last moment, he would collapse into bed in the early evening to be served dinner while channel-hopping on television or watching a video.

      Martin Cheeseman, his chef, had been recommended four years before by Harrod. ‘He’s worked in Downing Street,’ boasted the butler. ‘But can he cook?’ retorted Maxwell. He had proved to be a devoted servant. ‘I knew my customer and gave him what he wanted,’ explained Cheeseman, a thirty-seven-year-old south-east Londoner who served ‘mostly salmon, roast chicken and avocados’. Sufficient food was always prepared for Maxwell’s night-time feasts, especially melons filled with berries and cornflakes. Improbably Cheeseman insisted, ‘I only fed him healthy food. He didn’t pig out. He was that shape when I arrived.’ Their relationship flourished because Maxwell tended to treat his servants like directors and his directors like servants. He had warmed to the young man’s unassuming conversation, inviting him to accompany him on longer journeys so that he could avoid eating unwelcome dishes.

      Alongside Cheeseman were Juliet and Elsa, the Filipina maids. Their predecessor had been fired after accusations of stealing television sets, clothes, food and cases of wine. In any event, Maxwell had not prosecuted. But the maids were obliged to tolerate an unfortunate development in his personal habits: his obesity had spawned filthiness. Not only were his soiled clothes and half-eaten food thrown on the floors, but the lavatory after use was abandoned unflushed and the bed linen was occasionally oddly coloured. ‘We’re short of face towels,’ Terry Gilmour, a chief steward, once told the Publisher’s wife Betty. Puzzled, she reminded him that twenty-four Valentino flannels had been delivered just weeks earlier. ‘Mr Maxwell’s using them instead of toilet paper,’ explained Gilmour expressionlessly, ‘and discards them on the floor.’ To save the staff the indignity, Betty Maxwell arranged for the towels to be brought in sealed plastic bags to the family home in Oxford, for washing. All these members of Maxwell’s personal staff shared one quality: their ignorance of his business activities. Although his bedroom was occasionally turned into an office with documents piled beneath a computer screen, none of those in such close proximity would have understood his orders to move money and shares.

      Similar ignorance infected Sir John Quinton, chairman of Barclays Bank, who lunched with Maxwell on 7 November, the day after the Berlitz share certificates had been hidden in the safe. Britain’s biggest bank had lent Maxwell’s private companies over £200 million, and Quinton, who deluded himself that he could understand London’s more maverick entrepreneurs, was easily persuaded by his host of the health of MCC’s finances. As Quinton drove back into the City after lunch, the Publisher climbed