Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski Page B

and postrooms of large corporations. The indispensable human tools of the trade in my business.
    One of the larger utilities was mounting some form of legal defence against the government plan. But their counterplotting was somehow making it into the national press. As soon as something was discussed at boardroom level it soon arrived in print on the financial pages of one of the large national newspapers. Inconvenient. You can’t play chess when your opponent always knows your likely response to his movements. I was hired by phone by a Mr Jones in Corporate Planning. Money no object. Find out who was leaking the minutes of the secret meetings, and stop them.
    Piece of cake.
    The annoying columns were penned by the business correspondent of the newspaper. One I used to read once, but had recently given up on. I soon had a tap on his South London mews house telephone and 24-hour surveillance in operation. He operated from his Canary Wharf newsroom; unfortunately, because of the other year’s IRA bombing in the vicinity I couldn’t get access to the paper’s offices and his phone there. Not to worry. I would just have to be patient and more thorough than usual.
    Motive was quickly revealed: the guy’s wife was a member of the local Labour constituency. Bloody idealists. So now it was just a question of pinpointing who at the utilities was passing him the information. At first I assumed it was also a local party activist, passing information to the press for what he or she thought were all the right reasons. So I left a couple of freelancers to keep a close eye on the Canary Wharf and City jaunts of the damn journo, and decided to concentrate on the South London connection personally.
    And met her. The wife. Callie.
    And my problems began.
    And the joy.
    Turns out I was on the wrong trail, anyway. The division at the utilities that had called on my snooping services didn’t know what another division on another floor was up to ... It seems that they were aware there was no legal chance in hell of reversing the government’s new tax, even if they had spent months and mountains in cash taking their case to the European courts or wherever, so they had leaked the stuff to the newspaper themselves to put the frighteners on the politicians in the hope of discouraging the Exchequer to set the windfall tax too high. Manipulating the media, and my business correspondent target was just the patsy they had unwittingly used. He was fairly new to the job, an arrival from TV and radio who didn’t realise he was being manipulated. Probably thought all along he was God’s answer to investigative journalism. I never did like him anyway.
    But I didn’t know all that then and also thought I was doing a damn good job. Did I say patsy?
    Early bright late May morning, parked fifty yards from the couple’s semidetached, I munched on a chocolate biscuit in lieu of breakfast, aware that this job was playing havoc with my expanding waistline. Mark, the journalist, had left half an hour ago for Canary Wharf, and a reliable acolyte had followed him. I’d planned to keep on the wife’s trail. Already knew quite a bit about her. Second generation Irish, Epsom grammar school and Cambridge, a second in English, a few dead end jobs on regional newspapers and now a reader in the drama department for one of the new television cable channels; married eight years, in the chapel of the Cambridge college where they had both been undergraduates. No children. Canvassed for the local branch of the party. Must have had her first orgasm in months on the night Labour won and they fucked whilst blinding drunk. On paper, a common type. Somehow, I hadn’t summoned a mental picture of her, wasn’t really expecting anything surprising. She was just a pawn in another very ordinary case.
    The house’s front door opened.
    I was blinded.
    Within a week, I had contrived to meet her at a launch party for a balti