Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  This, or a judicious selection from this, was what Antony told Sutcliffe.

  “I see,” said the Superintendent, when the bland and blameless recital had come to an end. “And you still manage her investments?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is this an arduous task? Much to invest?”

  “There’s a tidy little nest-egg that she inherited from her mother, and there’s money that Partridge settled on her when they split up. Together it comes to a substantial sum.”

  “Does that mean she milked him for all she could get?”

  “That’s a rather tendentious phrase, isn’t it, Superintendent? It was a perfectly amicable separation. She had worked hard to make his career a success. And Partridge would naturally wish to ensure that the children were well provided for.”

  “And how have you invested this? Gilt-edged?”

  “Not entirely, Superintendent. Mrs Partridge enjoys a bit of excitement, relishes the element of risk. We’ve been living a bit dangerously with some of the money—hoping to increase it substantially.”

  “And have you?”

  “Yes,” said Antony, with an immodest smirk.

  “You’ve been living dangerously in other ways too, haven’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You left something out of your account of your friendship with Mrs Partridge, didn’t you. The weekends at country hotels . . .”

  Antony looked as if he would dearly have liked to give way to a spurt of venom, but he was a well-trained political animal, and he merely smiled a somewhat strained smile, and stretched out his legs underneath the table.

  “Ahhh . . . Who could have told you about that, I wonder. That mountain of Scandinavian muscle that looks after the kids, I suppose. Well, I can’t say I wanted it to come out, but equally I can’t say I’m particularly ashamed of it. We’re both men of the world, I take it, Superintendent?”

  “Yes, sir. But you’re a rather younger man of the world than I am.”

  “Meaning that fashions in what is on the edge of permissibility change, I suppose? I take your point. As far as my generation is concerned, I don’t think anyone would see anything at all remarkable in my spending the weekend now and again with a rather lonely woman—on a no-strings basis.”

  “Is that all it is, sir? A casual affair of convenience?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There’s never been any question of its developing into anything serious. Of course, as things have turned out . . . with my getting the nomination here . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, one rather regrets . . . I mean, retrospectively it doesn’t seem to have been awfully wise. But of course at the time Jim Partridge was alive, and so there didn’t seem . . .”

  “Quite. If you were that careful, all Tory MPs’ wives would be taboo, wouldn’t they, sir? Well, I imagine you’ll soon be wanting to get along?”

  Antony looked at his watch.

  “Well, yes, I would, rather . . .”

  “Just one more question before you get back to the hustings: do you happen to remember what you were doing on the night Mr Partridge died—December the twelfth it was.”

  “Good Lord, no—so long ago. Wait, though. I may still have last year’s diary.” He dived across the room, and rummaged in a briefcase. “Yes. Here it is. The twelfth, you say? Here we are. Oh yes: I was addressing a local Tory association—in Deptford. Meeting began at seven-thirty.”

  “And when did it end, sir?”

  “Haven’t a clue. I do a lot of that sort of meeting: the Conservative Central Office sends me round as a peripatetic speaker. On form, it would have ended round about nine-thirty or ten. When was Jim . . . When did Jim die?”

  “That we’re not sure about. There’s something to connect it to a time around ten-thirty or so, but it’s very slight. All we know is that when it was found the body had been in the water for hours.”

  “I see . . . Not very satisfactory . . . Well, Superintendent—”

  “Quite. I realize you’re busy, sir. I think we’ve gone as far as we can at the moment . . .”

  Some faint spurt of cynicism impelled Sutcliffe thus to imply that he had not finished with Antony. That might take the shine out of his campaigning! But whether that gentleman noticed, Sutcliffe was not quite sure, for he had bustled himself out, locked the door behind them both, and got himself into his car after the briefest of waves. He was off down the lane before Sutcliffe had even extracted his car keys from his mac pocket.

  “Excuse me.”

  Oh Lord: it was the inquisitive neighbour, who might well feel a grievance against him for his deception of her last time. Still, better not pass up the opportunity for a chat. He had had the feeling that she was a sharp-witted, observant person.

  “You’re the man who pretended to be Mrs Partridge’s friend.”

  “Not quite. If you go over what I actually said—”

  “Don’t worry. I have. And it was a bit borderline, to put it politely. I still think you got into that cottage under false pretences.”

  “It was a question of time. I’m a policeman. I only had to go away and get a warrant, or permission from Mrs Partridge. I’m afraid I took a short cut.”

  “Oh, I see,“ said Mrs Burkshaw, mollified. “So you’re police, are you? I did wonder . . . Investigating his death, I suppose?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And talking to Mr Fisk. I shouldn’t have thought there could be any connection there . . . could there?”

  She was fishing. Sutcliffe kept a smiling silence, then asked:

  “What’s your opinion of him?”

  “I do breakfasts for him. I’m glad to have the work.”

  Sutcliffe was not the only one who could keep mum.

  “Will you be voting for him?”

  “Not on your life! I’ve never voted Tory in all my days, except the once, and that was personal—for Mr Partridge. Here—you know I told you about them men coming round at night?”

  “Yes. Have they been again?”

  “Yes. No. Well—not like that. It’s just that two nights ago . . . much earlier this time, around ten o’clock—I looked out of my window, and in the lane I saw this van. Well, I’m not an expert, but it looked just the same shape as the van that had been there that night. There were lights on in the cottage. Now, I didn’t want to do any nosey-parkering—”

  “No, no.”

  “—but I thought they might be breaking in. So I went out, very nervous, like—it’s that dark at nights around here—and I saw at once that they weren’t likely to be breaking in, because Mr Fisk’s car was parked further along. But I just walked towards the cottage a bit, to make certain all was all right, and sure enough it was: Mr Fisk was talking in his living-room with another man—a big chap.”

  “Ah yes.”

  “But I thought you might like to know what it said on the side of the van. It said: MANOR COURT FARM LTD.”

  “Yes,” said Sutcliffe. “I rather thought it might.”

  Chapter 15

  Tory Helpfuls

  Night after night, as the date of the Bootham by-election approached, the television news programmes had by-election specials, with their reporters filing breathless copy against a background of gas works, slum council flats, or one of the innumerable disused factories. “More relevant,” the reporters told their cameramen. It was estimated that one in ten of the inhabitants of Bootham had been interviewed, some of them more than once, and some of them so often that they had in the end threatened physical violence towards the interviewer.

  All this was, when one came to think about it, a quite factitious excitement, for the government had a majority so large that no mere by-election loss in an area that was remote from Tory heartland was likely (in a sane world) to cause more than a shrug of the shoulders. But politics is not a sane world, and politicians as well as political commentators were indeed looking to Bootham, as complacent publicans in the constituency so often
pronounced them to be.

  And yet, the more excitement hotted up in Bootham, the more it began to live up to its description as a political cynosure, the more Sutcliffe wondered whether his work there might not for the moment be finished. Some sort of pattern, or patterns, was beginning to form in his mind, but to get them fully into focus he felt he had to turn elsewhere. For James Partridge had been no more than an occasional visitor to Bootham, and the centre of his life had been in London. One night in his miserable little room in the Happy Dalesman, Sutcliffe took out his notebook; he tabulated some of his facts and ideas, and then he wrote down a list of the people he would like to see or speak to. The next day he happily handed in his key, and set his car towards the Smoke.

  The first day back in London he spent in moderately fascinating routine. He was on vacation, on final, preretirement leave, and his activities were his own choice. He drove to the South Bank and to the library of County Hall, where he spent an interesting half-hour leafing through the minutes of the Leisure Activities Committee—interesting because of what was not said, rather than what was: every meeting seemed to demand no more than a bald statement of decisions taken, followed by “The meeting closed at 9:40,” or “The meeting was adjourned at 9:30.” They were never much longer than two hours, these meetings, and why should they be? Had not all the decisions been taken in advance? How easy to proclaim the virtues of open government when that was the case!

  Sutcliffe spoke over the phone to a policeman in Rotherham who remembered the Oliver Worthing case, back in the early ’fifties. It had made a real impression on him. “At first glance it seemed like a particularly vicious business, and the boy nothing short of a thug,” he recalled; “but you only had to have a few words with the mother and you began to have sympathy with the lad.” Sutcliffe looked into Jeremy Grayling-Snaithe’s military career, found out that he had been in the SAS, and had a long and meaty chat with his commanding officer, since retired: “Of course we need people who can go in with all guns blazing if necessary, but we can do without people who want to do it all the time. It’s a question of instinct, and he didn’t have it. It was his judgment that was in question,” the Colonel added, in an unconscious echo of the Amplehurst monk.

  Sutcliffe’s cunningest move was to ring the Chairman of the Conservative Party. After several layers of Roedean, he got through.

  “Ah—Good morning, sir. I’m glad to find you in. I thought perhaps you might be up in Bootham.”

  “No. Actually I thought I might have to be up there quite a bit during the campaign, but as it’s turned out . . .”

  “You’ve preferred not to? Found it better to distance yourself from the candidate?”

  The chairman, ignoring the slight note of impertinence, let out a little squeal of dissent.

  “Oh no, Inspector—Superintendent—no, I assure you—that’s quite a wrong impression you’ve got there.”

  “Is it, sir? I’ve been lodging with a pack of journalists, all very experienced in these campaigns, and I’m afraid that’s the impression they’ve got. That the party top brass has preferred to keep its distance.”

  “But that’s nonsense! We’ve absolutely poured top people into the constituency!”

  “But that was all arranged before we had our previous talk, wasn’t it, sir? Once they get there, they seem to have preferred to keep their distance from the candidate. I take it that, if you had the selection process to do all over again, you wouldn’t be pushing Mr Craybourne-Fisk quite so hard, am I right?”

  “That could be, Superintendent. But that’s because you—”

  “Because I found out his connection with Mrs Partridge. Quite. In fact, I suspect there is quite a lot to be found out about Mr Craybourne-Fisk that might be electorally disadvantageous. To you, I mean. Tell me, sir: why was he pushed by Conservative Central Office?”

  “Well, the PM . . . Actually, the word came from higher up.”

  “I see. Is Mr Craybourne-Fisk personally known Higher Up, or do you think there was some lobbying on his behalf by someone who has the ear of On High?”

  “Well . . . personally I blame Derek Manders.”

  “Ah—he would be a friend of the candidate, I take it.”

  “Very close. Thick as—very close. And Manders is Well Liked—higher up.”

  “And involved with Mr Craybourne-Fisk financially too, I take it?”

  The Chairman, who had become confiding on wings of grievance, suddenly clammed up.

  “That I wouldn’t know about.”

  “Thank you, sir. You’ve told me all I wanted to know.”

  Derek Manders, MP, when Sutcliffe spoke to him on the phone, sounded a lordly young man, whose lordliness slid into a sort of affability when he heard what Sutcliffe’s mission was. The policeman was invited for coffee at the gentleman’s Mayfair residence the next morning. There he sat in luxurious plush, from the depths of which he could watch Derek Manders himself—all long legs and good tailoring and gleaming brown leather shoes.

  “Antony?” The voice was Oxford and the City, and grated on Sutcliffe, perhaps because the arrogance seemed to have so flimsy a basis. “Oh no, not a close friend. By no means. In fact, you know, I rather doubt whether he has any close friends. But we’ve had contacts, you know, over financial matters, as one does.”

  Sutcliffe suppressed the inclination to say “Does one?” and merely murmured: “Quite.”

  “He’s something of a whiz-kid in City matters, you know. The golden touch, in a modest kind of way.” He looked around his sitting-room, as if to say there were golden touches and golden touches. “As a matter of fact that happens to be my form of bingo too. So we’ve been . . . thrown together, on occasion.”

  “I see, sir. I gather Mr Craybourne-Fisk has been handling such matters for James Partridge’s wife as well.”

  “So I hear. Of course that’s perfectly normal—one of his sidelines, in fact. But still . . . I knew nothing about that, I may say; otherwise I’d have hesitated to . . . well . . .”

  “To recommend him as candidate for the Bootham seat?”

  “Ah, you know about that. Well, yes. And there’s the personal involvement, which is even worse. I’ve taken a fair bit of stick over that, I can tell you.”

  “From Higher Up?”

  “Precisely. But all I knew about were Antony’s own financial dealings, which were always above board. Very sharp, sometimes a bit close to the wind, but above board. Almost always.”

  Mr Manders was clearly distancing himself from Antony by being prepared to come remarkably clean, doubtless about everything except his own involvements with him. Sutcliffe prepared to take advantage of the frankness.

  “Only almost always, sir?”

  “Well, there was a business about shares in British Telecom—there were whispers about that. I suspect that he got far more shares than he was legally entitled to, and went for a quick killing. He knows all the dodges, and then some. He started very modestly, you know: rather ambiguous family background, and no money that you could call money. But he must be worth a tidy sum now.”

  “There’s a factory farmer in the constituency called Abbot. You wouldn’t know of any connection—financial connection, for example—between the two, would you?”

  “Good Lord, no. I don’t know any detail about Antony’s affairs. But of course a lot of shares with animal connections did dip a bit when the details of the Animals’ Charter were published. Not significantly, you realize, since there were doubts about the bill ever becoming law, but still, certainly a drop. Cosmetics, factory farming, the fur trade. Antony could have bought, being pretty certain that if the bill became law, all the teeth would have been removed, as far as commercial concerns went. We would have seen to that.”

  “We?”

  “The Tory MPs with City connections . . . with the commercial health of the country at heart.”

  Derek Manders, as he made his emendation, gave Sutcliffe a swift glance of complicity, as if they were in a game toget
her. After all, policemen were always Tory, weren’t they?

  “I ask about factory farmers,” resumed Sutcliffe, “because Mr Craybourne-Fisk seems to be in contact with this pretty large factory farmer in his constituency.”

  “Does he? Not necessarily anything significant in that. Antony would naturally get in touch with all the business leaders in the area. Any Tory candidate would.”

  “But this was a man who was on very bad terms with James Partridge, over the animals bill.”

  Derek Manders shrugged.

  “So what? Nothing very surprising there. Antony and Jim Partridge were a very different kind of Tory. Jim was the ’sixties version, Antony the later ’seventies or ’eighties version. Very little in common. They wouldn’t have found a lot to talk about if they were thrown together.”

  “Beyond, perhaps, Mrs Partridge.”

  Derek Manders gave an appreciative, lop-sided smile.

  “Beyond the lovely Penelope. Who, while her husband sailed the perilous seas at Westminster and Bootham, did not stay at home and peg away at her tapestry. Not one for home industries, our Penelope.”

  “Tell me,” said Sutcliffe, getting up, “did you know James Partridge well?”

  “No. Not well at all, I’m afraid.”

  “Was he a man of few close friends as well?”