reading

‘The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I see that now …’

A body washes up on the deserted coastline of America’s most exclusive holiday retreat. But it’s no open-and-shut case of suicide. The death of Robert McAra is just the first piece of the jigsaw in an extraordinary plot that will shake the very foundations of international security.

For McAra was a man who knew too much. As ghostwriter to one of the most controversial men on the planet – Britain’s former prime minister, holed up in a remote ocean-front house to finish his memoirs – he stumbled across secrets which cost him his life.

When a new ghostwriter is sent out to rescue the project it could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Or the start of a deadly assignment propelled by deception and intrigue – from which there will be no escape…

Robert Harris is the author of Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium and Lustrum, all of which were international bestsellers. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. After graduating with a degree in English from Cambridge University, he worked as a reporter for the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes, before becoming political editor of the Observer and subsequently a columnist on the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. He is married to Gill Hornby and they live with their four children in a village near Hungerford.

I would like to thank Andrew Crofts for permission to use the quotes from his excellent handbook, Ghostwriting (A & C Black, 2004). Two other successful ghostwriters, Adam Sisman and Luke Jennings, were kind enough to share their experiences with me. Philippe Sands QC generously provided advice about international law. Rose Styron spent several days showing me round Martha’s Vineyard: I could not have had a more gracious and well-informed guide. My publisher in the USA, David Rosenthal, and my agent, Michael Carlisle, gave me great help with the American aspects of this novel – although each, of course, is as unlike his fictional counterpart as it is possible to be.

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.

EVELYN WAUGH,
Brideshead Revisited

Of all the advantages that ghosting offers, one of the greatest must be the opportunity that you get to meet people of interest.

THE MOMENT I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that now. I should have said, ‘Rick, I’m sorry, this isn’t for me, I don’t like the sound of it,’ finished my drink and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick – I often thought he should have been the writer and I the literary agent – that once he’d started talking there was never any question I wouldn’t listen, and by the time he had finished, I was hooked.

McAra had caught the last ferry from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to Martha’s Vineyard two Sundays earlier. I worked out afterwards it must have been January the twelfth. It was touch and go whether the ferry would sail at all. A gale had been blowing since mid-afternoon and the last few crossings had been cancelled. But towards nine o’clock the wind eased slightly and at nine forty-five the master decided it was safe to cast off. The boat was crowded: McAra was lucky to get a space for his car. He parked below decks and then went upstairs to get some air.

The crossing to the island usually takes forty-five minutes, but on this particular night the weather slowed the voyage considerably: docking a two-hundred-foot vessel in a fifty-knot wind, said Rick, is nobody’s idea of fun. It was nearly eleven when the ferry made land at Vineyard Haven and the cars started up – all except one: a brand new tan-coloured Ford Escape SUV. The purser made a loudspeaker appeal for the owner to return to his vehicle as he was blocking the drivers behind him. When he still didn’t show, the crew tried the doors, which turned out to be unlocked, and freewheeled the big Ford down to the quayside. Afterwards they searched the ship with care: stairwells, bar, toilets, even the lifeboats – nothing. They called the terminal at Woods Hole to check if anyone had disembarked before the boat sailed or had perhaps been accidentally left behind – again: nothing. That was when an official of the Massachusetts Steamship Authority finally contacted the Coast Guard station in Falmouth to report a possible man overboard.

A police check on the Ford’s licence plate revealed it to be registered to one Martin S. Rhinehart of New York City, although Mr Rhinehart was eventually tracked down to his ranch in California. By now it was about midnight on the East Coast, nine p.m. on the West.

Rhinehart immediately confirmed over the telephone to the police that the Ford belonged to him. He kept it at his house on Martha’s Vineyard for the use of himself and his guests in the summer. He also confirmed that, despite the time of year, a group of people were staying there at the moment. He said he would get his assistant to call the house and find out if anyone had borrowed the car. Half an hour later she rang back to say that someone was indeed missing, a person by the name of McAra.

There was nothing now that could be done until first light. Not that it mattered. Everyone knew that if a passenger had gone overboard it would be a search for a corpse. Rick is one of those irritatingly fit Americans in his early forties who looks about nineteen and does terrible things to his body with bicycles and canoes. He knows that sea: he once spent two days paddling a kayak the entire sixty miles round the island. The ferry from Woods Hole plies the strait where Vineyard Sound meets Nantucket Sound, and that is dangerous water. At high tide you can see the force of the currents sucking the huge channel buoys over on to their sides. Rick shook his head. In January, in a gale, in snow? No one could survive more than five minutes.

A local woman found the body early the next morning, thrown up on the beach about four miles down the island’s coast at Lambert’s Cove. The driver’s licence in the wallet confirmed him to be Michael James McAra, aged fifty, from Balham in south London. I remember feeling a sudden shot of sympathy at the mention of that dreary, unexotic suburb: he certainly was a long way from home, poor devil. His passport named his mother as his next-of-kin. The police took his corpse to the little morgue in Vineyard Haven and then drove over to the Rhinehart residence to break the news and to fetch one of the other guests to identify him.

It must have been quite a scene, said Rick, when the volunteer guest finally showed up to view the body: ‘I bet the morgue attendant is still talking about it.’ There was one patrol car from Edgartown with a blue flashing light, a second car with four armed guards to secure the building, and a third vehicle, bomb-proof, carrying the instantly recognisable man who, until eighteen months earlier, had been the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The lunch had been Rick’s idea. I hadn’t even known he was in town until he rang me the night before. He insisted we meet at his club. It was not his club, exactly – he was actually a member of a similar mausoleum in Manhattan, whose members had reciprocal dining rights in London – but he loved it all the same. At lunchtime only men were admitted. Each wore a dark blue suit and was over sixty: I hadn’t felt so young since I left university. Outside, the winter sky pressed down on London like a great grey tombstone. Inside, yellow electric light from three immense candelabra glinted on dark polished tables, plated silverware and rubied decanters of claret. A small card placed between us announced that the club’s annual backgammon tournament would be taking place that evening. It was like the Changing of the Guard or the Houses of Parliament – a foreigner’s image of England.

‘Oh, but it has. Nobody’s made a secret of it. There’ve been obituaries.’

And now I came to think of it, I did vaguely remember seeing something. But I had been working fifteen hours a day for a month to finish my new book, the autobiography of a footballer, and the world beyond my study had become a blur.

‘What on earth was an ex-prime minister doing identifying the body of a man from Balham who fell off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry?’

‘Michael McAra,’ announced Rick, with the emphatic delivery of a man who has flown three thousand miles to deliver this punch-line, ‘was helping him write his memoirs.’

And this is where, in that parallel life, I express polite sympathy for the elderly Mrs McAra (‘such a shock to lose a child at that age’), fold my heavy linen napkin, finish my drink, say goodbye, and step out into the chilly London street with the whole of my undistinguished career stretching safely ahead of me. Instead I excused myself, went to the club’s lavatory and studied an unfunny Punch cartoon while urinating thoughtfully.

‘You realise I don’t know anything about politics?’ I said when I got back.

‘Adam Lang? Of course I did. Everybody voted for him. He wasn’t a politician; he was a craze.’

‘Well, that’s the point. Who’s interested in politics? In any case, it’s a professional ghostwriter he needs, my friend, not another goddamned politico.’ He glanced around. It was an iron rule of the club that no business could be discussed on the premises – a problem for Rick, seeing as he never discussed anything else. ‘Marty Rhinehart paid ten million dollars for these memoirs on two conditions. First, it’d be in the stores within two years. Second, Lang wouldn’t pull any punches about the War on Terror. From what I hear, he’s nowhere near meeting either requirement. Things got so bad around Christmas, Rhinehart gave him the use of his vacation house on the Vineyard so that Lang and McAra could work without any distractions. I guess the pressure must have gotten to McAra. The state medical examiner found enough booze in his blood to put him four times over the driving limit.’

‘Accident? Suicide?’ He casually flicked his hand. ‘Who’ll ever know? What does it matter? It was the book that killed him.’

While Rick went on with his pitch, I stared at my plate and imagined the former prime minister looking down at his assistant’s cold white face in the mortuary – staring down at his ghost, I suppose one could say. How did it feel? I am always putting this question to my clients. I must ask it a hundred times a day during the interview phase: How did it feel? How did it feel? And mostly they can’t answer, which is why they have to hire me to supply their memories: by the end of a successful collaboration I am more them than they are. I rather enjoy this process, to be honest: the brief freedom of being someone else. Does that sound creepy? If so, let me add that real craftsmanship is required. I not only extract from people their life stories, I impart a shape to those lives which was often invisible; sometimes I give them lives they never even realised they had. If that isn’t art, what is?

‘Yes, so let’s not admit you haven’t. He was some kind of aide when Lang was prime minister. Speechwriting, policy research, political strategy. When Lang resigned, McAra stayed with him, to run his office.’

Throughout lunch I’d been half watching an elderly television actor at the next table. He’d been famous when I was a child for playing the single parent of teenage girls in a sitcom. Now, as he rose unsteadily and started to shuffle towards the exit, he looked as though he’d been made up to act the role of his own corpse. That was the type of person whose memoirs I ghosted: people who had fallen a few rungs down the celebrity ladder, or who had a few rungs left to climb, or who were just about clinging to the top and were desperate to cash in while there was still time. I was abruptly overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the whole idea that I might collaborate on the memoirs of a prime minister.

‘Rhinehart Inc. are getting frantic. They’re holding a beauty parade at their London office tomorrow morning. Maddox himself is flying over from New York to represent the company. Lang’s sending the lawyer who negotiated the original deal for him – the hottest fixer in Washington, a very smart guy by the name of Sidney Kroll. I’ve other clients I could put in for this, so if you’re not up for it, just tell me now. But from the way they’ve been talking, I think you’re the best fit.’

‘No. I promise you. They need to do something radical – take a risk. It’s a great opportunity for you. And the money will be good. The kids won’t starve.’

We parted on the steps of the club. Rick had a car waiting outside with its engine running. He didn’t offer to drop me anywhere, which made me suspect he was off to see another client, to whom he would make exactly the same pitch he had just made to me. What is the collective noun for a group of ghosts? A train? A town? A haunt? At any rate, Rick had plenty of us on his books. Take a look at the bestseller lists: you would be amazed how much of it is the work of ghosts, novels as well as non-fiction. We are the phantom operatives who keep publishing going, like the unseen workers beneath Walt Disney World. We scuttle along the subterranean tunnels of celebrity, popping up here and there, dressed as this character or that, preserving the seamless illusion of the Magic Kingdom.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said, and dramatically, in a puff of exhaust fumes, he was gone: Mephistopheles on a fifteen per cent commission. I stood for a minute, undecided, and if I had been in another part of London it is still just possible things might have gone differently. But I was in that narrow zone where Soho washes up against Covent Garden: a trash-strewn strip of empty theatres, dark alleys, red lights, snack bars and bookshops – so many bookshops you can start to feel ill just looking at them, from the tiny little rip-off specialist dealers in Cecil Court to the cut-price behemoths of Charing Cross Road. I often drop into one of the latter, to see how my titles are displayed, and that was what I did that afternoon. Once I was inside, it was only a short step across the scuffed red carpet of the Biography & Memoir department, and suddenly I had gone from ‘Celebrity’ to ‘Politics’.

I was surprised by how much they had on the former prime minister – an entire shelf, everything from the early hagiography, Adam Lang: Statesman for Our Time, to a recent hatchet job entitled Would You Adam and Eve It? The Collected Lies of Adam Lang, both by the same author. I took down the thickest biography and opened it at the photographs: Lang as a toddler, feeding a bottle of milk to a lamb beside a dry-stone wall, Lang as Lady Macbeth in a school play, Lang dressed as a chicken in a Cambridge University Footlights revue, Lang as a distinctly stoned-looking merchant banker in the seventies, Lang with his wife and young children on the doorstep of a new house, Lang wearing a rosette and waving from an open-topped bus on the day he was elected to parliament, Lang with his colleagues, Lang with world leaders, with pop stars, with soldiers in the Middle East. A bald customer in a scuffed leather coat browsing the shelf next to me stared at the cover. He held his nose with one hand and mimed flushing a toilet with the other.

I moved around the corner of the bookcase and looked up McAra, Michael in the index. There were only five or six innocuous references – no reason in other words why anyone outside the party or the government need ever have heard of him, so to hell with you, Rick, I thought. I flicked back to the photograph of the prime minister seated smiling at the cabinet table, with his Downing Street staff arrayed behind him. The caption identified McAra as the burly figure in the back row. He was slightly out of focus – a pale, unsmiling, dark-haired smudge. I squinted more closely at him. He looked exactly the sort of unappealing inadequate that is congenitally drawn to politics and makes people like me stick to the sports pages. You’ll find a McAra in any country, in any system, standing behind any leader with a political machine to operate: a greasy engineer in the boiler room of power. And this was the man who had been entrusted to ghost a ten-million-dollar memoir? I felt professionally affronted. I bought myself a small pile of research material and headed out of the bookshop with a growing conviction that maybe Rick was right; perhaps I was the man for the job.

It was obvious the moment I got outside that another bomb had gone off. At Tottenham Court Road people were surging up above ground from all four exits of the tube station like storm water from a blocked drain. A loudspeaker said something about ‘an incident at Oxford Circus’. It sounded like an edgy romantic comedy: Brief Encounter meets the War on Terror. I carried on up the road, unsure of how I would get home – taxis, like false friends, tending always to vanish at the first sign of trouble. In the window of one of the big electrical shops the crowd watched the same news bulletin relayed simultaneously on a dozen televisions: aerial shots of Oxford Circus, black smoke gushing out of the underground station, thrusts of orange flame. An electronic ticker-tape running across the bottom of the screen announced a suspected suicide bomber, many dead and injured, and gave an emergency number to call. Above the rooftops a helicopter tilted and circled. I could smell the smoke – an acrid, eye-reddening blend of diesel and burning plastic.

It took me two full hours to walk home, lugging my heavy bag of books – up to Marylebone Road and then westwards towards Paddington. As usual, the entire tube system had been shut down to check for further bombs; so had the main railway stations. The traffic on either side of the wide street was stalled and, on past form, would remain so until evening. (If only Hitler had known he didn’t need a whole air force to paralyse London, I thought: just a revved-up teenager with a bottle of bleach and a bag of weedkiller.) Occasionally a police car or an ambulance would mount the kerb, roar along the pavement and attempt to make progress up a side street.

It must have been six when I reached my flat. I had the top two floors of a high, stuccoed house in what the residents call Notting Hill and the Post Office stubbornly insists is North Kensington. Used syringes glittered in the gutter; at the halal butchers opposite they did the slaughtering on the premises. It was grim. But from the attic extension which served as my office I had a view across west London which would not have disgraced a skyscraper: rooftops, railway yards, motorway and sky – a vast urban-prairie sky, sprinkled with the lights of aircraft descending towards Heathrow. It was this view which had sold me the apartment, not the estate agent’s gentrification patter – which was just as well, as the rich bourgeoisie have no more returned to this area than they have to downtown Baghdad.

Kate had already let herself in and was watching the news. Kate: I had forgotten she was coming over for the evening. She was my …? I never knew what to call her. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend. Partner wasn’t right either, as we didn’t live under the same roof. Lover? How could one keep a straight face? Mistress? Do me a favour. Fiancée? Certainly not. I suppose I ought to have realised it was ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship. (Kate isn’t her real name, by the way, but I don’t see why she should be dragged into all this. In any case, it suits her better than the name she does have: she looks like a Kate, if you know what I mean – sensible but sassy, girlish but always willing to be one of the boys. She works in television, but let’s not hold that against her.)

‘Thanks for the concerned phone call,’ I said. ‘I’m dead actually, but don’t worry about it.’ I kissed the top of her head, dropped the books on to the sofa and went into the kitchen to pour myself a whisky. ‘The entire tube is down. I’ve had to walk all the way from Covent Garden.’

I topped up my glass with water from the tap, drank half, then topped it up again with whisky. I remembered I was supposed to have reserved a table at a restaurant. When I went back into the living room she was removing one book after another from the carrier bag. ‘What’s all this?’ she said, looking up at me. ‘You’re not interested in politics.’ And then she realised what was going on, because she was smart – smarter than I was. She knew what I did for a living; she knew I was meeting an agent; and she knew all about McAra. ‘Don’t tell me they want you to ghost his book?’ She laughed. ‘You cannot be serious.’ She tried to make a joke of it – ‘You cannot be serious’ in an American accent, like that tennis player a few years ago – but I could see her dismay. She hated Lang; felt personally betrayed by him. She used to be a party member. I had forgotten that, too.

She went back to watching the news, only now with her arms tightly folded, always a warning sign. The tickertape announced that the death toll was seven, and likely to rise.

‘But if you’re offered it you’ll do it?’ she asked, without turning to look at me.

I was spared having to reply by the newsreader announcing that they were cutting live to New York to get the reaction of the former prime minister, and suddenly there was Adam Lang, at a podium marked ‘Waldorf-Astoria’, where it looked as though he had been addressing a lunch. ‘You will all by now have heard the tragic news from London,’ he said, ‘where once again the forces of fanaticism and intolerance …’

Nothing he uttered that night warrants reprinting. It was almost a parody of what a politician might say after a terrorist attack. Yet watching him, you would have thought his own wife and children had been eviscerated in the blast. This was his genius: to refresh and elevate the clichés of politics by the sheer force of his performance. Even Kate was briefly silenced. Only when he had finished and his largely female, mostly elderly, audience was rising to applaud did she mutter, ‘What’s he doing in New York anyway?’

‘I suppose because no one here would pay him a hundred thousand dollars a throw.’

‘There was a time,’ said Kate slowly, after what felt like a very long silence, ‘when princes taking their countries to war were supposed to risk their lives in battle – you know, lead by example. Now they travel around in bomb-proof cars with armed bodyguards and make fortunes three thousand miles away, while the rest of us are stuck with the consequences of their actions. I just don’t understand you,’ she went on, turning to look at me properly for the first time. ‘All the things I’ve said about him over the past few years – “war criminal” and the rest of it – and you’ve sat there nodding and agreeing. And now you’re going to write his propaganda for him, and make him richer. Did none of it ever mean anything to you at all?’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. You’ve been trying to get an interview with him for months. What’s the difference?’

‘What’s the difference? Christ!’ She clenched her hands – those slim white hands I knew so well – and raised them in frustration, half-claw, half-fist. The sinews stood out in her arms. ‘What’s the difference? We want to hold him to account – that’s the difference! To ask him proper questions! About torturing and bombing and lying! Not “How does it feel?” Christ! This is a complete bloody waste of time.’

She got up then and went into the bedroom to collect the bag she always brought on the nights she planned to stay. I heard her filling it noisily with lipstick, toothbrush, perfume spray. I knew if I went in I could retrieve the situation. She was probably expecting it: we’d had worse rows. I’d have been obliged to concede that she was right, acknowledge my unsuitability for the task, affirm her moral and intellectual superiority in this as in all things. It needn’t even have been a verbal confession: a meaningful hug would probably have been enough to get me a suspended sentence. But the truth was, at that moment, given a choice between an evening of her smug left-wing moralising and the prospect of working with a so-called war criminal, I preferred the war criminal. So I simply carried on staring at the television.

Sometimes I have a nightmare in which all the women I have ever slept with assemble together. It’s a respectable rather than a huge number – were it a drinks party, say, my living room could accommodate them quite comfortably. And if, God forbid, this gathering were ever to occur, Kate would be the undisputed guest of honour. She is the one for whom a chair would be fetched, who would have her glass refilled by sympathetic hands, who would sit at the centre of a disbelieving circle as my moral and physical flaws were dissected. She was the one who had stuck it the longest.

She didn’t slam the door as she left but closed it very carefully. That was stylish, I thought. On the television screen the death toll had just increased to eight.

A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.

RHINEHART PUBLISHING UK consisted of five ancient firms acquired during a vigorous bout of corporate kleptomania in the nineties. Wrenched out of their Dickensian garrets in Bloomsbury, upsized, downsized, rebranded, renamed, reorganised, modernised and merged, they had finally been dumped in Hounslow, in a steel-and-smoked-glass office block with all its pipes on the outside. It nestled among the pebbledash housing estates like an abandoned spacecraft after a fruitless mission to find intelligent life.

I arrived, with professional punctuality, five minutes before noon, only to discover the main door locked. I had to buzz for entry. A noticeboard in the foyer announced that the terrorism alert was ORANGE/HIGH. Through the darkened glass I could see the security men in their dingy aquarium checking me on a monitor. When I finally got inside I had to turn out my pockets and pass through a metal-detector.

‘We’re publishing Lang’s memoirs,’ replied Quigley in a stiff voice. ‘That alone makes us a target, apparently. Rick’s already upstairs.’

I knew Roy Quigley fairly well – well enough to know he disapproved of me. He must have been about fifty, tall and tweedy. In a happier era he would have smoked a pipe and offered tiny advances to minor academics over long lunches in Soho. Now his midday meal was a plastic tray of salad taken at his desk overlooking the M4 and he received his orders direct from the head of sales and marketing, a girl of about sixteen. He had three children in private schools he couldn’t afford. As the price of survival he’d actually been obliged to start taking an interest in popular culture: to wit, the lives of various footballers, supermodels and foul-mouthed comedians, whose names he pronounced carefully and whose customs he studied in the tabloids with scholarly detachment, as if they were remote Micronesian tribespeople. I’d pitched him an idea the year before, the memoirs of a TV magician who had – of course! – been abused in childhood, but who had used his skill as an illusionist to conjure up a new life, etc., etc. He’d turned it down flat. The book had gone straight to number one: I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered. He still bore a grudge.

‘I have to tell you,’ he said, as we rose to the penthouse floor, ‘that I don’t think you’re the right man for this assignment.’

Oh yes, I had Quigley’s measure right enough. His title was UK Group Editor-in-Chief, which meant he had all the authority of a dead cat. The man who really ran the global show was waiting for us in the boardroom: John Maddox, chief executive of Rhinehart Inc., a big, bull-shouldered New Yorker with alopecia. His bald head glistened under the strip lighting like a massive varnished egg. As a young man he’d acquired a wrestler’s physique in order (according to Publishers Weekly) to tip out the window anyone who stared too long at his scalp. I made sure my gaze never rose further than his superhero chest. Next to him was Lang’s Washington attorney, Sidney Kroll, a bespectacled forty-something with a delicate pale face, floppy raven hair and the limpest, dampest handshake I’d been offered since Dippy the Dolphin bobbed up from his pool when I was twelve.

‘And Nick Riccardelli I think you know,’ said Quigley, completing the introductions with just a hint of a shudder. My agent, who was wearing a shiny grey shirt and a thin red leather tie, winked up at me.

I felt nervous as I took my seat beside him. The room was lined, Gatsby-like, with immaculate unread hardcover books. Maddox sat with his back to the window. He laid his massive, hairless hands on the glass-topped table, as if to prove he had no intention of reaching for a weapon just yet, and said, ‘I gather from Rick you’re aware of the situation and that you know what we’re looking for. So perhaps you could tell us exactly what you think you’d bring to this project.’

‘Ignorance,’ I said brightly, which at least had the benefit of shock value, and before anyone could interrupt I launched into the little speech I’d rehearsed in the taxi coming over. ‘You know my track record. There’s no point my trying to pretend I’m something I’m not. I’ll be completely honest. I don’t read political memoirs. So what?’ I shrugged. ‘Nobody does. But actually that’s not my problem.’ I pointed at Maddox. ‘That’s your problem.’

‘And let me be even more recklessly honest,’ I went on. ‘Rumour has it you paid ten million dollars for this book. As things stand, how much of that d’you think you’re going to see back? Two million? Three? That’s bad news for you, and that’s especially bad news,’ I said, turning to Kroll, ‘for your client. Because for him this isn’t about money. This is about reputation. This is Adam Lang’s opportunity to speak directly to history, to get his case across. The last thing he needs is to produce a book that nobody reads. How will it look if his life story ends up on the remainder tables? But it doesn’t have to be this way.’

I know in retrospect what a huckster I sounded. But this was pitch-talk, remember – which, like declarations of undying love in a stranger’s bedroom at midnight, shouldn’t necessarily be held against you the next morning. Kroll was smiling to himself, doodling on his yellow pad. Maddox was staring hard at me. I took a breath.

‘The fact is,’ I continued, ‘a big name alone doesn’t sell a book. We’ve all learned that the hard way. What sells a book – or a movie, or a song – is heart.’ I believe I may even have thumped my chest at this point. ‘And that’s why political memoir is the black hole of publishing. The name outside the tent may be big but everyone knows that once they’re inside they’re just going to get the same old tired show, and who wants to pay twenty-five dollars for that? You’ve got to put in some heart, and that’s what I do for a living. And whose story has more heart than the guy who starts from nowhere and ends up running a country?’

I leaned forwards. ‘You see, here’s the joke: a leader’s autobiography ought to be more interesting than most memoirs, not less. So I see my ignorance about politics as an advantage. I cherish my ignorance, quite frankly. Besides, Adam Lang doesn’t need any help from me with the politics of this book – he’s a political genius. What he does need, in my humble opinion, is the same thing a movie star needs, or a baseball player, or a rock star: an experienced collaborator who knows how to ask him the questions which will draw out his heart.’

There was a silence. I was trembling. Rick gave my knee a reassuring pat under the table. ‘Nicely done.’

‘Think so?’ asked Maddox, still looking at me. He said it in a neutral voice, but if I had been Quigley, I would have detected danger.

‘Oh, John, of course,’ said Quigley, with all the dismissive scorn of four generations of Oxford scholars behind him. ‘Adam Lang is a world historical figure, and his autobiography is going to be a world publishing event. A piece of history, in fact. It shouldn’t be approached like a …’ he ransacked his well-stocked mind for a suitable analogy but finished lamely ‘… a feature for a celebrity magazine.’

There was another silence. Beyond the tinted windows the traffic was backing up along the motorway. Rainwater rippled the gleam of the stationary headlights. London still hadn’t returned to normal after the bomb.

‘It seems to me,’ said Maddox, in the same slow, quiet voice, his big pink mannequin’s hands still resting on the table, ‘that I have entire warehouses full of “world publishing events” that I somehow can’t figure out how to get off my hands. And a heck of a lot of people read celebrity magazines. What do you think, Sid?’

For a few seconds Kroll merely carried on smiling to himself and doodling. I wondered what he found so funny. ‘Adam’s position on this is very straightforward,’ he said eventually. (Adam: he tossed the first name as casually into the conversation as he might a coin into a beggar’s cap.) ‘He takes this book very seriously – it’s his testament, if you will. He wants to meet his contractual obligations. And he wants it to be a commercial success. He’s therefore more than happy to be guided by you, John, and by Marty also, within reason. Obviously, he’s still very upset by what happened to Mike, who was irreplaceable.’

‘Irreplaceable,’ he repeated. ‘And yet – he has to be replaced.’ He looked up, pleased with his drollery, and at that instant I knew there was no horror the world could offer – no war, no genocide, no famine, no childhood cancer – to which Sidney Kroll would not see the funny side. ‘Adam can certainly appreciate the benefits of trying someone entirely different. In the end, it all comes down to a personal bond.’ His spectacles flashed in the strip lights as he scrutinised me. ‘Do you work out, maybe?’ I shook my head. ‘Pity. Adam likes to work out.’

Quigley, still reeling from Maddox’s put-down, attempted a comeback. ‘Actually, I know quite a good writer on the Guardian who uses a gym.’

‘Maybe,’ said Rick, after an embarrassed pause, ‘we could run over how you see this working practically.’

‘First off, we need it wrapped up in a month,’ said Maddox. ‘That’s Marty’s view as well as mine.’

‘A completed manuscript does exist,’ said Kroll. ‘It just needs some work.’

‘A lot of work,’ said Maddox grimly. ‘Okay. Taking it backwards: we publish in June, which means we ship in May, which means we edit and we print in March and April, which means we have to have the manuscript in house at the end of February. The Germans, French, Italians and Spanish all have to start translating right away. The newspapers need to see it for the serial deals. There’s a television tie-in. Publicity tour’s got to be fixed well in advance. We need to book space in the stores. So the end of February – that’s it, period. What I like about your résumé,’ he said, consulting a sheet of paper on which I could see all my titles listed, ‘is that you’re obviously experienced and above all you’re fast. You deliver.’

‘Never missed once,’ said Rick, putting his arm round my shoulders and squeezing me. ‘That’s my boy.’

‘And you’re a Brit. The ghost definitely has to be a Brit, I think. To get the jolly old tone right.’

‘We agree,’ said Kroll. ‘But everything will have to be done in the States. Adam’s completely locked in to a lecture tour there right now, and a fundraising programme for his foundation. I don’t see him coming back to the UK till March at the earliest.’

‘A month in America, that’s fine – yes?’ Rick glanced at me eagerly. I could feel him willing me to say yes, but all I was thinking was, A month, they want me to write a book in a month …

I nodded slowly. ‘I suppose I can always bring the manuscript back here to work on.’

‘The manuscript stays in America,’ said Kroll flatly. ‘That’s one of the reasons Marty made the house on the Vineyard available. It’s a secure environment. Only a few people are allowed to handle it.’

‘Sounds more like a bomb than a book!’ joked Quigley. Nobody laughed. He rubbed his hands unhappily. ‘You know, I will need to see it myself at some point. I am supposed to be editing it.’

‘In theory,’ said Maddox. ‘Actually we need to talk about that later.’ He turned to Kroll. ‘There’s no room in this schedule for revisions. We’ll need to revise as we go.’

As they carried on discussing the timetable I studied Quigley. He was upright but motionless, like one of those victims in the movies who gets stuck with a stiletto while standing in a crowd and dies without anyone noticing. His mouth opened and closed ever so slightly, as if he had a final message to impart. Yet even at the time I realised he’d asked a perfectly reasonable question. If he was the editor, why shouldn’t he see the manuscript? And why did it have to be held in a ‘secure environment’ on an island off the eastern seaboard of the USA? I felt Rick’s elbow in my ribs and realised Maddox was talking to me.

‘How soon can you get over there? Assuming we go with you rather than one of the others – how fast can you move?’

‘It’s Friday today,’ I said. ‘Give me a day to get ready. I could fly Sunday.’

Maddox and Kroll looked at one another and I knew then that I had the job. As Rick said afterwards, the trick is always to put yourself in their position. ‘It’s like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning, and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who’ll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you’ll clean their fucking house.’

‘We’ll go with you,’ said Maddox. He stood and reached over and shook my hand. ‘Subject to reaching a satisfactory agreement with Rick here, of course.’

‘No problem,’ I said, also getting to my feet. That didn’t bother me. Confidentiality clauses are standard procedure in the ghosting world. ‘I couldn’t be happier.’

And I couldn’t have been. Everyone except Quigley was smiling and suddenly there was a kind of boys-together, locker-room-after-the-match kind of feeling in the air. We chatted for a minute or so, and that was when Kroll took me to one side and said, very casually, ‘I’ve something here you might care to take a look at.’

He reached under the table and pulled out a bright yellow plastic bag with the name of some fancy Washington clothes store printed on it in curly black copperplate. My first thought was that it must be the manuscript of Lang’s memoirs, and that all the stuff about a ‘secure environment’ had been a joke. But when he saw my expression, Kroll laughed and said, ‘No, no, it’s not that. It’s just a book by another client of mine. I’d really appreciate your opinion if you get a chance to look at it. Here’s my number.’ I took his card and slipped it into my pocket. Quigley still hadn’t said a word.

Maddox laughed. ‘Hey! Remember!’ he called as Quigley showed me out of the door. He struck his big fist against his blue-suited chest. ‘Heart!’

As we went down in the lift, Quigley stared at the ceiling. ‘Was it my imagination or did I just get fired in there?’

‘They wouldn’t let you go, Roy,’ I said, with all the sincerity I could muster, which wasn’t much. ‘You’re the only one left who can remember what publishing used to be like.’

‘“Let you go”,’ he said bitterly. ‘Yes, that’s the modern euphemism, isn’t it? As if it’s a favour. You’re clinging to the edge of a cliff and someone says, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, we’re going to have to let you go.”’

A couple on their lunch break got in at the fourth floor and Quigley was silent until they got off to go to the restaurant on the second. When the doors closed, he said, ‘There’s something not right about this project.’

‘No. Before you.’ He frowned. ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it. The way no one’s allowed to see anything, for a start. And that fellow Kroll makes me shiver. And poor old Mike McAra, of course. I met him when we signed the deal two years ago. He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. Rather the reverse. He was the sort who specialised in making other people want to kill themselves, if you know what I mean.’

‘Hard, yes. Lang would be smiling away, and there would be this thug next to him with eyes like a snake’s. I suppose you’ve got to have someone like that when you’re in Lang’s position.’

We reached the ground floor and stepped out into the lobby. ‘You can pick up a taxi round the corner,’ said Quigley, and for that one small, mean gesture – leaving me to walk in the rain rather than calling me a cab on the company’s account – I hoped he’d rot. ‘Tell me,’ he said suddenly, ‘when did it become fashionable to be stupid? That’s the thing I really don’t understand. The Cult of the Idiot. The Elevation of the Moron. Our two biggest-selling novelists – the actress with the tits and that ex-army psycho – have never written a word of fiction, did you know that?’

‘You’re talking like an old man, Roy,’ I told him. ‘People have been complaining that standards are slipping ever since Shakespeare started writing comedies.’

‘Yes, but now it’s really happened, hasn’t it? It was never like this before.’

I knew he was trying to goad me – the ghostwriter to the stars off to produce the memoirs of an ex-prime minister – but I was too full of myself to care. I wished him well in his retirement and set off across the lobby swinging that damned yellow plastic bag.

It must have taken me half an hour to find a ride back into town. I had only a very hazy idea of where I was. The roads were wide, the houses small. There was a steady, freezing drizzle. My arm was aching from carrying Kroll’s manuscript. Judging by the weight, I reckoned it must have been close on a thousand pages. Who was his client? Tolstoy? Eventually I stopped at a bus shelter in front of a greengrocer and a funeral parlour. Wedged into its metal frame was the card of a minicab firm.

The journey home took almost an hour and I had plenty of time to take out the manuscript and study it. The book was called One Out of Many. It was the memoir of some ancient US senator, famous only for having kept on breathing for about a hundred and fifty years. By any normal measure of tedium it was off the scale – up, up and away, beyond boring into some oxygen-starved stratosphere of utter nullity. The car was overheated and smelled of stale takeaways. I began to feel nauseous. I put the manuscript back into the bag and wound down the window. The fare was forty pounds.

I had just paid the driver and was crossing the pavement towards my flat, head down into the rain, searching for my keys, when I felt someone touch me lightly on the shoulder. I turned and walked into a wall, or was hit by a truck – that was the feeling: some great iron force slammed into me and I fell backwards, into the grip of a second man. (I was told afterwards there were two of them, both in their twenties. One had been hanging round the entrance to the basement flat, the other appeared from nowhere and grabbed me from behind.) I crumpled, felt the gritty wet stone of the gutter against my cheek and gasped and sucked and cried like a baby. My fingers must have clasped the plastic bag with involuntary tightness, because I was conscious, through this much greater pain, of a smaller and sharper one – a flute in the symphony – as a foot trod on my hand, and something was torn away.

Surely one of the most inadequate words in the English language is ‘winded’, suggestive as it is of something light and fleeting – a graze, perhaps, or a touch of breathlessness. But I hadn’t been winded. I had been whumped and whacked and semi-asphyxiated, knocked to the ground and humiliated. My solar plexus felt as though it had been stuck with a knife. Sobbing for air, I was convinced I had been stabbed. I was aware of people taking my arms and pulling me up into a sitting position. I was propped against a tree, its hard bark jabbing into my spine, and when at last I managed to gulp some oxygen into my lungs, I immediately started patting my stomach blindly, feeling for the gaping wound I knew must be there, imagining my intestines strewn around me. But when I inspected my moist fingers for blood, there was only dirty London rainwater. It must have taken a minute for me to realise that I wasn’t going to die – that I was, essentially, intact – and then all I wanted was to get away from these good-hearted folk who had gathered around me, and were producing mobile phones and asking me about calling the police and an ambulance.

The prospect of having to wait ten hours to be examined in casualty, followed by half a day spent hanging around the local police station to make a statement, was enough to propel me out of the gutter, up the stairs and into my flat. I locked the door, peeled off my outer clothes, and went and lay on the sofa, trembling. I didn’t move for perhaps an hour, as the cold shadows of that January afternoon gradually gathered in the room. Then I went into the kitchen and was sick in the sink, after which I poured myself a very large whisky.

I could feel myself moving now out of shock and into euphoria. Indeed, with a little alcohol inside me I felt positively merry. I checked my inside jacket pocket and then my wrist: I still had my wallet and my watch. The only thing that had gone was the yellow plastic bag containing Senator Alzheimer’s memoirs. I laughed out loud as I pictured the thieves running down Ladbroke Grove and stopping in some alleyway to check their haul: ‘My advice to any young person seeking to enter public life today …’ It wasn’t until I’d had another drink that I realised this could be awkward. Old Alzheimer might not mean anything to me, but Sidney Kroll might view matters differently.

I took out his card. Sidney L. Kroll of Brinkerhof Lombardi Kroll, attorneys, M Street, Washington DC. After thinking about it for ten minutes or so, I went back and sat on the sofa and called his cell phone. He answered on the second ring: ‘Sid Kroll.’

‘Sidney,’ I said, trying to sound natural using his first name, ‘you’ll never guess what’s happened.’