A Sentimental Traitor by Michael Dobbs Page A

moment cascaded into squeals of outrage and much splashing.
    ‘What am I going to do with you?’ he asked carelessly when at last a measure of order had been restored in the bathtub.
    ‘I was rather hoping you might let me help you with your election campaign,’ she said. His entire afternoon had been taken up with constituency correspondence and he hadn’t
even started the process of culling the hundreds of e-mails that had accumulated since he’d last opened his parliamentary account a few days previously.
    ‘No secret I could do with more help,’ he muttered. ‘Since the air crash the atmosphere’s turned, gone sour, our people are sitting on their hands. It was all looking so
comfortable just a couple of weeks ago.’ He would be fine, of course, with his thumping majority, but suddenly the polls – and his nose – were telling him that the government
could be in for one hell of a fight. Still, plenty of time to go.
    ‘I’d love to help, Harry, if you’d let me. Weekends, and then there’s the Easter holidays.’
    ‘You’d give that up for me?’
    ‘Yes.’
    It would change things. Jemma would be introduced to his constituents, be seen at his side, the two of them a public item. It had been a long time since there had been anyone to join him on the
campaign trail. Perhaps it was too early.
    ‘Elections are bloody hard work,’ he said.
    ‘Try teaching a classroom of five-year-olds.’
    ‘You offering to iron my shirts?’
    ‘I’m offering to pick them up from the laundry.’
    ‘It would mean very little sleep.’
    ‘What, more rushed sex?’
    ‘A million sandwiches to make.’
    ‘So long as you let me make you breakfast first.’
    Damn, but she was good at this game. ‘Then I accept your offer, Miss Laing. Frankly, at the moment, I need all the help I can get.’
    ‘I’m all yours,’ she whispered, her eyes suddenly serious.
    They stopped the banter, beyond it now. He turned the tap for more hot water, wanting to prolong the moment, and the suds, suddenly refreshed, clung gently around her breasts. He stared,
provocatively, but when he raised his eyes he found her thoughts elsewhere, a shadow across her face. ‘Already going off the idea?’ he asked.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Come back to me, Jem.’
    ‘Sorry, I was thinking . . . you know, those kids. And the more I think about them, the less I understand it all.’
    ‘Me, too.’
    ‘What would be the point of blowing them out of the sky? No one’s claimed responsibility – isn’t that what usually happens, try to humiliate the enemy, announce that
it’s all been done in retaliation for some other massacre of innocents? But there’s been nothing. Except for a finger pointed at the Egyptians, and it’s been a pretty wobbly
finger, to my mind. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong.’
    Harry sank back into the bath, allowing his muscles to relax and his thoughts to float free as the water rippled across his face, until suddenly he grabbed the taps and hauled himself back up
with an urgency that sent waves of suds lapping over the sides. ‘Maybe we all got it wrong, Jem. Maybe we’ve been climbing up a slope that leads nowhere. We keep talking about the kids.
But what if it was nothing to do with them?’
    ‘Then, why – who?’
    ‘Somebody else on board, perhaps.’
    ‘Who else was on board?’
    ‘I’ve absolutely no idea. But I think I know someone who might.’ He stretched out from the bath to retrieve his phone from beside the basin and began fumbling with it. He
punched a number and, when it had been answered, asked for the Police Casualty Bureau. ‘Shelagh – that you? Harry here,’ he began. ‘No, I’m not in a sewer, I’m
in my bath.’
    There was a silence as he listened to the voice at the other end; Jemma thought his jaw stiffened, trying to give nothing away – which meant there probably was something, so far as Shelagh
was concerned.
    ‘That would be great, I’d love to catch up, it’s been too long, but