Political Death

by Antonia Fraser

  “Somewhere a bit quieter than Gino’s. The West End is hateful on Saturday night. More in your direction perhaps. I’d love to continue our conversation about Marlowe. I could hardly hear anything last night, could you? At one point I was talking about Doctor Faustus and I suddenly realised you were talking about Edward II.” There was of course no mention of Millie Swain (who had been rather interesting on the subject of Marlowe and his female characters). And Jemima Shore, naturally, agreed to the date.

  The surprise lay in the fact that Randall had telephoned her quite late—seven o’clock—and with deep apologies postponed the date. The apologies sounded genuine (“an unexpected professional obligation”) but then Randall Birley was of course an actor. Thus it was that Jemima Shore Investigator happened to be at 27 Holland Park Mansions when Sarah Smyth telephoned her from Number Nine Hippodrome Square.

  When Jemima Shore arrived, she found Sarah Smyth’s first remark curiously bathetic. “Oh dear,” murmured Sarah, “that lovely outfit. That pink is so gorgeous with your hair. I’m afraid everything here is absolutely filthy. There’s also a lot of whitish paint about in the outer cellar, but that’s been dry for generations.” Jemima wondered if Tory training meant that you always commented graciously on people’s dress no matter what the occasion. It seemed to be Sarah’s chosen way of relieving tension.

  Jemima’s frank question (hardly surprising under the circumstances), “What on earth are you both doing here?” was met with an elliptical reply from Sarah. “You could call it a treasure-hunt. Which went wrong,” she said smoothly.

  Archie, on the other hand, chose to be slightly belligerent: “We were having a bit of fun,” he replied. Jemima thought he scarcely looked as though the word fun was appropriate. Altogether, Archie Smyth was much less gracious on the subject of his discovery and a good deal more forthright. “This thing. This skeleton. What the hell can we do about it? Sarah says we can’t just wall it up and of course she’s right as usual. But Christ, it’s nothing to do with us, Jemima. We just don’t want to be involved.”

  None of this—neither Sarah’s social manner nor Archie’s aggression—prepared Jemima for the grisly sight in the inner cellar. The three of them gathered around the hole. Then Jemima, granted Sarah’s torch, crouched by it and the twins stood behind her. The whole experience was extremely unpleasant; even the Smyths’ standing so closely behind her was not exactly reassuring. Supposing this were all a plot … Come on, Jemima, she told herself, these are Tories, not trained assassins, and even for a Labour voter there has to be some difference.

  Like Sarah Smyth, Jemima was disconcerted by the perfect shape of the skeleton. But unlike Sarah, she’d had some experience of forensics (one particular previous investigation) and knew that the corpse in question had been dead for a long, long time.

  Her torch caught the glint of something bright beside the bones. Jemima thought there were fragments of clothing there as well, dark pieces of something. “What’s that? Did you see that? It could be a clasp of a belt or even a watch.”

  Archie said, “I think I should fetch it out, whatever it is. It may be a clue.”

  Sarah Smyth issued a protest, “Archie, let’s discuss it.” But by this time her brother had half crawled, half walked into the hole, his fair hair illuminated in the beam. He picked up the object without much difficulty; it seemed to be lying to the side of the bones, which Jemima noticed he managed, delicately, to avoid touching. Archie made his way, still crouched, out of the hole. He rubbed some of the dirt off the object in his hand and held it in the direction of the torch which Sarah held. Jemima watched while Sarah shone the torch downwards. Not hidden treasure as Archie had suggested, not an old can as Sarah had thought, not a belt buckle, not a watch—but a medal.

  Jemima Shore, the former convent girl, suddenly recognised it for what it was: St. Aloysius, the patron saint of youth. The good little girls of Blessed Eleanor’s Convent belonged to the Order of St. Aloysius around the time of their First Communion, and wore medals like this on green ribbons. Whatever, if anything, had once dangled this medal was no longer attached to it. From the fact that the medal retained some brightness it was probably made of gold.

  Archie turned the medal over and Sarah shone the torch even closer. “There’s something on it, a date I think,” said Archie. He rubbed again.

  “Here Archie, let me do it. You hold the torch.” Sarah was taking charge again.

  Jemima experienced a pang of dread. Why? she wondered later. Nevertheless, dread and even a kind of fear—not for herself but for others—was what she felt at that moment. The fear was for other people, circle upon circle, circles which might reach ever further away like the rings of water in a pool when a stone is dropped in. In this case, the stone was an engraved medal.

  Perhaps it was that premonitory dread which enabled her to see, in advance of the Smyths, what the initials said.

  “F.F.,” said Jemima Shore slowly. “I can’t make out all the figures. The last two look like a three and a nine: thirty-nine. But those are definitely two Fs.” Again Jemima Shore realised far more quickly than the Smyths what those letters must inevitably mean.

  F.F.: Franklyn Faber. Easy to remember because “F.F.” was what Faber had been called by most of his friends on Jemima’s television programme about the Faber Mystery, including Laurel Cameron, the lawyer. And Faber himself had used them. Including on that last note—the suicide note?—which he had signed. F.F. for Franklyn Faber, the journalist-on-trial, missing for thirty years and now presumably found. Burgo Smyth’s friend; the man who had betrayed his trust, sold his government’s papers for publication, found in the cellar of Smyth’s ex-mistress. Jemima had a horrible feeling that they had stumbled on the solution to the Faber Mystery, and it was not going to be good news for anyone once involved and still living.

  The Smyths did not make the connection. Even Sarah seemed bemused. Archie was frankly baffled.

  Archie spoke first, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I mean the police will be able to trace him.”

  “Or her,” put in Sarah automatically.

  Archie ignored her. “Poor bugger. F.F., whoever he is. Stuck in that hole. I wonder where he died and how he died. My God, I hope he wasn’t just shoved in there and left to suffocate. F.F., who on earth could he be? Do you suppose he was murdered?”

  “Archie, enough.” Sarah’s sharp voice indicated to Jemima that she was beginning to be aware of the implications of the medal. Sarah steadied herself. “We must now all consider quite calmly and rationally how and what and above all when we tell the police.”

  “Listen, both of you.” Once more, Jemima Shore could not explain to herself afterwards why she felt this protective instinct, but she did. “The man—and I think it is a man—has been dead for a very long time. In fact he’s a skeleton, not a man. Call the police whenever you like. We’ll all make statements about what we found.”

  How to put the next bit?

  “But first of all,” she went on carefully, “first of all, I think you should tell your father.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE TWIST

  I didn’t kill him.” Burgo Smyth sounded infinitely weary. He had taken off his spectacles; his eyes could be seen to be red with exhaustion. Curiously enough, the effect of their removal was to make him look younger and more vulnerable. He rubbed his eyes and blinked several times as though unaccustomed to the light, a nocturnal animal. The dark eyes unconcealed and the lashes still much too long for a man, gave Jemima Shore a glimpse of the young man he had once been, the appealing younger man generally hidden in the carapace of the fatherly politician. It was that same appealing young man of course who had been the lover of Imogen Swain.

  Nobody spoke. Finally Burgo Smyth said, “I assume you will believe me when I say that.” He now sounded not so much exhausted as very sad.

  Jemima Shore did believe him and she was sure his children believed him. On the other hand, some niggling voice in her ear insisted on adding
, “Just as you believed Randall Birley. Successful politicians are actors too.”

  It was by now extremely late at night, or, to be accurate, it was very early on Sunday morning. The point was made by the presence of the Sunday papers—some of them, the early editions available late Saturday—lying on the Foreign Secretary’s broad desk beside his armchair. The Sunday Opinion was on the top of the pile and some of its numerous sections had been pulled out. (Since the Op had been bought by Mack McGee, it had spawned a new joke: “What’s the difference between the Op and a grapefruit? Answer: The Op has more segments.”) The section called OPTOP which contained John Barrymoor’s notorious campaigning column (notorious to politicians, that is) was clearly visible.

  On the back of OPTOP was the equally notorious Mousehole column signed Catwatchman. The Mousehole was supposed to be social comment, whatever that might mean. It actually contained a lot of peculiarly vicious gossip, vicious because it was generally true. The Mousehole was an ancient institution in column terms; Franklyn Faber had started life on it before graduating to his own column. It was fashionable to say that the Mousehole had gone downhill (or wherever a hole went). Jemima privately wondered whether it had ever been quite the force for good that people nostalgically remembered.

  Jemima thought Burgo Smyth must have been reading OPTOP when they arrived. She remembered Cherry’s hint on Friday over the mobile phone and wondered what the Mousehole and/or John Barrymoor were discussing. This was hardly likely to have been Burgo Smyth’s night: Sunday was not likely to be his day either.

  A bizarre event as the Smyths and Jemima left Number Nine Hippodrome Square had reminded her all over again of the tangled mystery of Imogen Swain’s death. Jemima had looked with a shudder into the basement area where Lady Imogen had fallen. Sarah Smyth, whether because she was still so shaken by recent events or out of genuine indifference, followed the direction of her gaze without visible emotion.

  “That’s where she died,” she said, quite casually. At that moment two enormous fat black-and-white cats emerged out of the area where they had been lurking. One started to mew, the other purred raucously as it rubbed itself against Jemima’s legs. The purring cat then transferred its attentions to Sarah Smyth, who immediately lost her air of indifference and delivered what looked like a very sharp kick.

  “Get away. I hate cats,” she added, slightly unnecessarily in Jemima’s opinion. Joy or Jasmine? Which one had been unwise enough to desert cat-lover Jemima Shore for fastidious Sarah Smyth? Jemima recognised Imogen Swain’s “girls”—those wandering cats named, as she recalled, for Lady Imogen’s favourite scents, and disliked by her daughters with the same virulence as Sarah Smyth had shown. Jemima thought that she would at least establish one thing about the situation if only to satisfy her own curiosity.

  “You came here, didn’t you, Sarah, that night?”

  “Naturally. We met you that night—”

  “No, the night of her death. It was you who let out the cat, one of the cats.”

  Jemima was interrupted by another plaintive cry, this time it was human.

  “Girlies, girlies, where are you, girlies? Joysie and Jassie, Joysee …” Mrs. Humphreys, the next-door neighbour, had somehow got saddled with Joy and Jasmine, probably for life. Better with her than with either Swain, let alone with either Smyth; the latter pair, she was convinced, never looked at any animal smaller than a labrador. Jemima was relieved that the vague notion she’d had of taking on “the girls”—the cat-lovers’ equivalent of adopting orphan children featured in the newspapers—had proved unnecessary; it would have horrified the existing animal incumbent of Holland Park Mansions, the princely Midnight.

  Shock had made Sarah much less guarded: for once she did not give Jemima the benefit of her frank I-am-about-to-deceive-you politician’s smile.

  “It’s true. I was supposed to collect the letters. Dad’s letters. It was all set up. We had to do something. All those calls she was making. Including to our mother who went on the binge. If only … no point in saying that now. But when I came around exactly as arranged, they were gone. She was drunk and dotty and kept telling me that I’d already taken them. Then she cried, howled really, told me things about my father that I really did not want to know, intimate things which, true or untrue, no daughter should know about her father.” Remembering Lady Imogen’s style of revelation, Jemima believed Sarah.

  Sarah Smyth went on, “Then she talked about her ghastly daughters and how they were so cruel to her and how they were going to throw her out of the house. Take her house away from her, then put her in a home. And so on. All most unedifying. At least drink makes our poor mother paralytic. She never speaks at all.”

  Not one but two drunken women in the life of Burgo Smyth; did he deserve that? Her original question returned to her: how much of it was his responsibility? In the sense that he left a trail of destruction behind him, while he, Burgo Smyth, went on to have a brilliant career. On the other hand, it was more than possible that the women themselves chose the path of self-destruction. Women did, people did.

  Jemima said: “Did Lady Imogen tell you she was going to leave the house to your father?” They were walking towards Archie’s car, a Porsche. Well, it would be.

  “Of course she didn’t,” Archie broke in. “Otherwise Sarah would have damn well put a stop to it. At source.”

  That was another curious phrase, thought Jemima. What exactly did “at source” mean? She now knew for certain what she had for some time suspected, that Sarah Smyth had been the last person to see Lady Imogen alive before she went to her death over the nursery balcony: unless, that is, there had been some further person present in the house, still later that night, who had assisted Imogen Swain to her lethal fall. There was, let’s face it, a third grisly possibility: that Sarah Smyth had done the assisting, in order to “put a stop to it,” in Archie’s phrase. She may well have wished to put a stop to the tide of political gossip which was beginning to swell around her father’s name, thanks to Imogen Swain’s periodic damaging telephone calls. Sarah Smyth was a determined, strongly motivated woman. But a killer?

  Then there was Archie Smyth, It was no doubt reversely sexist to regard the man of a couple as a more likely killer than the woman. Jemima in her investigations had had experience of female as well as male murderers. Nevertheless, it was a primitive response to cast suspicion on Archie as the perpetrator of the deed (if there had been a perpetrator; if there had been a deed). Of course she had no proof that Archie had been present. Sarah’s admission of her presence had come about as a result of Jemima’s guesswork. The most damning aspect of the whole affair (from Sarah Smyth’s point of view) was that Sarah had not reported her late-night visit to the house to anyone. But you could argue that meant genuine innocence, plus a natural wish for non-involvement in something potentially scandalous.

  Non-involvement! Every politician’s dream—to be untouched by scandal and present an immaculate family-man (or woman) face to the electorate. The theory was that this unspotted personal reputation was essential, otherwise the electors would rise up in indignation and cast whoever it was into the outer darkness. As a result, again and again politicians marched to their doom with personal behaviour in striking contrast to their pious public sentiments. Looked at from another angle, of course, such behaviour simply proved that they were human like everyone else.

  Currently, Burgo Smyth bid fair to be in that long line of politicians marching to their doom. Originally Jemima had felt sympathetic to him on the subject of the ancient sexual scandal being resurrected. Now she wondered. Old scandals were one thing, old murders were quite another: for peccadillo read crime. Her mind leaping ahead, Jemima wondered why on earth Burgo Smyth would have wanted to kill Franklyn Faber. Surely the damage—considerable—had been done by the trial before Faber died?

  “We’re there,” said Sarah Smyth. “Archie, park the car discreetly, will you?”

  The Foreign Secretary’s residence in Carlton House Terrace
was curiously impersonal, although Burgo Smyth must have occupied it for long enough. Perhaps it was the lack of a woman’s touch, pondered Jemima. She gazed at the Foreign Secretary, admiring quite dispassionately the image he projected of dignity based on integrity. Presumably this image was about to be shattered.

  “I didn’t kill him,” repeated Burgo Smyth, rubbing his naked eyes once more. “But, yes, that is Franklyn Faber. What remains of him—and just at present, please don’t tell me. I’ll save you the bother of wondering, is it? is it not? Too late for that, or it will be shortly. Yes, it is Franklyn Faber. You have there the solution to the Faber Mystery.” Smyth managed an ironic smile in the direction of Jemima Shore: “You must wish that this grisly discovery had taken place before you did your programme.”

  The smile faded. “I didn’t kill him, but yes, I did know he was dead. That’s my crime. And it was a crime, of course, concealment of a death, a body. I knew quite enough about the law to know that. Even then. And since then,” the faint, ironic smile returned, “I’ve even had a stint, a short stint, as Home Secretary.”

  “Dad, I can’t believe I’m hearing this!” exclaimed Sarah. She looked white with shock; her strong hands, whose large size was at variance with her general trimness, were clenched together. “You mean you knew what had happened to him, you knew all along.” Jemima, who had recently looked up Sarah’s biographical details, remembered that she had studied law, and had been an aspiring barrister before she got into Parliament. Even though company law was her special interest, as Jemima recalled it, Sarah would still appreciate all too keenly the legal consequences of what her father had done.

  “It was an accident, and an accident at which I wasn’t present.” Burgo Smyth was now speaking with his habitual authority. “This is not the moment for further details, although they will certainly come, have to come. All you need to know for the present is that it was an accident. Frank came secretly to her house—the house, the house you have just left. There was an accident; he fell; he tripped, fell down that staircase to the cellar on his way to fetch some drink. She called me. I did it, she and I did it, together we hid the body. That’s all you need to know.”