One can never tire of Jerry Westerby, an old-school Fleet Street soak with a rugby forward’s build but a talent for wicket-keeping before the call of sports journalism pulled him away from the crease and into the smoke-filled press boxes of a vanishing age. But a gentleman can, in half a day and without trying, tire of London.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’ called the capital, ‘That great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.’ One need not be Sherlock Holmes to conclude that the intervening one hundred and thirty-nine years have done little to improve the drainage.
Westminster still reeks of ambition mixed with desperation; the same faces still haunt the same corners, only now they call themselves lobbyists and strategic communicators and manipulate the smartphone instead of the penny dreadfulls. Speaking in the clipped, coded language of encrypted apps, they’ve eclipsed the old bar-room vernacular of scoops, exclusives and the far-fetched whodunit.
Beneath a rumpled, morally battered exterior, Westerby was every bit as observant as Holmes, and twice as worldly. He could tell a government was about to fall by the way ministers stopped returning one another’s calls. He winced at promising careers disappearing between breakfast and the evening edition, their names trapped under some ugly headline. In the secret world, he had seen men die for a misplaced trust, a careless word, a single step taken without looking. He learned long ago that the truth doesn’t arrive clean.
From a park bench in south London, under a heat wave as heavy as melting brass, he had something he was bursting to tell someone. The words came in short, careful bursts. The detail – committed to memory stick no larger than a thumb – was then entrusted to me with the sort of grave, almost paternal seriousness that old reporters reserve for the stories they know will outlive them.
It sat in my pocket, a small weight against my thigh, as, two hours later, the provinces beckoned. My train pulled out of Euston with the reluctant dignity of an ageing thoroughbred and gathered speed while my nervousness mounted. A suspicious mind might have guessed I was expecting another rendezvous — late, and at a hundred and at twenty-five miles an hour while tilting through the Hertfordshire curves at twilight.
As the landscape blurred into soft greens and greys beyond a first-class window, I kept glancing at the time and at the vestibules, counting the seconds. Chocolate and coffee stood on the table before me; next to the remains of the lamb, still warm, juices congealing, cutlery set ceremonially to twelve noon.
That questioning mind would have been correct. But my contact was not tardy; rather she was two steps ahead of me. She approached from behind. Must have been seated nearby all along. Watching, waiting, measuring me, waiting for the perfect moment to slide into the seat opposite me with a fluid ease that tells of someone long accustomed to moving through crowds without drawing attention.
She placed some slim black technology on the table. If my contraband was a memory stick, my new companion was a firestick – slender, auburn hair spilt across the shoulders of a black jacket. A matching shirt was open at the neck but buttoned well short of the cleavage in the careful calculation of professionalism and quiet allure of the skilled enchantress. Circular copper framed spectacles rested upon a sculpted nose above smug scarlet lips. They whispered with the confidence of the prettiest shop girl on the high street,
‘I’m the laptop.’
‘Every gigabyte of it,’ I whispered back, sharing her tone, my caution as automatic as muscle memory.
‘You must be well connected for a retiree. I’ve never seen a piece of equipment leave the building so quickly — or so unofficially.’
‘One keeps a note of one’s emergency codes, just in case the end of the world begins on a summer’s afternoon in Vauxhall.’
Image generated using GROK AI
She opened the laptop and angled it so we both caught the screen’s cold glow. Outside, as the carriage rocked, the sinking sun sparkling on distant windows like the last thoughts of the innocent commuter land we were leaving behind.
‘Porn habit out of control?’ she asked, the corners of her mouth curling into a mocking smile.
‘Sometimes one has subterfuge to look at instead,’ I replied, pulling Jerry’s memory stick from its hiding place and holding it towards her.
‘Busy day?’ She wondered aloud while taking it with careful fingers.
Busy enough. Dashing across the metropolis, trying not to think of the stabbings and gangs while texting my urgent requests from a series of anonymous café corners. At Piccadilly I bought a disposable coffee I did not drink, allowing me to stand still for a minute and check plate glass reflections of anyone who might be following too close.
A protest of some kind disturbed Wardour Street — young people with handmade signs protested a distant country, their voices rose and fell in the early evening light. I did not linger. London has a way of swallowing such moments whole, and I had already swallowed enough.
‘How was the lamb?’ she said, nodding toward my place setting.
‘Tender. Juicy. An omen.’
‘Let’s find something juicy on here.’
She took the stick and slid it home with a gentle, decisive click. We thundered into a tunnel. Reflections flared across the glass, doubling our faces for a moment before the darkness took them. She tapped keys with quiet efficiency.
Pages of code flickered and vanished. She inputted the commands that decode and run, that connect to servers and look for media. Pushing the machine towards me with the casual grace of a croupier reaching for a losing wager she said, ‘Just in case of catastrophe. You’re the more deniable. And the more expendable, if it comes to that.’
I clicked on ‘open’.
The usual stuff appeared first, the bureaucratic throat-clearing that always precedes. What you are about to see is proprietary and top secret, for your eyes and your eyes alone. Unauthorised disclosure will be treated as a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
The subtext being, in certain contingencies, considered grounds for more permanent measures— including, should the need arise, the arrangement of an accident or a suicide to ensure the material never reaches wider circulation. The content was dry, almost boring, until the the next page, ‘Operation Steady State: Planning The Assassination of …’
To be continued…
© Always Worth Saying 2026
