A Secret Worth Killing For

‘What do you mean? Harry Davies is the candidate there.’

‘Not for much longer. Few know it but he’s had a stroke. The medics have told him he’s got to take it easy.’

‘So?’ she repeated.

‘You live there. You’re attractive and articulate. You have a rising profile. Put your bonnet in the ring, my dear.’ He launched his most extravagant smile. ‘And I will do a little moving and shaking in the background.’

For once, she did not return the smile. She felt a stirring, an echo of youthful ambition that had seemed irretrievable. ‘If I were to do this, I’d enter the goldfish bowl. The media would scrutinize me, try to rake over my past, exercise their bloodlust.’

‘Are you afraid of that?’

For a woman so quick on her feet, it took a split second longer than usual to find a response. ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ she quoted.

‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inauguration speech, March 1933.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s your answer, isn’t it?’

Carnegie’s forecast was accurate. The government moved from bickering to in-fighting to self-destruction. No alternative could be formed to command a majority. The only way out was an immediate General Election. There was a vacancy at Lambeth West.

Anne-Marie cross-examined herself, both present and past. Since her reinvention after Dublin and entry into a different world, she had not come face to face with anyone who remembered her. Standing as an MP would expose her but, in a national election, an unknown first-timer would attract only local attention. In any case, there had been no shame in adopting her new life. The circumstances could even win her sympathy. Which left the two jeopardies. The knowledge of the dead and disappeared had vanished with them. The chance of any credible, living witness emerging this many years later was too remote to stand in her way. She could not always hide from risk.

‘OK,’ she told Carnegie. ‘I’ll give it a go. But don’t you forget it’s your fault.’

The first hurdle was the panel to select a shortlist of candidates. The males were easy meat but then came the formidable Margaret Wykeham, the well-bred chair of a progressive school to which she would never have sent her own children. ‘Ms Gallagher, your grasp of the issues is formidable,’ she began. ‘But perhaps we could know a little more about you.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Anne-Marie was prepared for it. ‘After university, where I graduated with first-class honours, I joined Audax Chambers. There, over the years, I have been lucky enough to form firm friendships and eventually to oversee the expansion of its human rights practice.’

‘You were at university in Dublin?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘And, before that, one has rather little sense of your background. Your family, for example.’

‘Mrs Wykeham,’ stated Anne-Marie with cool deliberation, staring at the emerald brooch pinned on the bosom of her interrogator’s cashmere sweater, ‘this election is not about whether I was born with a silver spoon or a poor mother’s saliva-wetted finger in my mouth. I am a self-made woman. I am happy to discuss my professional life, even happier to discuss the problems that confront our country. But the condition of my candidature is that I will not speak in public beyond those.’

The die cast, she fired a defiant stare at the panel. After a silence interrupted only by the rumble of a passing train, grins began to spread across the faces opposite, including Margaret Wykeham’s.

At an open meeting three weeks later, constituency party members selected her as their candidate with an overall majority on the first ballot.

During these weeks Anne-Marie came to wonder at her gift for artifice. She felt a sheen of hardness beginning to cloak her like a sleek, well-tailored suit. What surprised her, once she had entered the fight, was her will to win.

‘Jonathan Alfred Ashby, Conservative, 24,317,’ continued the acting returning officer. The sitting MP maintained a rictus smile below bulging eyes.

‘Brian Hugh Butler, Liberal Democrat, 2,318.’ The forlorn loser failed to disguise a murderous intent towards his one-time partner in government.

‘Joy Freedom, Hen Party “Backing Genuinely Free Range”, 141.’ A figure buried inside a giant yellow chicken costume did a hop.

‘Anne-Marie Gallagher, 25,779.’ An eruption of shrieks, youthful OmiGods, cheers and whistles exploded through the hall. ‘And I declare that Anne-Marie Gallagher has been duly elected Member of Parliament for Lambeth West.’

Amid the racket, the outlandishness of the moment seized her. The cheers went silent; she was confronted by a mass of mute, mouthing faces. There was something unreal about it. She had a déjà vu of another moment of unreality in her previous life; it chilled her like a blast of arctic wind.

Catching herself, she moved along the row of beaten rivals, shook hands – a pat on the beak for the hen – exchanged false congratulations on a campaign well fought, and approached the microphone.

‘There are so many people to thank, particularly the acting Returning Officer and his most efficient staff.’ She spoke with crystal purity, realizing that any delay in this traditional act of courtesy would show an unwise contempt for election-night protocol. ‘But before I give other thanks,’ she continued, ‘and while this hall commands its brief moment of attention, there is something I want to say.’

She paused, her smile yielding to a cool intent. Right up until the last minute, she had not been sure of what she might say. Now, in this crucible of democratic fervour, hundreds of eyes bearing up at her, TV cameras trained on her, an unexpected sense of destiny tugged.

Perhaps Kieron Carnegie had been right. Perhaps this was her time, her chance at last to cash in years of slog in the mire of law chambers and courts, and the frustrations of committee rooms and thwarted campaigns.

Heeding the instant, her audience ceased its cheering. An expectation created by her magnetic fragility reduced the hall to a hush.

‘Are human rights a joke?’ She fired the question like a crossbow bolt, puzzled faces beneath straining to understand its target.

‘Sometimes you might think so. We read stories of voting rights for child rapists. Refugees granted asylum to look after their cat. Such stories are always distorted, if not invented. But what they betray is an attitude. Human rights are a nuisance. Or silly. Or something foreigners deploy to take advantage of us.

‘Such a state of mind makes us an ungenerous nation. We give the impression of wanting to send asylum seekers into danger, not welcome them to safety. To keep families separated, not united. To make ourselves less civilized, not more.

‘But what ultimately prevents us from so demeaning ourselves is law. The laws that enshrine human rights. I want to tell you on this extraordinary night that I have stood in this election for the lawful human rights of every individual in this nation. And of those who with just cause seek refuge in it.’

There were stirrings not just on the floor below her. A few minutes earlier, the party leader and his entourage had swept into Festival Hall, commandeered for a mass gathering of the ranks. Pummelled by jostlers and backslappers, they paused to watch the Lambeth West declaration, knowing that victory there would surely see them into Downing Street. After the announcement of the result, they made to move on but were halted by the remarkable speech of their winning candidate.

For a moment Anne-Marie thought of stopping there. But, almost despite herself, the words flowed on, an undercurrent of payback throbbing within her.

‘No human right has been more trampled,’ she resumed, ‘than the right to live our lawful lives unobserved in the privacy of our homes, our meeting places, with our friends, with our families.

‘Under the cloak of fear, of exaggerated threats from terrorists and other convenient enemies, technology – and a lust for control – has created the surveillance state.

‘I condemn that state.’

She could hear the collective gasp around her. A single cough reverberated like a gunshot. In Festival Hall, the volume dropped again and the now Prime Minister in waiting watched on. In a few still-lit rooms in Whitehall, in two fortress buildings by the Thames, and on comfortable sofas in commuter belts, a network of men, and a few women, were taking note of this upstart lawyer just turned MP.

‘There must be no more snooping on the lives of tens of millions of innocent people by NSA, GCHQ, CIA, MI5, MI6 or any other sets of initials and numbers the faceless, unaccountable watchers choose to hide behind.

‘There must be no more dirty tricks, extraordinary renditions, unexplained disappearances.

‘Every citizen of this country is entitled to a life that is private, unviolated, and free.

‘I make you a promise. I will work to dismantle the surveillance state. Nothing will deter me from keeping that pledge.’

For a few seconds, the Lambeth West election revellers remained stunned in a frozen silence. Then came the first ripples of applause, followed by waves of cheering and chanting. At Festival Hall, normal service was resumed, though raised eyebrows were exchanged amid mutterings of, ‘Did you see that?’

Social media buzzed. The speech began to trend on Twitter; party workers posted it on Facebook and ‘likes’ mounted in their thousands. Anne-Marie had hit a nerve.

But, as well as in the secretive recesses of Whitehall, other nerves were less favourably struck. Long-in-the-tooth politicians noted the rashness of her words. Patriotic support of the ‘vital work’ of the security services was a mantra – particularly if you wanted your own secrets to stay buried. One senior member of her party amused himself by wondering what skeletons might lurk in pretty little Anne-Marie Gallagher’s cupboard.

Having stepped down from the platform, Anne-Marie found Margaret Wykeham alongside her, leaning in for a hug. ‘Your speech was wonderful. But take care.’ They locked eyes, two women in a stadium where the gladiators were still largely male. ‘Get some rest. It’s allowed, you know.’