Corridors of Death (26 page)

Authors: Ruth Dudley Edwards

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Corridors of Death

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Amiss got up, made himself a cup of coffee and stole a cigarette from Phil. He felt a deep depression flooding through him.

You will point out that gifted people do reach positions of power from which they can affect the course of history. I would point you towards the far greater numbers of them who get no such opportunity, but spend their lives looking wonderingly at the mess their idiotic contemporaries are making of things, and towards those whose successful efforts are spat upon, before they are cold in their graves, by their mediocre successors. You may point out also that one should make the best of the situation in which one finds oneself – that like you, one should at least attempt to be reasonably efficient and humane within one’s constraints. You are right if you believe this. That is exactly what I should have done. I could have made at least this department a happier and more effective organization. I did not because I could never lose sight of the opportunities I had lost and I felt only contempt for the tiny contribution I would be allowed to make. That is why I have chosen to write this to you. Do not take the same destructive path. If you ever find that dissatisfaction with the work you are doing has taken a grip on you, change your life drastically even at the expense of those of whom you are fond. You will always have in me a prime example of how discontent can lead to hatred not only of other people but of oneself.

It is self-hatred which has led me to decide to kill myself. I should have done it years ago, but there lurked within me always a stupidly tenacious belief that my
Weltanschauung
might change with promotion and greater power. I might have gone on hoping for more recognition of my abilities – promotion to more important departments – had not my uselessness been made clear to me by developments in my private life. Only the week before last I found that my wife, whom I trusted and had once loved, found a rabble-rousing leader of the great unwashed more worthy of her affections than me, and that my son, for whom I have always had a deep if unexpressed love, had become a queer. My knowledge of popular psychology leads me to assume that that was in some way my fault. I realized that they would be better off without me and that I could not in any case bear the ignominy of seeing them desert me. Were I a better person, I should have taken a quiet way out, so causing them and everyone else the least possible distress, but the cancer of bitterness within me does not allow me to do what I perceive to be the weak and apologetic thing.

You will therefore see that my motives for trying to involve my family and Martin Jenkins in my death are those of simple jealousy and the desire for revenge. You will also probably understand by now why I have so carefully set out to implicate Nixon and Wells. The first I despise profoundly. He has no right to be in the position he is in. He has certainly no right to expect one of my abilities to strive to save him from public recognition of his undoubted stupidity. Stupidity. Worse than cupidity? Wells is able – I cannot deny that. But he is foul. He has no thought of anything but his own preferment. I consider my efforts to destroy the careers of the two of them to be in the public interest. Those efforts have too the virtue of bringing them to grief because of their own failings. It was Nixon’s pusillanimity which led him to agree to giving a speech for which he is unprepared. It was Wells’s conceit and indecent ambition that made him vulnerable to my encouragement towards disloyalty.

Stafford can be put in the same category as Nixon. He is, I recognize, not a bad man, but he has neither intelligence nor imagination. For too many years I have suffered his complacent drivel about his own success in heading a large company. He has even, on occasion, talked of the pleasure he gets from inhabiting the ‘real world’ or, in one of his more objectionable phrases, ‘working at the coal face’. My father worked ‘at the coal face’ for a time when his firm was smashed through the economic incompetence of a government. He did labouring jobs for which he was unsuited and I saw too often the state of exhaustion and despair to which he was reduced. That expression from a fool in fancy clothes has driven me to rage. Cold rage. To fix Stafford’s departure from a job he never deserved has been a pleasure.

Parkinson is different. He is an able man who has deserved better from me than he has received. I cannot hide from myself that some of the malice I have felt towards him has been a consequence of envy. He has more charm than I have and, within his own sphere, probably as much ability. It is his misfortune that he became a sacrificial victim. I choose to blame the oafs who think that administrators like me are in some way inferior to people with technological skills. When I suggested to Parkinson that he should come to work on the administrative side I intended to do him a favour. Later I realized that I simply could not bear his competence in my own field. Had he succeeded he would have given ammunition to those who think that the skills of a good administrator can be picked up by anyone. I couldn’t afford to let him succeed and over the years I have come to hate him as the enemy of those who should be the true élite. What understanding do scientists have of the political dilemmas with which government has to grapple? What have they ever done but exacerbate those dilemmas by the construction of weapons for whose use they decline to take responsibility? Parkinson has had to suffer for the sins of his kind.

I don’t have time to explain to you the plans I have made for bringing all these people to a murderous state. You would not, in any case, find the account edifying. You will probably rightly feel, despite my explanation, that I have become destructive for destruction’s sake. That may well be the truth. I cannot, however, resist the temptation to see whether any one of these people has the gumption to hit back at me. I doubt it. I only hope, should it happen, that I see who it is that does it. In any case my contingency suicide plans should provide some amusement for my staff over the next few days. I cannot think that I will be mourned.