The Sound of Trumpets

by Mortimer, John (Author)

• ISBN13: 9780140288513
• ISBN10: 0140288511
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

American readers will find much to recognize in this wicked satire of modern politics and morality wars. Laying low since he and his beloved Maggie Thatcher were removed from office, Leslie Titmuss has been waiting for an opportunity to return from his political grave and exact his revenge on the Tories who betrayed him. His chance comes with the arrival of New Labour hopeful Terry Flitton, a principled, centrist politician whose thirst for power is matched only by his political naivete. Who better to school him in the arts of political maneuvering than a seasoned veteran with an ax to grind? Before long Flitton and Lord Titmuss are celebrating success -- but at a price that leaves the young politician searching for the values he lost along the way.

Excerpts

Chapter One

A bird, one of the Red Kites restored to our skies as a result of careful breeding in the Nature Area, drifting among the grey and pink clouds of a September dawn, had the best view of the impact of recent history on the Rapstone Valley.

    The most serious blot on the landscape was Fallowfield Country Town which, from the bird's eye view, looked like a pile of bricks which a giant's child had failed to tidy up. There lay the towering Computers-R-Us, the monster Magic Carpet store, the multi-storey car park, the grim pedestrian walkways and the glass roof of the shopping mall, opened, somewhat grumpily, by the former Minister for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.) and local M.P., the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss.

    Away from Fallowfield the Red Kite swooped low over pockets of rural resistance, where woods enclosed an uncultivated grassland in which unusual orchids and butterflies flourished. A few nervous deer, descendants of the herd once paddocked at Rapstone Manor, pricked their way across a road and bolted into the shadows, where an awakened badger lumbered and snorted.

    Pale sunlight glittered on the river at Hartscombe, a town in which the shops, hard hit by the Fallowfield supermarkets, had sunk to selling little but greetings cards and pine furniture and frequently changed hands for reasons of bankruptcy. In a house by the bridge Agnes Simcox, née Salter, awoke from an uncomfortable dream which featured death. She felt for a cigarette, lit it and blew a perfect smoke-ring at the ceiling, coughing comfortably. The house, still known as `The Surgery', had belonged to two doctors, both of whom she had loved. One of them, her father, had often said that a visit to the Surgery was the first step on the road to the cemetery. She thought, not for the first time, that she must clear out the medical equipment, the trusses, crutches, stethoscopes, vaporizers, bandages, swabs and numerous boxes of free samples from drug companies which filled her cupboard under the stairs.

    She stubbed out her cigarette in the saucer of last night's cup of tea and went to the window wearing nothing but a man's blue shirt, frayed round the cuffs. A woman just fifty, beautiful, with lines bought with laughter and trouble at the corners of her eyes, she pulled at her hair, shaping and reshaping it as she looked up at the brightening sky and saw a Kite hovering.

Paul Fogarty, grey-haired, sleep ironing out the furrows on his daily troubled face, lay naked in his bed in the Skurfield Young Offenders' Institution of which he was the governor. He saw a line of youths, pinch-faced, matchstick-armed, with huge, sad eyes, chained together at the ankle, straining to lift huge hammers and break stones, the quarry dust turning them grey as statues. The guards were bulky men with cowboy boots and walrus moustaches, carrying bull-whips and shotguns. A boy fell and his dropping hammer cracked his skull, the blood clearing a red channel in the dust. The Home Secretary, it seemed to him dreaming, had passed new laws to crack down on juvenile crime. He awoke to the sound of the telephone and was relieved to find himself back in his bedroom, among the primitive paintings, the curiously suggestive plaster casts and wood carvings, the framed poems descriptive of life in custody, created by the young offenders.

    `Fogarty! Didn't wake you up, I hope. Just called to remind you about the lad Johnson.' The voice in the governor's ear was brisk, determined, used to command.

    `What about Johnson?' Was it bad news? The governor felt a moment of dread, a longing to put back the telephone and, returning to bed, pull the covers over his ears.

    `You remember you promised I could have him on day release. Give the lad a spot of work experience. Teach him a trade. Weeding. You'll remember we discussed that?'

    `I think so.' Paul the governor remembered a visit from a senior politician, interested in young offenders.

    `Then you've no objection to making it today? I want to get my money's worth, you know. Give him an early start.'

    Day releases were a scheme the governor encouraged. `I'm sure that will be all right,' he said. `I'll alert the staff.'

    `Good. Norman, my driver, will be with you in half an hour. When will you want him back?'

    `No later than six.'

    `No problem at all. I'll make sure he's mugged and murdered all the weeds in the rose garden. Oh, by the way, Fogarty. I've given your nick my seal of approval. Happened to bump into the Home Secretary at Chequers.'

    The governor put down the phone without saying thank you. No disaster had been announced, and he was glad that one of his young offenders was getting a day's work in a rose garden. However, he could get along, as he had in the last four years, without the dubious blessing of the Home Secretary. He had a moment of unease when he remembered that the boy to be let out for the day was universally known as `Slippy' Johnson. But then he relied on the impeccable authority of the voice on the telephone and stopped worrying.

At the top of a hill behind Hartscombe church a white house stood in its impressive spread. There were no surrounding trees, so it lay naked and unashamed with its newly built swimming pool flanked by columns on which the coach lamps still glowed, although the day had now broken.

    A green towel, still wet, with a pair of spectacles resting on it, was draped over a plastic poolside chair. A light breeze stirred the water, causing a blue and scarlet ball to bump against the concrete. Something else in the pool moved gently. A man in his late thirties, the black hair already leaving the pale crown of his head, crammed into a leopardskin bikini, with his hands manacled behind his back, floated face downwards. The ping-pong ball in his mouth was held in place by a handkerchief tied as a gag. Although he was undoubtedly dead the Kite showed no particular interest in him but wheeled away towards its home in the Nature Area.

    The next day's papers announced that Peter Millichip M.P. had suffered a heart attack during an early-morning swim. At the general election his majority had been seven thousand, and his death would cause a by-election in the constituency of Hartscombe and Worsfield South.

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