London Calling - James Craig [51]
The other two envelopes were smaller, just big enough to contain a couple of the Howard Hodgkin postcards he had bought at the Fitzwilliam Museum a week before. The first envelope, containing an image of Hodgkin’s painting entitled Bleeding, was addressed to his shrink, a nervous woman who seemed even more disturbed about what had happened to him than he was himself. The envelope containing the second card, Mourning, was simply addressed to ‘Suzy’. Both cards had been left blank, and both were apologies of a sort. Both, he knew, were pitifully inadequate, not that he cared. They could decipher them or not.
Satisfied that everything was finally in place, Robert Ashton stepped through some curtains and opened the door that led on to the small balcony overlooking the quadrangle. He was wearing just a thin black T-shirt the chill in the air made him shiver. The sun was rapidly sinking in the sky, and already beginning to disappear behind the buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. Squinting, he held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. The stone parapet in front of him was about four feet high and maybe ten inches wide. Yawning, he pulled himself up on to it and stood shakily surveying his domain. Forty feet below, people were going about their business, still heading to and from lectures. In the middle of the square was a large oak tree. Near the tree, a fantastically pretty girl was sitting on the grass, lapping up the attention she was getting from two would-be suitors competing for her attention.
For what seemed like an eternity, Ashton waited for the girl to look up and catch his eye. When she finally did so, he pulled back his shoulders and held his arms outstretched. Overwhelmed by a huge sense of relief, he listened to her scream of alarm fade away on the breeze.
Then he stepped off the wall and into space.
FOURTEEN
Carlyle prided himself on not paying much attention to politicians, but even he knew chapter and verse on Christian Holyrod. Known as ‘the Holy Rod’, ‘the Rod’, ‘Hot Rod’ or ‘the hero of Helmand’, depending on the mood of the tabloid newspapers on any given day, Holyrod had been enjoying the kind of press that other politicians could only dream of. Two years earlier, he had been Major Holyrod, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (motto: Virtutis Fortuna Comes, or ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’). It was one of the first British battle groups to go into Helmand in south-west Afghanistan, with a mandate to give ‘Terry Taliban’ hell.
Holyrod’s journey from unsung hero to big-time politician began when an American documentary crew arrived to film the story of Operation Clockwork Orange, a mission to capture a terrorist commander inside his mud compound in the middle of nowhere. The mission was a total fiasco, Holyrod’s boys were ambushed and a swift retreat followed, but the firefights and general chaos that followed made for great television. Shaky, hand-held pictures of the Major shouting, ‘Contact, contact, contact!’, while squeezing off rounds from his SA80-A2 assault rifle and trying to drag a wounded squaddie back to his truck, were as gripping as anything that Hollywood could have come up with. They made all the major news bulletins back home in Britain even before the programme was aired in the USA. For almost two days it was the most watched video on YouTube, with more than forty-five million hits around the world. Holyrod became an instant celebrity. He was offered his own radio talk show, signed up to do a newspaper column, acquired an agent and received more than one hundred offers of marriage.
For its part, the Ministry of Defence was, initially, more than happy to let a stream of journalists beat a path to the Major’s door, given their desperation for any kind of ‘good news’ out of a story that had been a complete disaster