Free The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne Page B

lady’s room.
    Out for the count on her small bed, Jack Pugh looked like the girl had looked, curled up defenceless on the ground, arms wrapped around her head protecting it from the blows. Max might have been distraught to discover the sex of his victim, but John had been disgusted by the whole fucking thing. If this was Jack’s revolution, he could stuff it.
    As he started to check over the room’s contents, he wondered if he should have asked the porter to call a doctor. Then something caught his eye – a letter addressed to Miranda de Coursey. He’d readabout a financier called Sebastian de Coursey who was interested in parts of British Leyland. His Longbridge brothers had pinned the article with a picture of the man to their dartboard and there hadn’t been much of it left last time he looked. But what a sweet effing possibility! This surely warranted a report and would justify a visit to Stacy. Then a troubling notion occurred to him. Supposing the Trot from Cowley was working to save the nation too?
    * * *
    The aftermath at Hunters’ yard reminded Harvey of Wellington’s comment in a letter to a friend after his battle at Waterloo, that nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. The ambulance had collected Abigail and she was now on life support at the local hospital. Tony had ranted at his sons for letting her drive and then cursed himself for delaying their exit.
    â€œThose men had been drinking. If we’d gone out first thing, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
    Amos and Virgil, caked in their own blood and that of their adversaries, had tried to comfort their mother. Now the family was standing vigil beside Abigail’s hospital bed.
    The photographers had combed the ground for their camera parts like scavengers searching for anything that could still be used. Hunters’ other drivers quickly extracted the first truck from the ditch and had already left to deliver what was likely to be their last load. A couple of policemen were taking statements and measuring distances and a colleague was photographing the blood on the ground where Abigail fell.
    Harvey took one last look at the scene before he and his neutered accomplice climbed into one of the taxis summoned to take the journalists to the station. On the train he wrote, crossed out and wrote again. By the time they’d reached London he felt he had it, butstill managed to make some changes on the way to St Paul’s.
    George Gilder was grim-faced.
    â€œI need pictures. I must have pictures.”
    While Harvey’s almost indecipherable freehand piece was being coaxed into life by an imaginative typist, George Gilder was on the telephone to the other editors whose journalists had also been at Hunters – had anyone retrieved a useable image? A photographer with The Tamworth Herald had managed to secure a picture of Abigail in hospital and was now negotiating his price, while the local police were being persuaded to release a picture of the blood-stained snow to a courier standing by.
    By 6.00 p.m., things were looking up. The police, anxious to catch Abigail’s assailant, had agreed to release a picture and it was now in The Sentinel office. One of the photographers, although not Harvey’s, had had the presence of mind to gather up all the unfurled film spread around the site like tagliatelle, and one grainy image had been retrieved. It hurt George Gilder to have to negotiate with a counterpart, but his determination to get a photograph of the blockade overcame his natural frugality. Only then did he grab Harvey’s piece from the typist’s desk and retreat to his office.
    The day had been something of an epiphany for Harvey. For the first time in his life he had come face-to-face with thuggery, the muscles of the authoritarian mind. He had also witnessed the courage needed to resist it.
    In her primitive, intelligent way, his mother had often talked not so