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McKenzie's political career was also left on the road alongside the ugly burnt tyre marks. It did not matter that the woman was not badly injured, or that she was not indeed a nurse at all but a fulltime union convenor and an experienced hand at turning a picket line drama into a newsworthy crisis. No one bothered to enquire. No man who could antagonise so many nurses and act in such a cowardly fashion in seeking to evade their protest could possibly occupy 10 Downing Street. For McKenzie, the tide had turned again and he watched helplessly as his life raft drifted back over the horizon.
FRIDAY 19th NOVEMBER
It had been a difficult week for Mattie, and a lonely one too, and she was having to work hard to keep her spirits up. While the pace of activity in the leadership race had picked up sharply, she found herself treading water, feeling as if she were being left behind by events. Nothing had come of her few job interviews; it had become clear to her that she had been blacked by all the newspapers in the expanding Landless empire, and none of his remaining competitors seemed particularly keen to antagonise him unnecessarily. And on Friday morning the mortgage rate had gone up.
Even worse, while she had more pieces of the jigsaw, still she could find no pattern in them. And it hurt. Inside her head the few facts she had gathered collided with her own speculative thoughts, but nothing seemed to fit. The collision left a dull, throbbing ache in her temples which had been with her incessantly for days. So she had hauled herrunning gear out of the wardrobe and was soon pounding her way around the leaf-covered tracks and pathways of Holland Park, hoping that the much needed physical exercise would purge both body and mind. But the throbbing in her head only combined with the new and growing pains in her lungs and legs to make it all hurt even more. She was running out of ideas, stamina and time. The first ballot was just four days away.
In the fading evening light she ran along the sweeping avenue of chestnut trees which towered magnificent and leafless above her like a living tunnel inhabited by half-seen, ghostly apparitions; down Lime Tree Walk where in daylight the squirrels and sparrows were as tame as house pets; past the red bricked ruins of old Holland House, burned to the ground half a century before along with its books, beauty and secrets, leaving just its brooding memories of past glories. In the days before what was left of Elizabethan London had grown into a voracious urban sprawl, Holland House had been the country seat of Charles James Fox, the legendary 18th century radical who had spent a lifetime pursuing revolutionary causes and who had used his ancestral home to gather all his conspiratorial colleagues and plot the downfall of the Prime Minister. It had always been in vain. Yet who had succeeded now where he had failed?
She went over the ground again, the field of battle on which Collingridge had fallen. It had started with the general election campaign which had gone badly wrong, with Collingridge and Williams left to blame each other and argue whose fault it all was.
Then came the fiasco of the hospital scheme, courtesy of Stephen Kendrick. There were no leads on the leak of Territorial Army cuts to the Independent; the document had been discovered floating around Annie's Bar, and they could scarcely blame Annie... The opinion poll, too, had been leaked - just another part of Collingridge's death by a thousand cuts - but she had no idea whom to thank for that. O'Neill, sheknew, was involved in the extraordinary episode of share purchases through the Paddington address, and Landless had taken a sudden and uncharacteristic interest in high politics, with motive unclear.
That was it. That was all she had. So where did she go from here? As she climbed up the slope towards the highest part of the wooded park, she pounded away at the alternatives.
'Collingridge isn't giving interviews. Williams will only talk through his press office. O'Neill doesn't seem capable of answering questions, and Landless wouldn't stop for me on a pedestrian crossing. Which leaves only you, Mr Kendrick!'
With one final spurt she reached the top of the hill and began stretching out on the long downhill slope which led towards her home. Now she felt better. She had got her second wind.
SATURDAY 20th NOVEMBER
It had not been too bad a week for Harold Earle. The media had nominated him as one of the five candidates most likely to succeed; he had watched Samuel's bandwagon fail to roll and McKenzie's become derailed. And in spite of the Chief Whip's creditable showing, Earle could not believe that Urquhart would succeed because he had no senior Cabinet experience of running any great Department of State, and at the end of the day experience really counted for the top job. Particularly experience like Earle's.
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