by James Lear
“Because,” said Morgan, staring out across the Common, “I tried to finish with him.”
Chapter Three
THE COMMON WAS STARTING TO GET BUSY WITH NANNIES pushing prams, workers on an early lunch break, and the leisured classes taking a preprandial stroll. Morgan got up, stretched his legs, and headed back to the house. “Just in case the police need me,” he said. “I suppose it wouldn’t look good if they thought I’d run away.”
I glanced up at him, hoping to see a smile on his face. It wasn’t there. “You weren’t thinking of doing that, were you, Morgan?”
“Not really,” he said, in a dreamy voice, as if that’s exactly what he wanted above all else. “It’s just…” He sighed, then sounded more like himself. “Of course not. I’m ready to face the music, and all that. It’s just I can’t stand those coppers looking at me as if I’d done something.”
“That’s their job.”
“What—making innocent men feel guilty? Is that what we pay their wages for?”
Better let him blow off some steam, I thought, so I listened to his rantings until we were safely back indoors. Sometimes Morgan sounded like the crustiest colonel in the stuffiest club in the whole of the British Empire. It was one of the contradictions in his character that I found charming; he could switch in a moment to the sparkling-eyed, mischievous boy who couldn’t wait to get my dick in his mouth.
I was hungry by the time we got in, and rustled up some sandwiches, which we ate in the kitchen while Morgan continued to talk.
“The whole thing was becoming too much for me, Mitch. The money for the house, the time we spent together, the hiding and sneaking around—it was wearing me out. I wanted to get back to how I was, to being a proper husband to Billie and a proper father to the children. But every time I struggled, the bonds seemed to get tighter. He never said as much, but Frank Bartlett was determined to keep me, and nothing that I said convinced him that I wanted to break with him.”
“Perhaps you just weren’t very convincing. Did you really want to finish it?”
“I did and I didn’t. That’s the truth. Part of me dreaded seeing him, but part of me wanted him more than ever.”
“I know which part that was.”
“Yes, well, you understand.” He was embarrassed by such direct references. “Anyway, it got to the stage that I couldn’t very well finish with him, because he’d done so much for us. He lent us that money, and I knew perfectly well that he didn’t expect to get it back. He even helped us to find this house. It belonged to an old client of his who sold it for a song when he went bust. Bartlett made sure we got first dibs. Belinda was thrilled—it’s just the sort of house she always wanted to live in.”
“It’s a very nice house.”
“I hate it now.”
“Come on, Morgan. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It feels like a trap.”
“You’d better not tell that to the police.”
“There’s a lot I’m not going to tell the police, Mitch.” He looked at me across the kitchen table. “But you… Well, I’m rather hoping that if I tell you everything, you might be able to find a way out of this—” He waved his hands in front of his face, as if brushing away cobwebs. “This muddle.”
Only an Englishman of Morgan’s class could call a queer suicide with overtones of financial wrongdoing a “muddle.” “Go ahead,” I said.
“The first time I told him that we ought to stop, he just wouldn’t listen. He told me I was confused, that I didn’t have enough experience to judge these things rightly, and that was that. The next thing I knew, the boss called me in to say how pleased he was with my work on the Bartlett and Ross account, that he was giving me a raise, and that Mr. Bartlett wanted me to take over a much larger investment portfolio now that his partner, Ross, was moving towards retirement.”
“A honey trap,” I said. Morgan nodded.
“So I had to spend even more time at Bartlett’s office, and my life was even more intimately tied up with his. I was working almost exclusively on his business; the bank was so happy to have this important client that they didn’t want me to be distracted by other matters. If I’d tried to break with Bartlett, I’d have had a lot of explaining to do. I owed him my house, and now I owed him my job.”
“If you’d really wanted to break with him, Morgan, you could have done so.”
“Maybe. Is that what you’d have done, Mitch?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see? It’s not always black and white. Anyway, I was happy. I put all the worries out of my mind and concentrated on the good things. The house was fine, work was successful, and I really enjoyed being part of Bartlett and Ross. It was a privilege to work there. Walter Ross is a fine man, Mitch. He made a great deal of money, and he was planning to spend the rest of his life enjoying it. He was always laughing at Bartlett and me, calling us worker ants, saying that we should stop slaving away and start enjoying life—if only he knew! We were still together at every opportunity, and it seemed that any time we had a break, we came back even stronger than ever. The personal side of things was… Well, I’ll spare your blushes, old man. You don’t want to hear me talking about all that.”
He was right, there. However exciting it was to think about Morgan being fucked by a powerful, athletic older man in principle, in practice it hurt me, right in the gut.
“I was spending more time at B and R than I was at the bank. There was so much stuff to go through—they had their fingers in a lot of pies, and part of my job was to consolidate all their investments into a streamlined, efficient portfolio that would carry on making them lots of money without them having to lift a finger. That meant shifting things around, buying this, selling that, like an enormous juggling act. Bartlett did what he could, but he had clients to work with. Thank God they had an efficient office manager. Tippett, his name was. One of the best damn men I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He came from a very humble background, did Tippett, but he’d done well for himself just through brainpower. Not like me. Good education and a bit of charm gets me a long way, but next to Tippett, I’m as thick as two short planks.”
I was about to say something unkind, but I held my peace. This degree of self-knowledge was a new development. Perhaps Bartlett had been a good influence after all.
“Anyway, thanks to Tippett I got everything shipshape, Bartlett was pleased, the bank was pleased, old man Ross was bloody delighted, and swanned off on an extended holiday in Italy as soon as he knew the money was in the right place. I got all the glory, but to be honest with you, Mitch, it was Tippett who deserved the credit. He was brilliant—he knew every shortcut in the book, how to make the most of money, how to work just within the rules. I could see why Bartlett relied on him so heavily. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, but Tippett had a mind like a steel trap.”
“What is he like?” I asked, envisaging some shaky, thin-legged man in late middle age, hunched from years of bending over a ledger.
“Oh, not much older than you and me,” said Morgan. “Slight little chap—quite short—slim as a whippet. Dark hair. Nice looking, once you really look at him—but not the sort of man you’d ever pick out in a crowd. Tends to sort of blend in with the background. Self…self… What’s the word, Mitch?”
“Self-effacing?”
“That’s the feller. Self-effacing. Bit self-conscious, I suppose. Grew up in Kent, or Essex, or somewhere like that. His people were shopkeepers. I suppose that’s where he learnt the tricks of the trade. Dragged himself up by his bootstraps, put himself through night school to qualify as an accountant, got a job at Bartlett and Ross as little more than an office boy, and he’s been there ever since. Frank’s right-hand man, you might say.”
“Were they—?”
“Certainly not.” Morgan scratched his chin. “At least, I don’t think so. God, Mitch, you’ve got a dirty mind sometimes. That had never occurred to me.”
“And did you have a go?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, “although I wouldn’t have said no. I saw how he looked at me sometimes. Nice little arse,” he said, kneading it in the air, “and I bet he’d know what to do with it.”
I made a mental note to meet Mr. Tippett, the organizational paragon with the promising rear end.
“Tippett took care of a lot of Frank’s more delicate business dealings,” said Morgan. “For instance, after I’d made one final attempt to cool things down between us, Tippett happened to mention that Frank had transferred some stock into my name, ‘for tax purposes,’ he said, but I knew that this was yet another gift. If Frank had given it to me himself, I’d have turned it down—maybe. But if it came through Tippett, if it was presented as nothing more than a business arrangement, it was so much easier to accept.”
“Did Tippett know about you and Bartlett? Did he suspect?”
“I don’t think so. He never said anything.”
“You don’t always notice these things, Boy. Sometimes you have to be hit over the head.”
“Well, if he did have his suspicions, he kept them to himself. He wasn’t married or anything; I think he lives with his mother, or an aunt or older sister or something—in any case, he’s the confirmed bachelor type. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was like…you.”
I raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
“Anyway, after that I didn’t even try to get out of the affair. It just seemed to make things worse, and I was worried that Bartlett would do something really compromising. So we carried on as we were, seeing each other most days at work, several times a month at each other’s houses when we entertained, and then sneaking off to hotels or empty houses to be together. I kept waiting for him to tire of me, but he never did. He was just as passionate as he was that first night. And—well, I have to be honest with you, Mitch. He made me feel the same way. The things he did to me… I don’t know. It was like electricity.” He shuddered. “God, it was wonderful. And now I’ll never feel that again.”
Did I never make you feel that way?
Poor Morgan—he was deeply distressed, and there was no one he could tell but me. But something was nagging at my brain. What was it? I held his hand while he struggled to compose himself—and then it came to me.
“Morgan—earlier on you said that you thought you knew why Frank Bartlett killed himself.”
“Did I?”
“You said you tried to finish with him. What did you mean?”
“We had a big row.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. No—when was it? My God, yes, it was yesterday. It seems like a lifetime ago.”
“What happened?”
“He came here so full of beans. I think he’d been looking forward to this weekend more than anything else in his life—to have me to himself for two whole nights, in the home that he’d bought for me, without having to make do with hotel rooms, without hiding and lying and sordid arrangements. And he was being very mysterious—he said he’d done something special for me, but he wouldn’t say what. Something to show me how much he cared. I knew exactly what it would be—another of these damned awkward cash gifts. I told him I couldn’t accept it, that he was making things difficult for me, and we ended up fighting. God, it was awful. Like two—well, like a man and his mistress. I felt so ashamed. And the worst thing was, the servants must have heard.”
“The servants? I thought they had the weekend off.”
“They did. They do. But they were still here when Frank arrived, they were clearing up after lunch. We were in the living room with coffee. They must have heard. It’s so…so bloody awkward.”
“And you said things that might have driven him to… you know?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, I think I did. I said that this couldn’t go on, that we would have to finish. I lost my temper, Mitch. I felt trapped, and I hate feeling trapped. I loved him in a way, but at times I hated him. My life had been jogging along quite nicely before I met Frank Bartlett, and suddenly it was all tied in knots. I told him we should stop, and he said he couldn’t. He said he couldn’t do without me. That I was his whole life. That’s when we both realized that we were not alone in the house. We heard the front door closing very quietly; it must have been cook or the maid letting themselves out.”
“And do you really think that’s why he killed himself? Because you’d told him that you were through? Because he was overheard saying something compromising by a servant girl?”
“I don’t know, Mitch. What am I supposed to think? I can’t ask Frank. He’s dead.”
It was obviously too soon to ask Morgan exactly what happened last night to precipitate the crisis, so I turned back the clock. “So you and Frank had been happy together up to that point?”
“As happy as we could be, knowing that we were both living a lie. Sometimes Frank was moody and irritable. He’d cancel arrangements at the last moment, or he’d snap at me, say something unkind just to upset me. I was confused. I asked him what was wrong, and he’d either pretend that nothing had happened, or he’d just wave me away as if I was some little clerk who was badgering him at the wrong time. He could be cruel when he wanted to be; he knew how hard it was for me, how much I was compromising myself to keep him happy, and it wasn’t easy to put up with this kind of treatment.”
“What was going on, then?”
“I don’t know. He never told me. I thought at first that it was business trouble—but of course it couldn’t be, because I knew as much about the business as Bartlett himself. I made a few discreet inquiries, and Tippett assured me that B and R had never done better—they had bigger clients and more money than ever before. Bartlett was the most respected man in his field—and he should have been happy.”
“So why wasn’t he?”
“I’ve thought about nothing else, Mitch, and I don’t know.”
“Was there…anyone else?”
“It occurred to me. But I don’t think there was. I mean, I knew him well—really well—and I do not believe that he could have done what he did to me if he was giving it to someone else as well. He was in his mid-forties, Mitch. I mean, even men as fit as Frank Bartlett slow down a bit in their mid-forties.”
“You drained him dry.”
“Something like that. And I never got the impression that he was—you know. Playing around.”
Did Belinda ever get that impression, I wondered? Does Vince?
“Sometimes he was just like his old, cheerful self—especially when we were with the girls, and particularly if the children were around. He doted on those kids, Mitch. He always had a little present for them, and he seemed to take real delight in playing with them. He talked to them as if they were equals—none of that silly baby talk that so many people go in for. And they adored him. Margaret called him Uncle Frank, and even Teddy would smile and hold out his arms when he walked into the room. It was such a shame he never had any of his own.”
He’d have had to fuck his wife first, I thought.
“But more and more of the time that we were together, he was miserable and distant. I tried to reach out to him—and sometimes, when we were making love, he came back to me, and it was just like before. But things were getting worse in every other way. He started talking about ending it all. I thought he meant us—ending the affair. Now I realize that’s not what he meant at all.”
“But this weekend? You said he was happy when he arrived.”
“He was. It was strange, now that I think about it. In the last few weeks, he’s been so gloomy. But then suddenly he changed—he invited Belinda and the children down to Teddington to stay with Vivie, and he brought himself up here to be with me, and he was full of the joys of spring. Until we had…words…”
“Why the sudden change?”
“It was as if a huge weight had lifted off his shoulders. But I was too bloody stupid to see that, wasn’t I? I was only thinking about myself. Whatever had happened to make him change like that, I just didn’t want to know. God
, what a fool I’ve been.”
“He didn’t say anything that might help us to figure it out?”
“No. Just what I told you before. That he’d done something special for me. And I threw it back in his face.”
“But he didn’t just rush out of the room and cut his wrists then and there, did he? You had the argument after lunch, you said, before the servants left. You didn’t find him until early this morning. What happened in between?”
“We went for a walk.”
“A walk?”
“On the Common.”
“You went for…” I was starting to sound like an irritating parrot, but suddenly I understood. “Wimbledon Common has a certain reputation, doesn’t it, Morgan? Especially after dark.”
“I…”
“It’s a place where unspeakable vice takes place, I believe. That’s what I read in the Sunday newspapers, at any rate.”
“Hmmm.”
“And did you and Bartlett by any chance…stumble upon some?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“I’m all ears.”
Chapter Four
“WE’D BEEN SITTING IN DIFFERENT ROOMS, SULKING like bears, which was ridiculous—we were supposed to be having the time of our lives, and we were both perfectly miserable. In the end, I couldn’t stand it anymore, and neither could Frank—he came out of the living room, I came out of the dining room, both at the same time, and we met in the hall. The situation struck me as so ridiculous that I burst out laughing, and that broke the mood. He smiled, thank God—I hated seeing him so gloomy—and put an arm around my shoulder. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, ‘and go for a drink.’
“It was way too early for the pubs to be open, so we went for a long ramble on the Common. It wasn’t a bad day yesterday—the sun was doing its best to break through, and it wasn’t too cold, and we walked for ages, talking about this and that.”
“Did he say anything that seems significant, in retrospect?”
“No, Mitch. I’ve been racking my brains, honestly I have, but he seemed completely normal. Too normal, if anything; that’s all I can put my finger on.”
