I’ll be on to it. If there aren’t any flights of fancy, well then… no need to worry.’ With the air of a man getting to the real purpose of themeeting at last, Prior drew another file towards him. ‘Now tell me what you know about MacDowell.’
After he’d finished milking Spragge of information, all of which he knew already, and had sent him home to await the summons, Prior sat motionless for a while, his chin propped on his hands.
‘The poison was for the dogs.’
‘There weren’t any fucking dogs. You might not know that, but she does.’
Was it possible Beattie had tried to reach out from her corner shop in Tite Street and kill the Prime Minister? The Beattie he’d known before the war would not have done that, but then that Beattie had been rooted in a communal life. Oh, she’d been considered odd – any woman in Tite Street who worked for the suffragettes was odd. But she hadn’t been isolated. That came with the war.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, Miss Burton’s little dog had gone missing. Miss Burton was a spinster who haunted the parish church, arranged flowers, sorted jumble, cherished a hopeless love for the vicar – how hopeless probably only Prior knew. He’d been at home at the time, waiting for orders to join his regiment, and he’d helped her search for the dog. They found it tied by a wire to the railway fence, in a buzzing cloud of black flies, disembowelled. It was a dachshund. One of the enemy.
In that climate Beattie had found the courage to be a pacifist. People stopped going to the shop. If it hadn’t been for the allotment, the family would have starved. So many bricks came through the window they gave up having it mended and lived behind boards. Shit – canine and human – regularly plopped through the letter-box on to the carpet. In that isolation, in that semi-darkness, Beattie had sheltered deserters and later, after the passingof the Conscription Act, conscientious objectors who’d been refused exemption. Until one day, carrying a letter from Mac, Spragge had knocked on her door and uncovered a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. Or so he said.
Could she have plotted to kill Lloyd George? Prior thought he understood how the powerless might begin to fancy themselves omnipotent. The badges of hopeless drudgery, the brush and the cooking-pot, become the flying broomstick and the cauldron, and not only in the minds of the persecutors . At first there would be only wild and flailing words, prophecies that Lloyd George would come to a dreadful end and then, nudged along by Spragge – because whatever Beattie’s part in this, Spragge had not been innocent – the sudden determination to act out the fantasy: to destroy the man she blamed for prolonging the war and causing millions of deaths.
Lode would have had no difficulty in believing Spragge. The poison plot fitted in very neatly with his preconceptions about the anti-war movement. Not much grasp of reality in all this, Prior thought, on either side. He was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.
He began putting away the files. It was a situation where you had to hang on to the few certainties, and he was certain that Spragge had lied under oath, and since Spragge had been the only witness, this of itself meant the conviction was unsafe.
He locked the filing cabinet and the door of his room, and walked along to the end of the corridor. The lift was stuck on the fifth floor. He decided not to wait and ran downstairs, coming out on to the mezzanine landingwhere he paused and looked down into the foyer, as he often did, liking to imagine the hotel as it must have been before the war, before this drabness of black and khaki set in.
The shape of a head caught his attention. Charles Manning , waiting for the lift, and with him – good God – Winston Churchill and
After he’d finished milking Spragge of information, all of which he knew already, and had sent him home to await the summons, Prior sat motionless for a while, his chin propped on his hands.
‘The poison was for the dogs.’
‘There weren’t any fucking dogs. You might not know that, but she does.’
Was it possible Beattie had tried to reach out from her corner shop in Tite Street and kill the Prime Minister? The Beattie he’d known before the war would not have done that, but then that Beattie had been rooted in a communal life. Oh, she’d been considered odd – any woman in Tite Street who worked for the suffragettes was odd. But she hadn’t been isolated. That came with the war.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, Miss Burton’s little dog had gone missing. Miss Burton was a spinster who haunted the parish church, arranged flowers, sorted jumble, cherished a hopeless love for the vicar – how hopeless probably only Prior knew. He’d been at home at the time, waiting for orders to join his regiment, and he’d helped her search for the dog. They found it tied by a wire to the railway fence, in a buzzing cloud of black flies, disembowelled. It was a dachshund. One of the enemy.
In that climate Beattie had found the courage to be a pacifist. People stopped going to the shop. If it hadn’t been for the allotment, the family would have starved. So many bricks came through the window they gave up having it mended and lived behind boards. Shit – canine and human – regularly plopped through the letter-box on to the carpet. In that isolation, in that semi-darkness, Beattie had sheltered deserters and later, after the passingof the Conscription Act, conscientious objectors who’d been refused exemption. Until one day, carrying a letter from Mac, Spragge had knocked on her door and uncovered a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister. Or so he said.
Could she have plotted to kill Lloyd George? Prior thought he understood how the powerless might begin to fancy themselves omnipotent. The badges of hopeless drudgery, the brush and the cooking-pot, become the flying broomstick and the cauldron, and not only in the minds of the persecutors . At first there would be only wild and flailing words, prophecies that Lloyd George would come to a dreadful end and then, nudged along by Spragge – because whatever Beattie’s part in this, Spragge had not been innocent – the sudden determination to act out the fantasy: to destroy the man she blamed for prolonging the war and causing millions of deaths.
Lode would have had no difficulty in believing Spragge. The poison plot fitted in very neatly with his preconceptions about the anti-war movement. Not much grasp of reality in all this, Prior thought, on either side. He was used to thinking of politics in terms of conflicting interests, but what seemed to have happened here was less a conflict of interests than a disastrous meshing together of fantasies.
He began putting away the files. It was a situation where you had to hang on to the few certainties, and he was certain that Spragge had lied under oath, and since Spragge had been the only witness, this of itself meant the conviction was unsafe.
He locked the filing cabinet and the door of his room, and walked along to the end of the corridor. The lift was stuck on the fifth floor. He decided not to wait and ran downstairs, coming out on to the mezzanine landingwhere he paused and looked down into the foyer, as he often did, liking to imagine the hotel as it must have been before the war, before this drabness of black and khaki set in.
The shape of a head caught his attention. Charles Manning , waiting for the lift, and with him – good God – Winston Churchill and
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