A Scandal in Belgravia (10 page)

Y
esterday Sutcliffe rang me to tell me that he'd got hold of the basic facts of the case. He said he was free in the evening—in fact he said he was free every evening—so we arranged that he should come round here about half past six. When Nina showed him in (Nina is one half of the Filipino couple who live in the basement and cook and clean for us) I felt a lift when I saw his amiable and doggy form again—a lift, and also a spurt of fellow feeling: he had about him that indefinable something that said “retired.” The feeling I had was the fellowship of the discarded: he and I were both rummaging on the rubbish-tip of life. He, pretty clearly, was enjoying it less than I.

“What will you have?” I asked. “There needn't be any nonsense about not drinking on duty now.”

“That's very kind of you, sir. I'm really a draught bitter man—”

“I can manage an Australian beer.”

“Don't make me laugh. I'll have a Scotch and water, sir, if you don't mind.”

“Couldn't we get on Christian name terms? I'm Peter, as you know.”

Sutcliffe shuffled his feet and looked a mite awkward.

“It doesn't slip easily off my tongue—I'm too wary of politicians—but
I'll try. I'm John, though mostly in the force I was known as Sutty.”

“That sounds too much like burning Indian widows. I'll stick with John.” I came over with the drinks. “How does retirement suit you?”

“It'll be all right when I can stop my mind from being active,” Sutcliffe said dourly. “And when I can get people out of the feeling that suddenly I need cossetting or ‘brightening up.' And when I can stop my daughters bringing me round things in casseroles that ‘only need heating up.' ”

“Bad as that?”

He gave a slow grin.

“Not really. I'm leaving out the things that I'm glad to have got away from. Still, I've enjoyed looking into this.”

He tapped his notebook, and I gestured towards the armchairs so we could go through it in comfort.

“I didn't push my luck by asking for photocopies,” Sutcliffe said as a preliminary, “so I made a lot of notes, and the rest is in my head. Where shall we start?”

“Where the police came into it, I suppose,” I said. “With the finding of the body.”

“Right. That's perfectly straightforward. The cleaner came in on the Friday morning at ten past nine. She had her own key, of course, saw the body immediately and phoned the police. The phone was off the hook, but that was about the only thing she disturbed. She seems to have been a sensible body.”

“What state was the flat in?”

“As you'd expect if there had been a roughhouse: chairs overturned, furniture displaced, a vase and a chair broken. It didn't look, though, as if there'd been any deliberate orgy of destruction.”

“Ah—I wondered. The boy seems to have been quite an ordinary lad, and a flat like that—”

“Right. What you might call a social resentment. It was something that occurred to me, and to the police at the time,
but in fact most of the disorder and destruction seems to have been incidental to the fight.”

“What about the violence to the body?”

“That was very considerable—bruises all over: to the face, legs, groin, and so on. There was a bad cut on the side of the face that had bled a lot before death. There were no abrasions or other damage to the knuckles, suggesting that he didn't actually counter the violence, merely tried to restrain his attacker. Does that surprise you?”

“No, it doesn't. He'd been attacked by a casual pickup once before, and he was very upset—hurt, if that's not a silly word. It would be very much in character for him to try to restrain rather than hit back.”

“That was the picture the police had of the fight. At some point he got to the phone, presumably to call the police, but he was stopped—no 999 call was received from him. Eventually, the police hypothesize, he was simply knocked out.”

“And then murdered?”

“Yes—a brutal blow on the back of the head, as he lay there. Some time later, the doctor thought—though like all such gentry he wasn't prepared to commit himself.”

“I see . . . As if the boy thought about what he'd done, the seriousness of the assault, then decided he'd be safer if he actually finished him off?”

“Yes, something of that sort, the police thought. His fingerprints were all over the flat, by the way, but he didn't have any police record, so he probably banked on that saving him. . . . I don't imagine he was thinking very straight.”

“Probably not.” I sat thinking about the scene for some time, the last hour of Timothy Wycliffe. It was an ugly picture. “How did the police get on to him, this Andrew Forbes?”

“Ah, that's quite interesting. It wasn't for some time, and when they did they found that he'd already left the country.”

“No interview with him then? That's a pity.”

“It is. The fact is, they relied for their information about Mr. Wycliffe's habits and friends on his neighbours.”

“The Belgrave Square mafia?”

“That's right—that's the impression the interview reports gave me: a really tight-knit community. There was a desire to hush up warring with a desire to gossip. If the police had had better links with homosexual circles they might have got to Forbes quicker, but for obvious reasons they didn't. And in fact it doesn't seem that Forbes was Wycliffe's principal boyfriend at the time of the murder.”

“No?”

“Not according to the Belgrave Square residents. There was a great wad of interview reports in the records, and Forbes's name was never mentioned once.”

“Whose names were?”

“Well, there were two men who had been at the flat—staying there—for longish periods over the summer and autumn of that year. One was called Gerald Fraser-Hymes, and the other Lawrence Cornwallis. I have addresses for them at the time of the investigation, though I don't imagine there'll be a great deal of joy there. They were both in flat or bed-sitter territory, with a transient population.”

“The name of Lawrence Cornwallis seems to ring a vague bell,” I said, trying to make concrete vague memories of reports read rather than people met. Nothing definite came. “I suppose these two were, to put it frankly, the sort of young men whom people in Belgravia might
know.
Their mob.”

“That's my impression. Or, more distantly, that someone had known someone who'd known the mother—that sort of thing, and then the names and details had gone the rounds of the Square.”

I remembered the unblushing snobbery of Lady Charlotte Wray and smiled.

“That figures. Name, school, family tree—‘I knew his poor
grandmother'—that sort of thing. That's how the Square was at that time.”

“No doubt there was a lot of that. Anyway, having those two names kept the police busy for a day or two, before they realized they had to look further.”

“The two had alibis?”

“No—at least, not very convincing ones. The fact was, it wasn't either of their fingerprints all over the flat.”

“But surely they could have worn gloves, and the Forbes prints remain from an earlier visit?”

He gave me the sort of pitying look that I probably give to people who show their ignorance of procedure in the House.

“You're talking like an amateur, Mr. Proctor . . . Peter. There are fingerprints and fingerprints. You don't hold a glass in the same way as you hold a crowbar. The police were pretty sure that the Forbes prints—as they turned out to be—were made in the course of the fight. Some were even bloody.”

“I see. Yes, I can imagine you'd make a different sort of print, in different places than usual, in the course of a fight. At what stage, by the way, did the police realize that Tim was a practising homosexual?”

“The moment they began talking to people in the Square.”

“Of course. Silly question.”

“They may even have had their eye on him earlier—I got a hint or two of that from the records. Remember when this was. In the early fifties there'd been a number of what you might call ‘show trials': an actor, a peer, and so on.”

“I remember. To encourage the others. The son of a government minister might have been a suitable follow-up. That was something I was always trying to impress on Tim at the time. He was convinced the police used their own men in plain clothes as bait.”

“They did. I'm not defending or apologising, just stating: they did.”

“You weren't yourself involved?” I asked mischievously.

“Not attractive enough by half!” Sutcliffe grinned as he got a mental picture of his youthful self. “And by the way it was the sort of job you could refuse, and I would have. Quite a lot rather enjoyed it.”

“Which says something about them.”

“Right. Well that's enough breast-beating. Let's get back to Andrew Forbes. The police didn't get hold of the name from the Belgrave Square mob, though later several confirmed that they'd seen a chap like that visiting the flat from time to time. As you say, Forbes wasn't the sort whose mummy they knew back in the twenties. His name came from Fraser-Hymes, one of the two friends. No doubt both men were feeling pretty hard-pressed, and with reason, and Fraser-Hymes named names. In fact there was a whole list of people whom the police contacted and took prints and statements from.”

“Which led eventually to Andrew Forbes?”

“Or rather to his flat. By then the bird had flown: he'd taken the night ferry to Dieppe on the second of November, the night after the murder. His landlady let our chaps into his flat, and there they found prints everywhere which matched the ones from Craven Court Mews.”

“Had Forbes given up his flat?”

“No, he hadn't. He'd just said to his landlady that he'd be away for a few nights. He'd taken a case full of clothes, toilet things, and that's about all.”

“Did the police get to know much about him? All that I know is that he was an unemployed electrician.”

“Even that's misleading—technically true, but misleading. Makes him sound like a down-and-out or a male prostitute who couldn't give his real job. It wasn't like that at all. Forbes had had a good job with the BBC for two and a half years. Commercial television had started up the previous year, and he had a job lined up with them, at better pay. When the BBC heard this they sacked him. They were very snooty about ITV
in those days. So Forbes had money in the bank, a small but nice flat, good prospects.”

“Not quite the picture I had of him.”

“No. Background: respectable working class in Nottingham. I've got the address of his parents—here, I'll leave it with you, though I doubt it will be of much use. Curriculum vitae: good reports from his Secondary Modern school, though he certainly wasn't the academic type; apprenticeship at fifteen, job at the end of it, then moved to London and the job at the BBC in 1954.”

“Did the landlady know him at all?”

“Oh yes—she lived on the ground floor, and Forbes had the flat at the top. Chatted to him a lot, gave him cups of tea. Liked him very much, said he was quiet, kept the flat clean, never any trouble beyond once or twice returning home drunk.”

“Boyfriends?”

“No. In fact she was convinced he had a girlfriend. But you've got to remember, Peter, when we are talking about. As far as the landlady was concerned they would be
friends,
not boyfriends. ‘Coming out' at that date could have meant being put inside. The landlady said he had a few friends, chaps of his own kind from work, and some of them she recognised, but no one specially close, she said. He kept in touch with his family, rang them once a week, went home for holidays and the odd weekend. Liked pop music and football, supported Arsenal, went to the occasional dance. And that was about it: the typical young man of the fifties.”

“That's the picture of an unlikely murderer. Did that strike the police too?”

A slightly cynical smile wafted across Sutcliffe's lips.

“Are you
sure
you're not on to one of these ‘miscarriage of justice' kicks, sir?”

“Not at all—I'm just interested in the pressures that made this particular young man into a murderer.”

“As far as that goes you could say that to the police there is
no such thing as an unlikely murderer: depends on the person, depends on the pressures. I think the police at that time took it as some kind of lovers' tiff.”

“Some tiff.”

“Quarrel. Again, remember the times: there was a tendency among the investigating policemen to regard homosexuals as by definition excitable and unstable.”

I followed this up.

“Then again, a
lover's
tiff. I can't see that it was established that they were particularly close.”

Sutcliffe nodded.

“Certainly the impression I got was that the other two men were much closer to him: both of them had spent periods of ten days or more in the flat in the months before the murder. So far as I can tell from the notes, Andy Forbes seems to have been more in the nature of an occasional lay—ugly word, sorry.”

“What about his family?”

“Denied indignantly that he was a homosexual. What you'd expect, really. Probably that was the reason he came to London. They certainly weren't able to point to any regular girlfriend while he lived in Nottingham, or anyone he'd brought home since. Remember that the working-class reaction to homosexuality is a gut one: they are less liberal than the middle class even, and certainly less so than the upper classes.”

I thought hard for a while.

“Right, well I think I've got a much better picture of the murder. What about afterwards? Did the police get any further leads on Andrew Forbes?”