Corridors of Death (12 page)

He gave up on the pictures and turned to the bookcases. A long row of reference books. That was to be expected. So was what looked to be a fine collection of Greek and Latin authors. Shelves full of biographies – mainly political. A surprisingly large collection of works on philosophy and religion. He looked in vain for English literature. There didn’t seem to be a novel or a poem anywhere. Not rigorous enough intellectually, he supposed.

He looked idly through a shelf of records and found them as perplexingly unfamiliar as many of the pictures. The collection seemed to be composed (with the exception of a great deal of Bach) of modern composers to whose music Milton never listened if he could possibly avoid it. But he could hardly be surprised that Sir Nicholas preferred dissonance to harmony.

There was only the desk to be looked at now. The rest of the study was sparse. Angular sculptures were dotted about here and there. They bore a close resemblance to the one which had finally done for Sir Nicholas. Milton looked quickly through the drawers of the desk. He could find nothing personal – only various kinds of stationery. He took one final look around, shuddered again at the pictures and rejoined Lady Clark.

‘Did you find anything, Superintendent?’ she asked brightly.

‘I don’t think so, Lady Clark. I must say I prefer the pictures you’ve got here to those in Sir Nicholas’s room.’

‘Oh, we didn’t have the same taste at all in things like that. I suppose I’m not intelligent enought to understand the sort of thing Nicholas liked.’

Milton was sitting silently.

‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Superintendent?’

‘Several things, Lady Clark. To begin with, did you notice anything different about Sir Nicholas’s mood during the weekend?’

‘Just that he was in very good spirits. He was really pleased with the speech he wrote. He said he expected it to be very successful. It seemed rather dull to me, but I don’t know anything about politics.’

‘Let me tell you about that speech,’ said Milton, and proceeded to give her the bare essentials of the story of the substitution.

She looked frightened. ‘Surely it was a mistake. He wouldn’t have done something as cruel as that to such a nice man as Harvey.’

‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, ma’am.’

‘You’re not saying that Harvey…?’

‘No, I’m not. He was not the only one present at that meeting who had been badly treated by your husband.’

He wondered if she would try being insulted – refusing to hear anything against the martyred husband. But she didn’t. ‘Archibald,’ she said. ‘I thought Nicholas was very hard to say to him what he did.’

‘Mr Stafford?’

‘Yes. You will know that he was going to lose his job. I heard Nicholas say to him on the phone that he should be man enough to know when he was past it.’

‘Was such cruelty unusual in Sir Nicholas?’

‘I don’t know if we’re using the right word, Superintendent. He had very high standards of behaviour, and he was hard on people who didn’t live up to them. That meant he sometimes seemed cruel. But I don’t think he realized what he was doing. It was disappointment really, I think.’

Milton thought of the Assistant Commissioner’s warning and decided to disregard it.

‘And did you live up to his high standards, Lady Clark?’

‘I haven’t for a long time,’ she said, and to Milton’s horror, like Bradley, she burst into tears.

19

As the sobs subsided, Milton prayed she wouldn’t be clearheaded enough to realize that as things stood he had no right to ask her to tell him about her marriage. She couldn’t be suspected of having murdered Sir Nicholas and she couldn’t know that he was looking for a motive for Jenkins.

He needn’t have worried. She held forth the way that Harvey Nixon had. Sir Nicholas had obviously succeeded in making his victims so tense that the first taste of the relief of being able to talk about what they had endured made them eager to get it all out.

‘We met nearly thirty years ago in Oxford. My brother was an undergraduate acquaintance of Nicholas’s, and he introduced us at a party he gave one weekend in January.’

‘Were you an undergraduate too?’

‘Oh, no. I was never much good academically. I had just started work in London as a secretary. I was only seventeen. Nicholas was almost twenty-three. He’d done his time in the army and was now in his final year. He was very clever, very glamorous and very attractive.’

Milton’s face must have betrayed his surprise at such a description of the desiccated face he had seen in death. She got up and pulled a photograph album from a cupboard.

‘Would you like to see a picture of us on our wedding-day?’

Milton looked with astonishment at the two happy faces which smiled confidently at him. The pretty blond girl sparkled at the dark and powerful young man at her side. He wasn’t handsome, but the humorous set of his mouth and the laughter in his eyes gave him an almost raffish attraction. He handed the album back without speaking.

‘You wouldn’t have recognized him, would you, Superintendent? For many years I’ve had to rely on that photograph to remind me of what we used to be like.’

‘You looked as if you were both very much in love.’

‘Oh, we were. We couldn’t see enough of each other. I used to go up to Oxford nearly every weekend and we had one of those magical summer terms of sun and parties and punting. Nicholas was so clever he didn’t need to work terribly hard. He got the best First of his year in Greats.’

‘When did you marry?’

‘A month after he graduated. It was a silly thing to do. We’d never done anything together except enjoy ourselves. We’d never had to face any problems. Yet Nicholas didn’t want to wait and I couldn’t think of anything except what joy it would be to be together all the time.’

‘Did he join the civil service immediately?’

‘No. Not until the following year. We had decided to give him a couple of years to try to find a seat.’

‘He wanted to go into politics?’ asked Milton, incredulously.

‘Oh, very much. Nicholas was very radical in those days. He wanted to reform the world. He was an active socialist all the time he was at Oxford. You see, his father’s business had failed during the thirties and Nicholas had known what poverty was like. He used to shock my father with some of his ideas. Daddy was pretty well off and he didn’t like Nicholas’s talk about the corruption of the capitalist system. They got on quite well, though. Nicholas was so charming he could get round anyone.’

Milton wondered wildly if they were talking about the same Nicholas.

‘You’re looking as though you don’t believe me, Superintendent, and I don’t blame you. I often haven’t myself been able to believe the change in him.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Money, really. We hadn’t got much to live on. I had gone on working and Nicholas was teaching at a crammer. He was spending a lot of his spare time in Labour party work and the prospects of getting a seat seemed reasonably good. Then I got pregnant and had to give up work.’

‘You couldn’t live on his salary?’

‘We probably could have managed. I wouldn’t have minded. But Daddy got at Nicholas about getting a proper job and keeping his wife and child decently. Nicholas was very proud and couldn’t bear to think I might regret the comforts of the old days. I couldn’t convince him that all I cared about was being with him. He made up his mind – and when he did that you couldn’t shift him. He applied for a number of jobs and the best one that came up was in the civil service. He had only been there a couple of weeks when I lost the baby.’

‘Couldn’t he have left the job then?’

‘He wouldn’t. He’d had to give up active politics when he joined and he wouldn’t go back. He had a very obstinate streak. He insisted that he had made his decision and would stick to it. He threw himself instead into making a success of his job. He’d been very upset about the baby, and work seemed to be the only thing that took his mind off it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I didn’t go back to work. It wasn’t really respectable for a middle-class married woman to work in those days and Daddy backed up Nicholas when he said there was no need for me to get a job now that he was earning a decent salary. Anyway, we assumed it wouldn’t be long before I became pregnant again.

‘During the next five years I miscarried twice and I was ill a lot. It was hard on Nicholas. He worked very long hours and I was a worry rather than a pleasure to him. That was when the disappointment began to show.’

‘But it wasn’t your fault.’

‘No. But Nicholas had already made one big sacrifice. His life was being disrupted by my endless illnesses. He desperately wanted children, and I couldn’t give them to him. It would have taken a very understanding man to feel no resentment of me.’

‘Didn’t it make a difference when Nigel was born?’

‘Oh, yes. For a while. But I had such a hard time with the birth that I was warned I shouldn’t have any more, and that was another disappointment. And although Nicholas was mad about Nigel, he wasn’t really much good with him. He was always trying to teach him and make him read when he just wanted to play. Nicholas knew that Nigel was much more fond of me.’

‘Wasn’t his success at work any compensation?’

‘It helped, but work brought its own problems. Of course, Nicholas was so clever that he got on very quickly, but he always seemed to crave more recognition than he got. Although he didn’t talk about it much, I noticed him being very bitter when others his own age were promoted earlier.’

‘He got to the top eventually, though.’

‘It depends what you call the top. Nicholas really wanted to head a bigger department. The Department of Conservation isn’t very important. It was hived off from the Department of Energy.’

‘What about your lives together?’

‘He grew more and more distant. When I inherited money and we could afford to buy this house and furnish it as we liked, I thought it would make a difference. It is very central and I had visions of being able to entertain a lot. Nicholas didn’t take much interest in the house, though. He left it to me to do what I wanted to it. He spent more and more time in his study, reading and working. He didn’t want to entertain – just to be left alone. We just had the odd few dinners when he thought it would be useful to talk informally to colleagues or politicians.’

‘What about friends?’

‘We didn’t have many. Nicholas kept up with a few of his independently. He seemed to prefer to have lunch with them rather than bring them home. I thought he was rather ashamed of me. He despised the kind of thing I read and was always telling me that my political views were ill-informed and naïve. I had never been as left-wing as he was in the early days, but I stayed loyal to the Labour party. He used to say that they were all fools and that he had been a fool as well ever to have thought that politics was an occupation for anyone with a brain.’

‘What about Nigel?’

‘I’m afraid he let Nicholas down by taking after me academically. God knows what his education cost. The school fees were enormous and he used to have private tuition in the holidays, but it didn’t make any difference. By most people’s standards he was bright enough. He went to university and got a second in Physics. But he was always a bit of a disappointment to Nicholas. He was hopeless at Classics and he was turned down by Oxford.’

‘They got on badly, then?’

‘Oh, no. They just didn’t have much to do with one another.’

‘Does Nigel live with you?’

‘He did for a while after university, but he’s just moved out. He’s come back to stay with me for a while now.’

‘I need to see him. Is he at work?’

‘No. He’s just gone over to collect a few things from his flat. He should be back any minute.’

Milton braced himself.

‘I’m sorry to have to ask you such a personal question, Lady Clark, but is it true that you are involved with Martin Jenkins?’

20

‘Is this what you’ve been leading up to all this time?’ she asked bitterly.

‘Look, Lady Clark. I know this is unpleasant for you, but it’s just as unpleasant for me. I have to find out who murdered your husband and Mrs Bradley, and if I have to trample over people’s private lives to do so, I will. You must understand that I can’t ignore a link between you and someone who was at the Monday morning meeting with Sir Nicholas.’

She was hesitating.

‘Just tell me the truth, Lady Clark. It’ll save us all a lot of harassment in the long run.’

‘You’re right, Superintendent. You’ve been kind to me, and I appreciate it. I realize you wouldn’t ask about Martin and me if you didn’t have to. I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We met about ten months ago at a local Labour party meeting where Martin was giving a speech. I hadn’t expected to like him. All I knew about him was that he was a trade-union leader with a line in fiery Welsh rhetoric. I went along to hear him with a friend of mine from the party, because I had nothing better to do that evening. I enjoyed his speech, though it was a bit radical for me. Martin goes on a lot about Establishment conspiracies, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘But afterwards, when a group of us had adjourned for a drink, he was quite different. He made me laugh a lot, and that’s something I haven’t done much of for a long time. And he seemed to find me amusing too. We went on talking after the others had left and he treated me as if I were intelligent and well-informed. We even found we shared a secret liking for murder stories.’

She looked ruefully at Milton.

‘When he suggested lunch, I couldn’t bear to refuse. He had made me feel young and attractive again. I didn’t tell Nicholas. I knew what he thought of Martin and I wouldn’t have been able to bear the snide remarks. We met several times for lunch, and then for dinner and for the last six months we’ve been having an affair. We’ve kept it as quiet as possible, but it looks as if we haven’t been very successful.’

‘Did Sir Nicholas know?’

‘I don’t see how he could. He never took any interest in how I spent my time. I was going to tell him soon. I had promised Martin that when Nigel left home 1 would leave Nicholas and go and live with him.’