Political Suicide (7 page)

“I don't see how I can give you a
very full
account. I mean, there is so little to say about it. We got bored—that's the beginning, middle and end of it. We found there was nothing left in the marriage, and we decided to separate. As far as I was concerned, James had become thoroughly boring, the original nowhere man, and I wasn't interested in staying tied to him. No doubt he saw things differently.”

“How do you think he saw them?”

Penelope Partridge was clearly about to suggest that he go and ask him, but she pulled herself back in time.

“I imagine he thought that when his ministerial career ended, I lost interest in the marriage. I expect he told himself I was a cold bitch—that's one of the things men do say about women, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Sutcliffe, with something like feeling. “And what about the children?”

“Well, he was intending to take them off my hands as much as possible. It was a trial separation. When and if we made it official—I said I'd do the odd constituency appearance, where it absolutely couldn't be avoided, until Christmas, just in case we either of us changed our minds—he was going to make the cottage in Moreton his main home, and take them there as often as possible. The flat in—where was it?—Battersea was simply a temporary
pied-à-terre.
I suspect it was rather tatty, wasn't it?” She asked that with a contented cat smile, which she seemed immediately to regret. “As it was, he came to see them or took them out quite often, because he was very fond of them.”

“There was no other woman?”

She shrugged.

“Not so far as I know. He wouldn't be likely to tell me.”

“Nor anyone in your own life?”

“No one at all.”

She was looking straight, coolly at him, in a way he found thoroughly untrustworthy.

“Why in fact did you lie about this?” Sutcliffe asked.

“I didn't
tell
you about it to save myself unnecessary embarrassment. Is there anything wrong in that?”

Sutcliffe left a few moments' silence.

“You'd been married—how long?”

“Eight years.”

“Why did you marry?”

It was an unconventional question, but one Penelope Partridge had frequently asked herself. Indeed when, a few days before the wedding, a friend had told her that her married name would make her sound like something out of Beatrix Potter, she had damned near
called the whole thing off there and then. Perhaps the truth was that she had been twenty-six, had come from a glacially traditional family who regarded that age in the light of “high time she was off our hands,” and she had taken the best on offer. But she had collected together in her mind other, slightly more presentable motives.

“James had built up a whole string of businesses almost from nothing. It wasn't very fashionable, that sort of enterprise, then, but I admired him for it. He'd made a good deal of money, and frankly I enjoy money. Only hypocrites pretend not to. At that time Lord Knowles—do you know him?—had a little knot of promising Conservative thinkers and young candidates, and they used to meet regularly at Mertlesham, his place.”

“Sort of Cliveden set?” (Sutcliffe pronounced it Clive-den).

“
Cliv
den. Yes. Only less a set than a random assortment. I was into politics myself then, and I was invited along because there were too few women . . . I must have been dazzled . . . though James was not in himself dazzling . . . Anyway, we were married, and happy enough, but somehow after the children were born, and even when his career was going well, he lost interest.” She did her characteristic look around the drawing-room, as if it held all that a heart could desire. “I mean, he inexplicably didn't seem to care any more. Don't ask
me
to explain. I never could.”

Sutcliffe, on the other hand, thought perhaps he could.

“And you say he came back now and again to see the children?”

“Oh yes. Frequently.”

“When was the last time you saw him, then?”

“Oh, Good Lord—I wasn't myself here necessarily when he came to see them. Helga would always be around. It must have been . . . oh, four weeks or more before he died when I saw him last.”

“And he seemed—normal?”

“Perfectly normal.” She looked at her watch. “And now, I do have an appointment, Superintendent . . . er . . .”

Sutcliffe waited several seconds before he responded.

“I have no more questions.” He got up, but added with the merest suspicion of a threat in his voice, “I'll be following things up, here and in Yorkshire. As soon as anything comes up that I need to consult you about, I'll be back.”

He looked at her hard.

“Oh—er—yes, of course.”

And Penelope Partridge actually rang for him to be shown out. Sutcliffe was pleased to see that the Danish au pair made no effort whatever to fit in with such an olde-world scenario. She bounced through the door, held it open for him, breezily banged it shut, and in the hall, from her six feet one to his five feet ten, winked at him. As they progressed down the hall towards the street door, Sutcliffe heard the drawing-room door open again, and Penelope Partridge walk briskly upstairs. He did not hear her go beyond the landing. He scuffled in his pocket to find one of the cards he always kept there, with his name and Yard extension number on it. At the door he handed it to Helga and mouthed “Ring me.” She nodded massively, smiled, and shut the door behind him.

Sutcliffe's car was parked unobtrusively round the corner. As he dawdled thoughtfully down the Chelsea street, thinking of the emptiness from which James Partridge had flown, he saw among the people coming towards him a young man: blue, expensive suit, umbrella, Burberry over his arm, a round, unlovely face set in an expression of some complacence. Nothing remarkable about any of those things; he could have been duplicated many times over in the streets of Chelsea at any hour. And yet the face—hadn't he seen it before? If not in the flesh, then as a photograph. Where? Not, surely, in the Yard's rogues' gallery of portraits. In connection, though, with a case, he felt. And since the young man looked a genuine smoothie, and since his cases seldom involved classes so well-heeled as this one, then didn't he have some vague connection with the Partridge suicide? He turned and looked round. The young man had rung the doorbell of Penelope Partridge's Chelsea house, and was now standing waiting on the step.

When he got back to the Yard he went straight to his file on the case. There, in the identical cutting that had sent Mr Wilfred Dowson along to him, he found what he wanted. Along with the picture of James Partridge whose death “has not yet been satisfactorily explained,” he saw staring at him the candidates adopted for the by-election by the three main parties. Among them he recognized the suavely self-absorbed features of Antony Craybourne-Fisk.

• • •

The call from Helga came earlier than Sutcliffe had expected, later in the same day.

“She is gone,” she announced.

“Gone?”

“To Herod's,” said Helga, as if Penelope Partridge was bidden to a party at which the Dance of the Seven Veils might be expected to be performed.

“When can we meet and talk?”

“I finish nine o'clock. I go vid my boyfriend to the pub—the Nelson, off Whitehall. You know?”

“I know.”

“You come?”

“I come.”

In the interval Sutcliffe spent some time trying to imagine what sort of a figure the boyfriend of the Wagnerian Helga could be. He came up finally with a diminutive Portuguese waiter, on the principle of the attraction of opposites. When he walked into the Admiral Nelson at twenty past nine he found he could not be more wrong. Sitting draped around Helga, the pair of them looking like one of Vigeland's more monstrous imaginings, was an immense young man who looked in his combination of flesh and muscle like an Olympic discus thrower, or a Smithfield porter at least. What bed could hold their couplings, Sutcliffe wondered, as he fetched himself a pint. Most likely they did it at night in Hyde Park, and the earth moved under them. Helga improbably introduced the young man as Seymour, and he sat there saying little but beaming amiably.

“Now, what you want to know?” asked Helga.

“The situation in the household, before and after the separation.”

“Before I don't know. I come in September, and he
had moved out already. She say he is busy, important politician, all that stuff. Then a few weeks later, she tell me they have—what do you call it?—trial separation. I say OK—is perfectly usual.”

“But he came back fairly often?”

“To see the children, yes. Mostly he take them out—to films, to the park, to tea.”

“What was your impression of him?”

Helga shrugged.

“Not very strong. Was a bit—
dempet ned
—subdued. Not so much later when he got use to me. Quiet man, not much personality on the surface, perhaps very strong underneath, I donno.”

“You didn't feel he was taking the separation badly?”

“Oh no. Perhaps a relief. He say to me once, ‘When Parliament is in re—re—' ”

“Cess?”

“Yes—‘recess, then I fix up the cottage in Yorkshire and have the children with me up there.' And I say: ‘Good—then I have more time free.' ”

Helga and Seymour indulged in giant panda embraces that threatened to overturn the small table they were all sitting at.

“What about her?”

“Her?” Helga shrugged. “Cold, snobbish, selfish—you see her, you judge. She is always the same. Can't hide it. Not the intelligence to see what impression she make, or maybe she don't care.”

“Is she having an affair?”

Helga thrust out her lower lip.

“Affair. Affair. Who knows? She is having
some
thing. Yes, I think she is probably having an affair.”

“Who with?”

“This young man with the fishy name.”

“Antony Craybourne-Fisk?”

“That's right. She try to make me announce him, but I always get the name wrong in intention, so she stop me. Fishy name, fishy nature.”

“Has this been going on since you took the job?”

Helga considered.

“I donno. You see, not much is going on at all, so when it start I'm not sure. Very low-temperature romance, like people think the British always have. They never sleep together at the flat, you know. So when it start, I can't really say.”

“Where do they sleep together, then?”

“Outside,” said Helga. Sutcliffe looked puzzled for a moment. Hyde Park was one thing for Helga and her boyfriend, quite unthinkable for Penelope Partridge and hers.

“She means away from home,” explained Seymour.

“That's right. He rings. And then three or four hours later—
very
clever, Mrs Partridge—she says, ‘Oh, Helga, I shall be away for the weekend,' and gives me
very
generous time off in compensation. Which gives the game away, because Mrs Partridge is
not
generous by nature, oh, by no means!”

“Does he come round often to the house?”

“Before, fairly often. Recently, not. Today the first time for—oh, two, three weeks. They talk on the telephone.”

“And do you hear what they say on the telephone?”

Helga giggled, like Isolde in skittish mood.

“Of course. She has a loud voice when she talk into the telephone, like she was calling to dogs.”

“What do they talk about?”

“Well, sometimes they plan these . . . meetings.”

“Dirty weekends,” said Seymour, as if he were supplying a technical term to a novice.

“Yes. Then the voice goes very low—so equally I
know
. Otherwise she talk normally. The other day what they talk about is this hut in Yorkshire.”

“Cottage,” said Seymour.

“What did they say about that?” asked Sutcliffe.

“She said: ‘Well, if it gets too awful at the hotel, you can always borrow the cottage.' ” (Helga's imitation of her voice was not too accurate, suggesting that Denmark did not boast of too many of the Penelope Partridge type). “Then she say ‘Wise? That's for you to decide. I can't see anybody commenting if you say that the widow of the late member has let you borrow the place.
I
shan't be using it, that you can be sure of. It's in the hands of the agents, but until it's sold it's yours to use if you want it.' Only I think she said ‘at your disposal,' which makes it sound like garbage.”

“And did he accept?”

“I don't know. I think they leave it up in the sky.”

“Air,” said Seymour.

Sutcliffe bought them both enormous tankards of lager, enlisted Helga as a spy for any future happenings of interest in the Partridge household, and then went on his way. The case was beginning to
be
a case, beginning to get accretions, have reverberations. He was beginning to think he might be able to justify a trip up to Yorkshire.

• • •

While he was clearing out his desk next morning, Sutcliffe had an important phone call. He knew it was
important because of the number of people who spoke to him before the caller himself actually came on. It was, a Roedean voice informed him, from Conservative Central Office, the Chairman himself who wanted to have a talk (quite informally, of course) with him.

“Superintendent Sutcliffe?” said the Chairman, trying to sound like a serious politician.

“Yes.”

“Look, you know the last thing we'd do is interfere with a genuine police investigation. But this really does seem over the edge. The PM is absolutely livid, I can tell you. Apparently you've been positively harassing the poor little widow of James Partridge. Now, really, I
can't
think that can be necessary. In fact, I thought the whole business was dead and buried. Why isn't it? I tell you, with the by-election starting officially in a week, dragging this thing out as you are doing begins to seem politically motivated.”