Goodfellowe MP

‘I understand all too well, Constable,’ he replied, bending down to release his trouser cuffs from captivity.

He was led downstairs to the Charge Room, which resembled the ticket counter of a bus station, except that the boards behind the reception desk carried duty rosters and charge sheets instead of timetables. It seemed to be rush hour.

‘Sarge, I’ve got one for the Chinese girl,’ the constable announced.

‘You her solicitor?’ the custody sergeant enquired, continuing to give his attention to a large batch of forms in front of him.

‘A Member of Parliament.’

‘Ah, you must be Mr Goodfellowe.’ The sergeant looked up. ‘She a constituent, sir?’

‘No. A friend, I suppose.’

‘Your … friend’ – the policeman tested the term cautiously – ‘is in a spot of real trouble, Mr Goodfellowe. Soliciting. Possession. Punching an officer. We’re all going to have to be rather careful about this, if you take my meaning.’ Goodfellowe took it to be a friendly warning. ‘We tried to get her to call a solicitor but she insisted it should be you. I can still call the duty solicitor, if you want. If you’re too busy. Got more important things to do.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant. Might as well see her while I’m here, don’t you think?’

‘Up to you. Entirely up to you,’ the sergeant pronounced, washing his hands of any further advice. Rush hour was well underway, the Charge Room was getting backed up and it was going to be a long night.

‘Are you going to charge her, Sergeant?’

‘Depends. Haven’t got her side of the story yet, she’s having trouble explaining herself. And we’re running a check through Clubs & Vice and through the Immigration Service to see if they’ve a handle on Miss Pan … Chou-you. That her real name?’

‘Zsha-yu,’ Goodfellowe pronounced phonetically. ‘I think so.’

‘Know the young lady well, do you, sir?’

‘Not really.’

‘I see.’

‘I doubt very much whether you do, Sergeant,’ Goodfellowe responded, more than aware of what was swirling through the policeman’s excessively stimulated mind. ‘I think perhaps I’d better see her now.’

All this time Jya-Yu had been sitting in a detention room. Less than ninety minutes beforehand she had been a carefree, bright-eyed eighteen-year-old looking forward to a night out with friends. Now she was rigid with terror, sitting on a plastic mattress on a concrete bunk in a cell whose painted brick walls were covered in crude graffiti and scratchings which seemed like the claw marks of animals. The room had been designed so that prisoners could do no harm to themselves, yet Jya-Yu, simply by sitting here, felt more harmed and in more pain than at any time in her short life. The scuffle, her arrest, the ride with head bowed in the back of a police wagon to a basement car park, with policemen and women shouting at her (or so it seemed), thrown amidst all the dregs that collected in a busy Charge Room. And then the strip search, the violation, to her the most profound humiliation of her life, almost as Madame Tang had described it to her, as though the Kuomintang army had marched right up Charing Cross Road and started to lay waste. When she was led from the cell and into an interview room to discover at last a familiar face, the emotions she had kept caged within at last escaped her control. She stood to attention, hands by her side, head bowed, and began to sob inconsolably. Instinctively Goodfellowe crossed to her and placed his arms defensively around her, trying to bury the tears in his embrace. The constable smirked.

‘Ah, could we be left alone to talk, Constable?’ Goodfellowe enquired when at last Jya-Yu had regained her composure.

‘’Fraid not, sir.’

‘But I thought …’

‘Not a privileged conversation, sir, not unless you’re a solicitor.’

The first battle lost. And so they had talked and Jya-Yu, calmer now and with better control of her English, had tried to explain, and the arresting constable, nose no longer weeping, had come in and recorded a formal interview during which he had displayed a plastic bag containing two twists of silver paper.

‘Are these yours, miss?’ the policeman had enquired, still slightly nasal.

She had nodded.

‘For the record, the prisoner has indicated that the silver packets belong to her. And what is the off-white powder inside them?’

She looked at Goodfellowe, her eyes flushed with confusion and torment, then sat with her head held low and would say no more.

‘Miss Pan Jya-Yu, it seems to me probable that this powder is a controlled substance, cocaine I would guess. Have you got anything to say?’ The constable sounded a little bored and began to make patterns on the table top with the rings left by his plastic coffee cup. ‘OK. For the benefit of the record, the prisoner refuses to answer. And you do understand, don’t you, that your refusal to say anything can be used against you in court?’

‘Yes. I do,’ she whispered.

They were taken back to the Charge Room, now in a state of controlled bedlam, where an inspector appeared. They had run Jya-Yu’s name through their records but had found no sordid past, no vice conviction, she was not an illegal, her presence in the country was entirely in order.

‘And you have no witness for the soliciting charge,’ Goodfellowe intervened.

‘But we do have a suspicious substance, sir. And the constable’s bloody nose.’

‘That was accident,’ Jya-Yu protested, but the inspector ignored her, continuing to address Goodfellowe.

‘I’m not going to charge the lady at the present time but we’ll release her on bail to return at a time when our lab analysis of the substance is completed. Probably in about six weeks’ time. When we know what it is, then we’ll know what to do.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘If you’ll let me offer you a word of advice, I should concentrate on running the country, sir. Tears and trouble. That’s all a gentleman like you will get from becoming tied up in a case like this. People have such suspicious minds.’

Corsa was feeling out of sorts. He hated receptions, even in Downing Street. Three hundred people crushed into a couple of steaming drawing rooms where they sipped cheap wine – Spanish this month, Sainsbury’s had a special – and waited for one of the Prime Minister’s funny little speeches. Corsa was used to making dramatic entrances, demanding the attention of all present, not shuffling along in an anonymous line, like his father. In a crowd his lack of physical stature made him feel claustrophobic, insignificant. He hated cheap wine, held disdain for casual acquaintance and had no high regard even for the Prime Minister. How could one take a man seriously whose eyebrows resembled two ferrets locked in coitus?

He turned to take out his frustrations on the Minister for Overseas Development, a man of giggles and girth who wore his suit as though beneath its immense folds it hid a chest of drawers with all the drawers open. ‘Bunny’ Burrowes was also notoriously Catholic and unmarried. And, this evening, he was a target that had moved out into the open. The Herald had recently launched a campaign exposing the high infant-mortality levels in Angola caused by an epidemic of flu believed to have been introduced by European nuns. As his features editor had pointed out to Corsa, the death rates in Angola were no higher than in Iraq or Mongolia but, as Corsa had in turn pointed out to the features editor, there was little public sympathy to be generated by Arabs or Orientals ‘and black babies have such enormous eyes. So appealing.’ Anyway, neither Iraq nor Mongolia had a Royal visit planned for three months’ time. So the Herald in traditional campaigning mood had promised to build them a hospital. Much fanfare, still more moral outrage, and all by Royal appointment. Great publicity. Sadly for the plans and promises, however, the Herald’s campaign had found its readers in a profound state of compassion fatigue. Both heart strings and purse strings remained steadfastly unplucked, and the Herald’s appeal was a quarter of a million short – money which Corsa had neither mood nor means to find from his own resources. So, privately and with great politeness, they had asked the Foreign Office whose officials, still more politely, had said no. Yet here, giggling in the middle of the Green Drawing Room, was the Minister in all his voluminous flesh. Corsa felt a challenge coming on.

‘My dear Minister, what a pleasure.’

Burrowes scowled at the interruption. Unlike some of his colleagues he did not welcome over-familiarity with the press, being neither photogenic nor particularly prudent in his private life. He replied with no more than a nod of his heavily jowled head and was about to pick up his interrupted conversation about costume with the country’s leading male ice skater when, with only perfunctory apologies, Corsa took his arm and led him off to a quieter corner.

‘Not your bloody hospital, Freddy,’ Burrowes started, objecting to the heavy hand upon his sleeve. ‘I’ve seen the papers. It won’t wash. We don’t have the money.’

‘Of course you have the money, Bunny. It’s simply a matter of priorities. But of course I understand your difficulties.’

‘Good,’ responded the Minister, his eyes dancing back to the skater and making to leave, but Corsa kept a firm grip on his sleeve.

‘I merely wanted to make sure that you had been fully briefed on the opportunities.’

‘What opportunities?’

‘The opportunity to get some richly deserved credit. For the Government. For the Foreign Office aid programme. And, when it comes down to it, for you.’

The Minister pulled distractedly at each of his pudgy fingers in turn as though checking that the press man hadn’t stolen any in the crush.

‘Think of the free publicity,’ Corsa continued. ‘The hospital building is all prefabricated. We could load it onto an RAF transport and fly it in together. You and me. Accompanied by a handirpicked selection of reporters and television cameramen, of course. Imagine the reception. The crowds on the runway. Laughing children, weeping doctors, dancing mothers, and as many effusive local dignitaries as their Mercedes can shuttle in. The lot. And you and the Cardinal being greeted like saviours – which is precisely what this hospital project is all about.’

‘The Cardinal?’ enquired the Minister.

‘Yes. I’ve had a word with his office,’ Corsa lied impetuously. ‘They say in principle he’d be delighted to help. Thinks it’s an excellent idea. Sort of absolution for the nuns. We Catholic boys should stick together, Bunny.’