Jasper touched the selector lever on the left side of the gun, moving it from “Safe” to “Semi,” allowing it to fire a single round.

His hands were quite steady.

He pulled the trigger.

PART SIX

FLOWER

1968

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Jasper Murray spent two years in the army, one year of training in the USA and one of combat in Vietnam. He was discharged in January 1968 without ever having been wounded. He felt lucky.

Daisy Williams paid for him to fly to London to see his family. His sister, Anna, was now editorial director of Rowley Publishing. She had at last married Hank Remington, who was proving to be more enduring than most pop stars. The house in Great Peter Street was strangely quiet: the youngsters had all moved out, leaving only Lloyd and Daisy in residence. Lloyd was now a minister in the Labour government and therefore rarely home. Ethel died that January, and her funeral was held a few hours before Jasper was due to fly to New York.

The service was at the Calvary Gospel Hall in Aldgate, a small wooden shack where she had married Bernie Leckwith fifty years earlier, when her brother, Billy, and countless boys like him were fighting in the frozen mud trenches of the First World War.

The little chapel could seat a hundred or so worshippers, with another twenty or thirty standing at the back; but more than a thousand people turned up to say good-bye to Eth Leckwith.

The pastor moved the service outside and the police closed the street to cars. The speakers got up on chairs to address the crowd. Ethel’s two children, Lloyd Williams and Millie Avery, both in their fifties, stood at the front with most of her grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren.

Evie Williams read the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke. Dave and Walli brought guitars and sang “I Miss Ya, Alicia.” Half the cabinet were there. So was Earl Fitzherbert. Two buses from Aberowen brought a hundred Welsh voices to swell the hymn singing.

But most of the mourners were ordinary Londoners whose lives had been touched by Ethel. They stood in the January cold, the men holding their caps in their hands, the women shushing their children, the old people shivering in their cheap coats; and when the pastor prayed for Ethel to rest in peace, they all said amen.

• • •

George Jakes had a simple plan for 1968: Bobby Kennedy would become president and stop the war.

Not all of Bobby’s aides were in favor. Dennis Wilson was happy for Bobby to remain simply the senator from New York. “People will say that we already have a Democratic president and Bobby should support Lyndon Johnson, not run against him,” he said. “It’s unheard-of.”

They were at the National Press Club in Washington on January 30, 1968, waiting for Bobby, who was about to have breakfast with fifteen reporters.

“That’s not true,” George said. “Truman was opposed by Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace.”