reading

‘What time d’you have?’

‘For what?’

‘For what what? For Christ’s sake, Faraday, I asked you for the time.’

It wasn’t Faraday’s fault. Arthur had recently attended a News Editors’ Symposium in Manhattan and had returned full of American vernacular.

‘It would help,’ Arthur said, looking at his wristwatch as the second hand swept twenty minutes past four, ‘if we had an Editor upstairs who was prepared to attempt a simple Yes or No decision.’

‘It’s a long way to go, Arthur, and there’s the awful expense.’

Arthur stiffened. He looked up from his desk, peering.

‘You’re an accountant, Faraday. You pose as a journalist but you’re really a bloody accountant. Half the bastards employed here are.’

He waved his arm across the desk in the direction of the newsroom. Faraday knew the sign. Whenever Arthur was obliged to sit and wait for an Editor’s decision he went into a state and became increasingly aggravated as waiting time extended.

Arthur was not a desk man, that is, not a man who found it easy to sit behind one. Which was unfortunate, because as more and more of the important everyday editorial decisions were taken from him the longer he sat at his desk wondering why. It was a devolution of responsibility that had been forced on him by younger, brighter men with university degrees and an ability to produce what occasionally passed for original thought.

And so, too often now, Arthur sat alone in the small room marked ‘Associate Editor’ watching through his open door the bustle and industry of the newsroom and wondering why, contrary to his expectations, he had become less and less in charge of affairs.

‘And I’ll tell you something else, Mr bloody Faraday,’ he continued, the aggravation recharging itself. ‘Men who spend their working days counting money are men who have no gut feeling for news. No Nuff! They wouldn’t know a story from my bloody backside.’

He jumped up suddenly from behind his desk, knocked a half full plastic cup of cold mauve tea into an open drawer marked ‘Private’ and slammed his office door shut. Then, with his right fist clenched, he turned and punched a 1967 Daily Telegraph map of the world hanging on the wall. He winced, whispered something Faraday couldn’t quite make out and carefully tucked the limp hand into his trouser pocket.

‘Not from my bloody arse they wouldn’t.’ He began opening and closing his wounded hand.

Faraday, not knowing whether he should stay or wait outside, pretended not to see or hear and watched the pool of tea slowly meander its way across the desktop.

Arthur’s room was full of nostalgic junk: mementos of Yesteryear scoops, beats and similar things that had made his beginner days in Television News exciting and pioneering. A Jewish infantryman’s helmet from the Yom Kippur war complete with the hole through which the Syrian bullet had passed; a transistor radio made in the shape of a hand grenade and sold in the streets of civil war Beirut by the ever-enterprising Japanese; and the Tricolour taken by the British army on the day they finally flushed out the Provisionals in Crossmaglen, County Armagh.

‘News, my lad, is not arithmetic, despite what you and all those bloody smart-alecs out there think.

‘The Editors of my day,’ he said, ‘could sniff out a story before it even happened. We used a word then you’ll never have heard of - HUNCH! It’s gone from the dictionary, but that’s what men had then. Great men too. Masters of their trade. Champions. They would have a headline even before the story hit the telex. Just by hunch.’

The doubt persisted. ‘But how,’ said Faraday, ‘could they have written a headline for a story they hadn’t even got? I don’t see that’s possible.’

‘ ’Course you don’t, you’re not a newsman you’re an accountant, your head’s full of equations. You forget you’re in the business of words. Real newsmen feel it in their gut, not in their bloody head. That’s where a hunch comes from . . . from here.’ He patted his stomach, where Faraday thought there seemed ample enough space for hunches and all kinds of things.

‘Your lot haven’t got hunches,’ Arthur said, ‘and no university bloody Honours crap will give it them.’

Arthur looked again at his painful hand and began turning it over looking for a bruise. For some odd reason Faraday felt sad, and suddenly he thought Arthur sounded sad, too.

‘We’ve no Champions left,’ Arthur said quietly. ‘None. I wish we had. We would have had a decision from upstairs hours ago.’

‘But the story’s only just broken,’ said Faraday.

‘Exactly.’

Arthur was at the wall map again, measuring distances from London. With his unbruised left hand outstretched, he eased the open palm across Europe, skimming the Alps, across the Mediterranean, North Africa, down over Addis Ababa, thumb to little finger like a crawling crab, on into the Indian Ocean.

‘Five and a half, my friend,’ he said and stood up.

‘What?’ asked Faraday.

‘Palms, Faraday, palms. Flattened out like this the span of my hand equals exactly 1,000 miles.’ Arthur still refused to speak in kilometres. He looked at Faraday. ‘Yours are probably around 850. Makes the addition a bit more difficult. A thousand mile span is much handier. I’m glad to have it.’

He went through his hand crawl again.

‘London,’ he said, ‘out to here, to the tip of Madagascar, is just over five and a half thousand palm-miles.’

‘I suppose,’ said Faraday, ‘it might just as well be eighty thousand, considering.’ He lifted Arthur’s little finger off the map so that he could see the line of latitude.

‘The flight leaves in two hours,’ he said, ‘and there isn’t another connection out of Nairobi till Thursday.’

Arthur walked backwards to his desk, staring at the wall map. Then, in a well co-ordinated movement born of much practice, he punched his left hand with his damaged right fist, and with the left still swinging slammed the open drawer marked ‘Private’ shut. Tea began to dribble through the cracks in the drawer on to his Terylene and worsted drip- dry but he didn’t notice.

‘Hell!’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t it have happened last week? Northgate was in Dar es Salaam doing a piece on the World Health Organization Bilharzia Conference. Could have popped across the Indian Ocean and saved money and worry.’

‘I thought he suffered from hydrophobia,’ said Faraday.

‘Hydrophobia?’

‘A fear of water.’

‘The only fear of water that blighter has is when it’s just about to fall into his whisky. It’s always the same with these . . . people.’ Arthur was about to say ‘blacks’ but presumed it to be a proscribed noun among the young and held it back. He considered himself a sensitive man. ‘And why now?’ he asked. ‘Right in the middle of the Labour Party Conference. Programme’s full of Blackpool! ’

‘Arthur . . . the Editor! ’ It was the Pretty Thing on the Foreign Desk, shouting above the babble of the newsroom as scriptwriters, producers, out-putters, in-putters, directors, teleprompters and a familiar face embarked upon the final phase of hysteria in the minutes leading up to the early evening news bulletin.

Arthur stood up, to attention it seemed to Faraday, and picked up his extension receiver. Faraday watched his profile, lips tight, jaw muscles tensing and flexing involuntarily, his eyes now slits, staring across the street to the garment factory opposite, seeing nothing.

Faraday heard the Editor’s voice fast and excited in Arthur’s earpiece. Arthur breathed deep, braced his shoulders as if he were preparing for bad news - or, to be more exact, unfortunate news: bad news is invariably good news to a newsman - and his forehead began to shine with sweat. In an absent-minded way, he leant forward and repeated his palming exercise across the wall map, occasionally moving his face to within a few inches of it and examining it so intensely that Faraday wondered if he’d lost a thumbprint. Still the high-pitched voice ripped from the telephone. Then, as was another of Arthur’s habits at times of stress, he shifted the telephone from his right hand to his left and hit the wall map hard again. He caught his breath in pain. Faraday, standing on tiptoe, though he didn’t know why, realized a decision had been made.

Arthur sucked his sore knuckles, turned to Faraday and winked. He was about to smile, but remembered Faraday’s status and checked himself.

Faraday heard the Editor’s voice. ‘In spite of the cost, Arthur, I’ll go along with you. We’ll send.’

But that wasn’t on. Not with Arthur. A decision by the Editor was unilateral, there was nothing shared about it. It wasn’t ‘we’ who were sending. ‘He’, the Editor, was sending.

And so, as always in these things, Faraday knew the talk would continue as the principle of collective responsibility was argued by the Editor at one end of the telephone and stubbornly qualified by Arthur at the other.

Faraday backed slowly out of Arthur’s door, towards the Foreign Desk and the Pretty Thing. He began fingering the pile of newspapers by the telex machine, flicking the pages, hardly reading, vaguely aware of more floods in India and some sporting tragedy that had occurred in a goalless draw at Nottingham Forest.

He wasn’t used to the suspense of waiting. This was after all his first opportunity of a big foreign story, and what did the older ones say? You’re not on a story until you’re having your first gin and tonic thirty thousand feet up.

He couldn’t believe his luck. The usual men, the big names who could fly to the far side of the globe without noticing, were away or sick or on holiday. Now, after his long, waiting, confusing apprenticeship on the Home Desk, there was the chance to join that tight, jealous band of Foreign Correspondents.

He’d been to Antwerp, of course, and twice to Dublin. Once he’d almost made it to West Germany, had actually been in the tube to London Airport, when the programme’s European Correspondent had emerged from someone’s bedroom in Bonn just in time to make his regular doomwatch via Eurovision on the late night news.

But this was a story to Africa and beyond. This was to the Indian Ocean.

He felt the strain of anticipation, his mouth dry. He pulled his passport from his breast pocket, thin and virgin, shining dark blue with its fresh gold crest and lettering, untouched beyond Europe. How he envied the Globe-Trotters with their special hundred-page edition, tattered and travel-worn, crammed with exotic visas in Arabic, Indian . . . thick with beautiful Entries and Exits from Peking, Phnom Penh, Laos and Sri Lanka, full of names that no longer existed on the map, like East Pakistan, Biafra, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Lourenço Marques, Basutoland, Saigon, Nyasaland, Ceylon.

Faraday was beginning to feel quite sick with anxiety, afraid the swing doors of the newsroom would suddenly be kicked open by one of half a dozen reporters smelling of afternoon brandy, ready to grab the prize.

The Pretty Thing on the Foreign Desk looked at him but without sympathy. She spent her boring days sending others to the exotic places she quietly dreamt of as she sat behind her typewriter. Bermuda and Rio, Cape Town and Bangkok, the Caribbean and places in the sun. Her bed-sit walls in West Acton were covered in British Airways and Air France wallpaper posters. She felt no generosity towards Faraday. If they didn’t send him it was one less to feel jealous about.

‘Okay . . . get the bugger off.’ Arthur was shouting from his door.

The Pretty Thing looked away, bit her lip and then remembered she had to buy onions and minced meat for the twosome dinner party she was giving for her landlord’s sister. The Home Desk Editor sitting opposite, whose habit it was to chew HB pencils so that the drooping corners of his mouth were always black, leant backwards in his chair and drew a line through Faraday’s name on the weekly duty ‘Home’ roster.

Faraday felt dizzy. He smoothed out the newspaper on top of the pile he had been fidgeting with and there on the front page of the Evening Standard was a photograph, a map and a banner headline: ‘INDIAN OCEAN ISLAND COUP: NEW PRESIDENT DECLARES MARXIST REVOLUTION’.

Union was a very small island, easily overlooked. Even on a large-scale map it was frequently mistaken for a fly dropping, a speck in the Indian Ocean lying midway between Malagasy and Mozambique 300 miles off the East African shore. Some pilots had been known to overshoot it, others never to find it during days of persistent cloud cover. It had been written, by sailors of earlier generations, that the island itself sailed, that it moved like an iceberg with the wind and currents, moving backwards and forwards along the stretch of water known on the charts as the Mozambique Channel. In countless ships’ logs, captains would record sighting Union, sail towards it, only to lose it in low cloud and sea mist. And then their bosuns would begin to doubt their eyesight and compass when, as the mists cleared, they found they had passed the island by.

It was, as one captain with a touch of the romantic had written, ‘as if the island does not want to be landed on, not to be lived on, at least not by anything as vulgar as Man’.

French rule was formally established in 1790 when a brigantine, La Belle Marie, owned by a Bordeaux merchant trading company, en route for Madras, lost its way in the sea mists and pierced its hull on the coral reefs that surrounded the island like a horseshoe.

But, in character with the island, even the sinking was done gently, giving the sailors time to disembark, the ship coming slowly to rest in thirty feet of the clearest water. And just as slowly, in the weeks that followed the wrecking. La Belle Marie’s distraught captain and his eighteen crew dived in and out of the submerged hold and cabins until, with the help of anxious natives, all items of potential value and obvious utility had been brought up and dried, cleaned and stored.

Exactly four weeks after his fondness for Cognac had ended his sea career. Captain Henri Lucien Chaudenson (retired) hoisted the fleur-de-lis on a twelve-foot bamboo cane, declared the island the property of Mother France and Louis, named it Union for obvious reasons and became, on his own appointment, its first Governor. He also decided in the same ceremony, saving time and emotions, to name the twenty or so straw huts they’d erected. Petit Royan, after his own birthplace, Royan, a small fishing town at the mouth of the Garoche River on the Bordeaux coast.

It was a sad occasion. The mention of France, his own Royan never to be seen again, his wife and three children always to be missed, the saddest prospect of twenty years or more of life to go with their love and memories forever scraping at his soul. He began crying and one by one, as is the way with the French, his men around him added their tears to his, dampening the sand they stood on in such a way it became almost a baptism.

Then, wiping their eyes, men again, they raised their heads to their flag as a young castrato galleyhand sang and in chorus they saluted their King Louis. As it happened, during the voyage, Louis’s court had been disbanded and many of his supporters dismembered. But on that soft summer evening they knew nothing of the guillotine or the barricades or Madame Defarge or of the howling mobs who were forever to make the French regret the loss of their throne and begrudge the English their ability and cheek in resurrecting theirs.

The spectacle of the white men singing, crying and standing perfectly still beneath the coloured cloth stuck on bamboo fascinated the natives who, quite unafraid of the paraphernalia, joined in.

They were, as Governor Chaudenson wrote in his diary, handsome people. The men were tall, strong and naked except for soft leather pouches that held their genitals safe like a truss. He wrote of women with plaited hair like straw- dolls who, in extraordinary fashion, carried their babies on their backs with them everywhere, strapped tightly round with a strip of cloth to keep them secure:

I am told that for some years after their birth, the children are carried this way, never, as it were, leaving their mother’s skin. It is as if they are still in the womb, feeling their mother’s pulse. This may help explain why in all the weeks we have been here, I have yet to hear a child cry or a mother’s harsh words.

He wrote also of the daughters and sisters, the girls who wore nothing except a small piece of animal skin over their Venus Mound: ‘. . . but of much softer skin, sometimes the fur of a rabbit or wild cat.’

Chaudenson, who never before had had the time or the reason to study young black females, remarked on the beauty of their skin:

. . . quite black, without shine and unlike those I have seen sold by Arabs; unmarked and without blemish. They have sturdy bodies, and long, well-shaped legs with rounded calves - again something unusual among the female Negro. Their stomachs are flat, their behinds are small and firm like a boy’s, and they have a proportion of hip and breast that is delightful to observe. The nipples of those without child are the size of walnuts, their lips are large and their teeth whiter and sturdier than anything I have ever seen.

Such things hadn’t gone unnoticed by the captain’s men, though their observations were far less clinical. And new as the young girls were, with their proportion of hip and breast, to the subtlety and technique of the white man’s flirtation, they quickly adapted to it and responded easily and with remarkable enthusiasm. Something that took even the Frenchmen by surprise.

So that evening, a new colony became part of the expanding French Empire and nine months later, almost to the day, the first coffee-coloured babies were registered by Governor Chaudenson and entered in his diary as: ‘The first children of Union’.

Union in the twentieth century was an expensive but still, because of its distance by air from the African continent, a relatively exclusive holiday island. Fat, tired, anginic Parisian attorneys and similarly fat, tired, anginic Johannesburg goldbrokers, bored with the Seychelles and Mauritius, decided, in their attempts to delay the inevitable coronary, to holiday in Union.

It was a very French island, despite its latitude, with the smell and touch of France. Advertisements for Perrier and Gauloise were everywhere. Renault 5s clattered down the cobbled streets, men put Vichy in their wine at lunchtime and ate apples with their cheese.

Union made its own wine and brandy, farmed its own clams and scallops, collected unlimited lobsters and langoustines beyond the coral, grew its own coffee, aubergines, coconuts, pumpkins, melons, grapes, oranges, lychees and a dozen more fruits. Sunflowers and olives grew on the tidy terraced land off the mountain slopes above Petit Royan and its harbour. Avocado and fig trees lined the lanes from farm to farm and the southern sun and Indian Ocean breezes merged the seasons into perpetual summer.

Union also had Guano, thousands of tons of it, exported every year as fertilizer to the arid agricultural wastelands of ailing Third World, developing Africa. Seagulls and cormorants took fish from the sea, processed them to their own advantage and then dropped the waste on to the scattering of rocks at the island’s northern tip. To encourage the birds further, concrete blocks had been dumped into the sea between the rocks forming a crescent-shaped breakwater, and from the air the white Guano-covered rocks looked like icing on the rich, spicy fruitcake of Union.

Which is how Faraday first saw it. White-tipped, an island of greens and browns, enclosed in blue-green coral with a secondary boundary of white-sand beaches.

There was a tingle of cassette-recorded bells and the seat- belt sign above Faraday reminded him to strap himself tight. Trays were taken, remaining Scotches were hurriedly swallowed, cigarettes smouldered black in their wells, seats sprung upright and the big Boeing’s tyres scorched the tarmac of Africa’s newest Marxist Republic.

‘The problem, Mateys, is how to keep here. With the best will in the world it’s going to be hard to stretch this one beyond a week. Even then we can just about keep it boiling. . .’

‘Simmering . . .’

‘. . . long enough for the Sundays to want a piece. I reckon come Monday and we’ll all have the old heavo! ’

Faraday had read, heard and been frequently shocked by Alf Prentice. There was seldom a Mirror front-page foreign story that didn’t have his by-line and photograph, taken, Faraday now realized, a long time ago when he had hair and a chin.

It was said that the stories-about Prentice were more outrageous than those he wrote - which was some boast, even by Mirror standards.

There was the time when, in a spasm of well-rehearsed anti-colonial anger, mobs attacked the British Embassy in Djakarta. The ambassador and his staff were under siege for three hours as pre-Tunku-Abdul-Rahmans threw stones and beer bottles through the windows and hammered at the ornate oak front door with rolled up copies of the Strait Times. Some were seen spitting at the Lion and Unicom crest by the doorbell.

Prentice, in one of those rare accidents of air travel, was in transit at Djakarta airport en route for Hong Kong and, hearing of the disturbance, tried to bribe his way past pre- Independence Customs and Immigration officials which, in those days, was a clumsy thing to do. They promptly arrested him and put him on the first flight out which so happened to be going to Singapore. From there he filed a story based on what a Malay lavatory attendant in Djakarta transit lounge had told him about the burning to the ground of the British Embassy and the dramatic exit of the British Foreign Office staff there.

‘I stood,’ he wrote from the Associated Press office in Singapore, ‘knee-high in rubble . . . the smouldering remnants of British rule around me.’

Which led the Mirror front page, upset the Foreign Office and all Whitehall and particularly outraged the British Ambassador in Djakarta, because once the revolting Malays were satisfied a point had been made, the gardens of the unsmouldering Embassy were thrown open to them and with admirable public relations, tea was served to them on the lawn by the Embassy typists.

Reuters later reported that the riot leaders, out of work owing to the capital-intensive programmes of the British rubber planters, had accepted employment as security guards, patrolling the grounds at something slightly above the current local rate of pay.

There had been another occasion when the Personal Private Secretary of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus complained that Prentice had twice in three weeks reported his Beatitude’s death and that Presidential business could no longer be conducted in the Residence because of the flowers that were stacked in every room.

Prentice was everything Faraday had imagined he wasn’t and nothing he should have been.

He sat perched high on a barstool. The skin on his face and the backs of his hands was tinged blue and his large broad nose was reddish purple, criss-crossed with haemorrhaged veins unable to cope any longer with the torrents of blood-alcohol that was regularly pumped through them. It looked a very painful nose. And he had enormously fat jowls that hung each side of his mouth like water pouches on a donkey. Faraday watched their extraordinary effect, a trick of the eyes, whenever Prentice lifted the glass of gin and tonic to his lips. The jowls seemed to close around it, like a sea-amoeba trapping a sea insect.

He had a very large stomach. It drooped and curved out from his chest like a ski-jump. When he sat, the fat rested comfortably on his thighs, but when he got up, which wasn’t often, the immense weight of the stomach fell, held, it seemed, only by his braces which became so taut that Faraday expected them to snap like an overstretched steel hawser.

Prentice was Faraday’s first disappointment, but it made him no less fascinating, because Faraday realized that, for the first time in his short career, he was part of a famous circle, names that had reported in the first person from the Congo, Cairo, Aden, Angola, Cyprus, Suez, Sinai, Soweto, Baghdad, Beirut and all by-lines east to Vietnam and the beyond. They did not look the part, but that added to their credibility. Who, he thought, watching them now, would believe they represented the elite of the British Foreign Press Corps? And yet their credentials were impeccable. Or so it seemed to him.

Prentice was talking again. His eyes were watering from the sting of the blue smoke that rose from a drooping, wet Silk Cut in his mouth. It appeared a habit of his to talk only when he was smoking.

‘So there you are, Mateys. Instead of our usual fart-arsing about, all trying to do our own little bit, we co-operate. A communal pot as it were . . . throwing in our little tit-bits. That way we can stretch it out here for as long as we like.’

‘Easy for you to stretch it out, Alf. The way your paper works you need only file two lines; the rest is made up of headline, by-line and your bleeding photo.’ It was Protheroe of the Mail.

‘Balls!’ said Prentice.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Protheroe, encouraged, and lifting his head to the others in the bar as if he was opening a public debate. ‘I reckon that photo of yours, Alf, was taken when you were giving away ten bob notes on Brighton Pier just after the war. Remember? Had to pat you on the back, hold up a copy of the Rag and say, “I spot you Mirrorman and I claim the Mirrorman prize.” ’

‘Balls!’ said Prentice again, not looking up from his gin. ‘Anyway, it was never Brighton. That was the Express’s beat. We had Hastings and Weymouth.’

‘Well it’s about bloody time you changed the snap, Alf. No one’s ever going to pat you on the back with that one.’

‘Look, fart-face.’ Prentice squared on to Protheroe, swivelling painfully round on the barstool. ‘You look after your public relations and I’ll bloody-well manage mine.’

Now Protheroe was perfectly able to look after his public image. In fact more and more frequently he found, nowadays, he was looking after Prentice’s as well, especially when events which had nothing to do with news-gathering made Prentice irresponsible and uncaring.

At times of professional stress, that is, on those rare occasions when their separate and competing London newsdesks were demanding facts and genuine comment, they suddenly became a pair, inter-dependent, and sharing like a married couple.

Protheroe’s journalistic record was, like Prentice’s, varied, unlikely and thoroughly pockmarked. Their joint survival in the trade was one of the marvels of Fleet Street. But the simple fact was that both had realized from their tea-boy days that there was much more to survival than success.

Many unkind things were said about Protheroe and, unlike his own stories, most had some basis of truth. Like the time in 1953 when the Persian Prime Minister, Dr Moussedeq, having nationalized British oil interests, defied the Shah and, worse, the army. Protheroe, on a belated British Petroleum binge, heard about it during a midday Scotch and soda session, and quickly filed that the unlovable doctor had lost his government and was in chains. Which so happened to be true.

It was the eighth Scotch and soda that did the damage because, after it, Protheroe decided to have Moussedeq sentenced and hung. Which so happened to be untrue.

For two days the Mail held its breath, staring at its published exclusive, waiting for confirmation by official communiqué that never came. Protheroe still has the cable his Editor sent him: ‘EITHER MOUSSEDEQ HANGS OR YOU DO.’

‘Now come lads! Where’s the esprit? Where’s the communal pot?’

The flat, dull Birmingham drawl was Doubleday’s, the ‘Expressman’. At times of strain, as this obviously was, he tried to act the peacemaker; it was his way of paying for a round. And anyway a communal pot suited Doubleday very well indeed, unable as he had always been to produce anything resembling original copy.

‘Alf’s right,’ Doubleday said. ‘There’s no need to break our necks on this one. Better we share.’

‘And what bleeding gems are you offering?’ asked Prentice. ‘A couple of commas and a full stop?’

There was a crash as Prentice fell off his stool attempting to lunge at Protheroe. Protheroe in turn fell backwards into the arms of a passing waiter, a large mulatto who, with sincere apology and with both hands, lifted Protheroe on to Prentice’s stool and gave him Prentice’s drink, which reduced the watching Prentice lying on the floor, helplessly drunk, to a state of purple apoplexy. There was a sudden flurry of uniformed porters in the small reception area behind them. The lift doors opened and the collected Press Corps were suddenly silent. Then a gasp from Prentice on the floor and a groan from Protheroe and Faraday turned. J. J. Day-Lewis, tall, tanned and suitably dressed in a cream short-sleeved suit, walked across the foyer to a door marked TELEX, entered and locked the door after him. The dinner gong sounded and the Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph had gone to file his third story of the day.

At that moment, six hundred miles due west, in an African capital not far from where the Zambesi River cascades over the Victoria Falls, five men sat around a large table in a dimly-lit office. It had been a thundery day, and the air was warm and sticky. The five were uncomfortable and hardly felt the breeze from the old-fashioned fan spinning on the ceiling. Two of them were in uniform, the other three wore lightweight tropical suits.

On the table was a large-scale map of Central and Southern Africa with the Indian Ocean islands shown as inserts in the bottom right-hand corner. But their eyes were not on the map or on the manilla folders opened in front of them. They looked at the sixth man standing by the shuttered window, a small, plump man, wearing gold- rimmed spectacles and a badly-fitting, creased, light-grey double-breasted suit. He stood quite still, his arms folded, feet apart, staring intently at the shutters as if he was seeing art in the flaking, chipped, white-painted louvres.

One of the uniformed men began to fidget with the row of coloured ribbons on his tunic, pulled out a packet of cigarettes, hesitated and put them back into his pocket again.

They could hear the noise and bustle of evening traffic outside and the sounds from the open vegetable market nearby, but they waited in silence. There was, after all, nothing more to be said now, nothing more to be done. It had all been agreed, the plan had been thoroughly vetted and finally accepted with only the smallest occasional correction. Everything and everyone settled, except the date and the time and only the plump man at the window could supply that. It was after all his plan. It would have to be his decision.

Outside there was a sudden, shrill squeal of car brakes and the plump man, seeming to take it as a cue, turned and walked back to his place at the head of the table. He pressed a button on the underside of the armrest of his chair and seconds later a door opened and a tall powerfully-built black guy came to attention and saluted. He was in uniform - at least it looked military - and he wore a beret. He didn’t have ribbons or insignias or any mark of rank, but his khaki shirt had epaulets, his khaki trousers had many pockets and his thick brown leather belt carried an ebony- handled revolver in a canvas holder.

The plump man did not acknowledge the salute; instead he turned a page of the manilla folder and wrote seven words, a date and a time in Greenwich Mean Time. Still looking at the page he very quietly read out what he had written and only then did he look up. He watched the black guy stiffen. Then he nodded and the black guy sat down opposite him.

Nodding in turn to the other men around him, the black guy took off his light green beret. On his tight curly hair was a small, bright-red skullcap.