Political Death

by Antonia Fraser

  Altogether the stalker felt sick once the deed was done, sick with revulsion at what had happened, sick with anger at what Hattie had made necessary. All sounds died away. Only far away, somewhere far below, something caused a door to swing. It was time for the stalker, mission accomplished, to depart.

  In another dark place, there was another intrusion, not long after Hattie Vickers fell to her protracted fate (she was still breathing but lay unconscious, huddled between two seats in the stalls). The searcher in Number Nine Hippodrome Square, unlike the stalker in the Irving Theatre, had plenty of time to work carefully and methodically. The main problem the searcher had to face was dust.

  The searcher, like the stalker, was wearing gloves. This was a treasure-hunt, wasn’t it? The searcher decided to begin on the bedroom floor, which was the most likely place for the search to succeed. The nursery floor would come later. Determinationlind proper method would prevent any flinching from that room, the room from which Imogen Swain had fallen to her death that windy night. In any case it was not necessary, even rather dangerous, to open the balcony doors. Method, thoroughness, these were the aims to pursue. The searcher had a torch cased in black rubber with a single strong focused beam which should be sufficient to carry out most of the task.

  The dirt was no less on the second floor and in the large front room which had once been Imogen Swain’s bedroom. Oddly enough, this was the only room which contained some element that caused the searcher to hesitate on its threshold. The door was apparently shut. After a moment, the searcher grasped the door-knob firmly in a gloved hand. The knob came off. This gave the searcher a certain grim amusement: how typical! Now how to proceed? In fact, the door had not been properly closed, so the searcher had merely to push it open.

  The beam illuminated the faded and tattered hangings of an enormous bed, an impression of peach-coloured taffeta, or what had once been peach-coloured taffeta. There were no bedclothes; just a vast heap of folded pink blankets and a pinkish satin eiderdown. Pink was, or had been, the predominant theme of the room. Even the walls had pinkish material on them and on the organdie covering of the wide dressing-table, now distinctly grey, some bedraggled pink bows could still be seen.

  There were no photographs on the dressing-table, no trinkets, nothing except a set of glass boxes with silver tops (IMS engraved there and everywhere) and silver brushes. The torch raked on. It stopped abruptly on a little clock, so small as to be hardly visible in the beam. The searcher took a step forward, then stopped. This was no time for sentiment. The cupboards must be systematically searched and whatever lay behind them, if anything did, examined.

  What did lie behind the cupboard doors with their painted fragments of ribbon and roses was a complete woman’s wardrobe. The searcher felt rather than saw the jackets and little skirts (how tiny she had been!) and recoiled suddenly from the jab of a hat pin in a straw hat tangled in veiling. Something else soft and hairy was also repugnant: the searcher realised it was an ancient hank of false hair. Ugh! The smell of scent, stale and rather sweet, haunted the searcher: every now and then an empty scent bottle was disturbed lying among the underclothes so silky to the touch. One rattled to the floor. The searcher shone the torch on the glass bottle and saw the words: Joy and Jean Patou. The sight checked the searcher much as the glimpse of the little clock had done.

  There was another faint smell, pungent, not so sweet, beneath the aroma of perfume. The searcher identified it: cat. The contrast of the two smells, one expensive and cloying, the other rank and feral, summed up the unpleasant double aspect of this deserted house. But the search had to go forward. Too much was at stake for it to be abandoned now.

  At that moment a loud noise, more like a shout perhaps than the scream which poor Hattie Vickers had uttered, came from below, somewhere in the bowels of the house. The searcher stiffened and put out the torch. The thump of footsteps followed—heavy, vast, coming up the stairs. Sooner or later they would reach the bedroom on the second floor. The searcher’s grip on the torch tightened. The searcher illuminated the doorway as the second searcher stood there, panting.

  “Oh Christ, it’s so ghastly. I’ve found something, something horrible.” The second searcher sounded hysterical. “Listen. I’ve found a lot of bones there, down in the cellar, the inner cellar beyond. There’s a skull. I think it’s a skeleton. Oh God, help me. God help us.”

  It was at about this moment that Hattie Vickers, in another dark place, slipped quietly into death.

  CHAPTER 10

  SLEEPING SKELETON

  We should call the police. Scotland Yard, top people anyway.” Sarah Smyth flicked distastefully at the rubber gloves she had used to search Number Nine Hippodrome Square. She added in her coolest voice, “I suppose that’s the right thing to do.”

  “I need a drink,” said Archie Smyth. His fair hair was tousled, his face smudged with dirt. He was wearing jeans with a black polo neck sweater; in the torchlight he looked very young indeed. Sarah, her combination of an immaculate coiffure, two rows of pearls and a designer track suit giving her a curiously middle-aged look, might almost have been his mother. “Jesus, what a nightmare. It was like being in the Ghost Train at the fun fair when the skeleton rushes out at you and you scream.”

  “You certainly screamed. What a ghastly treasure-hunt! Not a good idea, as it turned out.” Sarah touched Archie’s arm. “Come on, Boy, brace up, where is our gallant paratrooper now?” She was referring to her brother’s stint in the army after Sarah had sailed effortlessly into Oxford, from a girls’ school not renowned for its educational possibilities. Archie Smyth, from Eton, was declared “not university material.” “I’ll find something for you to drink. There’s bound to be something to drink in this house of all places. Although for obvious reasons, I wouldn’t fancy anything in this cellar. Must all have lain here for years, including that. Quite ghastly, isn’t it? The rest of the house, I mean. The way it’s all so untouched makes it worse. And the most terrible cracks everywhere. Subsidence.

  “And do you know, Archie,” Sarah hesitated, “she had a little clock just like Mum’s. I noticed it before when we went into the house the first time, after her death. Before that, I was never upstairs. And she used the same scent.”

  “Mum? She’s not exactly into scent, is she?”

  “Joy. I remember how delicious she smelt if you don’t. Dad used to give her huge guilty bottles for Christmas, and now we know he was giving it to his girlfriend at the same time.”

  “What a bastard!” Archie was pleased to find he sounded quite flippant. He stretched out his hand. It had stopped shaking.

  “A practical bastard,” said Sarah dryly. The Smyths were standing close together in the first big cellar at the bottom of the steep staircase from the ground floor of Number Nine Hippodrome Square. There were various old trunks there. One of them, which looked like an ancient school trunk, had the words IMOGEN CORY 113 painted on it, and the lid was open. There were also some packing cases stuffed with crumbled yellow newspaper, and more paper on the floor.

  There was no window in the cellar; it was blocked up entirely from the basement area outside. Sarah propped her torch next to Archie’s on a suitcase (once pale or even white leather, initials I.M.S.). She shone her torch on a fragment of the newspaper which looked to her to date from the thirties, but the date was 1958. Otherwise the main contents of the cellar were tins of paint with the lids lying beside them, and a good deal of white paint was sloshed in random fashion in solid pools on the floor and on the walls.

  “We’ve got to think about all this, Girl.” Archie, like Sarah, was using the private, half-mocking nickname of their youth when the grown-ups had endlessly introduced them with the words, “Archie-is-the-Boy and Sarah-is-the-Girl.” Generally speaking, the names had fallen into disuse and Archie, in particular, disliked being called Boy by Sarah; at this moment, however, their use indicated not so much mockery as sibling loyalty. “After all, we’re hardly responsible.”

  “No,
of course we’re not responsible. That doesn’t mean we can just walk away.”

  “For God’s sake, why not? We didn’t put it—him—there. We can just shut the door up again and quit. Those bloody letters certainly aren’t down here, that’s for sure.”

  “Him, why do you say him?” asked Sarah sharply. “Do you know it’s a man?”

  “Of course I don’t know whether it’s a man or not, do you think I did a quick forensic examination? I let out a fucking scream, didn’t I? It may be the skeleton of a she-bear, one of the last she-bears in London, for all I know.”

  “I wish I knew what to do—” Archie found Sarah’s admission touching because it was so rare. He gave her a hug.

  “Come on, Girl, where is our gallant Amazon now?” This was a return dig about a recent Jak cartoon showing a bunch of Tory Amazons, including Sarah Smyth, with flowered hats instead of helmets.

  “We’ve got to protect Dad. That’s the first thing and the last thing. That’s why we were here in the first place, to get rid of all the embarrassing traces. Secretly and silently. No questions asked. Those daughters, Millie Swain, with her ridiculous oh-so-trendy, left-wing views, I simply don’t trust her. Extremely evasive about all that. Dreadfully keen to get the house back, but ‘we’ll be back to you about the letters.’ We had to take independent action. As for Olga Carter-Fox, so meek in public, there’s something sly about her, I always think; one of those maddening wives who secretly thinks she’d be a much better MP than her husband.”

  “In the case of Mrs. Carthorse, who’s to say she is wrong? But Girl, Sarah, since it was Randall tipped you the wink about all that, weren’t you going to see him tonight? Before you came here?”

  “Oh that didn’t work out,” said Sarah quickly.

  “Was he off with the trendy left-wing girlfriend?”

  “No he was not!” Then Sarah carefully lowered her tone. “Let’s leave Randall out of it, shall we? I’m one woman he doesn’t manipulate.”

  Archie looked at her and said nothing.

  “It’s true. He respects my strength. We’re a partnership. Always have been, since we were little, you remember that.”

  “I remember that you were going to get married to him when you grew up. What happened to that?”

  “Who says anything happened to it? I’d be a damn sight better wife for Randall than—” Sarah stopped. “Shall we drop the subject? This is hardly the time and place. Let’s concentrate on the papers.

  “Yes, Randall did tell me that Millie Swain had deposited some family things in the theatre, but for some reason he knows that they were moved back.” Sarah took a deep breath. “Archie, I’d better have a look for myself. At it. At him. Your bear’s skeleton. And—we can hardly walk away, since you broke down the door or what remained of it. Fingerprints and all that. Besides, there is something called responsibility. I am a Member of Parliament, don’t forget.”

  “You were a Member of Parliament. Currently, we’re both candidates.” But Archie only muttered the words as Sarah was making her way purposefully towards the concealed entrance to the inmost cellar. With her torch in her hand, she reminded Archie irresistibly of the Jak cartoon; it was not a thought he could share with her. He followed his sister.

  They looked, with their two torches, Sarah’s slightly shaky, into an extremely dark and low recess. It might be low, it was also extremely deep. Once upon a time it must have been virtually impossible to detect the existence of this inner space. There were already two outer cellars leading off each other. The second of these contained numerous pieces of collapsed wood and some more stable metal stands: old wine racks which were now virtually empty. Two Coca-Cola bottles did incongruously adorn the lowest rack, one with its top still on, the other broken and on its side. There were other bottles, a few, black and very dusty and something else broken which looked as if it had once been a bottle of Gordons gin. Apart from the incongruous Coca-Cola bottles, the cellar might not have been used for generations.

  It was the decay of time rather than Archie Smyth’s detective instinct which had led him to the discovery of the inner aperture. (Sarah was secretly infuriated by Archie’s boyish curiosity, the curiosity which had led him to penetrate the inner depths of the cellar. How typical of Archie! There was no question of the vital things being down here. Always such a Boy’s Own Adventurer, and now look what he had got them into—and Dad. She did not however share this thought with her brother any more than he had revealed his secret amusement at her Amazonian posture.) When the racks were full, and pulled against the inner door, it must have been invisible even to people looking for something. Outsiders would never have noticed it.

  The weird thing to Sarah was that the skeleton was so markedly visible for what it was. It could have been something that medical students studied. How long would it take to reduce a human being to bones? She had no idea. She shuddered. Her anger with Archie faded and was replaced by an even greater worry.

  “Oh Archie,” thought Sarah as she looked into the aperture, “why couldn’t you have let sleeping skeletons lie?” What she said aloud was: “The Home Office. The Home Secretary. That’s who we should call. She’ll direct us to the right person, the right person in the police that is, if we need to call the police.”

  “That woman! HG’s stupidest appointment. She’d faint if she saw a skeleton: I’d almost rather talk to Helen Macdonald.”

  “You may yet find yourself doing just that,” replied Sarah coldly. “If we lose the election. Sandra Makin is a fine person, and even if she weren’t, the appointment is extremely popular in the country, calling for stiffer penalties while she wipes a tear from the corner of her eye with a delicate lace hanky. Furthermore, she’s crazy about Dad.”

  But it was Archie, gazing now quite coldly at the mass of bones, including a skull, in front of him, who came up with the interim solution.

  “Why don’t we call her? No, not her, old Mother Makin. Call Jemima Shore. Get her advice.” Archie bent forward.

  “Don’t touch anything, Archie, for God’s sake don’t touch anything more.”

  Archie shone the torch deeply into the hole. “There’s something there, Girl, glinting. Gold coins, hidden treasure! I’m going to get it.”

  “You are not.” Sarah put her hand firmly on her twin’s arm. “Yes, I do see the glint, something glinting. It may simply be an old can. All the more reason for us not to touch it. We need a witness. O.K., let’s call Jemima Shore Investigator. She’s supposed to be helping us. The telephone still works upstairs. I lifted the receiver in that morgue of a drawing-room.”

  “What do television people do on Saturday night?” murmured Archie dubiously.

  “Watch television, I suppose. What else have they got to do? Other than criticise politicians for what they can’t do themselves. She’ll be watching television.” It was fortunate for the future of the Smyths’ relationship with Jemima Shore Investigator that she could not overhear this snatch of dialogue: fortunate because it happened to be true. Jemima Shore was indeed in Holland Park Mansions watching television (CNN, the end of an enjoyable black-and-white thirties film on television which she switched on too late, and after that a good deal of disconsolate channel-hopping as, contrary to Sarah’s supposition, she tried to avoid all mention of politics). But it had not been how she had expected her evening to turn out.

  Tea with the Carter-Fox family, drinks with the Smyths, had been in the line of duty. That is, her duty to the investigation which continued to confuse and fascinate her had led her to both places. In one sense all this had begun with the single Diary which had ended up in her possession. But in another, truer sense Jemima recognised that it was her original unease concerning Imogen Swain’s death which was driving her on. She felt instinctively—had felt instinctively from the beginning—that there was something wrong about it. So finally her habitual curiosity, fuelled by this special unease, was responsible.

  Duty was one thing and Jemima Shore had a strong sense of duty. Pleas
ure was another thing altogether, and Jemima had a strong sense of pleasure. She did not see that the two things contradicted each other. Which is where Randall Birley came in. Correction, which is where Randall Birley should have come in. That supper at Gino’s after her Friday night at the theatre: she’d known that Randall had been attracted to her. But then he’d made such an open flowery declaration of his passion that she could hardly have been unaware of it.

  “Oh yes, he’s really mad about you. He always watches you on the box,” confirmed that little girl, the distressed, curly-haired ASM, sitting like an adoring groupie at the end of the table. (Jemima did notice that in the general reckoning up of the bill, always an interesting occasion on which to observe social nuance, Randall paid for Hattie Vickers with a genial wave, “No, Hat, I’ll treat you.”) His attention to Jemima was flattering and light-hearted, but what made Jemima suspect that the attraction was real (however temporary) was the behaviour of Millie Swain. She was too charming by half. While at Cambridge, Jemima had been involved with a professional heartbreaker and she remembered all too clearly her desperate use of the same technique. But this was not the point. The point was that Jemima in her turn, if she were honest, was fiercely attracted to Randall Birley.

  “Oh Ned,” she thought, “this is your fault. You should have come back. We should have gone to Dorset.” But Ned had not come back; he had become a man linked to her only by a number of passionate faxes. Marilyn Monroe was supposed to have said that you couldn’t curl up with a career on a cold winter’s night and the same might be said of faxes. Thus Randall Birley’s call on Saturday morning was not unwelcome. Nor was it a total surprise. Nor was his casual suggestion all that surprising either: that they might have supper again after the second house.