A Tokyo love hotel cuddling a pristine metro station would have been ideal. But hard to find in a de-industrial northern English town during the twilight zone that lies between last orders and sunrise. Usually inhabited only by burglars and insomniacs, tonight these streets also see two shocked secret servants, one in her prime and still serving, the other, myself, bald and retired.
We need to read a clandestine memory stick away from the prying eyes of a first-class dining carriage now departing in the general direction of Scotland. Victorian platforms strewn with rubbish greet those who flee their train at the next stop after their laptop announces, ‘Planning The Assassination of …’.
My flame-haired companion – still anonymous, as we haven’t yet been introduced – and I find a cheap Lego brick motel amongst the starlit silhouettes of boarded-up shops, derelict factories and, yes, a minaret or three.
At check-in, she reveals herself to be a Miss Blod, allowing me, safe in our shoebox room, complete with bunk beds and nothing else, to another of my ice-breaking quips. ‘Blod? I do hope you gave your place derivative ancestral clan back in the home country hell for that.’
‘Likewise, Mr Worth-Saying. It is Ashley de Pfeffel Worth-Saying MC, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed.’
‘No matter how far separated the parishes, the Worths and the Sayings were bound to marry into each other, were they not?’
‘As sure as any attractive female with half a brain is bound to leave a gypsy encampment on the eponymous branchline from Blod Junction to Botev Levski and offer her services to His Majesty.’
Introductions complete, we sat on the lower bunk, looking at the laptop, re-reading the contents of the memory stick Jerry Westerby passed to me surreptitiously in a Vauxhall park during that morning’s episode of the latest London heat wave.
‘Operation Stable State,’ Miss Blod read aloud, ‘Planning The Assassination of..,’ she paused; was there a tear? ‘When I first saw that, I thought of Widders…’
‘So did I,’ I replied. ‘Rightly so, in a way.’
For the document’s full title was, ‘Operation Steady State: Planning The Assassination of Reform UK’. Headlined for ‘Group of Sixteen eyes only’ – whoever they may be – the report was an all hands to the plough call to reinforce an unpopular progressive government by knobbling their main (only?) opposition.
‘Country house plotters, Worth? Leftie establishment this time? You’re old enough to remember the Wilson paranoia. Was it the eighties?’
‘Seventies,’ I replied. ‘Mrs Thatcher to the rescue. Having said that, if she’d had a loveless landslide and an insurgent party sapping at her heels, history might have been different. Coup d’état and all that. By good fortune she had Michael Foot.’
At a glance, the document was standard fare to those versed in the dark arts. Identify the objective, identify the target audience, research the opponent. Perception management 1.01. But what would catch even the most naive of eyes scanning between the lines was the obvious but unspoken objective. To destroy our country and its people, given, arguably, Reform UK are Blighty’s last hope.
‘Not so much a stately home plot, more a Wannsee Conference,’ I confided.
‘A Wannsee standing committee,’ she corrected me. ‘Point ten, measure and adapt at further meetings.’
Speaking of Japan, at once I imagined a gathering of sixteen nere-do-well international crims before a Mr Big in the Osato Chemical & Engineering Company boardroom. Or perhaps cartels hatching a plot behind a moving wardrobe in the corridor of a Parisian Brotherhood for the Assistance of Stateless Persons.
Being of a different generation but of the same profession, Miss Blod wondered aloud of supercars and the Italianate. ‘A former royal palace in Lazio at midnight, Mr Worth, early Baroque, late arrival Liberal globalists having their eyes crunched out by a heavy. No wonder Mr Westerby dumped this on you.’
‘He must be terrified,’ I replied, ‘not least after what happened to Widders.’
‘I’ll wager he’s scarpered,’ she continued. ‘Passed the gold dust to yourself – the reliable old hand at arm’s length from the troublesome centre – and run for the hills. I’ll promise a gold bar to a pile of prospector’s dust that we’re not the only ones on the move tonight, Westerby will already be as far away as possible. Somewhere…’ she scrolled the screen then read from it with a finger. ‘…somewhere this ‘Groups of Sixteen’ can’t reach him.’
‘Tell me,’ she continued, ‘does your source have impeccable timing?’
I confided that he always presented as somewhat shambolic. However, given his position on a Fleet Street rag in the days of morning papers and cast iron evening deadlines, he must be, beyond the persona, a ‘just at the right minute’ kind of guy.
She kept scrolling. ‘Quite. The next meeting is tomorrow,’ she announced, ‘and here’s the grid reference.’
Pricking our fantasies of a trip to Paris, Rome or Tokyo, the rendezvous point was not far from our miserable motel.
’One feels obliged, Miss Blod, to climb the outside of the building with a dagger between the teeth and a microphone in each pocket. Your turn or mine?’
‘No need,’ she was pointing to some very small text below point ten. ‘Admission is by code phrase, and here it is.’
Game on.
***
The next morning found ourselves in a taxi heading to that rendezvous point in a nearby big city. After sleeping in my clothes on the top bunk, I was fashionably unshaven, suit crumpled. My companion, versed in the pretty shop girl’s art of perfecting appearance with limited or no resources, looked stunning.
The driver’s music, jangling and foreign, was interupted. ‘This is the BBC Asia news at 9 am. Mr Burnham will attend an important conference this morning. Topics to be covered include growing the economy through migration, global heating and countering the ultra hard extreme far right.
‘In other news, tributes have been pouring in from the world of media for Fleet Street legend The Honourable Clive Gerald ‘Jerry’ Westerby. Fishermen discovered Mr Westerby’s bullet-riddled body floating in a bay off the island of Po Toi in what Hong Kong police are describing as a burglary gone wrong.’
The taxi eased through morning traffic, past city centre dark brick and glass. Rain stippled the windows. Tyres hissed over wet tarmac.
As we approached our destination, the atmosphere changed. A northern address with the weight of a London conspiracy attached to it; unmistakable sounds and smells surrounded: wet pavement, traffic, coffee, the faint metallic screech of a tram somewhere beyond.
The driver slowed to a stop, glancing towards the entrance of a nondescript office block. Security staff were visible ahead, giving the place a more guarded, official character than the surrounding streets.
For a moment there was only the ticking of the cooling engine.
I slid my window slid down to reveal a lady approaching, accompanied by two uniformed security guards with suspiscious bulges about their trousers at the sidearm o’clock possition. Beyond, the northern metropolis carried on as normal — tram bells, buses, footsteps, voices — but here the city seemed distant.
‘The rain this year is better at Manchester,’ the lady announced.
‘But not at Cholton-cum-Hardy,’ I replied.
She smiled.
‘You must be Number 14.’
That was handy. Not going to disagree with that.
‘Of course.’
She turned to Miss Blod,
‘I’m his assistant,’ my companion explained. ‘He’s getting old. You could even call me 14A.’
Formalities complete, we were escorted towards the sliding bullet proof doors that open to the foyer of Number 10 North.
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2026
