Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  “You never went to his cottage?”

  “What would be the point? That time he wrote to me was the last weekend he was up here.”

  But Sutcliffe had noted the shadow of equivocation cross his eyes.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “No. I never went there. Only been there once in my life.”

  “And you didn’t go after his death?”

  “No, I did not. Now, if you’ve quite finished—”

  “Can I be quite specific? You didn’t go to his cottage late one night and try to break in?”

  “No. No. No. Get me? No!”

  The man bellowed like a bull, the most naturally animal thing in his entire farm.

  “Well, well. I’ll be saying goodbye for the present. But I might well be back.”

  “I can’t think of any good reason why you should be. Just what sort of an investigation is it you’re conducting, Superintendent?”

  “It’s a very vague, fluid sort of investigation at the moment, sir. But you might say it has murder at the back of its mind.”

  The man looked at him, curiosity, cunning and apprehension battling it out across his red, porcine face. Then he turned and stumped back into the administrative office. Sutcliffe felt he would not like to be one of his underlings there for the rest of the day.

  As luck would have it, the visit was to have a follow-up, and from one of the underlings Sutcliffe had pitied in his heart. That evening, after he had eaten an execrable meal of boiled greens, mashed potato and supermarket meat pie, and while he was washing it down with a glass of tolerable beer in the bar and listening to the assembled hacks swapping the day’s campaign gossip, the landlord came in from the back.

  “Here, are you a policeman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s someone on the phone for you, then. You can take it through there in the passage.”

  Sutcliffe was mystified, and when he found the dingy little nook with the phone said a very cautious “Hello?”

  “Are you the policeman that was out at Manor Court Farm today?” asked a male voice with a rural Yorkshire accent. “Investigating the murder of the MP?”

  “The death of the MP. Yes, that’s right. How did you know I was here?

  “To tell you the truth, I had a pint or two myself in the Happy Dalesman last night, and when I looked out the window this morning, I thought I recognized you. Abbot was swearing up hill and down dale when he came in from talking to you, going on about the police, so it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together. The thing is, I wondered if he’d told you the whole truth.”

  “I should think it’s very unlikely. Are you willing to fill me in a little?”

  “Well now; no names, no pack drill, and then I might. But I don’t want any fall-out from what I’m going to tell you. Manor Court Farm is about the only employer that there is in Cordingate, so they’ve got us all in a cleft stick there. So, I’m not going to give you my name—”

  “And I’m in no position to get it, over the telephone.”

  “Right. Well, this thing goes back well before this bill that Partridge was bringing in. In fact, I’m not sure the bill didn’t spring from this visit he made—well before the last election it was, when Partridge was still a minister for something or other—was it Health?”

  “He was an under-secretary in the Ministry, yes.”

  “Right. Well, he came to the farm to see Abbot on some constituency business, Abbot being a big shot with the local Conservative Association, as you probably know. Trouble was, this Friday he came along at five o’clock, just as all of us were streaming out of the place. Now, one of us said that Mr Abbot was still at work, and Mr Partridge just strolled in, and nobody liked to stop him, though it was strictly against house rules. Well, unfortunately Mr Abbot had gone along to the lavatory: he spends a fair time on the lavatory seat does Mr Abbot, him being a heavy eater, a heavy drinker and a heavy anything you’d care to name. So after he’d waited around for a few minutes, Partridge goes out to the farm proper, to see if Abbot was down in any of the sheds.”

  “And he wandered round and didn’t like what he saw?”

  “Dead right he didn’t. Chickens with . . . Well, I’ll not go into it. We none of us like it, that work there. But it’s work, isn’t it? And these days, in Yorkshire, you cling for dear life to any job that’s going. So he sees . . . all these things—”

  “Isn’t the place ever inspected, by the way?”

  “Yes, it is. But not very frequently, and Walter Abbot manages to hear of it well in advance. Everything well above the acceptability threshold when the Ministry of Agriculture people come, I can assure you, though it is well below it all the rest of the time. Then it’s profit first, profit last, and profit all stations in between for Walter Abbot. Anyway, there was no row at the time; Mr Partridge was just thoughtful, so Abbot told someone. There was a row for us next day, about letting him in: Abbot charged around the offices bellowing from morning till night, until finally someone could stand it no more and handed in his notice. Abbot assumed he’d let Partridge in, and that cooled him down a bit. But then he heard that Partridge wasn’t letting the matter rest there.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “I don’t know in detail. You’d have to ask his politician pals about that. But I do know he was stirring things up in Whitehall, at the Ministry of Agriculture, and so on, about factory farming generally, and us in particular. There was an unscheduled inspection, but of course after his visit there’d been a brisk clean-up around the place: some animals slaughtered, some put out of sight—it’s easy enough to do. He’s ordered something similar after your visit today. So nothing came of that, but things rumbled on for some time, with Walter Abbot cursing Partridge, and going around chuckling fit to make your blood run cold when he got the boot from the government.”

  “He couldn’t have had anything to do with that, could he?”

  “I shouldn’t have thought so. He wouldn’t have the Prime Minister’s ear, would he? If he did, he’d bloody well have told us so, I can tell you. Any road, the next thing we heard was, Partridge had come second in the ballot for Private Members’ bills, and was bringing in this so-called Animals’ Charter. That was when the correspondence started to fly, and Walter Abbot really began to put the boot in.”

  “I’ve read the correspondence. What else did he do?”

  “In detail I don’t know, because we only heard of it by rumour, or from what he cares to tell anybody when he’s in a good humour, which means he’s halfway drunk. I know he tried to nobble other members of the Conservative Association to get a vote of no confidence, or something of that sort, with the aim of getting rid of him as the member for Bootham. One or two of them probably played along with him, but I shouldn’t think he got very far. It’s not a very Conservative thing to do, and besides Walter Abbot isn’t a popular personality—not the sort of man most people would want to get too closely associated with. That tinpot führer approach puts most people off. But still, he was certainly going all out to get James Partridge, and Walter Abbot going all out is a fearsome spectacle.”

  “You don’t know if he made any attempt to rob Partridge’s cottage after his death? To get his letters back, for example?”

  “Don’t know anything about that. He could easily have bullied some of the outdoor farmhands to go along with him, if necessary.”

  “You’re probably right. Well, this has been most useful. Is there anything else?”

  “Not that I can think of at the moment.”

  “Tell me, Mr—sir, what exactly is your part in all this? What motive do you have for telling me what you have done?”

  “If you’d ever worked for Abbot you wouldn’t need to ask. He’s the human dregs. But there is one more thing . . . When we heard about this Animals’ Charter, one or two people up at the Farm got on to Partridge, very much in the way I’m doing with you now. We gave him information, discussed the sort of things the
bill needed to guard against. He was always very courteous, very grateful, and seemed a nice bloke. Now he’s gone, and apparently his bill with it. I’d like to see whoever it was did it get caught.”

  “I wish I could be more confident that you will. But I’ll do my best. I’ll certainly do my best.”

  Chapter 9

  Campaigning (II)

  Nominations of candidates in the by-election at Bootham East closed on February 17th, and by evening it was clear what an array of political talent the voters of that constituency were to be offered on voting day. The three main parties’ candidates were already known, and had been canvassing for more than a fortnight. There were other nationally organized parties, more or less respectable, fielding hopefuls: the Communist Party decided that really they ought to show the red flag in depressed, industrial Bootham, though they knew they would have done infinitely better in, say, Hampstead; the National Front (which made token gestures towards respectability, rather as Charles II might appear on state occasions with his queen) thought the constituency was ripe for what they called radical thinking; and the Ecology Party, after much hesitation (for what, after all, had ecology ever done for Bootham?) decided that their ambitions to be a national party as successful as the German Greens obliged them to field a candidate.

  And then there were the rest.

  Taking them slowly, one by one, they were: the Home Rule for England candidate; the Women for the Bomb candidate; Yelping Lord Crotch, the Top of the Pops candidate; the Transcendental Meditation candidate; the Transvestite Meditation candidate (Ms Humphrey Ward); the John Lennon Lives candidate; The Bring Back Hanging candidate; the Britain Out of the Common Market candidate; the Richard III Was Innocent candidate; and Zachariah ZZugg, the I’m Coming Last candidate.

  This mixture of the aspiring, the exhibitionist and the plain dotty made up the choice that would be presented on the ballot papers of Bootham East. This list, to the joy of the nation, though decreasingly so, had by tradition to be read out every time the nation’s television or radio broadcast coverage of the by-election. Shortly afterwards the government was to increase the amount demanded as deposit by electoral hopefuls, in order to discourage lunatic fringe candidates. The government had a very shaky grasp of psychology.

  • • •

  February 17th had begun quite well for Jerry Snaithe. You wouldn’t have thought it was going to be one of those bitch days when all sorts of niggling little things go wrong.

  First Susan had come up by the early train. He had gone to meet her, and so had the press photographer from the Mirror to whom he had casually mentioned the time of her arrival the day before. They were photographed kissing on the platform, and though Sue had grimaced in distaste, Jerry was delighted.

  “You’re the only wife in this campaign,” he told Sue. “Except for the loonies—I expect some of them have wives.”

  “Thanks very much.” said Sue.

  It was, for February, a lovely day. When they got to campaign headquarters they found that the ancient central heating in the house (always inclined, like Jerry, to blow hot or cold quite unpredictably) was making the place into a kind of hothouse. The bruiser at the bottom of the stairs, the veteran of innumerable pithead confrontations with police and scabs, had changed his T-shirt for a string vest, out of which he bulged unpredictably with quite tremendous displays of muscle and belly.

  “Who on earth’s that?” Sue whispered to Jerry, as they went up the stairs.

  “Our bouncer,” Jerry whispered back, as if even he were unwilling to take any chances with the gentleman’s temper.

  “I didn’t know you were running a casino here. Are party funds that low?”

  “He’s to keep the media in their place, that’s all.”

  “Oh Jerry, you are a hypocrite. You know you love the media. Publicity is your life’s blood.”

  “I enjoy using the media. I don’t love them,” explained Jerry, as if to a backward child.

  The press conference started well, too. They had a bald-headed member of the Shadow Cabinet, who said supportive things in a reassuringly moderate way. Sue sat on the platform with Jerry and the rest, and said a few words about her work in Hackney, and the hideous effects of government cuts on underprivileged families. She did well, because she knew her facts and kept it simple. Jerry thought to himself that he’d have to put pressure on her to up her contribution to the campaign. The morning’s conference was nearly over when the little pot-bellied man from the Daily Grub got up.

  “Could Mr Snaithe tell us where he went to school?”

  “I went to school in Yorkshire,” said Jerry, a shade too quickly. “It’s in the campaign biography.”

  “Quite,” said the Grub man. “We’ve all done our homework. I wanted to know which school it was you went to.”

  There was one thing you had to say for Jerry, his opponents (and they were legion) always admitted: he was very good at damage-limitation. He knew at once when he had to come clean. He put on a sort of self-deprecating smile—a smile that would have had some old ladies eating out of his hand, and other, sharper ones itching to run him through with their umbrellas.

  “I went to Amplehurst. It’s a Roman Catholic school, to the north of here. My people—my parents were Roman Catholic. You could say I had a privileged education. It’s because I had a privileged education that I’m against elitist education in all shapes and forms, and the obscenity of people buying privilege for their kids.”

  The Grub man smiled happily, pleased at having made his point.

  “I always wondered why you used ‘media’ as a plural,” he said, sitting down. “Shows what a classical public school education does for you.”

  “Surprised anyone from the Grub would notice,” said Jerry. He said it genially, and the audience laughed. It was cleverly done. Sue had to admire him for it. Or admire it in him. Jerry himself sat back, moderately content. He had fielded that well. If it had to come out, that was the best line to take. Jerry had long ago forgotten that he had in fact very much enjoyed his schooldays, which had suited his inclination to believe in the survival of the fittest. Jerry at that time had been very fit.

  When the press conference was over, they all went back to headquarters to prepare for a morning’s canvassing, and the reporters milled around too, collecting their copies of the morning’s handouts. It was while they were milling around at the bottom of the stairs, and while the bruiser was examining closely the credentials of one of the political staff of The Times (he peered close and long at it, whether because his eyesight had been impaired by long years at the coal face, or because he’d never learnt to read with any confidence, nobody would have dared ask him), that the political correspondent of the Daily Strip noticed something interesting. The bruiser’s new, or rather not new, string vest showed up with hideous clarity the tattoos which undulated their way up his brawny arms and around his bull neck and throat: snakes entring through the legs of one naked woman after another, all the women busty and welcoming, adorned with names like FANNY and MANDY and uttering invitations like COME AND GET ME and I’M RIPE, RANDY, AND READY, and the reporter (conscious of the editorial decision that the political content of the Daily Strip should never be more than three per cent of the whole) was wondering whether something of a general and salacious interest might be made of these, when he saw, under the horrendously detailed and lifelike pair of snakes that curled their way around the man’s neck, a slogan previously hidden by the back of his T-shirt: I’M WHITE. The Strip man smiled to himself and got out his notebook.

  Jerry and Sue and the visiting Shadow Cabinet man had a very successful morning’s canvass. They were doing door-to-door in the part of Somertown that lay in his constituency (which in fact had very nearly been called Bootham Somertown—if it had been, it would have been the most misleadingly titled constituency since Sheffield Brightside). Jerry throve on the poverty, the neglect, the filthy toddlers, the debris that littered the front gardens, the peeling paintwork and the mat
ted, dead weeds. In the streets the young men, idle, were hunched over clapped-out cars like priests tinkering with the souls of dying sinners. In kitchens radios and cassette-recorders blared and babies howled. Susan was wonderful, Jerry had to admit it. She knew areas like this, people like this; she knew how to talk to them. So did he, in a way, expert and experienced canvasser that he was, but he wondered if he was quite as good at listening. So he let Sue listen, and then gave them a bit of uplift at the end about getting to the polling stations. They all responded to him warmly. In spite of my public school education, he told himself with a satisfied smile.

  At lunch-time the canvassing party and the hangers-on all stopped at a pub for beer and sandwiches. In some parts of the constituency you could do this, in other parts it wasn’t wise. In Somertown you definitely could do it. Jerry praised Sue’s morning’s work to the skies, and thanked her sincerely. Why does he make me feel like just another constituency worker? Sue wondered. Then Jerry told her she could take the afternoon off.

  “Why?”

  “We’re having a march through town with Albert Scadgett, the sheet-metalworkers’ leader.”

  “I can come along. I have the use of my legs.”

  “No, no. You represent a different side to my image. We don’t want to get the ideas mixed up. The Shadow Cabinet man is sloping off too, though that’s because he wouldn’t be seen dead with Albert. You go and do some shopping.”

  Sue’s eyebrows raised themselves, delicately dangerous.

  “I’m sure I shall find lots of things to buy in Bootham that I couldn’t get in London.”

  “Well, there’s blood puddings,” said Jerry, humourously, but not registering the danger. His attention, in any case, was diverted by the reporter from the Daily Strip, who had been following them around with unusual devotion throughout the canvass.

  “Mr Snaithe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you employing Fascist thugs in your campaign?”