Free Goodbye to an Old Friend by Brian Freemantle

worshippers were prostrate on the grass and Adrian studied them enviously. No worries, he thought. No broken marriages, no bewigged secretaries, no laundry problems. And they’d have eaten as well.
    Both knew the inside of the Prime Minister’s official house from previous visits and confidently followed the male secretary through the corridors and into the small office off the larger Cabinet Room.
    Although they were ten minutes early, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were waiting.
    â€˜Here you are, here you are,’ said the Premier, Arnold Ebbetts, impatiently, as if they were at least an hour late for the appointment.
    He was a fat, fleshy man, who affected a pipe he rarely lit and the sort of tweed suits that cost thirty pounds from multiple tailors and could be recognized as such. He cultivated a reputation for bluntness, which he practised when it would cause no harm, and always invited the press to his summer cottage in Yorkshire for duty pictures of him with flat cap and briar stick, a man of the people who’d made good but hadn’t forgotten his humble origins of grammar school and Barnsley Technical College. He had a mind like a computer, an ambition to be remembered as one of Britain’s ablest premiers and rarely in public speeches did he forget to drop his aitches.
    Arnold Ebbetts was a politician’s politician. The man he most admired was Arnold Ebbetts.
    â€˜Here you are,’ echoed the Foreign Minister. Predictably, Adrian felt sorry for him. Sir William Fornham was a cartoonist’s dream, a caricature of a British aristocrat, so that people judged him – quite wrongly – from a commentator’s drawing rather than his performance. He was a tall, bony man, who had forsaken his hereditary title to serve his country, which he did well but for which he got little recognition. He suffered the disadvantage of believing through tradition, breeding and education that all men were gentlemen who told the truth and was constantly offended to discover otherwise. Apart from that his only other failing was that he often appeared to be thinking of something else, which he wasn’t, and so to prove his attention he had developed the habit of repeating the final five or six words of the person who spoke before him.
    He was Foreign Secretary because the government needed a man of wealth to capture the intellectual right wing of the party. Sir William was aware of it, but he knew his worth and was prepared to be used by an ambitious prime minister because it had been the role of his family for three centuries to serve their country. History, hoped Sir William, would correctly assess his contribution to be as great as that of any of his ancestors.
    Ebbetts had decided upon bluntness.
    â€˜What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded, looking at Adrian. ‘Don’t like the way this debriefing is going, don’t like it at all.’
    Sir William reserved judgment by failing to pick up the end of the sentence.
    â€˜What don’t you like?’
    Adrian felt the glance of Sir Jocelyn at the lack of respect and mentally shrugged it aside. He was right about Pavel. He knew he was. And he knew that time would prove him correct. He hoped he could maintain his attitude throughout the meeting.
    â€˜You’re handling the man wrong, all wrong,’ said Ebbetts. ‘He’s hostile. And we haven’t got time to muck about. Speed is the element here.’
    â€˜â€¦ element here,’ intoned Sir William.
    â€˜But why?’ queried Adrian. ‘I’m sure Sir Jocelyn has made it clear that speed is just the thing to avoid in a debriefing. Answers have got to be checked, then crosschecked, then analysed …’
    â€˜Rubbish.’ The Premier cut him off with a wave of his hand. ‘Is Bennovitch genuine?’
    â€˜Yes,’ replied Adrian, ‘I believe he is.’
    â€˜Is Pavel genuine?’
    â€˜Depends what you mean