Corridors of Death (10 page)
Tuesday Evening
15
It was almost 9.00 when Milton joined Amiss in the corner of the curry house. He had had a great deal of trouble in fobbing off the reporters surrounding the departmental building, but harassed as he was, he saw with concern that his companion was still looking very shaken. He had been reading an evening paper – a late edition which screamed the headline ‘MANIAC IN WHITEHALL?’, and he had obviously begun to drown his sorrows.
‘Are you sure you’re up to this conversation, Robert?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off going home and getting some sleep?’
‘Look, Jim, I live alone in a small flat near the office. It’s awash with dirty socks and stale half-loaves of bread. If I go home to it now in my present state of mind I’ll drink myself into oblivion and be no use to you tomorrow.’
‘If you’re sure. Don’t you have any friends you can go to?’
‘I don’t have much time for friends any more. You don’t have much of a social life if you rarely leave the office before half eight and frequently have to be away at weekends. People get tired of your unreliability. They put it down to self-importance. Besides, most of my university friends think I have sold out and have dropped me for reasons of the highest principle. Most of my socializing is with other Private Secretaries, and we don’t even know if we like each other. We just enjoy each others’ company because we have a lot in common and can be irreverent and indiscreet without fearing the consequences.’
‘No girlfriends?’
‘After the state I got into when the last one decamped because she couldn’t stand the way my work dominated my life, I’ve decided to avoid involvements until I move to a less demanding job. I’ll be monkish for a few months yet.’
Milton sympathized. After all, how many friends did he have outside the force – or even in it? He had become inured over the years to the distaste people felt for socializing with the police. He wasn’t really surprised to hear that Amiss’s generation reacted much the same way to civil servants.
He ordered a large drink and a meal. He was relieved to see that alcohol didn’t seem to affect Amiss’s articulacy and he managed to persuade him to eat something. Rice was terrific for soaking up gin.
‘Well, first of all, thanks for getting that message to me. It’s immensely useful.’
‘Your wife is very pleasant.’
‘She is,’ said Milton, suppressing an ache to spend an evening with her alone. The quicker he got this case over and done with the better. ‘Tell me how you got hold of the information about Jenkins and Lady Clark.’
Amiss told him about his researches of the morning.
‘I’m very grateful. I didn’t expect you to go to so much trouble.’
‘I’m ashamed to say I enjoyed it, Jim. I’m getting a taste for idle gossip like most of them. Maybe it’s just a way of compensating for the extreme discretion we are supposed to show in our work. We have to keep so much of what we do secret that we tend to let ourselves go in speculation about what our colleagues get up to privately. It’s a relief to be able to turn that gossip to practical effect for once;’
‘Well, in that case, keep digging. Though I don’t suppose there’s much else you can find out. Now it’s my turn.’
Milton gave an account of his main interviews of the day. He felt a qualm about breaking Nixon’s confidence, but he was sure enough of Amiss by now to know that he was too compassionate to leak something as intensely personal as this into the Private Secretary network. Amiss’s reaction was as he expected.
‘The poor bugger. It’s been worse even than I imagined. I’m not surprised that so many politicians hate civil servants. It only takes one destructive one to ruin the reputation of the rest of us.’
‘It still amazes me that anyone could get away with what Sir Nicholas got away with.’
‘Well, of course, that was a special case. Sir Nicholas was unusually nasty as well as very clever and Nixon was extremely vulnerable. But other politicians have occasional bad experiences as well. You see, as you’ve realized by now, you don’t have to be clever to be a minister, but you can’t rise to be a top civil servant without being very clever indeed. You can be negative, unimaginative and a bad manager but you’ve got to be able to reduce immense masses of material to comprehensible, lucid prose; you’ve got to be able to become an instant expert on the most obscure problems overnight; you’ve got to be able to churn out complex briefing at short notice; and you’ve got to be able to spot in the most bland and innocuous statements long-range policy implications for your department.’
‘It all sounds a bit like making a life’s work of those comprehension passages you get in school exams.’
‘You’ve got it perfectly, Jim. A great part of our work is
précis
writing at a superior level. The ability to justify the same policy in one sentence, a three-hundred-word press statement, a two-thousand-word brief or a five-thousand-word speech is a prerequisite of success. It’s very easy to impress outsiders with the command the civil service has of the written and spoken word. Few politicians can compete on paper; some are fine speakers, but rhetoric is of no use in small committees. You don’t find many Presidents of the Oxford Union going into the civil service. We attract the kind of people who were at their best defending their essays to their tutors.’
‘How can politicians possibly master their departments, then?’
‘Most of them can’t. Perhaps a couple in every administration. And they are invariably people who can beat the civil servants at their own game by absorbing information at lightning speed and using it for their own ends. It also helps to be a bully. We don’t like being shouted at.’
‘More and more, I feel for Nixon,’ said Milton.
‘Yes, me too. I hope we don’t find we drove him to murder in the end.’
‘Well, he’s in a worse position now than yesterday, I’m afraid. Since I left him I’ve been looking at all the evidence we’ve got on the whereabouts of the obvious suspects. Our short list is down to Nixon, Wells and Parkinson, with Shaw and Stafford possibles. Either of those two would have had to get hold of a pass into the building from somewhere, though, and it seems hard to imagine how they could have found their way to your office and Gladys without being spotted. How could they even have recognized Gladys yesterday? – unless they were introduced to her by Sir Nicholas.’
‘No chance of that. Sir Nicholas didn’t go in for that sort of courtesy with Clerical Assistants.’
‘Anyway, given what you’ve told me about Shaw’s relationship with Sir Nicholas, there doesn’t seem to be a motive worth considering in his case.’
‘Unless it’s class warfare.’
Milton treated that remark with the contempt it deserved.
‘So the other two on your shortlist have alibis?’ asked Amiss.
‘Right. Unshakable ones from what I’ve heard.’
‘What about Lady Clark and her son? Did they have anything useful to say?’
‘Only that they left the office at about five past one. That’s confirmed by the visitors’ passes they handed in on their way out, which show that they left the building at ten past one.’
‘There’s no chance, I suppose, that they killed Gladys in order to protect Jenkins?’
‘Nigel Clark would have had to have an Oedipus complex of spectacular proportions to connive at the killing of Gladys to protect his father’s murderer.’
‘Well, you never know,’ said Amiss hopefully. ‘Maybe he inherited his father’s mean streak. And God knows what kind of a parent Sir Nicholas was. I must see what I can find out about that.’
‘I’d be interested in anything you pick up about him. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow morning when I visit his mother. It’ll be a change, anyway, to see a female suspect. There are too many men in this case. Where are all the senior female civil servants? I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
‘We’ve only a tiny number in this department. Senior women tend to be pushed towards departments dealing with education or the social services. The same thing happens with female politicians. It’s an expression of the old conviction that they can’t cope with anything vaguely technical like energy, industry or whatever. It’s amazing really when you consider that a history graduate like me – who can’t change a bicycle tyre – can be put without a thought into a job dealing with plastics recycling. It’s even more remarkable when you know that, apart from appearance, senior female officials are indistinguishable from their male counterparts. We’ve got a lot of old women in the service, but the majority of them are men. We’ve also got a smaller number of thrusting dynamic people with balls, but there are women among their number too. I suppose one reason for discriminating against them is that there’s a general view that industrialists or trades unionists will have a seizure if they’re confronted by a woman in a position of responsibility. Miss Beckett’s our token woman. Maybe she’ll blaze a trail by proving that she’s a good chap.’
‘You seem very bitter about the civil service, Robert. Why do you stay in it?’
‘I’m literate and articulate, and I can do well there if I can also learn to be a bureaucrat. That’s the difficult bit. When I move to a more mundane job I’ll have all the crap of inter-departmental jealousies and niggling memoranda flying round like confetti. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick it then. The trouble is, there isn’t any other job I can think of that doesn’t have even more unattractive aspects and fewer intelligent people to play silly games with.’
Milton didn’t have any helpful suggestions to offer. Amiss seemed to be in a bleak mood. Perhaps he shouldn’t be taken too seriously tonight.
Amiss fell silent and ordered another drink. He caught Milton’s concerned look and gave a forced smile.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to crack up. It’s just that my generation isn’t used to death. Sanders was in the war and probably saw far worse sights than poor old Gladys. We’ve been protected from all of that. How did you come to terms with it, Jim? You can’t have seen many before you joined the police.’
Milton explained what the sight of his first corpse had done to him. He had been sick for hours after having been called out to a particularly gruesome car crash. ‘But you get used to it in no time. You find yourself making sick jokes to protect yourself from the horror of what you are seeing.’
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, that last night you were the one who was being shocked? You seemed to be horrified by all the things I take for granted – the fact that civil servants can be venal and politicians stupid.’
‘That makes me seem more naïve than I think I am. It was just that I’d never thought about it before. I’ve never been politically partisan. I don’t believe that either side has the monopoly of right. Very committed people worry me, whether they’re represented by the occasional National Front copper or a paranoid Trotskyite demonstrator. I prefer to get on with my job. I suppose I’ve been shocked by the discovery that politicians have so little power and that we expect them to be super-human, while insisting they be representative of their electorate.’
‘At least we can be grateful to the murderer for giving us both the opportunity to broaden our minds,’ said Amiss, calling for the bill. ‘Same place, same sort of time tomorrow?’
‘I look forward to it,’ said Milton, finding to his surprise that that was the truth.
Wednesday Morning
16
‘Come on, darling. Give me a professional view. Is it conceivable that Nigel Clark might have agreed to protect his mother’s lover by involving himself in murder?’
‘It’s not the kind of problem I come up against much in a management consultancy,’ said Ann Milton, wrinkling her forehead. ‘It’s a long time since I studied the psychology of the family. My guess would be that it’s almost impossible. Sons who love their mothers that much are unlikely to encourage them to have lovers. Now, if it were the other way round it would be different. There’s no love more ruthless than that of a mother.’
‘I thought you’d say that,’ said her husband, ‘but the security on Monday in Embankment Tower was so ferocious that Nigel couldn’t have got in without having been vouched for by someone working there. That would have been on record, and it isn’t.’
‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Ann, draining the last of her coffee and jumping to her feet. ‘I hope Deep Throat doesn’t want to get in touch with me this morning. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour and it’s likely to go on all morning.’
‘I shouldn’t think there’s any danger of that. I can’t really expect him to deliver any more nuggets. He’s already saved me days of work.’
‘Any chance of finding your murderer this week? We could take a few days off and go to Paris for a long weekend.’
‘The last time we planned that you had to cancel because someone at work got sick.’
‘True. And the time before you had to cancel because of a panic about IRA bombs.’
They both sighed. ‘Damn it,’ said Milton. ‘We’ll never get there if we don’t keep trying. It’ll give me an added incentive. Not that I really need one. Book tickets provisionally for Saturday morning and I’ll let you know on Thursday evening if we can go ahead.’
Ann went off with a spring in her step which Milton gloomily recorded as another triumph of hope over experience. The chances of disentangling this one quickly had to be slim indeed. He wondered bitterly how a floor so stuffed with people could yield no one who had been in the corridor at the moment when the murderer slipped in or out of Gladys’s office.
Even St James’s Park couldn’t help that morning, though Milton spent a couple of minutes staring conscientiously at the splashings of the ducks in an effort to lighten his mood. His morning conference with his superiors didn’t help much. Although the Assistant Commissioner was clearly impressed by the way in which Milton had managed to get so much out of the suspects he had interviewed, he was in one of those panics to which he was subject when a case was grabbing the headlines. The popular papers were enjoying themselves hugely, and were all carrying interviews with Gladys’s husband. The A.C. didn’t like the tone of them. ‘Seems like a surly brute.’