Chapter Twenty: The Clarification

They did it again with Branson, and by then the technique was a production line, and there is a scene worth putting down not because it is dramatic but because it explains the man.

An hour before the event, in a holding room, a junior events coordinator — twenty-four, a marketing graduate, the kind of earnest young person these operations consume on eighteen-month cycles — asked a question.

"Should we clarify in the intro that Sir Richard isn't, you know. Endorsing the property side."

The room went quiet.

Warren Stokes, who by then had been with Jamie for years and had a salesman's nose for weather, looked at the floor.

Jamie turned around.

And he didn't shout. That is the thing that made him frightening in the end: he almost never shouted.

He put a hand on the young man's shoulder and said, warmly:

"Mate. What's the actual word on the poster?"

"...Special guest."

"Special guest. And is he a special guest?"

"Yes."

"Is he here?"

"Yes."

"Is he special?"

A small laugh from somebody near the door.

"So what," Jamie said, still warm, still with the hand on the shoulder, "exactly, would we be clarifying?"

And the young man said nothing, because there was nothing to say — because every single word on the poster was true, and the poster was a lie, and you cannot explain the difference to a man who has spent his entire adult life living in the space between them.

He left four months later. He gave evidence eventually. Not to a court — nobody ever quite got Jamie McIntyre into a criminal court — but to a journalist, on background, in 2015.