Corridors of Death (13 page)

‘Wouldn’t that have caused a minor scandal?’

‘I just didn’t care any more, Superintendent. I’ve wasted an awful lot of my life on Nicholas, who didn’t want me. Martin wants me desperately, and I want him.’

‘I hope you’ll be very happy.’

‘Thank you, Superintendent. I think we will, although the decencies require me to play the bereaved widow for a few months. Nicholas’s death has postponed our being together, you see. So you can’t possibly think that Martin had any motive to kill him. Quite the reverse.’

They heard the front door opening and a young man came into the room. Lady Clark introduced her son. He was very like his mother – the same blond hair and narrow features. He didn’t have her elegance, but by the standards of his generation he was spruce – a well-pressed check shirt and a sharp crease in his white cotton trousers.

‘Did you want to see me, Superintendent?’

‘Only for a moment, sir. I wanted to check your movements yesterday lunchtime.’

They both confirmed their statements of the previous day. Lady Clark anticipated Milton’s request to be left alone with Nigel for a moment and found a reason to go to the kitchen.

‘Have you any idea, sir, who might have had reason to want to kill your father?’

‘No, Superintendent. Unless someone wanted his job. I can’t imagine the usual motives applying in my father’s case. He didn’t indulge in torrid love affairs and he won’t leave much money.’

‘You’d be surprised what a wide range of motives lead people to kill, sir. What seems trivial to most of us can seem overwhelmingly important to some. You can’t think of anything, however slight, that might have led to his death?’

‘Honestly, no, Superintendent. I haven’t had much to do with my father over the past few years. I’ve been away at university most of the time.’

‘I understand you had just moved into your own flat. There wasn’t a breach between you, was there?’

‘Oh, no, Superintendent. I always wanted to live away from home and be independent as soon as I could afford to.’

‘How were your relations with your father, sir?’

‘Not very close, Superintendent. We weren’t much alike. Didn’t have a lot to talk about.’

‘No rows?’

‘Well, of course there were some disagreements, since our approach to life was so different. He hadn’t got much time for my generation. Thought us frivolous and idle. But I went my way and he went his. Neither of us was the rowing type.’

‘Very well, sir. Thank you. I don’t think there’s anything else I want to ask you.’

‘I’ll just call my mother.’

Lady Clark came in carrying another silver tray, on which rested this time three glasses and a decanter.

‘Do have a glass of sherry with us before you leave, Superintendent?’

Milton accepted with some secret amusement. Amiss had confided in him the previous night, when ordering drinks, that he was looked on askance by some colleagues because he couldn’t stand sherry (the traditional tipple at in-house get-togethers) and had provided gin instead for a Christmas office drink. Apparently the effect on Gladys had been dramatic. She had shown an unexpected talent for singing old Rosemary Clooney numbers. Milton didn’t care for sherry much either, but he knew a symbolic drink when he saw one. Lady Clark was showing her appreciation of the police for showing a human face.

When Nigel’s back was turned, Milton most improperly raised his glass to Lady Clark and mouthed ‘Good Luck.’ The grin he got in return made him wonder at Sir Nicholas’s blind stupidity.

21

Amiss had racked his brains all the way to the office that morning to turn up the name of someone who could tell him something about Nigel Clark. He drew a complete blank. He couldn’t remember Nigel coming into the office more than once or twice. Then he recalled that Sir Nicholas had once got him a vacation job in the department – in the days before the unions stopped the employment of temporary clerical staff. Yes, of course. It had been the summer before Amiss became Sir Nicholas’s Private Secretary, and he had heard about it when the union decision became known. Fulminations: the service now dominated by the whims of a crowd of oafs who should be employed digging ditches instead of dealing with papers they couldn’t read without moving their lips.

Amiss couldn’t think of any unofficial way of finding out where Nigel had worked. He didn’t have any contacts in Personnel Division, bar his Careers Advisor, with whom his relations had been, of necessity, above-board and rather formal. He still remembered the interview there when he was informed of the privilege that was to be his in working for Sir Nicholas. Not a hint, amid all the piety, that he was known to his staff, with reason, as ‘Old Nick’. No – string-pulling with Personnel Division was out. He referred the problem to his subconscious and walked into his office hoping for a day of peace unmarked by any more murderous assaults on public servants.

Personnel Division had obviously worked at lightning speed to find a replacement for Gladys. Others could wait for months for urgent clerical staff, but perish the thought that a Permanent Secretary might be inconvenienced for a moment – even a stand-in Permanent Secretary. Poor Gladys’s desk was manned by a familiar figure, feet in the in-tray, gnawing on one of the canteen’s polystyrene rolls and gazing at the generous breasts of a pouting young woman who tumbled over half of page three of his newspaper.

‘Hey, Robert, cop a load of this pair. They’re fantastic’

‘What are you doing here, you sex-crazed yob?’ asked Amiss with pleasure.

‘That old tart in Personnel rung me up and said as how there was a National Emergency and my place was by your side.’

Amiss was amazed at the intelligence the old tart had displayed in sending him someone who knew the job. Phil had been the bright spot of the office until Sir Nicholas had him ejected on the famous occasion when he overheard himself being referred to as ‘Shit-face’. Gladys had been in all respects an unworthy successor.

‘Well, if it wouldn’t swell your already enormous head, I’d say I was pleased to see you back.’

‘Up yours,’ said Phil affably, and returned to his studies.

Amiss got himself a cup of coffee and fell on the more sober newspapers. Even
The Times
had brought itself to make Gladys’s murder the lead story. The report was heavy with references to grave concern in Whitehall and embarrassing implications for the government. One of the popular papers had heard rumours of a vendetta against Sir Nicholas and his staff. At least Milton would be relieved that they hadn’t discovered who was on the short-list of suspects.

‘Swap?’ asked Phil, who read
The Times
as enthusiastically as his tabloid. (It was generally thought that the ghastly rag he claimed to love was just another tactic in his
épater le bourgeois
campaign – or ‘stickin’ it up their noses’, as he would more likely put it.)

Amiss leafed listlessly through Phil’s paper. Even the news of an alleged rapist vicar failed to arouse his interest.

‘Don’t you want to hear about the murders?’

‘Nah. Julia’s already told me about ’em. Seems to me everyone’s making too much of a bleedin’ fuss about two ole geezers that should of been buried years ago.’

Phil’s iconoclasm wasn’t usually too much for Amiss, but decency required him to remonstrate.

‘For Christ’s sake, Phil. I agree about Sir Nicholas but it’s a bit thick about Gladys.’

‘From all I’ve ’eard the old bint didn’t enjoy life much,’ said Phil carelessly. ‘Seems to me the murderer was doin’ ’er a favour.’ And he bent to a consideration of
The Times
’s leading article on Israel and the Left Bank.

Amiss gave up. There was no point in trying to impose even the most widely held social
convenances
on Phil. It only made him more outrageous. Anyway, he didn’t want to be called ‘a pompous git’. It was something he secretly worried he might become if he stayed in the civil service long enough. Phil had a way of touching the nerve.

‘I fink them Palestinians should kick the Israelis in the arse,’ said Phil consideringly. ‘Seems to me the latest carry-on over the…’

Amiss cut him short, cursing, not for the first time, the respect for Phil’s intelligence which had made him propel him towards evening classes and an interest in current affairs. There didn’t seem to be a clerical assistant’s job in Whitehall busy enough to engage him for a full day’s work. He read the newspapers with more attention than his more elevated colleagues and liked nothing better than embarrassing them by showing that he was more up-to-date and better informed than they. Amiss shuddered at the recollection of the time Phil had become converted to monetarism, and had proved in argument to have a grasp of the views of Milton Friedman which made mincemeat of his own vaguely-held Keynesianism.

‘Get on with some work.’

‘Don’t want an argument, do you?’ said Phil, who always saw through attempts to kill off debates. ‘O.K. then, I’ll leave you in peace. But I ain’t got no work to do. I done it all before you got in, you lazy bugger.’

Amiss retired to his paper work in a dignified silence. Julia had gone off to find more audiences for her story, and George and Bernard seemed disinclined for chat.

‘That’s a good picture of that poofdah,’ broke in Phil, who had the habit of assuming that one could instantly divine the subject he was alluding to. ‘Untrained mind,’ said some. Amiss had seeen too many people wrong-footed by the technique to believe it was entirely unconscious.

‘Which poofdah?’

‘That Nigel Clark. There’s a picture in ’ere of ’im and ’is mum, lookin’ all sad. That’s a laugh. Imagine anyone looking sad about that ole fart gettin’ done in.’

‘What are you talking about? You don’t know Nigel Clark.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Phil aggrievedly. ‘Worked with ’im in Accounts Division, didn’t I, when he was doin’ a few weeks graft eighteen months ago?’

Amiss couldn’t believe his luck. An unsolicited piece of information at last.

‘What do you mean, poofdah?’

‘Bum bandit. Queen. Fag. Gay. ’Omosexual. What do you think I mean?’

Amiss resisted the temptation to thump him. He could do that later – when he had extracted whatever Phil had on offer.

‘I mean what makes you think he’s a poofdah, you narg?’

‘I ’aven’t got where I am today wivout bein’ able to spot a poofdah when I see one. Besides, I used to listen to ’im on the phone talkin’ to ’is poofdah friends. ’Eard ’im cooin’ down the phone at some feller called Billy makin’ dates to go dancin’ in one of them gay discos up West.’

‘Sir Nicholas can’t have liked that much.’

‘Nigey baby seemed to be keepin’ it pretty quiet from what I could hear of his arrangements. ’E never knew I was listenin’. Didn’t realize how good my ears are,’ said Phil modestly.

‘You should have been a detective, you nosey little bugger.’

‘The only pigs I want anyfink to do with are the ones I eat for breakfast,’ said Phil, turning over to the Business News. The conversation clearly was closed.

Amiss let ten minutes go by before slipping out to find a private telephone. He wasn’t going to risk using the extension in the next office with Phil around. Mrs Milton wasn’t in, he was informed by a helpful secretary, but he might try just before lunch. He swore to himself. There was no point in trying Milton. He had said he wouldn’t be in all morning. Nigel would have to wait his turn.

Later in the morning Sanders called for Amiss to discuss the brief for the Secretary of State’s Question Time in the House the following day. ‘Have the police been back?’ he asked, as Amiss rose to leave.

‘No. They said last night they’d finished with the room.’

‘Oh, well, in that case I’ll move back in this afternoon. And, by the way, would you mind sorting out Sir Nicholas’s private papers? I think you’d know your way around them better than I should. Use your own discretion about what should be destroyed.’

There was still no Mrs Milton. Amiss went back to his office and decided he might as well deal with Sir Nicholas’s papers before lunch. He worked quickly through the desk drawers. Everything there that Sanders wouldn’t need could be chucked out. Then he turned his attentions to the small cabinet with the combination lock in which were kept all confidential papers.

As he had expected, there was very little there. Sir Nicholas didn’t hold on to departmental papers. He either took them home with him or sent them back for Amiss to deal with. Amiss leafed through the solitary folder marked ‘Personal’. It consisted mainly of neat accounts of personal expenditure incurred while travelling on departmental business. There was a small batch of receipts from restaurants which Sir Nicholas used for official entertaining. Amiss wondered idly why he locked up innocuous stuff like this. Still, it was in character. He had even insisted that his staff lock up the departmental telephone directories at night on the grounds that they were confidential. Amiss supposed that it would be proper procedure to send in a claim for these expenses to the Accounts Division, asking them to forward the cheque to Lady Clark. Perhaps he had better ask Sanders if he thought it would be too tactless. Probably depended on how much money was involved.

He was flicking through the receipts to estimate the amount to be claimed when he came on one headed:

J. RITCHIE

CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS

Dated a week previously, it recorded that the bill of £300 for professional services had been paid in full. Amiss stood for a moment thinking. He put his head through the connecting door and saw that Phil had disappeared. He went back into Sir Nicholas’s room and rang Milton’s office.

Wednesday Afternoon

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22

Milton was in a rage, as much with himself for failing to make a simple routine check, as with the P.C. involved who had been one of those investigating the Monday lunchtime movements of all the staff in Embankment Tower, government employees or otherwise. (The building housed a number of unrelated enterprises.)