The scene is the American East Coast island of Martha’s Vineyard in the mansion of a multi-millionaire publisher, Marty Rhine-hart. The narrator, a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, has arrived to rescue the disastrous $10m autobiography of Adam Lang, Britain’s former prime minister. Overshadowing him is the mysterious death of Mike McAra, a former Downing Street aide who wrote the first draft of Lang’s book.

From somewhere inside the house I heard a woman with a British accent shouting, “This is absolutely bloody ridiculous!” Then a door slammed, and an elegant blonde in a dark blue jacket and skirt, carrying an A4 black and red hardcover notebook, came clicking down the corridor on high heels.

“Amelia Bly,” she said with a fixed smile. She was probably 45 but at a distance could have passed for ten years younger. She had beautiful large, clear blue eyes, but wore too much make-up, as if she worked on a cosmetics counter in a department store and had been obliged to demonstrate all the products at once. She exuded a sweet and opulent smell of perfume. “Adam’s in New York unfortunately and won’t be back till later this afternoon.”

“Actually, forget I said that: it’s f****** ridiculous!” shouted the unseen woman.

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Amelia expanded her smile a fraction further, creating tiny fissures in her smooth pink cheeks.

“Oh dear. I’m so sorry. I’m afraid poor Ruth’s having one of those days.”

Ruth. It had never occurred to me that Lang’s wife might be here. I had assumed she would be at home in London. She was famous for her independence, among other things.

“If this is a bad time . . .” I said. “No, no. She definitely wants to meet you. Come and have a cup of coffee. I’ll fetch her. How’s the hotel?” she added over her shoulder. “Quiet?”

“As the grave.” I retrieved my bag from the Special Branch man and followed her into the interior of the house, trailing in her cloud of scent. She had very nice legs, I noticed; her thighs swished nylon as she walked. She showed me into a room full of cream leather furniture, poured me some coffee from a jug in the corner, then disappeared.

An urgent burst of Morse from the passage signalled her return.

“I’m so sorry. I’m afraid Ruth’s a little busy at the moment. She sends her apologies. She’ll catch you later.” Amelia’s smile had hardened somewhat. It looked as natural as her nail polish. “So, if you’ve finished your coffee, I’ll show you where we work.”

She insisted that I went first up the stairs.

“We’re in here,” said Amelia, opening a door.

I followed her into a big study. There were two desks – a little one in the corner at which a secretary sat typing at a computer, and a larger one, entirely clear except for a photograph of a powerboat and a model of a yacht.

“We’re a small team,” said Amelia. “Myself, Alice here” – the girl in the corner looked up – “and Lucy who’s with Adam in New York. Jeff the driver’s also in New York – he’ll be bringing the car back this afternoon. Six protection officers from the UK – three here and three with Adam at the moment.”

“And how long have you been with him?”

“Eight years. I worked in Downing Street. I’m on attachment from the Cabinet Office.”

“Poor Cabinet Office.” She flashed her nail-polish smile. “It’s my husband I miss the most.”

“You’re married? I notice you’re not wearing a ring.”

“I can’t, sadly. It’s far too large. It bleeps when I go through airport security.”

“Ah.” We understood one another perfectly.

She produced a key from the pocket of her well-cut jacket and unlocked a big gun-metal filing cabinet, from which she withdrew a box file. It was the autobiography.

“This is not to be removed from this room,” she said, laying it on the desk. “It is not to be copied. You can make notes, but I must remind you that you’ve signed a con-fidentiality agreement. You have six hours to read it before Adam gets in from New York. I’ll have a sandwich sent up to you for lunch.”

I flipped open the lid of the file, pulled out the manuscript and started to read.

The whole book somehow felt false, as if there was a hollow at its centre. It hadn’t been written so much as bolted together from speeches, official minutes, communi-qués, memoranda, interview transcripts, office diaries, party manifestos and

newspaper articles. I was beginning to feel nauseous, scanning the sheer white cliff-face of featureless prose for any tiny hand-hold of interest I could cling to. No wonder McAra had thrown himself off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry.

I finished the last of the 621 pages in mid-afternoon (“Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold”) and when I laid down the manuscript I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

That was when I heard a cough in the doorway and looked up to see Ruth Lang watching me. To this day I don’t know how long she’d been there. She raised a thin black eyebrow.

“As bad as that?” she said.

She was wearing a man’s thick, shapeless white sweater, so long in the sleeves that only her chewed finger-nails were visible, and once we got downstairs she pulled on top of this a pale blue cagoule, disappearing for a while as she tugged it over her head, her pale face emerging at last with a frown. Her short dark hair stuck up in Medusa’s spikes.

It was she who proposed a walk. She said I looked as though I needed one, which was true enough. She found me her husband’s windproof jacket, which fitted perfectly, and a pair of waterproof boots belonging to the house, and together we stepped out into the blustery Atlantic air. We followed the path around the edge of the lawn and climbed up on to the dunes. Ahead of us, bare white sand stretched for a couple of miles, and when I looked behind, the picture was the same, except that a policeman in an overcoat was following about 50 yards distant.

“You must get sick of this,” I said, nodding to our escort.

“It’s been going on so long I’ve stopped noticing.”

We pressed on into the wind. The big waves came in with a roar and receded like passing trucks.

“So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?”

“You haven’t read it?” “Not all of it.” “Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.”

“How much?” The word Hiroshima floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

“It’s the deadline that’s the trouble. We absolutely have to do it in four weeks, and that’s less than two days for each chapter.”

“Four weeks!” She had a deep, rather dirty laugh. “You’ll never get him to sit still for as long as that!”

“He doesn’t have to write it, as such. That’s what I’m being paid for. He just has to talk to me.”

She had pulled up her hood. I couldn’t really see her face. Only the sharp white tip of her nose was visible. Everyone said she was smarter than her husband, and that she’d loved their life at the top even more than he had. If there was an official visit to some foreign country, she usually went with him: she refused to be left at home.

You only had to watch them on TV together to see how she bathed in his success. Adam and Ruth Lang: The Power and the Glory. Now she stopped and turned to face the ocean, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. Along the beach, as if playing Grandma’s footsteps, the policeman also stopped.

“You were my idea,” she said.

I swayed in the wind. I almost fell over. “I was?”

“Yes. You were the one who wrote Christy’s book for him.”

It took me a moment to work out who she meant. Christy Costello. He was my first best-seller. The intimate memoirs of a Seventies rock star.

“You know Christy?” It seemed so unlikely.

“We stayed at his house on Mustique last winter. I read his memoirs. They were by the bed.”

“Now I’m embarrassed.” “No? Why? They were brilliant, in a horrible kind of a way. Listening to his scrambled stories over dinner and then seeing how you’d turned them into something resembling a life – I said to Adam then: ‘This is the man you need to write your book.’”

I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. “Well,” I said, “I hope your husband’s recollections aren’t quite as hazy as Christy’s.” “Don’t count on it,” she said. She pulled back her hood and took a deep breath. She was better-looking in the flesh than she was on television. The camera hated her almost as much as it loved her husband. It didn’t catch her amused alertness, the animation of her face.

“God, I miss home,” she said. “Even though the kids are away at university. I keep telling him – it’s like being married to Napoleon on St Helena.”

“Then why don’t you go back to London?”

She didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the ocean, biting her lip. Then she looked at me, sizing me up. “You did sign that confidentiality agree-ment?”

“Of course.” “Because I don’t want to read about this in some gossip column next week, or in some cheap little kiss-and-tell book of your own a year from now.”

“Whoa,” I said, taken aback by her venom. “I thought you just said I was your idea. I didn’t ask to come here. And I haven’t kissed anyone.”

She nodded. “All right. Then I’ll tell you why I can’t go home, between you and me. Because there’s something not quite right with him at the moment, and I’m a bit afraid to leave him.”

Boy, I thought. This just gets better and better.

“Yes,” I replied diplomatically. “Amelia told me he was very upset by Mike’s death.”

“Oh she did, did she? Quite when Mrs Bly became such an expert about my husband’s emotional state I’m not sure.” If she had hissed and sprung claws she couldn’t have made her feelings plainer.

“Losing Mike certainly made it worse, but it isn’t just that. It’s losing power – that’s the real trouble. Losing power, and now having to sit down and relive everything, year by year. While all the time the press are going on and on about what he did and didn’t do. He can’t get free of the past, you see. He can’t move on.” She gestured helplessly at the sea, the sand, the dunes. “He’s stuck. We’re both stuck.”

As we walked back to the house, she put her arm through mine.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You must be starting to wonder what you’ve let yourself in for.”

There was something disconcerting about Ruth Lang. You never knew where you were with her. Sometimes she could be aggressive for no reason and then at others she was bizarrely overfamiliar, holding hands or dictating what you should wear. It was as if some tiny mechanism was missing from her brain: the bit that told you how to behave naturally with other people.

There was a lot more activity in the compound when we got back. A dark green Jaguar limousine with a Washington licence plate was parked at the entrance, and a black minivan with darkened windows was drawn up behind it. As the front door opened I could hear several telephones ringing at once. A genial grey-haired man in a cheap brown suit was sitting just inside, drinking a cup of tea, talking to one of the police guards. He jumped up smartly when he saw Ruth Lang. They were all quite scared of her, I noticed.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” “Hello, Jeff. How was New York?”

“Bloody chaos, as usual.” He had a crafty London accent. “Thought for a while I wouldn’t get back in time.”

Ruth turned to me. “They like to have the car ready in position when Adam lands.” She began the long process of wriggling out of her cagoule just as Amelia Bly came round the corner, a cell phone wedged between her elegant shoulder and her sculpted chin, her nimble fingers zip-ping up an attaché case.

“That’s fine, that’s fine. I’ll tell him.” She nodded to Ruth and carried on speaking – “On Thursday he’s in Chicago” – then looked at Jeff and tapped her wristwatch.

“Actually, I think I’ll go to the airport,” said Ruth, suddenly pulling her cagoule back down. “Amelia can stay here and polish her nails or something. Why don’t you come?” she added to me. “He’s keen to meet you.” Score one to the wife, I thought. But no: in the finest traditions of the British civil service, Amelia bounced off the ropes and came back punching. “Then I’ll travel in the back-up car,” she said, snapping her cell phone shut and smiling sweetly. “I can do my nails in there.”

Jeff opened one of the Jaguar’s rear doors for Ruth, while I went round and nearly broke my arm tugging at the other. I slid into the leather seat and the door closed behind me with a gaseous thump.

“She’s armoured, sir,” said Jeff into the rear-view mirror as we pulled away. “Weighs two and a half tons. Yet she’ll still do a hundred with all four tyres shot out.”

“Oh do shut up, Jeff,” said Ruth, good-humouredly. “He doesn’t want to hear all that.”

“The windows are an inch thick and don’t open, in case you were thinking of trying. She’s air-tight against chemical and biological attack, with oxygen for an hour. Makes you think, doesn’t it? At this precise moment, sir, you’re probably safer than you’ve ever been in your life, or ever will be again.”

Ruth laughed again and made a face. “Boys with their toys!”

The outside world seemed muffled, distant. The forest track ran smooth and quiet as rubber. Perhaps this is what it feels like being carried in the womb, I thought: this wonderful feeling of complete security.

“Nervous?” asked Ruth. “No. Why? Should I be?” “Not at all. He’s the most charming man you’ll ever meet. My own Prince Charm-ing!” And she gave her deep-throated, mannish laugh again. “God,” she said, staring out of the window, “will I be glad to see the back of these trees. It’s like living in an enchanted wood.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the unmarked minivan following close behind. I could see how this was addictive. I was getting used to it already. Being forced to give it up after it had become a habit would be like letting go of Mummy. But thanks to terrorism, Lang would never have to give it up – never have to stand in line for public transport; never even drive himself. He was as pampered and cocooned as a Ro-manov before the revolution.

We came out of the forest on to the main road, turned left, and almost immediately swung right through the airport perimeter. I stared out of the window in surprise at the big runway.

“We’re here already?” “In summer Marty likes to leave his office in Manhattan at four,” said Ruth, “and be on the beach by six.”

“I suppose he has a private jet,” I said, in an attempt at knowingness.

“Of course he has a private jet.”

She gave me a look which made me feel like a hick who’d just used his fish knife to butter his roll. Of course he has a private jet. I realised then that just about everybody the Langs knew these days had a private jet. Indeed, here came Lang himself, in a corporate Gulfstream, dropping out of the darkening sky and skimming in low over the gloomy pines.

Jeff put his foot down and a minute later we pulled up outside the little terminal. Inside, a patrolman from the Edgartown police force was already waiting.

The private jet taxied in from the runway. It was painted dark blue and had HALLING-TON written in gold letters by the door. It looked bigger than the usual CEO’s phallic symbol, with a high tail and six windows either side, and when it came to a stop and the engines were cut the silence over the deserted airfield was unexpectedly profound.

The door opened, the steps were lowered, and out came a couple of Special Branch men. One headed straight for the terminal building. The other waited at the foot of the steps, going through the motions of checking the empty tarmac, glancing up and around and behind him.

Lang himself seemed in no hurry to disembark. I could just about make him out in the shadows of the interior, shaking hands with the pilot and a male steward, then finally – almost reluctantly, it seemed to me – he came out and paused at the top of the steps. He glanced around as if he was trying to remember what he was supposed to do.

It was on the edge of becoming embarrassing when suddenly he caught sight of us watching him through the big glass window. He pointed and waved and grinned, in exactly the way that he had in his heyday, and the moment – whatever it was – had passed. We left the window just in time to meet him as he came in through the arrivals gate.

“Hi, darling,” he said, and stooped to kiss his wife. His skin had a slightly orange tint. I realised he was wearing make- up.

She stroked his arm. “How was New York?”

“Great. They gave me the Gulfstream Four – you know, the transatlantic one, with the beds and the shower. Hi, Amelia. Hi, Jeff.” He noticed me. “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I’m your ghost,” I said. I regretted it the instant I said it. I’d conceived it as a witty, self-deprecatory, break-the-ice kind of a line. I’d even practised my delivery in the mirror before I left London. But somehow out there, in that deserted airport, amid the greyness and the quietness, it hit precisely the wrong note. He flinched.

“Right,” he said doubtfully, and although he shook my hand, he also drew his head back slightly, as if to inspect me from a safer distance.

Christ, I thought, he thinks I’m a lunatic.

“Don’t worry,” Ruth told him. “He isn’t always such a jerk.”

“Brilliant opening line,” said Amelia as we drove back to the house. “Did they teach you that at ghost school?”

We were sitting together in the back of the minivan. Through the windscreen I could see the Jaguar immediately ahead carrying the Langs. It was starting to get dark.

“It was particularly tactful,” she went on, “given that you’re replacing a dead man.”

“All right,” I groaned. “Stop.” “But you do have one thing going for you,” she said, turning her large blue eyes on me, and speaking quietly so that no one else could hear. “Almost uniquely among all members of the human race, you seem to be trusted by Ruth Lang. Now why’s that, do you suppose?”

“There’s no accounting for taste.” “True. Perhaps she thinks you’ll do what she tells you.”

“Perhaps she does. Don’t ask me.” The last thing I needed was to get stuck in the middle of this cat fight. “Listen, Amelia – can I call you Amelia? As far as I’m concerned, I’m helping write a book. I don’t want to get caught up in any palace intrigues.”

“Of course not. You just want to do your job and get out of here.”

“Now you’re mocking me again.”

“You make it so easy.” After that I shut up for a while. I could see why Ruth didn’t like her. She was a shade too clever and several shades too blonde for comfort, especially from a wife’s point of view. In fact it struck me as I sat there, passively inhaling her Chanel, that she might be having an affair with Lang. That would explain a lot. He’d been noticeably cool towards her at the airport, and isn’t that always the surest sign? In which case, no wonder they were so paranoid about confidentiality. There could be enough material here to keep the tabloids happy for weeks.

I was on the point of asking her about the rendition stories in the weekend papers when the brake lights of the Jaguar glowed, and we came to a stop.

“Well, here we are again,” she said, and for the first time I detected a hint of weariness in her voice. “Home.”

I’d anticipated that my biggest problem next day would be physically getting Adam Lang into a room and keeping him there for long enough to start interviewing him. But the strange thing was that he was already waiting for me.

Amelia had decided we should use Rhinehart’s office, and we found the former prime minister, wearing a dark green tracksuit, sprawled in the big chair opposite the desk, one leg draped over the arm. He was flicking through a history of World War II which he’d obviously just taken down from the shelf. A mug of tea stood on the floor beside him. His trainers had sand on their soles: I guessed he must have gone for a run on the beach.

“Hi, man,” he said, looking up at me. “Ready to start?”

“Good morning,” I said. “I just need to sort out a few things first.”

He went back to his book asI opened my bag and carefully unpacked my digital tape recorder, laptop, notebooks and other tools of the ghosting trade.

“Did you know,” said Lang suddenly, “that the Germans had jet fighters in 1944? Look at that.” He held up the page to show the photograph. “It’s a wonder we won.”

“We have no floppy disks,” said Amelia, “only these flash-drives. I’ve loaded the manuscript on to this one for you.” She handed me an object the size of a small plastic cigarette lighter. “You’re welcome to copy it on to your own computer, but I’m afraid that if you do, your laptop must stay here, locked up overnight.”

“And apparently Germany declared war on America, not the other way round.”

“Isn’t this all a bit paranoid?”

“The book contains some potentially classified material which has yet to be approved by the Cabinet Office. More to the point, there’s also a very strong risk of some news organisation using unscrupulous methods to try to get hold of it. Any leak would jeopardise our newspaper serialisation deals.”

Lang said: “So you’ve actually got my whole book on that?”

“We could get a hundred books on that, Adam,” said Amelia, patiently.

“Amazing.” He shook his head. “You know the worst thing about my life?” He closed the book with a snap and replaced it on the shelf. “You get so out of touch. You never go in a shop. Everything’s done for you. You don’t carry any money – if I want some money, even now, I have to ask one of the secretaries or one of the protection boys to get it for me. I couldn’t do it myself anyway, I don’t know my . . . what’re they called? I don’t even know that.”

“PIN?”

“You see? I just don’t have a clue. I’ll give you another example. The other week, Ruth andI went out to dinner with some people in New York. They’ve always been very generous to us, so I say, ‘Right, tonight, this is on me.’ So I give my credit card to the manager and he comes back a few minutes later, all embarrassed, and he shows me the problem. There’s still a strip where the signature’s supposed to be.” He threw up his

arms and grinned. “The card hadn’t been activated.”

“This,” I said, excitedly, “is exactly the sort of detail we need to put in your book. Nobody knows this sort of thing.”

Lang looked startled. “I can’t put that in. People would think I was a complete idiot.”

“But it’s human detail. It shows what it’s like to be you.” I knew this was my moment. I had to get him to focus on what we needed right from the start. I came round from behind the desk and confronted him. “Why don’t we try to make this book unlike any other political memoir that’s ever been written? Why don’t we try to tell the truth?”

He laughed. “Now that would be a first.”

“I mean it. Let’s tell people what it really feels like to be prime minister. Not just the policy stuff – any old bore can write about that.” I almost cited McAra, but managed to swerve away at the last moment. “Let’s stick to what no one except you knows – the day-to-day experience of actually leading a country. What do you feel like in the mornings? What are the strains? What’s it like to be so cut off from ordinary life? What’s it like to be hated?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“What fascinates people isn’t policy – who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people – the detail of another person’s life. But because the detail is naturally all so familiar to you, you can’t sort out what it is the reader wants to know. It has to be drawn out of you. That’s why you need me. This shouldn’t be a book for political hacks. This should be a book for everyone.”

“The people’s memoir,” said Amelia drily, but I ignored her, and so, more importantly, did Lang, who was looking at me quite differently now: it was as if some electric light bulb marked “self-interest” had started to glow behind his eyes.

WE worked all morning without a break, except for when a tape was filled. Then I would briefly hurry downstairs to the room Amelia and the secretaries were using as a temporary office, and hand it over to be transcribed. This happened a couple of times, and always on my return I’d find Lang sitting exactly where I’d left him. At first I thought this was a testament to his powers of concentration. Only gradually did I realise it was because he had nothing else to do.

I took him carefully through his early years, focusing not so much on the facts and dates (McAra had assembled those dutifully enough) as on the impressions and physical objects of his childhood. There was cunning in my method, and Lang, with his genius for empathy, grasped it at once, for this was not just his childhood we were itemising, but mine and that of everyone who was born in England in the Fifties and who grew to maturity in the Seventies.

“What we need to do,” I told him, “is to persuade the reader to identify emotionally with Adam Lang. To see beyond the remote figure in the bombproof car. To recognise in him the same things they recognise in themselves.”

“I get it,” he said, nodding emphatically. “I think that’s brilliant.”

And so we swapped memories for hour after hour, and I will not say we began to concoct a childhood for Lang exactly – I was always careful not to depart from the known historical record – but we certainly pooled our experiences, to such an extent that a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his.

We decided that his first memory would be when he tried to run away from home at the age of three and he heard the sound of his father’s footsteps coming up behind him and the hardness of his muscled arms as he scooped him back to the house.

We remembered Christmas pantomimes he had been to and his stage debut in the school nativity play.

“Was I a wise man?” “That sounds a little smug.” “A sheep?” “Not smug enough.” “A guiding star?” “Perfect!” By the time we broke for lunch, we had reached the age of 17. While Lang went off to play tennis with one of his bodyguards I dropped by the downstairs office to check on the transcription. An hour’s interviewing generally yields between seven and eight thousand words, and Lang and I had been at it from nine till nearly one. Amelia had set both secretaries on the task. Each was wearing headphones. Their fingers skimmed the keyboards, filling the room with a soothing rattle of plastic. For the first time since arriving on the island, I felt the warm breath of optimism.

“This is all new to me,” said Amelia, who was bent over Lucy’s shoulder, reading Lang’s words as they unfurled across the screen. “I’ve never heard him mention any of this before.”

I left her peering at the screen and went back upstairs. I had had an idea, and my newborn confidence gave me the courage to act on it. I went into the study and closed the door. I plugged Amelia’s flashdrive into my laptop, then I attached a cable from my computer to the cell phone and dialled up the internet.

How much easier my life would be, I reasoned – how much quicker the job would be done – if I could work on the book in my hotel room each night. I told myself I was doing no harm. The risks were minimal. The machine rarely left my side. If necessary it was small enough to fit under my pillow while I slept.

The moment I was online, I addressed an e-mail to myself, attached the manuscript file, and pressed SEND. The upload seemed to take an age. Amelia started calling my name from downstairs. I glanced at the door and suddenly my fingers were thick and clumsy with anxiety.

“Your file has been transferred,” said the female voice which for some reason is favoured by my internet service provider. “You have e-mail,” she announced a fraction later.

Immediately I yanked the cable out of the laptop and I had just removed the flashdrive when somewhere in the big house a klaxon started. At the same time there was a hum and a rattle above the window behind me and I spun round to see a heavy metal shutter dropping from the ceiling. It descended very quickly, blocking first the view of the sky, then the sea and the dunes, flattening the winter afternoon to dusk, crushing the last sliver of light to blackness.

I groped for the door, and when I flung it open the unfiltered sound of the siren was strong enough to vibrate my stomach. The same process was happening in the living room: one, two, three shutters, falling like steel curtains. I stumbled in the gloom, cracking my knee against a sharp edge. I dropped my phone. As I stooped to retrieve it the klaxon stalled on a rising note and died with a moan. I heard heavy footsteps coming up the steps, and then a sabre of light flashed into the big room, catching me in a furtive crouch, my arms flung up to shield my face: a parody of guilt.

Extracted from The Ghost by Robert Harris to be published by Hutchinson on October 4 at £18.99. It can be purchased for £17.10 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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