Publish and Be Murdered (15 page)

‘I’ve got some ideas about how to boost circulation,’ said Jason. ‘Can we talk about them sometime?’

‘Sure. But I warn you it’s going to take a long time before Lambie Crump agrees to any advertising.’

‘Stupid git.’

‘You may say that, Jason. I couldn’t possibly comment. Anyway, we have to deal with what we have to deal with. And my immediate problem is practical. Do you by any chance know how to break into a locked filing cabinet? Did your misspent youth equip you with such a useful skill?’

Jason grinned. ‘No. But I’ve got a mate who’s sure to. Have you lost the key to your cabinet, or are you trying to break into someone else’s?’

‘Mr Ricketts’s. He’s got some records I need to see that he’s convinced are top secret. I don’t want to give him a heart attack by insisting he disgorge them.’

‘Be better if you did, Robert. We don’t need the old sod. Any more than we need old Naggiar.’

‘You have all the heartlessness of youth, Jason. For now, please do your research and then we can do the deed when Ricketts has gone home.’

‘Glad to, Robert.’ Jason smiled at him beatifically, for Amiss had transformed his life and his gratitude was boundless.

The staff ledger duly liberated by Jason made fascinating reading. It was clear that whatever tenets of New Labour Lambie Crump now claimed to belive in, equal pay was not one of them. For Phoebe Somerfield not only earned less than a fifth of Lambie Crump’s salary, but only just over half that of Dwight Winterton, twenty-five years her junior. Even Ben and Marcia earned more. Outraged, Amiss stormed off to the editor’s office.

‘Oh goodness, it’s nothing to make a fuss about.’ Lambie Crump looked at Amiss with distaste. ‘One pays what the market requires, does one not? One is not a charitable institution.’

Amiss repressed the first six retorts that came to mind. ‘I know it is technically none of my business, Willie, but since I’m the cost-cutter, I’m sure you’ll listen to me seriously when I suggest a cost increase. I’m uncomfortable myself earning twice as much as Phoebe and I will tell her so.’

Lambie Crump sat bolt upright. ‘You’re not seriously contemplating telling her, are you? Nobody tells anyone what they earn. Nobody knows except Ricketts and he doesn’t know what he knows. Or does he? You didn’t get it from him, did you?’

‘No, Willie. As you rightly say, Josiah Ricketts doesn’t know what he knows. But I have my sources.’

‘What are you asking me to do?’

‘Double her salary.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m prepared to consider a couple of thousand extra.’

‘Willie, if there was any justice you’d give her twenty years of backpay.’

‘But it was perfectly well understood when Phoebe came to work here that you could get a first-class woman for the price of a second-class man.’

‘What you have in fact is a first-class woman for the price of a fifth-rate man. It’s grossly unfair.’

Lambie Crump looked at him petulantly. ‘Another five thousand? That’s plenty. And even that will make her ask difficult questions.’

‘You can tell her all the recent administrative economies have made some money available.’

‘Oh, really.’ Lambie Crump pouted at his tormenter. ‘It just seems such a waste, when she’s never complained. Well, not much, anyway.’

‘She’ll complain a lot more if she finds out what I’m earning, Willie.’

‘That’s blackmail.’

‘Afraid it is.’

‘Be under no illusion that one is pleased.’

‘You’ll get over it,’ said Amiss cheerfully. ‘Phoebe’s still in her office, I think. I’ll send her straight up.’ He walked out, taking Lambie Crump’s silence for consent.

‘She saw me after she saw Willie,’ reported Amiss to Rachel, ‘and burst out crying. As she’s usually so private, I hadn’t known she was supporting an ailing mother who has to have a paid companion while Phoebe’s at work. So money’s been ferociously tight. She was so happy. I took her out for a bottle of champagne to celebrate.’

‘Good old Robert,’ said Rachel. ‘Always a bottle rather than a glass.’

He felt suddenly very deflated.

15

«
^
»

‘I just thought for curiosity I’d check out how Number Ten views the recent
Wrangler
lurch towards the new Establishment,’ said Amiss to Winterton. ‘I’ve got an old civil service colleague working in there.’

‘And?’

‘Mixed. It was much appreciated that New Labour were getting such surprisingly generous treatment, but Willie’s own behaviour makes it unlikely that he’s going to become a popular pet.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Apparently over the past few weeks he’s rung up the PM’s private secretary, the press secretary and the chief of staff and demanded a peerage from all of them.’

Winterton chuckled maliciously. ‘You’re kidding. He couldn’t do that.’

‘Well, he did.’

‘Maybe he was sozzled.’

‘They didn’t seem to think so. Though he was when he rang me at home last week.’

‘And me. Long tirade about my iniquities.’

‘Much the same as my call, then. You aren’t the only one under the lash.’

‘And Henry had a few in his time when he was around.’

‘I’ve never seen Willie drunk. Have you?’

‘Not in the flesh,’ said Winterton. ‘Seems to be a recent development. I suppose it might be tension, from all the rows. I think he was nervous for a time that the trustees might come down heavily on him as Henry wanted them to. But of course the other two are spineless creeps who think Willie’s God.

‘It’s all very sad, Robert. He’s going to wreck a great institution and there’s bugger-all anyone can do about it.’ Winterton got up. ‘I’d better go off and find some way of saying what I believe in terms that’ll pass the muster with New Willie. You’ve cheered me up a bit anyway. It looks as though he’s scored a few own goals. I can stand anything except him becoming Lord Lambie of Crump.’

‘I bet he’d drop the “Crump”. Watch this space for Lord Lambie of Mayfair.’

‘Where the hell is Willie?’

Amiss looked up in surprise at the unprecedented sight of Phoebe Somerfield crashing into his room angrily and without ceremony. ‘I’m sorry, Phoebe. I’ve no idea. I assumed he was in his room by now. Have you tried his flat?’

‘There’s no answer. I can only guess he was off on one of his nights in the country with toffs and hasn’t got back yet. I could strangle him.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s press day and we’re looking set fair to produce this week a journal with three blank pages unless I fill them full of whatever we spiked last week. Willie was supposed do a leader and an assessment of the latest collapse in the Northern Irish peace process. It’s eleven o’clock and there’s no sign of him or what he was supposed to write. And Dwight’s up to his ears.’

‘You’d better start writing, just in case he doesn’t turn up. I’ll try to locate him.’

‘I’ve already fucking well written half the goddamn journal,’ said Phoebe Somerfield. ‘And we’ve only got an hour and a half left.’

‘What is the leader about?’

‘The government’s U-turn over personal taxation.’

‘I’ll do that and you do Northern Ireland. How many words?’

‘Eleven hundred.’ She turned to go and then looked back. ‘But can you write?’

‘You’ll have something better than a blank page. And wasn’t it you told me the journalist’s golden rule was, “Don’t get it right. Get it written”?’

She shrugged and disappeared.

After a dash to Lambie Crump’s room that yielded a diary that showed him as having been due at the opera in London the previous night, Amiss went back to his office and began to type frantically. Ninety minutes later he delivered the leader to Phoebe Somerfield, who scanned it quickly and then smiled at him. ‘I hand it to you. It’s OK. In fact, it’s better than OK. I didn’t realize you were a writer
manqué
.’

‘I’m not, Phoebe. But I was once a civil servant and had to write about complex issues simply and quickly.’

‘Thanks, anyway,’ she said rather gruffly. ‘You got me out of a hole. I’ll be off now to the printers with Marcia, and if you see that hound Willie, spit in his eye for me, will you?’

‘I hope he’s all right. After all, he might have had an accident.’

She got up, gathered up her papers and looked squarely at Amiss. ‘Frankly, my dear,’ she said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’

Amiss went downstairs and addressed Miss Mercatroid. ‘Fatima, are there spare keys to Mr Lambie Crump’s flat?’

She peered suspiciously at him. ‘There could be.’

‘What do you mean, “There could be”?’ he asked irritably.

‘I mean it depends who’s looking for them. Mr Lambie Crump leaves me the keys to let in workmen on occasion. They’re not for anyone else.’

‘Fatima, Mr Lambie Crump has disappeared and I am fearful that he is ill in his apartment and unable to answer the telephone. Perhaps you might accompany me and we will investigate together.’

That seemed to reassure her that he was not intending to set fire to the Lambie Crump pad or scrawl graffiti all over the walls. ‘Very well, Mr Amiss. I shall give you the keys. Obviously it would be improper for me to accompany to such a place a man to whom I am not related. And even if it were, I could not do so at a time when I am required to be at prayer.’

She handed him a handsome brass key, stood up, looked at him challengingly and with impressive speed prostrated herself across the rug behind her desk. Amiss resisted the temptation to point out that since she was facing west rather than east, it was her feet that were pointing to Mecca; he left her chanting indistinctly but enthusiastically.

As he went up in the lift to the top of the house, he wished he had someone with him. If Lambie Crump was inside, presumably the best scenario was that he was dead drunk and the worst that he had died of a heart attack or been strangled by a rent boy or by some other homicidal visitor.

Amiss resisted the temptation to summon Ben or Jason: there was, after all, only a slim chance that Lambie Crump was on the premises at all. He was very relieved when this assessment proved to be right: the flat was empty of everything except the exquisite furnishings which – to Amiss’s by now trained eye – looked to have been liberated from
Wrangler
stocks. Whatever one felt about Lambie Crump, reflected Amiss, one had to admit he had excellent taste, as well as an unerring capacity for finding whatever was most agreeable in the line of the good things of life and acquiring them for himself – preferably at other people’s expense.

Of the flat’s tenant there was no sign. Everything was neat, the bed was made, there were no dishes in the sink.

Amiss wandered around the flat for a few minutes, assessing Lambie Crump’s taste in pictures (English watercolours), books (political biography, nineteenth-century novels, art and travel) and music (obscure opera). Resisting the temptation to look in the wardrobe for any signs of sartorial perversion, he headed virtuously towards the front door, pausing only to admire the view from the window of what Lambie Crump undoubtedly would refer to as his withdrawing room. Urban though the vista was, it was calculated to gladden Lambie Crump’s heart, being composed entirely of elegant Georgian houses, unpolluted by any trace of the twentieth century other than the fire escapes forced on ungrateful inhabitants by bossy bureaucrats.

It was as Amiss cast an appraising eye on the fire escape of
The Wrangler
’s building, that he saw down in the garden a flash of white in the middle of an expanse of black. As he tried to identify it, a nasty idea came into his mind. Frantically, he rushed around searching for a door out to the fire escape exit, only to find that access was via the window through which he was looking: climbing out was simple.

Amiss raced down the first flight of stairs: just before he came level with the fourth floor his foot struck violently against something thin and sharp. He was never to know to what primitive instinct he owed his survival, for, as he began to fall, he wrapped his arms around the handrail and held on grimly, thus avoiding plunging like Lambie Crump to his death a hundred feet below.

Amiss’s shock was compounded by the sight that met him, when, nauseated and in pain and still clutching the rail, he arrived swaying at the bottom of the fire escape. To his left was the body of Lambie Crump. From his battered and bloody face stared open, sightless eyes.

Although Amiss realized that since Lambie Crump was wearing a dinner jacket, it followed that he had almost certainly been in the garden for more than sixteen hours, he nerved himself nevertheless to feel his pulse: the clammy wrist yielded no sign of life.

Limping to the back door, Amiss staggered to the hall. He had just reached the reception desk when he fainted. When he came to he was lying on the floor with a cushion under his head and Miss Mercatroid dabbing at his brow with a damp handkerchief. As he struggled to sit up she forgot her maidenly modesty, put an arm around him and helped him prop himself against the wall.

‘What’s the matter with you, Mr Amiss? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I’m afraid that’s essentially what I have seen, Fatima. I’m afraid I’ve bad news. Mr Lambie Crump’s body is in the garden. Can you please be very brave and call the police and tell them that.’

With a muttered ejaculation to Allah, Miss Mercatroid followed his instructions swiftly and then rang Jason to instruct him to procure a cup of tea straightaway and bring it to reception. Within five minutes Amiss was on his feet and functioning: his right leg, though bruised and sore, needed no medical attention. Immediately, he put out calls to all the staff to come to reception, where he told them the news.

‘How could he have fallen down the stairs?’ asked Jason. ‘Unless he was pissed, that was.’

‘He was ambushed by a trip-wire. I’m afraid we have to face the fact that it’s murder. So we’re going to have to come to terms with a police investigation and all that that entails. I doubt if this will be an open-and-shut case. Can I just ask all of you to be calm and cooperative?’ Seeing tears running down Josiah Ricketts’s face, he got up and went over and put his arm around the old man. ‘Would you like to lie down for a few minutes, Mr Ricketts? I know this is very upsetting for you.’