Read Online Connections by Hilary Bailey - Free Book Online

mumbled.
    Did he mean him, himself, or his situation and the place? She knew the answers – yes, he was good enough, more than good enough – and no, his life wouldn’t do. She only said, “Own bed – get some sleep. See you soon.”
    He muttered something and went straight back to sleep. She let herself out into the grey day, with light just coming.

Six
    Dear William,
    I hope you don’t mind me calling you William. Or would you rather I used the whole thing: Sir William Clegg, Chairman and Treasury Representative for the Bank of England Enquiry? I think we were at Downside together, though you must have been four years younger. You’ve done well, William. You always did, from what I heard, and here you are now, investigating me. Or anyway, you’ve issued an invitation for me to give evidence at the Bank’s Enquiry into the affairs of Strauss Jethro Smith.
    I seem to remember a chubby face and a pure soprano voice hitting the chapel rafters while – what was I doing? Thinking about girls, planning an escape route, working out the day’s punishment plan for whoever I was bullying at the time?
    You’ve done well, William – twenty-five years later here you are chairing the committee, while I’m sitting here looking out over the wintry sea from my small hotel on the coast. I’m watching an old man in a trilby walking his dog over the wet sand under a moving black and grey sky. It all seems quintessentially English – out-of-season, sea-surrounded, misty-aired English.
    This communication of mine will put you in a bit of a quandary, I imagine. It will come to you as a private letter, through your own front door. As such, technically, it will be your private property. You’ll be under no legal compulsion to disclose what I’m telling you, though you might think there’s a moral one. Not that I’m one to preach morality to my betters. William Clegg – the choice is yours.
    Background first – you need to know who it is you’re dealingwith, who’s taking you down roads that you’ll wish, before it’s over, you’d never started walking on.
    Who am I? My name, your Honour, is Sam Hope, and I come from a respectable home; not poor, but honest servants of State and Empire over many generations. I’m ex-army and took a hike in the early eighties, after the Falklands war. I joined up with John Vansittart, who was ex-army himself and had a small private security company. I recruited my own small corps from the British Army, SAS and elsewhere. We’d stand on the airstrip, me and the lads, ready for Africa, the Balkans or wherever, and when I looked at them the words of the Duke of Wellington reviewing his own troops before Waterloo would ring in my ears – “I don’t know what they’ll do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.
”
    By the later eighties Hope Vansittart Private Security was on covert missions, not abroad but over here, helping to persuade the doughty colliers of the Midlands to set up their own union in opposition to Scar gill’s NUM and up north helping the other pitmen to give up their obstinate ways. Previously we’d been guarding oil sheikhs and film stars, and dictators with good reason to fear their own dissident groups. Then there we were in GB, making life a misery for the miners.
    This was how Hope Vansittart Private Security – HVPS – came into what you might describe as politics. Funny, really: it was the Falklands that got me out of the army and the miners’ strike which put me on the path to the best part of my fortune. Ultimately, you might say, the Lady made me.
    Since then, William, I’ve been a non-attributable resource, buried deep in your firm’s books. Thus the private schools for my children, the big house in Twickenham with the Thames running sweetly at the end of my garden, the blonde-streaked wife with the discontented expression