Publish and Be Murdered (22 page)

‘But would it not have been of benefit to you, Mr Winterton, to have had him elevated to such a position? Wouldn’t he have been compromised as editor and have had to leave the paper?’

‘I don’t know that he would, Mr Milton. From what Henry Potbury told me about his fellow trustees, Lambie Crump would have been allowed to stay on even if he had become the Prime Minister’s official catamite. Anyway, I didn’t care. I just wanted to spike his chances of becoming Lord Arselicker of NewLab the way he spiked my articles.’

Tewkesbury looked even more disapproving. Milton tried not to show how much he was beginning to like Winterton.

20

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‘I wish I could kill off Tewkesbury’s obsession with ideological motives once and for all. I’ve made some progress. He’s given up on Phoebe Somerfield as a suspect on that front and has been pretty shaken on Winterton since he discovered he was doing well screwing Crump up by other means, but now he’s clinging to the notion of Professor Webber as prime ideological suspect and we’re going to Oxford to see him tomorrow.’

Amiss grinned. ‘Make sure you neglect no opportunity to get them talking to each other.’

‘Sounds promising. I’ll do what I can.’

Milton looked up from his file as Tewkesbury drove into North Oxford. ‘Tell me, Sergeant, I know you don’t like Webber for political reasons, but do you dislike him personally?’

‘I never met him, but I didn’t like what I heard about him in Oxford. Mad as well as reactionary, I understand.’

‘Still, it helps that you know something of him. And after all, it’s a bond that he teaches at your alma mater. Feel free to join in the interview.’

The car pulled up outside a large villa and the two policemen got out. Milton looked with some distaste at his colleague, who had taken to applying gel to his expensively coiffed hair, which was brown, with artful blond streaks. It was not, he realized, as they opened the gate, that he cared about the gel, the dye, the haircut or the money – just that since he couldn’t stand Tewkesbury, everything about him was irritating.

A large and portly man with small, green staring eyes greeted them impatiently at the door of his North Oxford villa and led them briskly into a large study. ‘Now, what do you want to know?’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve only an hour.’

‘I hope that will be ample time, Professor Webber. May I introduce Sergeant Tewkesbury, who remembers you from his Oxford days.’

Webber looked positively pleasant. ‘You were a student of mine?’

‘No, Professor Webber,’ said Tewkesbury. ‘I read English.’

Webber’s face darkened. ‘Good God, what an absolute waste of your time and the taxpayers’ money. They’re a collection of Marxists, pseuds, mad feminists, halfwits, crazed structuralists and neo- and post- this and that who have nothing in common except that they’re all wankers. You’ll have emerged from Oxford more ignorant and stupid than when you arrived. Why didn’t you have the sense to take a real subject, like classics – or, of course, philosophy? I would have stretched a point to include history until it was taken over by that shower of dreary and pretentious – ’

Pleased though he was to see Tewkesbury looking both aggrieved and embarrassed, duty required Milton to interrupt. ‘Professor Webber, you’re a busy man. Could we perhaps get down to business?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘We’d be grateful for your view on why anyone would have wanted to murder Mr Lambie Crump, or – as is also possible – Mr Potbury.’

‘Henry I can’t help you on – in his professional life, that is. I imagine there may well have been people who were fed up with his drunkenness and philandering, but all those of us connected with
The Wrangler
liked Henry Potbury. He’d a good mind and was an honest man. But as for that little creep Lambie Crump.’ Webber began to turn puce. He clenched his fists and waved them wildly over his head. ‘By the time he died, I would think that at least’ – he paused and began to count on his fingers – ‘ one, two, three, four, five of us would have been prepared to contemplate doing him in. And I can tell you that I would have had no difficulty in justifying his murder to my ethics group.’

‘The five were?’

‘Winterton, Phoebe Somerfield, Amaryllis Vercoe, me and probably Amiss.’

Tewkesbury broke in excitedly. ‘Do you mean, Professor Webber, that you can see an ideological reason for Robert Amiss to have wanted Lambie Crump out of the way?’

Webber looked at him in bewilderment. ‘Ideological? Pull yourself together, you stupid boy. What are you talking about? What’s ideology got to do with it?’

Tewkesbury began to stammer slightly. ‘It’s j-j-just that I’ve noticed a discrepancy here. Now, you admit that it was ideology that was at the root of the disagreements you and your colleagues had with Lambie Crump. Yet Amiss has always denied feeling sufficiently angry about the change in
The Wrangler
’s political line for it to constitute a motive for murder.’

Webber bounced angrily in his chair. ‘What a load of claptrap.’ He looked at Milton. ‘What sort of morons are you taking into the police force these days? I don’t know what world this person is living in. But what can you expect when he read English under that crowd of addle-pated, venal fools who jabber platitudes and think that to use obscure terminology and peddle tenth-rate ideas makes you an intellectual?’ He glared at Tewkesbury like an enraged lizard. ‘Ideology my arse. This is England, not fucking Cambodia. We don’t kill each other over ideology. At
The Wrangler
, ideological arguments are our intellectual bread and butter – our
raison d’être
. It’s called debate. Something you wouldn’t understand, coming from an environment where they all vie with each other to impose their own pet orthodoxy: mediocre minds hate dissent.’

‘Really, Professor Webber, you’re being very unfair. There are many fine minds in the English faculty.’

‘What would you know about fine minds, Sergeant Trendy?’

A wave of compassion hit Milton. In a gentle voice, he addressed the heavily breathing philosopher. ‘Professor, I wonder could you kindly tell us more about why you and your colleagues so much disliked Lambie Crump?’

Webber stopped glaring at Tewkesbury. As he looked at Milton, the mad look went out of his eyes. ‘Like Henry Potbury, we had all come to abominate Lambie Crump because he was such a self-seeking little shit. What made us feel murderous was knowing that he was a double-dyed hypocrite who had paid lip service to the
The Wrangler
’s historic position when it suited him and then shifted his position to support what passes for thinking in New Labour. That’s not to do with ideology, Sergeant Numbskull,’ he observed, turning to glare again at Tewkesbury. ‘It’s to do with principle. One had the urge to stand on him as one would on a poisonous toad.’

‘Whatever you call it,’ said Tewkesbury gamely, ‘it’s a motive for murder.’

‘Good God, have you not even a vestige of a brain? One thing you have to understand about the Right is that it has a sense of history. The English Right, that is – I’m not talking about European fascists or American fundamentalists and, of course, Celts are too obsessed by nationalism to have any real understanding of Left and Right. The English Right know that our time will come around again: our enemies will be routed in due course.’

He turned to Milton. ‘I was contemplating resigning from
The Wrangler
because Lambie Crump was using me less and less. I would have hawked myself elsewhere. I would be surprised if my colleagues hadn’t been thinking the same way.’

He turned on Tewkesbury again. ‘Dwight, Amaryllis, Phoebe and Robert are pragmatists. They would have stayed or gone as it suited them.’

‘So you cannot see any of them actually standing on the poisonous toad?’ asked Milton.

‘I could imagine any one of us having the impulse to assault Willie by breaking over his head the portrait of our founder, but I couldn’t see any of us acting against him in cold blood. And from what I understand, the method of murdering him was cold-blooded.’

‘How did you feel about Sharon McGregor’s interest in buying
The Wrangler
?’

‘Obviously, I hoped it wouldn’t happen, but if it had, I could have lived with it. As I was trying to get through to your absurd sergeant, people of my political persuasion are better at accepting that one can’t win all the time than are the sort of people he surely supports.
The Wrangler
was going to pot and that maddened me. If McGregor buys it and ruins it, I’ll be madder. But it won’t blight my life. And besides, McGregor won’t necessarily ruin it. Some colonials respect our traditions.’

‘But you know that there was some bad blood over the proposals to modify the terms to the trust, don’t you?’

‘All I knew was what Henry told me at the party and I’ve heard nothing new since then.’ The mad look came back into his eyes. ‘For Christ’s sake, whatever-your-name-is, can’t you understand that I’m busy. I teach, I write, I sit on stupid committees with stupid people. Journalism is an extra and I don’t give a fuck about office politics.’

The door opened and a small, harassed-looking woman arrived carrying a tray with a pot of coffee, a milk jug and a mug. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Clement,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realized you had people with you.’

She turned to the policemen. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘No, they wouldn’t,’ said Webber. ‘They’re just going.’

Milton kept his temper and stood up. ‘Thank you, Mrs Webber, but we’re fine. Professor Webber, we will not go until we have checked out your alibi for the twenty-four hours before Lambie Crump died.’

‘I’ve already given it to one of your stupid people.’

Milton looked him straight in his little lizard eyes. ‘Professor Webber. I suggest you cooperate.’

Webber glared. Then his eyes dropped. ‘I went to a dinner, came home and didn’t leave Oxford that night or the following day.’

‘You gave my colleagues details of engagements during that day which proved that you were tied to Oxford, but in theory you have no alibi after eleven p.m.’ He bowed to Mrs Webber. ‘I know you told the police that your husband was at home all night, but were you not asleep for much of that time?’

‘Not for much of it,’ she said, in an unexpectedly tart tone.

‘You’re a bad sleeper?’

‘Only when I’m obliged to be. But on this occasion I can certainly give Clement an alibi.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Webber. ‘Stop pussy-footing and give them the full story.’

‘Clement came home from the senior philosophers’ dinner assisted by two friends. At my request, they deposited him upstairs on our bed, where he remained until perhaps eight o’clock the following morning, snoring loudly. That’s why I didn’t sleep and he has an alibi. And in any case, he couldn’t have got down our stairs without falling, let alone have driven to London and climbed up Lambie Crump’s.’

For the first time, Webber smiled. ‘And I can’t remember a thing. But I can give you the names of the people who took me home.’

Milton saw the expression on Tewkesbury’s face and sympathized with his disappointment.

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Dwight Winterton’s ‘The Triumph of Humbug’, which savagely attacked the new and cynical debasement of language on both sides of the Atlantic, amused Amiss greatly. Men had followed women in adopting meaningless rhetoric of the ‘outreaching’, ‘inclusive’, and ‘feeling-and-sharing-each-other’s-pain’ variety and using it shamelessly to cover shallowness, arrogance and vainglorious ambition. The major casualty was truth.

Amiss had been rather perturbed to find that the male minister whom Winterton had singled out as – if anything – worse than the Prime Minister, was the junior Foreign Office minister for whom Rachel worked. ‘Does it absolutely have to be Eric Sinclair that you produce as the prime example of bullshit?’ he asked Winterton.

‘Why shouldn’t it be? He’s the worst.’

‘It’s just slightly difficult for personal reasons into which I cannot go.’

‘But, Robert, you can’t ask me to find a stand-in for a man who talks of the importance of the peoples of all nations sharing in joy the tapestry of their multicultural experience, can you? Especially when he’s trying to cover up the fact that they’re carrying out the policy of the previous government when it comes to arms sales.’

‘Um,’ said Amiss.

Winterton seized the typescript from him. ‘Come on, Robert. What about, “We offer a vision where all will give and none will take and Britain’s moral leadership as an ethical touchstone will be hailed as a star in a black sky?” You can’t ask me to leave that out, can you?’ His face crumpled suddenly into dejection. ‘But of course you can. You’re the editor.’

‘Oh, never mind,’ sighed Amiss. ‘OK, Dwight. I promise I won’t change a word. I’ll deal with my personal problem as best I can.’

He evaded the issue all evening, pleased that Rachel was in good form, bubbling with excitement about her forthcoming trip to South-East Asia where her minister would be speaking at a conference on International Law about New Britain’s approach to human rights. Normally Amiss would have queried whether the best way to win over the representatives of ancient civilizations with problems and priorities different from our own was to send them political neophytes to lecture them on how to run their countries, but tonight he was treading carefully.

‘Just one thing, Rach,’ he said at the end of the conversation.

‘Yes?’

He wriggled back into his chair. ‘There’s something I have to warn you about.’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s going to be an article in
The Wrangler
this week that I’m afraid you won’t like. I’m really sorry if it upsets you, but I’m afraid there was nothing I could do about it.’

‘I don’t like
The Wrangler
– period.’