The Plot by Nadine Dorries

Author:Nadine Dorries
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-10-11T12:53:57+00:00

Chapter 10

Boris: From the Jaws of Victory

It was early Sunday morning and he greeted me in the kitchen of his house in the Cotswolds. Both the lids of the Aga were up and I had to take a very deep breath. I’m a woman of a certain age who has had an Aga since I left the poverty of my background. However, you can never escape your upbringing, and the thing about an Aga is, when the lids are up, the heat is escaping.

Boris was pouring hot water into a coffee pot. Carrie, as always, serene, unphased by her two toddlers, has taken both upstairs to bath and dress them and has left us a plate of warm fresh croissants. Dilyn, the dog, has jumped onto a chair and is trying his best to reach the counter and snaffle them. While Boris chatted, I surreptitiously lowered the Aga lids onto the hot plates and my zen returned.

‘The blasted boiler broke,’ he said, as he caught me with a glance from the corner of his eye. ‘It was all the heating we had over Christmas.’

We could hear hysterical squeals of laughter from Wilf as he charged across the landing.

‘C’mon!’ Boris shouted as he lifted the tray and led the way into the study with Dilyn close on his heels.

I knew he hated this. The unravelling of the past three years, the realisation of who betrayed him and why. It’s not what he’s about: personalities, game-playing, parties, deceit. He is just not that man, he literally has no time for it. As I placed my bag on the floor and took out my phone to set Otter to record, I looked around me: this room is who he is. A huge volume of Shakespeare’s complete works open on a wrought-iron stand, like the type people use to keep a cookery book open on a certain recipe. To his side, a textbook open next to his laptop and a notepad with a well-placed pen keeping his page, and on the other side of the desk stands high a pile of hardbacked books, waiting to be read. I went to sit down in the leather wingback chair at the side of the desk and jumped back up as quickly. Dilyn had got there first and even as I sat on him, refused to budge.

‘Get, down, Dilyn,’ I said as I lifted him onto the floor and took my place, before he leapt straight back up onto my lap. I noticed that the book on the top of the pile was uniquely a novel, Act of Oblivion, by the author Robert Harris. The remainder of the books appeared to be on politics, history and economics; some on the spines were written in Greek, so I couldn’t really make out what they were actually about at all.

‘Robert Harris, he’s not one of us,’ I said. Meaning he was far from being a Brexiteer.

I had read a number of Harris novels and loved them. I read Pompei

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