A Scandal in Belgravia (22 page)

“Ah yes, you're the gentlemen for Mr. Pardick,” said the first attendent we came upon, a pretty, smart young woman with a lot to do and not much time to do it in.

“He's well enough to see us?”

“Oh yes—perfectly well.”

“And, er, mentally sharp?”

“Oh yes! If it's stories of his life as a reporter that you're after, you won't be disappointed. He's full of stories, is our Mr. Pardick!”

He sounded like a bore with a captive audience. The woman led us briskly through to a large, sunny lounge, with several elderly people sitting around—one or two talking, but most either reading a newspaper or watching television. A couple were just sitting and staring into space. The atmosphere was
hardly stimulating, but I've never been in an old people's home where it was. As we came in most of them followed us with their eyes. What was in them? Jealousy? A cynical scepticism about Terry Pardick? I was very cautious of those eyes as we were led to a little group of three chairs set slightly apart from the others, with an old man seated in the centre one.

“Here are your visitors, Mr. Pardick.”

He was a small man, in open-necked shirt and baggy trousers that flapped around him: not only small, but getting smaller. The flesh at his neck and on his hands was loose and scrawny, and his fingers were so deeply stained with nicotine that they looked like polished wood. His face was small but dominated by a large pointed nose and eyes that were sharp and sardonic to the point of cruelty. It was impossible to avoid thinking of a rodent.

When we had introduced ourselves and sat down he said:

“What's in it for me, then?”

The assumptions of the chequebook journalist died hard, it seemed. I took out a packet of cigarettes I had brought along specially and handed it over.

“Money's what I'm talking about,” said Pardick, though he pocketed the cigarette packet. “You want the results of my researches on Timothy Wycliffe and I'm willing to sell.”

“I'm not a newspaper reporter, you know,” I said rather pompously. “I'm not after a story.”

“I don't give a fuck if you're the Queen of Sheba,” said Pardick. “You'll still have to pay. I'm not asking the earth. Twenty pounds will do the trick.”

I said nothing, but I took out my wallet and peeled two tenners from the wad, watched by the intent eyes of every old person in the room. It may have been my imagination but they seemed now full both of jealousy and contempt. Terry Pardick took the money and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

“That's what I call businesslike. Mind you, I can't see why you're interested in Timothy Wycliffe. There's a lot bigger fish
than him in my files, and pretty much for the same reason. Plenty of politicians too. When I first heard your name I thought you might be interested in some of your old colleagues—a bit of tit-for-tat for the sacking.”

“I'm not.”

“There was a lot of talk about—”

He mentioned one of my former colleagues who had fallen like Lucifer a year or two before I did.

“It was just talk, and anyway he's no longer in the Cabinet.”

He shook his head in a horribly knowing way.

“They talk a lot about preserving the family, your lot, but they can't half put it around when they feel like it, can't they? There's that minister for—”

“The person I'm interested in is Timothy Wycliffe.”

“Oh, right . . . yes. Well, it's a long time ago.”

I was beginning to lose patience with him. I've always expected value for money.

“You were told that's who we wanted to talk about. You've had time to remember.”

“Oh, I've been putting my thinking cap on, I can tell you. . . . 'Course, I had him marked down long before he was done in.”

“You did?”

“Son of cabinet minister. Foreign Office man. We were interested in the Foreign Office in those days. It wouldn't have made a first-rate story, but it would have been a nice little earner, if anyone had run it.”

“Where did you do your researches? Who were your sources?”

“Well, for example, I'd hang around the clubs he went to.” He leaned forward till he was closer than I liked, twisting his horrible old face into a lubricious grin. “Didn't go in, o' course: didn't want to feel strange hands around my hind quarters.” (Looking at him now, and imagining what he looked like then, it struck me as eminently unlikely that he would have done.)
“But I'd watch and see who did, and talk to some of the boys who came out with them afterwards. You had to be on the ball, so to speak, because these clubs sprang up overnight and vanished in the same way. Sometimes the police tolerated them for a bit and infiltrated, but sometimes they came down on them like a ton of bricks as soon as they twigged what they were. Over the years I built up a dossier, not just about young Wycliffe, but about all sorts of people. Did you realize the Duke of—”

“Timothy Wycliffe!”

“Oh, all right. . . . Well, as I say, I got quite a lot of info on young Tim—where he went, where he picked 'em up, who his real pals were—his regular pals, as opposed to his one-night stands. I was just waiting for him to do something really outrageous, then all the editors I worked for would come running for the dirt on him. Trouble was, the outrageous thing he did was get murdered.”

“What did you do then?”

“Well, of course I wanted to be the one who delivered the dirt on him and the nancy boy they said had murdered him. Naturally. Trouble was that in the days—weeks—after the murder, all the newspapers were full of was bloody Suez. By the time they got back to normal the story was as dead as a duck. The only thing that might have revived it was his murderer getting caught.”

“Did you know anything about his murderer?”

“I had his name in my files. Andrew Forbes. Went around with Wycliffe, visited at his flat, all that sort of thing. I got that from his cleaner—Wycliffe's cleaner. As far as I was concerned he was a working-class lad who'd joined the hand-flapping brigade. Then, weeks, maybe months, after the murder I heard a whisper that he was working in a bar on Majorca. It was a pretty firm story. But in those days you didn't just hop on a plane and go. It cost money. I didn't need a photographer—I could do my own. In fact, I tell this mob”—he gave a
derogatory handwave in the direction of the ten or twelve pairs of eyes that were still intent on us—“that I was the original of these Pappa-whatsits.”

“Paparazzi.”

“That's the ticket. You ever been followed by them, Mr. Proctor? Not interesting enough, I don't suppose. But anyway, it still cost money, and I needed a firm commitment from an editor that he'd run the story and play it big. But it was no go. All I got was shifts and evasions.”

“Why do you think that was?”

“It was just after Suez, wasn't it? Tory party fortunes at rock bottom. They might have run the story when the party was riding high, but they weren't going to kick their party when it was down.”

“But there were Labour papers.”

“One or two. But they always got into a bit of a quandary when a story like that came up. The high moral tone didn't come natural to them. There were too many in the party who wanted to let the queers do what they liked provided they did it behind closed doors for them to be entirely easy when they were handed a story like I hoped to get hold of. . . . Makes you sick, doesn't it? . . . Mind you, it's not surprising. There was that Tim Driberg—”

“Yes, we all know about Tom Driberg.”

“The things I had on him! Anyway, the long and the short of it was they wouldn't take it either. If it had been a cabinet minister I expect they'd have swallowed their scruples and sent me after it, but a cabinet minister's
son
 . . . He just wasn't big enough, not worth the risk of alienating a lot of people in the party. So I never got to sunny Spain. . . . Mind you, I did wonder later on whether I hadn't been barking up the wrong tree.”

“Why was that?”

“Well, it was a couple o' years later. They sent me up to Nottingham to dig up some dirt on this Alan Sillitoe—he was
in the news, one of those Angry Young Men, and they wanted lots of dirt about what a hell-raiser he'd been, all the women he'd put in the club, just like the bloke in his book. . . . Dead loss it was: seems to have spent most of his time in the Public Library. . . . Anyway, it was nothing but dead ends, so I had plenty of time to spare, and I went along to this street where Andy Forbes used to live, and I talked to all the neighbours. Now, there were some that were shocked and there were some that were sorry, but there were none that I could find that had a hard word to say about Forbes when he was growing up in Nottingham, not one. . . . Got a fag?”

“I don't smoke.”

Reluctantly he took out the packet I'd given him, opened it up, and lit one. The faces watching seemed to say “Basking in his moment of glory, isn't he?”

“Well, I thought that was odd. And eventually I knocked at his parents' home, and when his old man came to the door I put my foot in it and made sure I got all my questions answered. He was a nice enough bloke, upset of course, but I kept on at him, and what he said was that his boy had beaten up—well, what he said was ‘had a fight with'—Timothy Wycliffe, because he'd been forced into bed with him. He'd beaten him up pretty badly, the father admitted that, but he'd definitely been alive when he left his flat. And thinking about it, that made sense to me.”

“Why?”

“Well, quite a lot of my contacts at the time of the murder had insisted Forbes wasn't one of the limp-wristed brigade, and of course I'd said to myself, ‘Like hell he wasn't.' And they'd said Tim and he weren't bed partners, and I'd said to myself ‘Tell that to the marines.' Wasn't being cynical, just realistic. But all the neighbours and now the dad seemed to back this up. And I'd always worried about the phone being off the hook. I just couldn't see your nancy friend trying to telephone in the middle of the fight. It made more sense if he'd been left badly
beaten up, had
then
tried to ring for help, and had then blacked out.”

“Yes, I agree. But did you get any line on who might then have come along and finished him off?”

“No.” He shook his head regretfully. “Could have been anyone, couldn't it? Any of his pals, for instance. Unbalanced, most of that lot. Get mad with jealousy. They're all either on a mad high or a mad low. Mind you, I didn't try very hard to find out. That was a story there was no hope of resurrecting.”

“But you think someone just happened to come along, and took advantage of Tim's situation?”

“No, I don't. I think that would be too much of a coincidence. I think it was whoever he rang.”

“But—”

“Because I'll tell you this: one thing a homosexual who'd been attacked by his boyfriend would not do in 1956 is ring the police. And I don't believe he'd ring ambulance either. I think he rang someone for help, and that was the help he got.”

O
n the road back to London, Sutcliffe and I discussed, and laughed about, the man we had just talked to.

“One of the things I remember about my really important cases,” said Sutcliffe, a reminiscent expression on his face, “is that the men covering the case for Fleet Street, as it was then, always turned out to be so much more dislikeable than the criminal when we caught him. Terry is at the grubbier end of the spectrum for the sort of men I had to do with then.”

“He is the pits,” I agreed. “And don't his attitudes really take you back?”

“Maybe. I can see why you'd think that. But you've been cut off, all those years you've been minister. In fact you could hear the same in any East End pub today. Pardick has that dirty-minded relish that you always get at the lower end of the tabloid press. And that press knows its audience.”

“I suppose so. Depressing thought. And yet, and yet . . .” I looked at him meaningfully to see if he agreed with me.

“What he said made sense,” said Sutcliffe, nodding. “He was on to the innocence of Andy Forbes, which I take it is the assumption that we're working on. So far as we know no one else at the time had got there. And I'm damned sure he was right about not phoning the police. I don't like to say it, and I should have thought of it earlier, but we were the last people
any homosexual in the fifties would put himself in the hands of voluntarily.”

“Absolutely. The point about not ringing for an ambulance is more dubious, though, isn't it?”

“Not necessarily. The medical authorities could have felt duty-bound to inform the police about what had been a serious attack. He was also the sort of person who would have used private medicine anyway, isn't he?”

“I've no idea. Not necessarily. But in any case it may have been Tim's instinct in an emergency to get help from family or friends. Tim was always very hot on friendship.”

We drove on in silence for some time, and then I said:

“I need to find a way to talk to Tim's brother.”

We tossed this to and fro, wondering how best to manage it, but Sutcliffe's experience was mainly of turning up on a doorstep, flashing his ID, and then asking questions. Clearly something else was needed here, but I was hampered by knowing nothing about Tim's brother beyond the fact—gleaned from Marjorie's way of speaking about him—that he is still alive. When I got back home I tried to ring Marjorie, intending a bit of tactically vague questioning, but there was no reply. I sat thinking for a bit, and then got to work with
Burke's Peerage
and
Who's Who.
I came up with the information that the address for both Lord John Wycliffe and James Wycliffe was Maddern Hall, near Formby, in the county of Avon. Now that I did find interesting.