The Ghost Read online

  Lang finally dragged his eyes away from the television. ‘I don’t know about doing all that. It could look as though I’m panicking.’

  ‘No it won’t. I’ve already spoken to them. They send their best wishes: they want to do everything they can to help. They’ll both say the meetings were fixed weeks ago, to discuss the Adam Lang Foundation.’

  ‘But that sounds false, don’t you think?’ Lang frowned. ‘What are we supposed to be discussing?’

  ‘Who cares? Aids. Poverty. Climate change. Mideast peace. Africa. Whatever you like. The point is to say: it’s business as usual, I have my agenda, it’s the big stuff, and I’m not going to be diverted from it by these clowns pretending to be judges in The Hague.’

  Amelia said, ‘What about security?’

  ‘The Secret Service will take care of it. We’ll fill in the blanks in the schedule as we go along. The whole town will turn out for you. I’m waiting to hear back from the Vice President, but that would be a private meeting.’

  ‘And the media?’ said Lang. ‘We’ll need to respond soon.’

  ‘On the way to the airport, we’ll pull over and say a few words. I can make a statement, if you like. All you have to do is stand next to me.’

  ‘No,’ said Lang firmly. ‘No. Absolutely not. That really will make me look guilty. I’ll have to talk to them myself. Ruth, what do you think about going to Washington?’

  ‘I think it’s a terrible idea. I’m sorry, Sid, I know you’re working hard for us, but we’ve got to consider how this will play in Britain. If Adam goes to Washington he’ll look like America’s whipping boy, running crying home to Daddy.’

  ‘So what would you do?’

  ‘Fly back to London.’ Kroll began to object but Ruth talked over him. ‘The British people may not like him much at the moment, but if there’s one thing they hate more than Adam, it’s interfering foreigners telling them what to do. The government will have to support him.’

  Amelia said, ‘The British government are going to cooperate fully with the investigation.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Ruth, in a voice as sweet as cyanide. ‘And what makes you think that?’

  ‘I’m not thinking it, Ruth, I’m reading it. It’s on the television. Look.’

  We looked. The headline was running across the bottom of the screen. ‘BREAKING NEWS: BRITISH GOVT “WILL COOPERATE FULLY” WITH WAR CRIMES PROBE.’

  ‘How dare they?’ cried Ruth. ‘After all we’ve done for them!’

  Josh said, ‘With respect, ma’am, as signatories to the ICC, the British government have no choice. They’re obliged under international law to “cooperate fully”. Those are the precise words of Article Eighty-Six.’

  ‘And what if the ICC eventually decides to arrest me?’ asked Lang quietly. ‘Do the British government “cooperate fully” with that as well?’

  Josh had already found the relevant place on his laptop. ‘That’s covered by Article Fifty-Nine, sir. “A State Party which has received a request for a provisional arrest or for arrest and surrender shall immediately take steps to arrest the person in question.”’

  ‘Well, I think that settles it,’ said Lang. ‘Washington it is.’

  Ruth folded her arms. The gesture reminded me of Kate: a warning of storms to come. ‘I still say it will look bad,’ she said.

  ‘Not as bad as being led away in handcuffs from Heathrow.’

  ‘At least it would show you had some guts.’

  ‘Then why the hell don’t you just fly back without me?’ snapped Lang. Like his outburst of the previous afternoon, it wasn’t so much the display of temper that was startling as the way it suddenly erupted. ‘If the British government want to hand me over to this kangaroo court, then fuck them! I’ll go where people want me. Amelia, tell the boys we’re leaving in five minutes. Get one of the girls to pack me an overnight bag. And you’d better pack one for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, but why don’t you share a suitcase?’ said Ruth. ‘It will be so much more convenient.’

  At that, the very air seemed to congeal. Even Kroll’s little smile froze at the edges. Amelia hesitated, then nervously smoothed down her skirt, picked up her notebook, and rose in a hiss of silk. As she walked across the room towards the stairs, she kept her gaze fixed straight ahead. Her throat was flushed a tasteful pink, her lips compressed. Ruth waited until she had gone, then slowly uncoiled her feet from beneath her and carefully pulled on her flat, wooden-soled shoes. She, too, left without a word. Thirty seconds later, a door slammed downstairs.

  Lang flinched and sighed. He got up and collected his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugged it on. That was the signal for us all to move. The paralegals snapped their laptops shut. Kroll stood and stretched, spreading his fingers wide: he reminded me of a cat, arching its back and briefly unsheathing its claws. I put away my notebook.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Lang, offering me his hand. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I’m sorry to abandon you. At least all this coverage should improve sales.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. I cast around for something to say that would lighten the atmosphere. ‘Perhaps Rhinehart’s publicity department have arranged the whole thing.’

  ‘Well, tell them to stop it, will you?’ He smiled, but his eyes looked bruised and puffy.

  ‘What are you going to say to the media?’ asked Kroll, putting his arm across Lang’s shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s talk about it in the car.’

  As Lang turned to leave, Kroll gave me a wink. ‘Happy ghosting,’ he said.

  Nine

  * * *

  What if they lie to you? ‘Lie’ is probably too strong a word. Most of us tend to embroider our memories to suit the picture of ourselves that we would like the world to see.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  I COULD HAVE gone down to see them off. Instead I watched them leave on television. I always say you can’t beat sitting in front of a TV screen if you’re after that authentic, first-hand experience. For example, it’s curious how helicopter news shots impart to even the most innocent activity the dangerous whiff of criminality. When Jeff the chauffeur brought the armoured Jaguar round to the front of the house and left the engine running, it looked for all the world as if he were organising a Mafia getaway just before the cops arrived. In the cold New England air, the big car seemed to float on a sea of exhaust fumes.

  I had the same disorientating feeling that I’d experienced the previous day, when Lang’s statement started pinging back at me from the ether. On the television I could see one of the Special Branch men opening the rear passenger door, and standing there, holding it open, while down in the corridor I could hear Lang and the others preparing to leave. ‘All right, people?’ Kroll’s voice floated up the staircase. ‘Is everybody ready? Okay. Remember: happy, happy faces. Here we go.’ The front door opened, and moments later on the screen I glimpsed the top of the ex-prime minister’s head as he took the few hurried steps to the car. He ducked out of sight, just as his attorney scuttled after him, round to the Jaguar’s other side. At the bottom of the picture it said ‘ADAM LANG LEAVES MARTHA’S VINEYARD HOUSE’. They know everything, I thought, these satellite boys, but they’ve never heard of tautology.

  Behind them, the entourage debouched in rapid single file from the house and headed for the minivan. Amelia was in the lead, her hand clutched to her immaculate blonde hair to protect it against the rotors’ down-draught; then came the secretaries, followed by the paralegals, and finally a couple of bodyguards.

  The long, dark shapes of the cars, their headlights gleaming, pulled out of the compound and set off through the ashy expanse of scrub oak towards the West Tisbury highway. The helicopter tracked them, whirling away the few winter leaves and flattening the sparse grass. Gradually, for the first time that morning, as the noise of its rotors faded, something like peace returned to the house. It was as if the eye of a great electrical storm had finally moved on. I wondered where
Ruth was, and whether she was also watching the coverage. I got up and stood at the top of the stairs and listened for a while, but all was quiet, and by the time I returned to the television, the coverage had shifted from aerial to ground level, and Lang’s limousine was pulling out of the woods.

  A lot more police had arrived at the end of the track, courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a line of them was keeping the demonstrators safely corralled on the opposite side of the highway. For a moment the Jaguar appeared to be accelerating toward the airport, but then its brake lights glowed and it stopped. The minivan swerved to a halt behind it. And suddenly, there was Lang, coatless, seemingly as oblivious to the cold as he was to the chanting crowd, striding over to the cameras, trailed by three Special Branch men. I hunted around for the remote control in the chair where Amelia had been sitting – her scent still lingered on the leather – pointed it at the screen, and pumped up the volume.

  ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting so long in the cold,’ Lang began. ‘I just wanted to say a few words in response to the news from The Hague.’ He paused and glanced at the ground. He often did that. Was it genuine, or merely contrived, to give an impression of spontaneity? With him, one never knew. The chant of ‘Lang! Lang! Lang! Liar! Liar! Liar!’ was clearly audible in the background.

  ‘These are strange times,’ he said, and hesitated again, ‘strange times’ – and now at last he looked up – ‘when those who have always stood for freedom, peace and justice are accused of being criminals, while those who openly incite hatred, glorify slaughter and seek the destruction of democracy are treated by the law as if they are victims.’

  ‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’

  ‘As I said in my statement yesterday, I have always been a strong supporter of the International Criminal Court. I believe in its work. I believe in the integrity of its judges. And that is why I do not fear this investigation. Because I know in my heart I have done nothing wrong.’

  He glanced across at the demonstrators. For the first time he appeared to notice the waving placards: his face, the prison bars, the orange jumpsuit, the bloodied hands. The line of his mouth set firm.

  ‘I refuse to be intimidated,’ he said, with an upward tilt of his chin. ‘I refuse to be made a scapegoat. I refuse to be distracted from my work combating Aids, poverty and global warming. For that reason, I propose to travel now to Washington to carry on my schedule as planned. To everyone watching in the United Kingdom and throughout the world, let me make one thing perfectly clear. As long as I have breath in my body, I shall fight terrorism wherever it has to be fought, whether it be on the battlefield, or – if necessary – in the courts. Thank you.’

  Ignoring the shouted questions – ‘When are you going back to Britain, Mr Lang?’ ‘Do you support torture, Mr Lang?’ – he turned and strode away, the muscles of his broad shoulders flexing beneath his handmade suit, his trio of bodyguards fanned out behind him. A week ago I would have been impressed, as I had been by his speech in New York after the London suicide bomb, but now I was surprised at how unmoved I felt. It was like watching some great actor in the last phase of his career, emotionally overspent, with nothing left to draw on but technique.

  I waited until he was safely back in his gas- and bomb-proof cocoon, and then I switched off the television.

  *

  With Lang and the others gone, the house seemed not merely empty but desolate, bereft of purpose. I came down the stairs and passed the lighted showcases of tribal erotica. The chair by the front door where one of the bodyguards always sat was vacant. I reversed my steps and followed the corridor round to the secretaries’ office. The small room, normally clinically neat, looked as if it had been abandoned in a panic, like the cipher room of a foreign embassy in a surrendering city. A profusion of papers, computer disks and old editions of Hansard and the Congressional Record was strewn across the desk. It occurred to me then that I had no copy of Lang’s manuscript to work on, but when I tried to open the filing cabinet, it was locked. Beside it, a basket full of waste from the paper-shredder overflowed.

  I looked into the kitchen. An array of butcher’s knives was laid out on a chopping block; there was fresh blood on some of the blades. I called a hesitant ‘Hello?’ and stuck my head round the door of the pantry, but the housekeeper wasn’t there.

  I had no idea which was my room, and I therefore had no option but to work my way along the corridor, trying one door after another. The first was locked. The second was open, the room beyond it exuding a rich, sweet odour of heavy aftershave; a tracksuit was thrown across the bed: it was obviously the bedroom used by Special Branch during the night shift. The third door was locked and I was about to try the fourth when I heard the sound of a woman weeping. I could tell it was Ruth: even her sobs had a combative quality. ‘There are only six bedrooms in the main house,’ Amelia had said. ‘Adam and Ruth have one each.’ What a set-up this was, I thought, as I crept away: the ex-prime minister and his wife sleeping in separate rooms, with his mistress just along the corridor. It was almost French.

  Gingerly, I tried the handle of the next room. This one wasn’t locked, and the aroma of worn clothes and lavender soap, even more than the sight of my old suitcase, established it immediately as McAra’s former berth. I went in and closed the door very softly. The big mirrored closet took up the whole of the wall dividing my room from Ruth’s, and when I slid back the glass door a fraction, I could just make out her muffled wailing. The door scraped on its runner, and I guess she must have heard, for all at once the crying stopped, and I imagined her startled, raising her head from her damp pillow and staring at the wall. I drew away. On the bed I noticed that someone had put a box of A4 paper, stuffed so full the top didn’t fully fit. A yellow Post-it note said, ‘Good luck! Amelia.’ I sat on the counterpane and lifted the lid. ‘MEMOIRS’, proclaimed the title page, ‘by Adam Lang’. So she hadn’t forgotten me after all, despite the exquisitely embarrassing circumstances of her departure. You could say what you liked about Mrs Bly, but the woman was a pro.

  I recognised I was now at a decisive point. Either I continued to hang around at the fringes of this floundering project, pathetically hoping that at some point someone would help me. Or – and I felt my spine straightening as I contemplated the alternative – or I could seize control of it myself, try to knock these six hundred and twenty-one ineffable pages into some kind of publishable shape, take my two hundred and fifty grand, and head off to lie on a beach somewhere for a month until I had forgotten all about the Langs.

  Put in those terms, it wasn’t a choice. I steeled myself to ignore both McAra’s lingering traces in the room, and Ruth’s more corporeal presence next door. I took the manuscript from its box and placed it on the table next to the window, opened my shoulder bag and took out my laptop and the transcripts from yesterday’s interviews. There wasn’t a lot of room to work, but that didn’t bother me. Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start. I plugged in my laptop, switched on the Anglepoise, and contemplated the blank screen and its pulsing cursor.

  A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something which will arrest the reader’s attention – which will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third. I picked up McAra’s manuscript to remind myself of how not to begin a ten-million-dollar autobiography:

  Chapter One

  Early Years

  Langs are Scottish folk origina
lly, and proud of it. Our name is a derivation of ‘long’, the Old English word for tall, and it is from north of the border that my forefathers hail. It was in the sixteenth century that the first of the Langs …

  God help us! I ran my pen through it, and then zigzagged a thick blue line through all the succeeding paragraphs of Lang ancestral history. If you want a family tree, go to a garden centre – that’s what I advise my clients. Nobody else is interested. Maddox’s instruction was to begin the book with the war crimes allegations, which was fine by me, although it could only serve as a kind of long prologue. At some point, the memoir proper would have to begin, and for this I wanted to find a fresh and original note – something which would make Lang sound like a normal human being. The fact that he wasn’t a normal human being was neither here nor there.

  From Ruth Lang’s room came the sound of footsteps, and then her door opened and closed. I thought at first she might be coming to investigate who was moving around next door, but instead I heard her walking away. I put down McAra’s manuscript and turned my attention to the interview transcripts. I knew what I wanted. It was there in our first session:

  I remember it was a Sunday afternoon. Raining. I was still in bed. And someone starts knocking on the door …

  If I tidied up the grammar, the account of how Ruth had canvassed Lang for the local elections and so drawn him into politics would make a perfect opening. Yet McAra, with his characteristic tone-deafness for anything of human interest, had failed even to mention it. I rested my fingers on the keys of my laptop, then started to type:

  Chapter One

  Early Years

  I became a politician out of love. Not love for any particular party or ideology, but love for a woman who came knocking on my door one wet Sunday afternoon …

  You may object that this was corny, but don’t forget that (a) corn sells by the ton, (b) that I only had two weeks to rework an entire manuscript, and (c) that it sure as hell was a lot better than starting with the derivation of the name Lang. I was soon rattling away as fast as my two-finger typing would permit me: