Political Suicide (19 page)

“Because of the attack on your mother?”

“I'm not an amateur psychiatrist, but it's a fair bet, isn't it? I worry particularly about my own children, of course. Though, God knows, their home life was never anything like mine, even while the marriage was crumbling apart. And these days being the children of divorced parents is hardly rare, or any sort of stigma. But—I worry about them constantly, would ring my ex-wife up every other night if I thought she'd stand for it . . . Well, that's me. That's what people are whispering about.”

“You don't think of putting out a statement?”

“Yes, I've thought about it, as I said. But my agent says it would do much more harm than good at this stage of the campaign. Inevitably it would be played up by the gutter press. And in fact I've got a good local reputation, through my years on the council, and the job at the College. Quite a lot of my voters have been through my hands there, or have children who have, and I think their word will stand up against all the rumour-mongers.”

“The fact remains that you have reason to be grateful to James Partridge.”

“I do. That's why I don't quite understand your interest. I suppose in a case like this you have to check all possibilities.”

“Exactly. That's what all cases involve: slog over irrelevancies. One little irrelevancy: what were you doing the evening he died?”

“That's easy. I was at a college council meeting. I remember because I reported there on the case of the girl who had a scholarship to Cambridge—the thing Jim Partridge sorted out for us. I felt quite sick next morning when I heard he was dead.”

“Everything I hear suggests he was an admirable chap.”

“As far as I'm concerned, I would say he had an instinctive moral sense that told him what should and shouldn't be done. It's pretty rare in a politician—practically unknown these days.”

“As witness Jerry Snaithe.”

“Or his henchmen. I gain pleasure from the fact that they do a great deal more harm to themselves than good. I loathe the idea of a candidate coming in with a little posse of disciples. I gather you can cut the atmosphere
at the Labour Party HQ with a knife—the old North-South divide in miniature. I must say I have one great advantage in this campaign which I didn't have last time: I have two very dislikeable opponents.”

“You don't know the Conservative?”

“No, indeed. But he is getting known locally as a prize shit. He is one of the yes-men at Conservative Central Office, hoping to be one of the yes-men in Parliament, then one of the yes-men in government. People always talk about the Prime Minister as tough, but I don't think it's tough to surround yourself with pipsqueaks, do you? Have you talked to Craybourne-Fisk yet, Superintendent?”

“Not yet. I have that pleasure to come.”

“Because there are one or two rumours going around about
him.”

Breakfast-time, Sutcliffe had learnt from Oliver Worthing, was one of the only times when one could hope to find a candidate alone, so it was at breakfast-time next day that he went back to Moreton-in-Kirkdale, to try and have a few words with Antony Craybourne-Fisk.

Antony's breakfast had been made for him by Mrs Burkshaw from the next cottage. Antony was one of the last males in his generation to have been brought up totally unable to fend for himself, and to have remained in this benighted state thus far into his adulthood. If he had been forced to make his own breakfast he might have managed to pour milk on cereal, to butter bread and spread marmalade on it, but further than that—even to a boiled egg, or toast—he could not have gone. Fortunately Mrs Burkshaw's late husband had been a farm labourer and she was used to getting up at the crack of dawn, so that when he asked her if she could cook something nourishing for him early she had been glad to. She had quoted a sum in recompense so
low that Antony had jumped at it without haggling. Perhaps, he had thought, there might be compensations in living part of the year in England's cheapest county.

“I'll be glad of the money,” Mrs Burkshaw said later, in the village shop, “but I can't say I took to him. Any more than I took to that Mrs Partridge—even at the beginning, when she was trying to be nice.”

People in general, it seemed, were not taking to Antony. As he ate his breakfast that morning the crease-lines on his forehead showed that he was worried. He himself had detected, from the beginning of the campaign, a lack of warmth towards him even from longstanding Conservative voters. He and Harold Fawcett had kept quiet about it for a time, but there was no disguising it now, with the campaign entering its last week. The latest humiliation had been to overhear a discussion in the loo at Tory Party Headquarters as to whether he would or would not be pushed into third place. Third place! It was unthinkable! And yet it had happened to the Conservative candidate at Chesterfield, who was a much more endearing young man than he was. (This was not quite how Antony Craybourne-Fisk put it to himself, but he was not unaware that among his political assets charm was his short suit.)

And there was another thing that was bothering Antony. He had been aware from the beginning of the campaign that the distinguished politicians who came to Bootham ostensibly to give him a hand were in fact keeping him at arm's length. Conservative Headquarters, while ostensibly pouring in support, was in innumerable little ways distancing itself from him as candidate. It was damned unfair! He had, against his
better judgment, allowed them to send up seven or eight members of the dreariest cabinet in human memory, and then they treated him as if he had a mild attack of leprosy. Why? Why?

In his lonely meditations on his satin-eiderdowned bed in the Partridge cottage Antony Craybourne-Fisk had been forced to the conclusion that there had been Rumours. Leaks and rumours had bedevilled this government. Only the previous year rumour had nearly destroyed one of its most senior members—apparently quite untrue rumours. If they didn't even have to be true . . . ! As to leaks, the government had lived by leaks and eventually could well die by them. Once one had faced up to the fact that one was being talked about in muffled tones, it needed no ingenuity to connect the rumours with the presence in Bootham of a Scotland Yard detective. Would the man want to interview him? It was a situation that would require the utmost care in its handling. Antony decided that if the policeman should come to see him, he would be nice. Tremendously nice. Unnaturally nice. It would be worth the effort.

Thus it was that when Sutcliffe knocked on the door of the cottage on the Thursday before polling day, Antony (who had watched him arrive, and guessed who it was) was smiling bonhomously in welcome even when he went to open the door. The smile disconcerted Sutcliffe: it was a bit like meeting Oliver Hardy when you were expecting Stan Laurel.

“Good morning, sir. I hope I'm not disturbing you. I'm Superintendent Sutcliffe. I wonder if I could have a few words with you?”

“Of course, Superintendent. I was wondering if you would need to. Come right in. Cup of tea? There's one left in the pot, and it should be reasonably warm.”

It wasn't reasonably warm, but Sutcliffe took it, and settled himself down in one of those over-large armchairs, preparing to play the interview the way Antony seemed to want it.

“I haven't asked what your business is, you notice,” the Tory candidate said, spearing efficiently into his mouth the last fragments of his fried breakfast. “There have been rumours of a policeman going round asking questions about Jim Partridge.”

“That's right. That's what I've been doing.”

“Meaning, presumably, that the police are still not satisfied?”

“Something of the sort,” Sutcliffe said. He decided to be very vague. This was no time, for example, to admit that he was in fact on holiday. “We're in a difficult position: we have no pin-downable grounds for dissatisfaction, yet on the other hand we have no particular reason to be satisfied. We have found no motive for suicide, for example—not one that we think holds water.”

“You don't think the breakdown of his marriage—?”

“It had happened some time before. It seems to have been coming on for some time, and he appears to have taken it very calmly. That's our information. Perhaps you yourself know more about it, sir?”

“Me?” Antony's Adam's apple bobbed up and down like a skiff in choppy seas.

“As a close friend of Mrs Partridge's.”

“Ah—I see—well, I don't know that I—”

“Hadn't you better tell me, sir, something about that friendship with Mrs Partridge?”

Oh, that friendship with Mrs Partridge! How bitterly to be regretted now, the more so as it had never meant particularly much to him at any moment of its duration. How to explain to a policeman that one slipped into these things, especially on aimless vacations, and in rundown, once-fashionable hotels in Italy? They had both been staying, separately, at the Hotel Splendido in Santa Margherita Ligure. It was the end of the season, and the only other guests had been Italian or German, and they had sat dotted around ten or twelve tables in the enormous dining-room, and the atmosphere had been soporific. It was September, and the break-up of Penelope Partridge's marriage had just become an established fact. In the mornings she took the children to sit by but not to bathe in that putrid section of the Mediterranean. Sometimes in the afternoons she would take them to Portofino, or went up to Genoa to shop. It was in Portofino, at an outdoor café, that Antony had first talked to her, though he had noticed her across those expanses of dining-room, and had registered that she was of his kind, had “sniffed the exhalation of his own herd.” They had come together out of boredom, slept together for the same reason, and because “why not?” They had discovered common interests—money and power—and had established and rejoiced in a common coldness of heart. When Antony had promised to take charge of the financial side of the separation, and to help her with quick kill investments after the settlement was made, an alliance was made between them that had never been broken. Unfortunately.

This, or a judicious selection from this, was what Antony told Sutcliffe.

“I see,” said the Superintendent, when the bland and blameless recital had come to an end. “And you still manage her investments?”

“That's right.”

“Is this an arduous task? Much to invest?”

“There's a tidy little nest-egg that she inherited from her mother, and there's money that Partridge settled on her when they split up. Together it comes to a substantial sum.”

“Does that mean she milked him for all she could get?”

“That's a rather tendentious phrase, isn't it, Superintendent? It was a perfectly amicable separation. She had worked hard to make his career a success. And Partridge would naturally wish to ensure that the children were well provided for.”

“And how have you invested this? Gilt-edged?”

“Not entirely, Superintendent. Mrs Partridge enjoys a bit of excitement, relishes the element of risk. We've been living a bit dangerously with some of the money—hoping to increase it substantially.”

“And have you?”

“Yes,” said Antony, with an immodest smirk.

“You've been living dangerously in other ways too, haven't you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You left something out of your account of your friendship with Mrs Partridge, didn't you. The weekends at country hotels . . .”

Antony looked as if he would dearly have liked to
give way to a spurt of venom, but he was a well-trained political animal, and he merely smiled a somewhat strained smile, and stretched out his legs underneath the table.

“Ahhh . . . Who could have told you about that, I wonder. That mountain of Scandinavian muscle that looks after the kids, I suppose. Well, I can't say I wanted it to come out, but equally I can't say I'm particularly ashamed of it. We're both men of the world, I take it, Superintendent?”

“Yes, sir. But you're a rather younger man of the world than I am.”

“Meaning that fashions in what is on the edge of permissibility change, I suppose? I take your point. As far as my generation is concerned, I don't think anyone would see anything at all remarkable in my spending the weekend now and again with a rather lonely woman—on a no-strings basis.”

“Is that all it is, sir? A casual affair of convenience?”

“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's never been any question of its developing into anything serious. Of course, as things have turned out . . . with my getting the nomination here . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, one rather regrets . . . I mean, retro
spect
ively it doesn't seem to have been awfully wise. But of course at the time Jim Partridge was alive, and so there didn't seem . . .”

“Quite. If you were
that
careful, all Tory MPs' wives would be taboo, wouldn't they, sir? Well, I imagine you'll soon be wanting to get along?”

Antony looked at his watch.

“Well, yes, I would, rather . . .”

“Just one more question before you get back to the hustings: do you happen to remember what you were doing on the night Mr Partridge died—December the twelfth it was.”

“Good Lord, no—so long ago. Wait, though. I may still have last year's diary.” He dived across the room, and rummaged in a briefcase. “Yes. Here it is. The twelfth, you say? Here we are. Oh yes: I was addressing a local Tory association—in Deptford. Meeting began at seven-thirty.”

“And when did it end, sir?”

“Haven't a clue. I do a lot of that sort of meeting: the Conservative Central Office sends me round as a peripatetic speaker. On form, it would have ended round about nine-thirty or ten. When was Jim . . . When did Jim die?”

“That we're not sure about. There's something to connect it to a time around ten-thirty or so, but it's very slight. All we know is that when it was found the body had been in the water for hours.”