A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

breathing a sigh of relief.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Now that the Tories are back in power, there’s no longer any danger of it being confiscated and turned into council flats.’
    ‘That’s not fair, William, you know my parents are Labour supporters – and, in fact, wouldn’t mind having this house off their hands.’
    ‘What a shambles.’
    ‘You mean the house?’
    ‘No, I mean the election.’ Labour had won the popular vote, but had taken fewer seats owing to boundary changes, which benefited the Tories and returned an elderly Churchill to power.
    Catesby’s wife got up and straightened her skirt. ‘I think the lamb is nearly done.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Frances, I really apologise.’
    ‘For what?’
    ‘For being a shit husband, a shit step-dad – and I was also a shit Army officer and now I’m a shit intelligence officer. Je suis simplement une grosse merde .’
    ‘I think we need to flush you down the toilet. But I’ll serve the food first.’
    As Frances padded off to the kitchen, Catesby surveyed the flat. It badly needed redecorating and repairing. There were botched repairs from wartime bombing that still needed putting right. The Regency ceiling was water damaged from burst pipes and loose-hanging plaster was concealed with wallpaper. The house was a five-storey terrace divided into flats overlooking Stanhope Gardens. Catesby knew that his parents-in-law hadn’t the money to put things right. They were shabby genteel idealists.
    As his wife came back into the dining room bearing a steamingcasserole, Catesby lifted his glass of semi-sweet sparkling rosé, ‘Votes for women!’
    ‘You’re out of date, William. Women now have the vote.’
    ‘But if wasn’t for your brave cousin, you wouldn’t have the vote.’
    ‘She was my father’s cousin – and I’m not sure that throwing herself under the King’s horse made much of a difference.’
    ‘I was also being ironic, not about your cousin, but about you doing all the work. What can I do to help?’
    ‘You can pour me a glass of wine.’
    ‘It’s ghastly – I apologise.’
    ‘Stop apologising, William. Once again, your Roman Catholic guilt is driving me mad.’
    ‘And once again, Frances, I am not a Roman Catholic – I am an atheist and a socialist. I lost my… Why are you yawning?’
    ‘Because I’ve heard that line so many times before: “I lost my faith when I found my brain”.’
    ‘Don’t you think it’s clever?’
    ‘I did the first time you said it. But, in any case, I don’t think it’s true: once a Catesby always a Catesby.’
    ‘The Catesby jibe is as tiresome as my repetitions – my name is just a coincidence.’
    ‘You get teased a lot about it in SIS, don’t you?’
    Catesby sighed and nodded. The fact that he bore the surname of the fanatical recusant Roman Catholic who led the Gunpowder Plot wasn’t lost on his colleagues. Catesby, like most British working class, couldn’t trace his family tree back further than his grandparents, but the name came to haunt him. Catesby had never heard of his alleged ancestors until he studied Shakespeare’s Richard III at the grammar and discovered that a William Catesby had been one of the hunchback king’s henchmen:
The Cat, the Rat and Lovell the Dog,
Rule all England under a Hog.
    A few weeks later a history master, using an embarrassed Catesby as a cue card, recounted the story of Robert Catesby, a direct descendant of William ‘The Cat’. Catesby had masterminded theplot to blow up Parliament, but Guy Fawkes was more famous because he had been so publicly hung, drawn and quartered for high treason. Catesby, on the other hand, had escaped to Holbeche House in Staffordshire where he had been shot in a last-ditch stand and died clutching an image of the Virgin Mary. But had, dreamed Catesby, that really happened? Could the man killed have been another? And had the real Robert Catesby escaped to the Suffolk coast where he had waited in vain for a rescue ship from the