Games with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

‘He’s a “hang ‘em and flog ‘em”, church-going Tory for one thing. And, last week, he defied the party whip to vote against reducing the gay age of consent to sixteen, in line with the heterosexual age of consent.’

‘How old is his rent boy?’

‘There’s the rub, for want of a better word. When the Right Honourable George Field began relations with this man, he was a sixteen-year-old boy, which, under the law he himself championed, makes him a child sex offender and, even worse for a politician, a rampant hypocrite.’

‘God his poor kids. And wife.’

‘She must have known he swung both ways before she married him.’

‘How can you just assume that? And how can you square doing this to his kids?’

‘His sons are cocooned at some twenty-grand-a-year private school where buggery is virtually on the curriculum. I’m sure their wealthy friends will rally around and get them all massively paid numbers in the City.’

‘Is it a class thing with you really, Fintan? Are you the hunt sab who cares about foxes, or the one who just loves knocking over-privileged gits off their expensive horses?’

‘A bit of both,’ he grins, jumping to his feet. ‘Come on. Saturday is Take Down a Tory Day!’

Chapter 12 (#ulink_37d5202e-34f2-5f75-835d-c67ac28b4f2f)

Lingfield, Surrey

Saturday, June 18, 1994; 17.00

Our Porsche turns not a single head outside the Lingfield Park Country Club.

‘You watch, he’ll sit there and lie through his teeth,’ says Fintan.

‘You can tell?’

‘Jesus, don’t they teach you anything at cop school? Two classic giveaways. If he glances low and left directly after the question, he’s about to lie. If he keeps starting sentences with things like “truthfully” and “honestly”, then he’s in the act of lying. Look and learn.’

I recognise George Field MP as soon as we walk into reception. Tweedy, rotund, red-faced and hairy-eared, he’s every inch the rugger-bugger buffoon who some- how defies evolution by earning the right to run the country.

Fintan introduces himself. Field wobbles to his feet, snorting like an addled rhino. He introduces us to Theresa Brunt, a Tory spin doctor dubbed ‘Total’ Brunt by Private Eye magazine and a ringer for one of those cross-dressing brutes who frequented Mother Clap’s in Victorian London.

We all sit and, like a magician flourishing a bunch of flowers, Fintan plucks a photo out of thin air and holds it beneath Field’s purple, pockmarked nose.

‘What is your relationship with this man?’ he asks.

Field’s nasal breathing grows so equine, it causes the photo clasped between Fintan’s thumb and forefinger to flap. He takes a quick glance low to his left and blusters: ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life.’