Political Death

by Antonia Fraser

  Jemima raised the subject with Olga Carter-Fox. Olga declared herself as being frantic in her house between bouts of canvassing and caring for Elfi (her au pair had chosen this precise moment to leave for a better-paid job looking after one of Elfi’s friends, contacted via the school pick-up). But she was agreeable to signing a paper allowing Jemima to take charge of her mother’s Diaries, saying firmly that she, not Millie, had been named as executrix of her mother’s will. “I always end up doing that kind of thing,” she remarked in her deep voice, signing her name in a diminutive, repressed script.

  Jemima mentally contrasted it with the handwritten fax she had received from Sarah Smyth, in answer to one of hers, hoping that her entry into Hippodrome Square, escorted by the police, would not be felt to conflict “with any interest of your family.” Even in haste—and as a candidate Sarah Smyth had every reason to be frantic at such a time—Sarah Smyth’s writing was beautifully flowing and completely legible. She declared herself well satisfied on behalf of her family with anything Jemima might choose to do in the house, without committing herself to any precise involvement: a politician’s letter.

  On the telephone Sarah said to Jemima in a voice without emotion, “I feel completely drained on this subject, you know. I’ve failed Dad or he’s failed me. A bit of both. For the time being, I’m just trying to hold my seat. The horror will come later. For now, do what you like.”

  Jemima did not speak to Archie, but she did speculate what his handwriting would be like. Could he write? But these were prejudiced thoughts … then she saw that Archie Smyth had signed the fax beneath his sister’s signature. But his handwriting was so small, smaller even than Olga’s, that she had not noticed: A.B. Smyth, she read.

  “Don’t you hate him? Burgo Smyth?” Jemima couldn’t resist asking Olga. She had a feeling that Olga wanted to prolong the interview a little longer, if not on this precise subject. But Burgo’s broadcast had been the subject of polite chit-chat when they first arrived, part of the course of this unpredictable election.

  “As a politician I admire him,” replied Olga carefully, in her MP’s wife voice. Then she added in quite a different tone, “As a man, I hate him. Or rather I hated him as a child.”

  “Who?” asked Elfi. “What child? Hate is horrid. I’m not allowed to say hate.” Her large soulful eyes, so like those of her grandmother Imogen Swain, gleamed with pleasure.

  “How can you admire him as a politician—now?”

  “Who?” Elfi’s voice was rising. Jemima, who had arrived armed with chocolates (for Olga), applied one to Elfi’s little O-shaped mouth.

  “We don’t eat chocolates in this house.” Olga spoke as if by rote. But she made no gesture towards removing the large chocolate-toffee her daughter was chomping happily.

  “What difference does it make? To him as a politician, I mean. All that. Harry is such a good man, but where has that got him? Is Burgo Smyth such a terrible Foreign Secretary just because of what happened in the past? They wouldn’t tell you that in Europe, not in all those dreadful unhappy Balkan places. Look what he did in Georgia, look what he’s done for us. He had a bad past. So what difference does it make?” It was the question Jemima had been asking herself. Even so she was shocked at the measure of despair in Olga’s voice. Then she saw to her dismay that Olga Carter-Fox had buried her face in her handkerchief. She was crying.

  Olga gulped, “It’s nothing, pay no attention, I’m just so bloody exhausted.”

  “Bloody! Bloody!” echoed Elfi in ecstasy, chocolate finished. She gave a little skip and clapped her hands. “Mummy said bloody!”

  Olga stopped sobbing, scrunched her handkerchief and said to her daughter in a loud, cold voice, “Elfrida, go upstairs. Go into your bedroom. Shut the door.” Immediately and without protest, Elfi Carter-Fox left the room. They heard her laborious child’s footsteps climbing the steep staircase, and upstairs a door was carefully shut.

  Olga began to cry again. “It’s all too much for me. Harry’s going to lose his seat. I know he is. He can’t help it. All that redistribution, immigration, in spite of all he’s done to help people, help them, help everybody. Holy Harry, my sister calls him. But I’m not at all holy. And I feel so guilty. I’ve been just as bad as my mother.”

  “Olga, you’re crazy, I mean you’re not crazy, you’re definitely not losing your memory—”

  “No, not that way. My memory is fine, all too good. You see, Jemima, I’ve been having this—this affair I suppose it was. Except it’s over now. With a married man, a married man who has two little children, and a nice wife. In Harry’s local Conservative office. His agent’s brother. He came to help out. Oh God, what a mess. It’s all hopeless, of course, and it’s well and truly over. I ended it, the night Madre died. Except I didn’t know she was going to die. That was just a horrible coincidence. But I went out, left Elfi, the moment the au pair came home, I shouldn’t have done that. The au pair was never all that reliable and of course Elfi did come looking for me. I had to see him, Chris, this man, tell him it couldn’t go on. Listening to Madre’s ravings about her sordid past made me determined not to go the same way.

  “I’m not sure it was even love,” Olga sobbed. “Just sex. As for Harry, well, he worries so much, he’s always worrying, and that’s not easy in those ways, shall we say it doesn’t exactly promote romance. I won’t say more—you can imagine. But he’s a good man,” she ended violently, as though Jemima had contradicted her.

  Jemima had not contradicted or even answered Olga. Who was she to point a finger at poor Olga Carter-Fox? She had made no move to contact Randall Birley, and what had that encounter been about if not “just sex”? He had telephoned her twice, leaving messages on the machine, then signed off on the note, “You know where I am.” He had made only a brief reference to the death of Hattie Vickers: “A dreadful thing happened here, you may have read about it.”

  Jemima had put this together with a call out of the blue from a certain Charley Baines, who introduced himself as “Sir Toby Belch at the Irving Theatre. I saw you at the Garrick Awards but you didn’t see me, worse luck.” He went on, “You’re an investigator sometimes, aren’t you? Kath Lowestoft—that’s Maria—and I think you should know that Hattie Vickers was hugging some kind of secret which frightened her. We’ve tried telling the police but they don’t want to know.” Then he mentioned the benefit for a Hattie Vickers Memorial which would be given on Election Night. But Jemima had other plans for that evening.

  Yes, Jemima knew where Randall Birley was: at the Irving Theatre, at least he would be there until 10:30. But there had been a picture of him in the paper escorting Helen Troy out of the Ivy restaurant after a late night rendez-vous. His arm was around Helen Troy, who was otherwise virtually extinguished by her Chaplinesque black hat, but still indubitably a star. Baz Bamigboye of the Daily Mail was the first to put into print the rumour that Helen Troy might star in the film of Twelfth Night in place of Millie Swain (there was no comment from Millie). No, Jemima would not be calling Randall Birley. Nor would she be pointing a finger at Olga Carter-Fox.

  Besides, she was busy coming to terms with what Olga had just told her. So Olga’s mysterious outing that fateful night—the one which Elfi had referred to reproachfully during Jemima’s previous visit—had no more sinister explanation than the guilty conscience of a frustrated wife. Jemima realised that at some level she had retained a suspicion about Olga; had that suspicion now to be dismissed?

  “I must go to Elfi.” Olga sounded calmer. “And I’ve got to organise a babysitter so that I can be with Harry at the Town Hall for the count. Forgive me.”

  Jemima wanted to say: forgive yourself. Instead, she patted Olga on the shoulder and pressed the open chocolate box into her hand. “One more little one won’t hurt Elfi,” she suggested. Jemima had done worse things in her life than silence Elfrida Carter-Fox by stuffing her with forbidden chocolates.

  Jemima Shore was let into Number Nine Hippodrome Square, according to arrangement
, by the policeman on the beat who had the task of keeping an eye on the house. A skeleton had turned up there, even if the fact was not yet generally known. PC Carr was a stolid taciturn young man, but Jemima did not object to his silence or his stolidity. She took him to be a young man who had his orders and intended to follow them.

  PC Carr drew her attention to the taped-off basement area: out of bounds. But Jemima had no wish to go down to the basement; she had been there. Furthermore, whoever had hidden the Diaries had done so in a hurry, and done so before the basement area was opened up.

  Then PC Carr gave Jemima an unexpectedly charming smile. “It’s quite like the telly, isn’t it—Prime Suspect. I love it, though it’s not much like life around here, I can tell you. But I think you look rather like Helen Mirren.” On that happy note, he left Jemima to her task and resumed a position outside the house in the square. She could see his hat and shoulders for a while, outlined in the street light; then he moved away.

  She was alone. For a moment, Jemima was genuinely frightened. The house was so dark, so immense, so cavernous. Suddenly, to her fraught imagination, it was also full of ghosts. She was aware of all the tragedies which had taken place there, including one death and the long death-in-life of a deserted woman. She even thought she heard a creak upstairs and something like a footstep, but she knew that could not be so. The noise probably came from next door; these old houses might be imposing, but they were not necessarily well built. Think of all those cracks in the walls she had noticed on her visit to Lady Imogen. Jemima looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock.

  Voting had just finished. The politicians—all of them, even Burgo Smyth—would be in their constituencies, awaiting the count. Millie Swain (and for that matter Randall Birley) were still on their own kind of stage, taking their bows. There would shortly be a collection in the name of Hattie Vickers, announced by Randall Birley according to Charley Baines, who had admitted that the precise destination of this sum was still the subject of argument. Burgo Smyth, Sarah, Archie, the Carter-Foxes, Millie and Randall, all on their respective stages.

  Jemima decided to move fast. She ran up the first flight of stairs. That sense of distant light footfalls somewhere above still haunted her. But that was common to any experience at night in an empty house, as she told herself. At first she thought she would not venture into the large decayed first-floor drawing-room, the room where she’d had her encounter with Lady Imogen, playing her Miss Havisham role. Sarah and Archie Smyth must have searched the drawing-room, according to what she had gleaned from their “treasure-hunt” conversation the night of the discovery of the skeleton. But then she noticed the door was ajar. Jemima went in.

  Shutters had been drawn across the long windows, since the frayed strips of taffeta, all that remained of the curtains, were inadequate. But the shutters were warped, one of them did not fasten, and in any case, for some strange reason, the shutters had been fashioned to leave a gap at the top of the window. The glow of the street lights gave some illumination, which was just as well since she could not get the lights to work. Jemima shone the large practical torch she had brought with her, and its beam picked up some glass. The photograph of Lady Imogen as a society beauty getting married was lying upside down. The other photograph of Lady Imogen and her sulky dark-eyed daughters was on the floor, some way away, with the glass smashed. A little marquetry desk was open: and its drawers empty. There was nowhere else where a hefty packet of Diaries could be concealed. Jemima went out on to the landing and looked at the staircase. Was this the staircase where Franklyn Faber fell accidentally? and died?

  At that moment she heard it again: an indisputable light movement above her head. She was not alone in the house. The question was, what to do about it? She had to take a decision, rather as the rest of the country had been exhorted to do by the daily papers. The Evening Standard had been unable to resist the same headline, DECISION DAY. For her, it looked like being Decision Night.

  Jemima found that she was no longer frightened. The visceral terror which had seized her when she entered the house had vanished. Having lived alone all her adult life, she was not even particularly scared of the dark. And the dark in this case was only partial; there were still some light bulbs in the house, for example in the light on the upper staircase. The telephone was probably still working—Sarah Smyth had used it on Saturday—although she was at this point a long way from the nearest instrument.

  As irrational fear faded, a prudent rationality took its place. If there was a person upstairs, taking care to tread extremely softly (but unable to control the sound in an old house), that person was hardly likely to be an innocent bystander. That person, a deliberate and stealthy intruder, could on the contrary turn out to be dangerous.

  Jemima took her decision. She would go upstairs. But as she put her foot on the first step of the second staircase, which would lead her up to the upper floors, she hesitated. There was now silence again in the darkness above her head and she was probably responsible for the faint creaks around her. Another run at it: that was the only solution. Slightly breathless, Jemima arrived at the second landing and pushed her way through the half-open door into a large bedroom. She felt for a switch, and a dim pink-shaded light on the wall actually worked. Then she saw the huge dark mass in the centre of the double bed and in spite of herself screamed out: “Oh my God!”

  Something long and black uncoiled itself from the heap, followed by what was unquestionably a white paw. Her scream found its echo in an answering yowl. Jemima, heart thudding with a mixture of relief and sheer rage at her own foolishness, realised that she was gazing at Joy (or Jasmine), one of Lady Imogen’s cats. A softness brushed her legs, and Jemima looked down. Here was the second cat, Jasmine (or Joy) gazing up at her with an expression that could be construed as imploring—or défiant.

  Joy and Jasmine, Lady Imogen’s precious “girls.” How on earth had they got in? The kindly neighbour was supposed to be harbouring them. The cats seemed unfazed, perfectly at home, as well they might be, having lived for so long in this house, and no doubt this bedroom. Knowing the ways of cats, Jemima guessed that they were spending a lazy period in their old home before going next door to be fed in the morning.

  Quite light-hearted in reaction, Jemima turned to the drawers before her. They were open and empty. The second cat joined the first on the bed. Together, the pair paid her no more attention.

  All along, Jemima had imagined that the nursery floor would provide the answer. When she reached it, she found that here at least the doors were shut. The first room had a narrow bed in it with an iron bedstead, and the atmosphere was extremely stale. Was this the former room of Nanny Forrester? If so, she had certainly lived to enjoy more luxurious circumstances. A bulb (which did not work) hung from a flex in the middle of the ceiling, without a lampshade.

  The second room was bare, whatever its original function, and also without light. There was only one other room, apart from a poky lavatory of an old-fashioned sort, and a dismal room which contained a sink and a half-bath (for children? how unbelievably spartan!). This was the nursery. This was the room from which Lady Imogen had fallen. Jemima could see the balcony, the doors to it closed. The light in the middle of the nursery ceiling, which had a broken shade, did work. A hand mirror with the glass cracked and splintered—that traditional unlucky symbol—lay in the middle of the floor.

  The pictures on the walls were a curious mixture. There was a series called “Flower Fairies” by Margaret Tarrant (Jemima could remember having those in her own little bedroom) and several posters of some pop star she also dimly recalled, conventional in black leather jacket and sporting a guitar. The room was full of cupboards, with drawers below, none of them open. But Jemima did not have to look far. In a basket-work chair by the window was an airline bag zipped shut. She opened it. She was looking once more at the Diaries of Lady Imogen Swain. She sat down in the basket chair and started to read.

  A long time later—Jemima had no idea how lo
ng—she heard footsteps on the staircase. This time there was no mistake. These were human footsteps and they were approaching the top floor. She thought she knew who it was, who it must be.

  Jemima was still holding one of the Diaries when the latest entrant to Number Nine Hippodrome Square came through the nursery door.

  “Ah,” said Jemima Shore coolly. “You. I was just reading about you.” She pointed to the Diary and read aloud in a voice which she was proud to note did not tremble. “Saw his children again today at dancing. Archie is such a little white mouse.”

  She gazed at Archie Smyth, the little white mouse who had grown up to be a man standing in front of her with a gun in his hands.

  CHAPTER 17

  STRANGE RENDEZ-VOUS

  You’re wrong,” said Jemima Shore. “That won’t solve anything.”

  Archie Smyth stepped farther into the room. He put the gun on a basket-work table. Then he sat down on the only other piece of furniture, a very small carved wooden chair. His long limbs stuck out from the chair like Gulliver’s in the land of Lilliput. He put his head in his hands.

  “I think I’m going mad. I thought—I would frighten you. Don’t worry. It wasn’t loaded.”

  “You did,” replied Jemima with some feeling. “You frightened me very much. Not when I saw you, not with your gun, but before I saw you, when I heard you coming up the stairs. Before I knew it was you.”

  She added, “Archie, here are the letters. Take them. Destroy them. Don’t read them. You asked me to help you. Remember?”