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Trying to sort out the implications of the leadership ballot had left Mattie feeling drained. She needed to assess opinions as they were being formed and while the excitement of the race still gripped the participants, rather than waiting until the morning by which time they would simply be reiterating the noncommittal party line. Even the powerful elder statesmen of the Party would be caught up with the passion of the moment and find themselves offering delphic but expressive signs. Around Westminster a raised eyebrow or a knowing wink can speak as loudly to some ears as a sentence of political death, and it was vital that she knew in which direction the tumbrils were headed.
There was also the complicated election procedure to fathom. The Party's balloting rules made sense to nobody other than those who had devised them; they prescribed that the first ballot should now be set aside and new nominations made. It was even permissible, although not likely, that individuals who had not even stood in the original ballot could now enter the race for the first time. If from the confusion no victor emerged with more than half the votes, a third and final round of voting would be held between the leading three candidates, with the winner being selected by a system of proportional representation which the Government would rather die than allow to be used at a general election. It was clearly a case of one rule for the Party, an entirely different rule for the public. It was all enough to make for furrowed brows and wearied pens amongst the parliamentary correspondents that evening.
She had called Krajewski. It had been more than a week since they had seen or talked to each other, and in spite of herself she felt an inner desire to be with him. She seemed to be surrounded on all sides by doubts and unresolved questions, and she was finding it difficult on her own to pierce through the confusion. She hated to admit it, but she needed to share.
Krajewski was unsure how to respond to the call. He had spent the week debating whether she was important to him or simply using him, or both. When she had asked to see him he had offered a lavish dinner at the Ritz, which he instantly knew was a mistake. She wasn't in a mood for romance, with or without violins. Instead they had settled for a drink at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where Johnnie was a member. She had walked the half mile from the press gallery in the House of Commons, only to discover that he was exercising the privileges of a deputy editor and was late. Or was this simply his way of expressing frustration with her? She waited in the club's vaulted reception area with its magnificent columns and smoke-laden atmosphere. It was a time capsule, which Gladstone could have re-entered to find scarcely a single significant change since he had enjoyed its hospitality a century earlier. She always felt it was ironic that this great bastion of Liberalism and Reform had taken 150 years to accept women and she had often twisted the noses of its members about their sexual chauvinism until one had reminded her that there never had been a female editor of the Telegraph.
When Johnnie arrived they took their drinks and sat amongst the shadows of the upper gallery in the deep, cracked leather chairs which were so easy to relax in and so difficult to leave. As Mattie drank in the cloistered atmosphere and thick veneer of generations long departed, she desperately wanted to give herself over to the tired will of the flesh and float gently into oblivion. In those chairs, she felt as if she could sleep for a year and wake to find herself transported back several lifetimes. Yet the nagging in her head allowed her no relief.
'What is it?' he asked, although he didn't need to. One glance had been enough to reveal that she was tired, anxious, quite lacking in her usual spark.
The usual,' she responded grimly, lots of questions, too few answers, and the pieces I do have don't make sense. Somehow I know it has to be tied in with the leadership election, but I simply don't know how.'
Tell me about it.'
She brought him up to date, how she could with more or less certainty hang most of the identifiable bits of the puzzle around O'Neill's neck.
'He almost certainly leaked the poll to me, he as good as admits he opened the accommodation address in Paddington, he caused the hospitals fiasco by leaking the promotional plans to Kendrick, and I'm sure he altered the headquarters' computer file to incrirninate Charles Collingridge. Which means he's mixed up in some way with the share purchase and the bank account as well. But why ?'
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