What You Don't Know by David Belbin

Author:David Belbin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Paul brought Sarah coffee in bed. They were at his King’s Cross flat. It was the morning after the first time that Sarah had spent the night there. Paul did not make any moves to suggest an encore of last night’s love-making. Sarah’s mind, inevitably on a day when she had to be at the Home Office soon, drifted to work issues that they had in common.

‘About the Power Project …’

‘Let it go,’ Paul told Sarah. ‘We did our duty by the place, but it was too soon.’

‘That’s all very well for you to say,’ Sarah told him. ‘You’re not on the board any more.’

Now was not the time to tell a new lover that she couldn’t let it go because she wanted to protect a former lover. This was an affair, not a fully fledged relationship. Secrets were allowed. He stroked her hair.

‘There won’t be a board for much longer. Look, I’m sorry I talked you into joining it. Truth is, that night, I wanted an excuse to see you. When I showed up in your room and Eric was there, you can’t begin to imagine what went through my mind …’

‘I’m sure I can.’

They both laughed. Paul kissed her, then went for a shower. She was not going to fall in love with Paul, she told herself. She was going to have fun. They had been together for a week and had already, casually but definitively, agreed the terms of their relationship. They would spend one or two nights a week together, but not in public. As far as possible, they would steer clear of each other in Nottingham.

Paul assured her that, he and Annette having separated, there was nobody else in his life. He was almost as busy with work as she was, so the arrangement suited him as well as it did her. Sarah thought she had found the perfect relationship for a junior Home Office minister. Paul was the best-looking man she’d been out with since Nick. One day, maybe, after he was divorced, she’d be happy to have him seen on her arm. But that day was a long way off.

They caught separate taxis to the Home Office. Paul ran an unpublicized policy unit on updating drugs laws. He reported directly to the Home Secretary. As did Sarah. Today she had to formulate the government’s response to an EC recommendation that prisoners should be paid real wages for the work they did inside. It was an issue that enraged the kind of voters Labour needed to keep onside if they were to win a second term.

Sarah didn’t think prisons should be work camps. That said, only idiots believed that governments profited by having men sew mail bags or assemble cheap radios. Each prison place cost more than several new nurses. Any money paid to prisoners came out of some other budget. The point about work in prison was that it kept dissent down and aided rehabilitation. Occasionally it qualified prisoners to do certain jobs when they got out.

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