Corridors of Death

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  Amiss liked this policeman. But then there was the ethos of the civil service. He thought about breaking ranks, ratting, letting the side down, being over-zealous, bringing the service into disrepute and all the other things he would be doing if he gave Milton the kind of cooperation he deserved. He thought about his career—blotting his copybook, demonstrating poor judgement, displaying disloyalty towards colleagues—all the accusations he would be open to if he were found acting as a copper’s nark. He thought of the semi-helpful information he could give Milton if he left out the bits that might be traced back to him. Then he thought about his self-respect and his sympathy for the under-dog. If ever there was an under-dog it was this poor sod, who was going to make a long, slow and tedious balls of the whole business if someone didn’t give him a helping hand. Milton didn’t look away while Amiss was thinking all this through. Amiss liked that too.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you the dirt, and without any reservations, on two conditions. You guarantee that none of my colleagues ever knows where you got your information from—and that means meeting me when and where I suggest—and you compensate me for the risk I’m running by keeping me daily in touch with your investigation, thus satisfying my curiosity.’

  ‘What risk could you possibly be running that would entitle you to be kept informed of the progress of a confidential police investigation?’ asked Milton, covering his grin with a stern copper look. ‘The same sort of risk you would run if you pointed the finger at a crooked colleague,’ said Amiss. Milton looked him in the eyes for a minute and the grin broke. ‘Done,’ he said and held out his hand.

  Monday Evening

  Chapter Three

  They met a couple of hours later in a seedy curry-house of Amiss’s choice—well away from Whitehall and staffed by waiters with limited English. Milton had had time to throw a few noncommittal scraps to the slavering pack of newshounds, go back to the Yard for consultations with superiors, arrange for the processing of the statements and the routine checking of alibis, check that the preliminary pathology report had come up with nothing helpful and dismiss his sergeants for the evening. Amiss had had time to show his face in his office, confirm to colleagues that he had undergone only a routine interview with the police, make a few telephone calls, talk to the Deputy Secretary who had already taken over responsibility for Clark’s work, and ensure that papers for immediate action were being dispatched to the proper quarters. There was no need to cancel any of Sir Nicholas’s appointments; the civil-service machine was more than capable of coping with sudden death, however scandalous. Sir Nicholas’s meetings and speeches from tomorrow onwards would be dealt with by his temporary successor, Douglas Sanders, who would by morning have digested enough briefing material to enable him to behave as if he had been in the job for years. Sanders’s responsibilities would be similarly taken over, and the only sufferers would be the poor devils who were now required within a few hours to expand existing briefing to cope with the newfound ignorance of some of their superiors.

  Sanders dismissed Amiss with an approving nod and Amiss mentally saw a tick on his personnel report under the section headed ‘Ability to cope with pressure’. He hurried off with relief to the twilight environment of the Star of India, where Milton was already lurking in a distant corner. ‘Ah, Robert,’ Milton hailed him. ‘Sit down and have a drink, and tell me why, at a moment of personal tragedy, you are smirking all over your face.’

  ‘It’s the masterly way in which you employ my Christian name to denote our new status as unofficial colleagues, James. It is James, not Jim, I trust. Civil servants don’t like diminutives; they’re considered vulgar.’

  ‘God Almighty, don’t tell me that the use of Christian names is another civil-service mystery. It’s very simple with us. You just call everyone your senior “sir”. And I’m afraid it is Jim.’

  ‘I can see you’ve got a lot to learn. To put it simply, if you’ve got no other evidence to go on, the use of the Christian name is the key to finding out a man’s status and prospects. Thus, if you are sitting with an official of immense importance and two men enter the room—one young and spotty, one middle-aged and distinguished looking—you may assume that the former works for the latter. Then you hear young and spotty address your host as Alaric and middle-aged and distinguished address him as Mr Snodgrass. This means that young and spotty is a high-flyer, has a good degree—probably from Oxbridge—and has come into the service at the bottom of the administrative ladder. The other poor fellow, who may still outrank him, is a decent soul who has worked his way up the executive ranks but has little hope of ever attaining real power. Conversely, your high-flyer will probably be addressed by his minions by his Christian name—because he can afford to be seen to be democratic—while the other honest fellow, who has been obliged to spend years grovelling to his superiors only to be overtaken by people half his age, will cling to his few privileges and will be addressed as Mr Blenkinsop by all who work for him.’

  Milton’s stunned look touched Amiss’s heart and he broke off his discourse. ‘Sorry. You’ve enough troubles without my digressing on the anthropology of the civil service. I’ve dug up some information for you, but I want yours first.’

  They paused to order a meal and then Milton leant forward warily. ‘So far we know that Sir Nicholas Clark died in the cubicle of the lavatory after a heavy blow to the base of the skull from a small steel abstract sculpture, the top part of which provided a useful handle.’

  ‘He’d have liked that. Always fancied himself a bit of an aesthete. But who in God’s name was carrying round with him an object like that? You don’t get many modern-art enthusiasts at IGGY.’

  ‘IGGY?’

  ‘Sorry. The group is called the Industry and Government Group, and we do go in for disrespectful acronyms.’ At the look on Milton’s face Amiss hastily yielded the floor.

  ‘No one was carrying it about with him. It happened to be conveniently placed on a stand about six feet away from the lavatory. You must have seen it. Two interweaving circles on a round base.’

  ‘Not …?’

  ‘Yes. The piece entitled “Reconciliation”.’

  ‘I’m beginning to like this murderer more and more,’ said Amiss gloomily. ‘It’s affecting my motivation.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Milton. ‘There are heavy odds against our man being either a prankster with a keen sense of the ridiculous or a zealot determined to make the world a better place by ridding it of someone who, I infer, was a blot on the civil service escutcheon. It’s very rarely the motive is anything worthier than greed or fear.’

  ‘All right. Go on.’

  ‘Sir Nicholas was discovered at 1.55 by an Embankment Tower Accommodation Officer summoned to investigate the mysterious immovability of the cubicle door. By the time the police doctor arrived it was possible only to estimate the time of death as being between approximately 12.45 and 1.15. There were no finger-prints on the top part of the sculpture and only a few half-hearted smudges on the base. Anyway, that was largely covered in blood and …’

  ‘Yes, yes. Don’t put me off my Chicken Biryani. Obviously any prints you identify will be those of people wholly unconnected with IGGY.’

  ‘Right. The murderer used one of those little linen towels laid on, I understand, on the days when there are important meetings in the conference room.’

  ‘Why was the cubicle door immovable anyway? Wouldn’t he have toppled forward when he was struck?’

  ‘It looks as if his murderer hit him as he pushed the cubicle door inwards. He would then certainly have fallen forward. As far as we can see the murderer then half closed the door and leaned the body against it so that Sir Nicholas’s weight pushed it shut. There are no gaps under those doors, so nothing was visible. Anyone who tried it would have found it resistant to pushing. That’s why it took so long to discover the body.’

  ‘Wou
ld the murderer have had to be particularly strong?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t. The preliminary pathology report is of little help. It rules out only people of below average height and weight or the excessively tall. That excludes only half a dozen of the people who attended the IGGY meeting.’ Milton screwed his face up at the unpalatable acronym and took a gulp of lager.

  ‘So far, so bad. Have you managed to rule many out by checking alibis?’

  ‘Someone’s doing an exhaustive check now, but it looks as though it’s down to eight, all of whom can account for their movements but can’t produce witnesses for all of them. Virtually everyone except two of the civil servants went to the lavatory some time during that half hour.’

  ‘It would be civil servants. They develop highly trained bladders to save them ever missing any part of a meeting lest their departmental interests suffer from their absence. So who’s on the present short list?’

  Milton pushed a list over to him.

  Norman Grewe, Chairman, Industrial Electronics Ltd

  Gerald Hunter, Secretary of State for Energy

  Martin Jenkins, President, Fitters’ Union

  Harvey Nixon, Secretary of State for Conservation

  Richard Parkinson, Assistant Secretary, Department of Conservation

  Alfred Shaw, President, Plastics Extrusion Workers’ Union

  Archibald Stafford, Chairman, Plastics Conversion Company

  William Wells, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Conservation

  ‘Terrific,’ said Amiss. ‘Our department provides three—Nixon, Wells and Parkinson. The government—already shaky and with a small majority—provides three as well—Hunter, and Nixon and Wells again.’

  ‘Obviously we want to minimize the dislocation to government. I’ve had a lot of heavy breathing from my superiors about this already. The real difficulty now is to find motives, because if the eight are to be believed, there wasn’t one amongst them who had even the most rudimentary of reasons to want to see Sir Nicholas off. Grewe, Jenkins and Hunter claim nodding acquaintance only and the others talked about him as a friend rather than a colleague.’

  ‘I can’t help you with the nodding acquaintances,’ said Amiss grimly, ‘but if three strong motives and one weak one are of any use, you’d better get out your notebook.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘Did any single one of those who attended IGGY this morning tell you anything about the fiasco which revealed that Harvey Nixon, while presenting a paper on an aspect of his department’s policy, hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about?’

  ‘Need you ask?’

  ‘No. It’s a complicated story which I spent some time this evening disentangling with the unsuspecting help of the Private Secretary network within Whitehall. You ought to know that Private Secretaries hear everything, see everything and tell only each other most of it. The fiasco itself was inexplicable as it occurred, unless you accept that Sir Nicholas was prepared to sacrifice his future career entirely for the sake of his malice towards Nixon and Wells. His machinations over the past few days make me assume that he had totally flipped. We’ll have to start with the characters of the two politicians involved—Nixon and Wells. What do you know about either of them?’

  ‘Very little. I saw so many people, and so quickly, this afternoon that they’re all a blur. But I know that Wells is some kind of junior minister with a radical reputation.’

  ‘You need to get his status clear. A Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State is known for convenience—even in official documents—by the acronym PUSS. And that about sums up the general view of what his role should be. Our department has one Secretary of State, two Ministers of State, each of whom is basically his deputy for half the work, and each of them has a PUSS. The PUSS is normally without power, influence or honour, unless he happens to be very lucky in his superiors. His job is to stand in for ministers on unimportant occasions, see difficult but uninfluential deputations, do what he is told and shut up otherwise. I’ve even heard the PUSS described as being in office mainly for young officials to practise their burgeoning minister-controlling skills on. Every Whitehall civil servant’s and most senior ministers’ nightmare is a PUSS who gets too big for his boots and starts showing initiative, reminding ministers of manifesto commitments and trying to score at their expense in the party. Wells is a pain in the arse to everyone who works in the Department of Conservation.’

  ‘Why? Because he’s independent-minded?’

  ‘No. We’re not that bad. Independence of mind may often be an irritant, but it takes more than that to incur actual dislike. Wells is disliked because he is ambitious and unprincipled, while setting himself up as a principled man surrounded by time-servers. His radicalism gives him a power-base within his party which makes him difficult to sack; so he loses no opportunity of upstaging his colleagues and showing his contempt for civil servants, whom he never ceases to treat as subverters of the will of the people. Hardly fair—most of the time we merely try to enact the wishes of the Cabinet. We may be seen as the sinister undemocratic secret rulers of the country, but in fact we’re usually pretty loyal to our governments. That bugger treats us like the secret police and fuddy-duddy obscurantists by turns. And when you get choked off with the unhelpfulness you are likely to meet during this enquiry, remember that civil servants, too, have to put up with a lot of shit. Pass the chutney.’

  ‘Right. I’ve got Wells clear. Now Nixon always seems from press accounts to be a modest and competent sort of fellow.’

  ‘Modest he is. Competent he’s not. He’s a prime example of the power of the civil-service machine. He was made a senior minister for two good reasons. First, he was intensely loyal, and could be relied on to do anything the Prime Minister told him to do. Second, as a Scot, he helps to maintain a regional balance within the Cabinet.’

  ‘Surely that wouldn’t be enough to compensate for lack of ability?’

  ‘My God, have you any idea how many conflicting pressures a Prime Minister faces in getting a Cabinet together? Lobbies, regional amour propre, left/right/centre balance to be struck, no class or profession to dominate, personal debts of gratitude to be paid, magnanimity to be shown by the inclusion of erstwhile opponents, and more. When all that’s been taken account of, a Prime Minister would appoint to a vacant senior post someone who couldn’t read and write if his loyalty could be counted on. As long as you can scrawl a signature, you don’t need to be literate, let alone intelligent, to be a Cabinet Minister. Sorry—correction. You need to be able to read your speeches, but you’ll certainly never have to write them or anything else if you don’t want to.’

  Milton wiped his brow, but whether at these distressing revelations about the practicalities of government life or at the heat of the Meat Vindaloo he had incautiously ordered, Amiss couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Look at it the other way, Jim. Even if a Cabinet could be chosen on sheer merit, you’d be lucky to find a dozen people in the ruling party who could succeed at all aspects of the job. You need the stamina of a horse. Between party meetings, constituency responsibilities, House of Commons debates, routine ministerial duties, major speeches laying down government policy, Cabinet meetings and Cabinet committees, you’re lucky to have a couple of nights a week when you get home by ten. And even then, like every other night, you have one or two large boxes full of paper which, in theory, you digest and comment sensibly on. It’s an impossible load as it is, the way we run government. It’s almost unbearable when, as now, a small majority means that the minister has to be present to vote on even unimportant motions day and night in the House of Commons.’

  ‘I’m beginning to feel sorry for Nixon.’

  ‘So you should. A decent, compassionate M.P. Quite a good speaker when he knows what he’s talking about. Ambitions admittedly rather above his abilities, but for him most of the consequences o
f holding office turn out to be harassment round the clock, sniping in the House and perpetual terror of being asked detailed questions about policies he hasn’t initiated and hasn’t had time to grasp. On top of that, he has to nurse a marginal constituency in Glasgow.’

  ‘Why don’t people like that tell the Prime Minister that he can stuff his jobs?’

  ‘Because of loyalty or ambition, and because the glamour of office makes up for a lot. Everywhere you go you have cars to carry you, lavish offices to work in, minions—and intelligent ones at that—at your beck and call. People call you “minister” and treat you with deference. Play your cards right and you’ll end up in the House of Lords with a meal ticket and a platform for life. Only an exceptional man would give up all that for a half share in a scrubby little office in the House of Commons, a drop in salary of seventy per cent and a reduction in staff to half a secretary.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Milton, wondering if he would himself have the integrity to turn down the Commissioner’s job, arse-licking of politicians and pussy-footing with the press notwithstanding.

  ‘The late Sir Nicholas Clark despised Nixon and hated Wells. It looks as if last week he decided to nobble them both. It wasn’t a difficult job for him, because, as I said, he was prepared to risk his own career in the process. It merely required him to bypass a system of checks and balances which ensures most of the time that people turn up in the right places with the right kind of material.’

  If Milton had been alert so far, he was quivering now.