London Rules by Mick Herron

Author:Mick Herron [Mick Herron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2017-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Gimball felt better, now it was laid out clearly. Still needed a cigarette, though.

He found an alleyway and nipped down it, plugging a cigarette into his mouth before he reached the yard at the end. Catch me here, he thought – what would people make of it if they caught him here, skulking among wheelie bins like a feral cat? He breathed out, and smoke drifted up into scaffolding while a long-lost schoolboy memory retrieved itself and burned across his mind like a cave painting. Three of them behind the gym, passing a cigarette hand to hand. The image vanished, but he wondered: what had happened to those old companions, and what were their names, and what were their lives like? However they’d turned out, they’d be reading about him in the papers tomorrow, or on their screens later tonight. BREXIT HERO ADMITS PERVY LEANINGS. The headline refused to adjust itself, no matter how hard he tried. CROSS-DRESSER CROSSES FLOOR. He shook his head, but it was too late: the full horror of what he planned to do had landed, and there was no pretending it hadn’t. Stand up and publicly announce his most private of peccadillos – really? Spike Claude Whelan’s guns by throwing himself in front of a cannon? It was madness. Because it wasn’t Whelan he had to fear; it wasn’t even the media, which would do what the media always did, and feed on whatever red meat was thrown its way. No, it was his own people who would turn on him if he dared reveal the truth about himself. What had he been thinking?

He could feel damp on his neck, and that loosening inside which comes with narrow escape. It had been a few small hours of angry bravado, that was all. The future that awaited him was too grand, too important, to jeopardise out of pique. So yes, fine, he’d do what Whelan wanted. It would make no difference, not in the long run. He couldn’t announce, tonight, Zafar Jaffrey’s dealings with an underworld enabler; couldn’t undermine the PM by exposing his tame Muslim, but you couldn’t stop the clock on history: the story would break, sooner or later, and if Dennis Gimball wouldn’t be the one to announce it, he’d certainly be there to add colour and noise. In the end, that was what counted – that it was you who was there, at the end. Because politics was all about timing: hell, you could stick your dick in a dead pig’s mouth and get away with it if your timing was right. And provided you were shame-free, but that was a given for Eton. He’d come close to forgetting that lesson, but had pulled himself short in time, thanks to the sacred habit of smoking: if he’d not slipped away to clear his head with a nicotine blast, he might still be in the grip of the delusion that exposing himself in public was the thing to do. Christ. And Dodie got on his case about it.

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