Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  “Instant, I’m afraid. The penalty of accepting coffee with a ‘new bachelor.’ ”

  “Is that the expression? I take it you’re divorced.”

  “That’s right. I’m a single-parent family who’s lost his family—the most deprived and unsympathized-with group there is. Perhaps if I get in I’ll put together a private member’s bill to give them some rights. Yes, my wife left me not long after the last election. Things had been falling apart before then, but the political involvement didn’t help. It tends to be a full-time thing, or nothing. We’re still friends. That’s what they all say these days, isn’t it? What does it amount to? She sends me a card on my birthday, and I send her one a day or two after hers. We’re polite when I go round for the kids. I gather the Partridges broke up too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They kept it pretty quiet. I never heard rumours—and these things get about, as a rule, even across party lines. Was it just a trial separation?”

  “In name. She was doing a minimum of wifely things until Christmas, in case he had second thoughts. But I haven’t come across anything to suggest that he was having them. Did you know him well? Did you know him at all?”

  “Good question. Usually you don’t do much more than glimpse your opponents at the final count. Here you are with your names coupled day after day on TV or radio, and you never meet. I did have a little more to do with Partridge than that.”

  “Why was that?”

  “There were one or two small things connected with the Council—I’m on the Health Committee, and he was at the Ministry for a time. Mostly small things that were settled by phone. The only time I actually went to see him was about a student at College—a very bright girl, desperate to go to university. Her father—filthy rich garage owner—refused to chip in his contribution: didn’t believe in girls going to university, wasted when they got married, you know the kind of garbage. Jim Partridge got it settled very quietly and tactfully. He could have made more fuss about it, elevated it to a matter of principle, but then the girl would probably never have gone to Cambridge.”

  “What about the General Election campaign? Was it a friendly fight? A good, clean campaign?”

  “Ah,” said Oliver Worthing, handing Sutcliffe a cup and leading the way into the living-room. “So you’ve heard the rumours?”

  “I’ve heard whispers of rumours.”

  “Erroneous whispers, no doubt.” The two sat down, and Worthing gulped thirstily at his coffee. “The answer to your question is: yes, it was a good, clean campaign. And it was so thanks mainly to Jim Partridge.”

  “Ah—so you’ve reason to be grateful to him.”

  “I have. Though since the rumours are idiotic distortions of the truth I sometimes think I might as well issue a public statement giving the facts. I would have done so this time, but my agent said it would be political suicide.”

  “What actually happened last time?”

  “Oh, somebody brought the rumours over from Rotherham, where I was born and brought up. Naturally he shared his information with one or two others among the Tory bigwigs, and they buzzed around with it to a few more, and wanted to make it a campaign issue. There are one or two very unpleasant sods among the high-ups in the local party. Walter Abbot, for example—ah, you know him. Well, of course they took the rumour to Harold Fawcett, and I think he would have gone along with it—he’s an average, quarter-way decent individual, is Harold, and no great shakes morally. But of course he took it to Jim Partridge first, and Jim killed it stone dead, squashed it flat—but flat. Said he was not going to get elected with help of a dirty tricks department, that he’d publicly dissociate himself from any attempt to use the rumour, and so on. He was a gentleman, I realize that: an old-fashioned kind of gentleman. Perhaps that’s why he never really seemed at home in the modern Conservative Party.”

  “I think you’re right. But these rumours have surfaced again. Does that mean that Mr Craybourne-Fisk is all too at home in the modern Conservative Party?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I suspect that Harold Fawcett, for mere shame, felt he couldn’t use them this time, after Jim’s veto. All our information suggests they’re being spread this time by the Labour people. Mind you, I don’t think they’ve got very far with them, and from now on they’ll be very much on the defensive about that kind of thing.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Haven’t you seen the evening papers? No, I suppose you wouldn’t see the Bootham Evening Post.” He grabbed a copy of the paper from a side table. “They’ve got an interview with that thug the Labour Party employed to terrorize the media. Obliging chap now, apparently: always ready to talk to the media. His ‘I’m White’ tattoo, he told the Post, is some sort of code slogan for a little Fascist offshoot grouping, dedicated to duffing up any member of the immigrant community it doesn’t like the look of. He says his aim is to “Keep the blackies out of the pits”—odd that, I felt, in view of the nature of the work. Anyway, he’s got a record: two cases of aggravated assault, a string of minor offences, all against coloureds. Says he’s been a keen supporter of the Labour Party all his life. Pathetic, isn’t it? Without wishing to be calculating, that interview will be worth five hundred to a thousand votes to us. And Mr Jerry Snaithe won’t be spreading rumours about Borstal and criminal records in the near future.”

  “Have you any evidence it has been Snaithe?”

  Oliver Worthing shrugged.

  “Him or his henchmen. There’s a thin dividing line between what he tells them to do, and what they do knowing he’d be in favour. The London far left mob has a very bad reputation for spreading unsubstantiated or misleading rumours.”

  “And is this one without foundation?”

  “It’s untrue. But it’s not without foundation.” He leaned forward in his chair, his face troubled. “Here’s the whole story. I don’t like talking about it, but I realize you’ve got ways of finding out—and once in a while, talking about it is therapeutic. What connection it could have with James Partridge’s death is beyond me. I was brought up in Rotherham, as I told you, and my father was a schools inspector there—a pleasant, inoffensive man with a conscience. My mother made his life hell. She was a woman—I try to look back on her objectively now, though it’s difficult—with a vile, simmering temper. The whole house was tense with it, twenty-four hours a day, waiting to see whether it would break out, or confine itself to jibes and pin-pricks and expressions of grievance. You can imagine the atmosphere in the house. My father, my sister, myself—all waiting, watching for some explosion, for one of those red-hot blazes of temper. She nursed grudges for months, and then suddenly out they would come in some searing stream of hatred. I don’t know how my father could stand it. And the long and the short of it is—I couldn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “I exploded. In the only way I could. I couldn’t fight her verbally—it had to be physical.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Just turned fourteen. One of the blazing tempers was just reaching a climax, and I simply threw myself on her with whatever weapon happened to be to hand. It was a poker, actually—but a heavy, iron one, and I just kept hitting her. The front door was open—it was summer—and she ran screaming into the street, face running blood, and the neighbours naturally rang the police. There wasn’t much chance of keeping it within the family after that; probably wouldn’t have been anyway, because she was seriously hurt. The police weren’t bad about it. I don’t think they really knew what to do. They took me into custody, questioned me, then lodged me in a children’s home while they waited for medical reports and went into the family background. The children’s home is the origin of the ‘Borstal’ sneer, of course. It was a pretty tough place, actually, but a haven of peace after my home. Eventually my father’s sister said she’d take me in. She was a big, cheerful woman with several kids of her own. My father paid her, of course, and I think she was glad of the money, but I was always grateful to her. I li
ved there until I went to university, and I always regarded it as my home.”

  “Did you ever see your mother again?”

  “Once. When my father was dying. She didn’t speak to me. She was a woman utterly without self-knowledge. I believe she urged the police to press charges. Later on she devoted herself to ruining my sister’s life. I feel guilty about that: I snapped and got away, and my life turned out—well—middling to all right. She stood it, year after year, and her life was ruined. She never married, because Mother scared anyone off. She worked at a dreary job, and she’s still at it, twisted and sick. Yes, I feel guilty about that . . . As a matter of fact, people who know me well say that I can feel guilty about almost anything under the sun.”

  “Because of the attack on your mother?”

  “I’m not an amateur psychiatrist, but it’s a fair bet, isn’t it? I worry particularly about my own children, of course. Though, God knows, their home life was never anything like mine, even while the marriage was crumbling apart. And these days being the children of divorced parents is hardly rare, or any sort of stigma. But—I worry about them constantly, would ring my ex-wife up every other night if I thought she’d stand for it . . . Well, that’s me. That’s what people are whispering about.”

  “You don’t think of putting out a statement?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought about it, as I said. But my agent says it would do much more harm than good at this stage of the campaign. Inevitably it would be played up by the gutter press. And in fact I’ve got a good local reputation, through my years on the council, and the job at the College. Quite a lot of my voters have been through my hands there, or have children who have, and I think their word will stand up against all the rumour-mongers.”

  “The fact remains that you have reason to be grateful to James Partridge.”

  “I do. That’s why I don’t quite understand your interest. I suppose in a case like this you have to check all possibilities.”

  “Exactly. That’s what all cases involve: slog over irrelevancies. One little irrelevancy: what were you doing the evening he died?”

  “That’s easy. I was at a college council meeting. I remember because I reported there on the case of the girl who had a scholarship to Cambridge—the thing Jim Partridge sorted out for us. I felt quite sick next morning when I heard he was dead.”

  “Everything I hear suggests he was an admirable chap.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, I would say he had an instinctive moral sense that told him what should and shouldn’t be done. It’s pretty rare in a politician—practically unknown these days.”

  “As witness Jerry Snaithe.”

  “Or his henchmen. I gain pleasure from the fact that they do a great deal more harm to themselves than good. I loathe the idea of a candidate coming in with a little posse of disciples. I gather you can cut the atmosphere at the Labour Party HQ with a knife—the old North-South divide in miniature. I must say I have one great advantage in this campaign which I didn’t have last time: I have two very dislikeable opponents.”

  “You don’t know the Conservative?”

  “No, indeed. But he is getting known locally as a prize shit. He is one of the yes-men at Conservative Central Office, hoping to be one of the yes-men in Parliament, then one of the yes-men in government. People always talk about the Prime Minister as tough, but I don’t think it’s tough to surround yourself with pipsqueaks, do you? Have you talked to Craybourne-Fisk yet, Superintendent?”

  “Not yet. I have that pleasure to come.”

  “Because there are one or two rumours going around about him.”

  Chapter 14

  Tory Hopeful

  Breakfast-time, Sutcliffe had learnt from Oliver Worthing, was one of the only times when one could hope to find a candidate alone, so it was at breakfast-time next day that he went back to Moreton-in-Kirkdale, to try and have a few words with Antony Craybourne-Fisk.

  Antony’s breakfast had been made for him by Mrs Burkshaw from the next cottage. Antony was one of the last males in his generation to have been brought up totally unable to fend for himself, and to have remained in this benighted state thus far into his adulthood. If he had been forced to make his own breakfast he might have managed to pour milk on cereal, to butter bread and spread marmalade on it, but further than that—even to a boiled egg, or toast—he could not have gone. Fortunately Mrs Burkshaw’s late husband had been a farm labourer and she was used to getting up at the crack of dawn, so that when he asked her if she could cook something nourishing for him early she had been glad to. She had quoted a sum in recompense so low that Antony had jumped at it without haggling. Perhaps, he had thought, there might be compensations in living part of the year in England’s cheapest county.

  “I’ll be glad of the money,” Mrs Burkshaw said later, in the village shop, “but I can’t say I took to him. Any more than I took to that Mrs Partridge—even at the beginning, when she was trying to be nice.”

  People in general, it seemed, were not taking to Antony. As he ate his breakfast that morning the crease-lines on his forehead showed that he was worried. He himself had detected, from the beginning of the campaign, a lack of warmth towards him even from longstanding Conservative voters. He and Harold Fawcett had kept quiet about it for a time, but there was no disguising it now, with the campaign entering its last week. The latest humiliation had been to overhear a discussion in the loo at Tory Party Headquarters as to whether he would or would not be pushed into third place. Third place! It was unthinkable! And yet it had happened to the Conservative candidate at Chesterfield, who was a much more endearing young man than he was. (This was not quite how Antony Craybourne-Fisk put it to himself, but he was not unaware that among his political assets charm was his short suit.)

  And there was another thing that was bothering Antony. He had been aware from the beginning of the campaign that the distinguished politicians who came to Bootham ostensibly to give him a hand were in fact keeping him at arm’s length. Conservative Headquarters, while ostensibly pouring in support, was in innumerable little ways distancing itself from him as candidate. It was damned unfair! He had, against his better judgment, allowed them to send up seven or eight members of the dreariest cabinet in human memory, and then they treated him as if he had a mild attack of leprosy. Why? Why?

  In his lonely meditations on his satin-eiderdowned bed in the Partridge cottage Antony Craybourne-Fisk had been forced to the conclusion that there had been Rumours. Leaks and rumours had bedevilled this government. Only the previous year rumour had nearly destroyed one of its most senior members—apparently quite untrue rumours. If they didn’t even have to be true . . . ! As to leaks, the government had lived by leaks and eventually could well die by them. Once one had faced up to the fact that one was being talked about in muffled tones, it needed no ingenuity to connect the rumours with the presence in Bootham of a Scotland Yard detective. Would the man want to interview him? It was a situation that would require the utmost care in its handling. Antony decided that if the policeman should come to see him, he would be nice. Tremendously nice. Unnaturally nice. It would be worth the effort.

  Thus it was that when Sutcliffe knocked on the door of the cottage on the Thursday before polling day, Antony (who had watched him arrive, and guessed who it was) was smiling bonhomously in welcome even when he went to open the door. The smile disconcerted Sutcliffe: it was a bit like meeting Oliver Hardy when you were expecting Stan Laurel.

  “Good morning, sir. I hope I’m not disturbing you. I’m Superintendent Sutcliffe. I wonder if I could have a few words with you?”

  “Of course, Superintendent. I was wondering if you would need to. Come right in. Cup of tea? There’s one left in the pot, and it should be reasonably warm.”

  It wasn’t reasonably warm, but Sutcliffe took it, and settled himself down in one of those over-large armchairs, preparing to play the interview the way Antony seemed to want it.

  “I haven’t asked what your business is, you notice,”
the Tory candidate said, spearing efficiently into his mouth the last fragments of his fried breakfast. “There have been rumours of a policeman going round asking questions about Jim Partridge.”

  “That’s right. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “Meaning, presumably, that the police are still not satisfied?”

  “Something of the sort,” Sutcliffe said. He decided to be very vague. This was no time, for example, to admit that he was in fact on holiday. “We’re in a difficult position: we have no pin-downable grounds for dissatisfaction, yet on the other hand we have no particular reason to be satisfied. We have found no motive for suicide, for example—not one that we think holds water.”

  “You don’t think the breakdown of his marriage—?”

  “It had happened some time before. It seems to have been coming on for some time, and he appears to have taken it very calmly. That’s our information. Perhaps you yourself know more about it, sir?”

  “Me?” Antony’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a skiff in choppy seas.

  “As a close friend of Mrs Partridge’s.”

  “Ah—I see—well, I don’t know that I—”

  “Hadn’t you better tell me, sir, something about that friendship with Mrs Partridge?”

  Oh, that friendship with Mrs Partridge! How bitterly to be regretted now, the more so as it had never meant particularly much to him at any moment of its duration. How to explain to a policeman that one slipped into these things, especially on aimless vacations, and in rundown, once-fashionable hotels in Italy? They had both been staying, separately, at the Hotel Splendido in Santa Margherita Ligure. It was the end of the season, and the only other guests had been Italian or German, and they had sat dotted around ten or twelve tables in the enormous dining-room, and the atmosphere had been soporific. It was September, and the break-up of Penelope Partridge’s marriage had just become an established fact. In the mornings she took the children to sit by but not to bathe in that putrid section of the Mediterranean. Sometimes in the afternoons she would take them to Portofino, or went up to Genoa to shop. It was in Portofino, at an outdoor café, that Antony had first talked to her, though he had noticed her across those expanses of dining-room, and had registered that she was of his kind, had “sniffed the exhalation of his own herd.” They had come together out of boredom, slept together for the same reason, and because “why not?” They had discovered common interests—money and power—and had established and rejoiced in a common coldness of heart. When Antony had promised to take charge of the financial side of the separation, and to help her with quick kill investments after the settlement was made, an alliance was made between them that had never been broken. Unfortunately.