Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  In her last year at Cambridge she started a blog, entitled ‘PLAIN COMMON SENSE’, in homage to her mother’s column. She regularly sent Sir Peter links to the latest entries, but he almost never responded, even though she was doing her best to imitate the tone and content of his own newspaper, and to carry on her mother’s tradition of ruthless, instantaneous opinion-forming. Undeterred by her lack of first-hand knowledge, Josephine began to campaign against what she called Britain’s ‘benefits culture’, which handed rewards to idlers, scroungers, loafers and cheats while ‘ordinary, hardworking people’ (of whose silent, victimized existence it suited her to appear convinced) picked up the tab. At the centre of her phantasmagoric worldview there lay a malignant, amorphous monster called ‘the left-liberal establishment’, dedicated to the redistribution of funds from the deserving to the undeserving, and to the general sabotage of everything that was right and proper in British civil society. The paradox of this monster was that, although Josephine knew exactly what its tentacles consisted of, she could not have put the knowledge into words. It was a slippery, evasive nexus of institutions, made up of grant-awarding bodies, human rights organizations, legal advice services, NGOs, certain branches of the Church of England and the judiciary and, of course, hovering over it all, more powerful, more insidious, more venomous than any other public body in the kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation itself, whose mission it was (in the eyes of Josephine and her growing band of supporters) to drip-freed a toxic daily diet of left-liberal propaganda to the nation at the taxpayers’ expense.

  Sir Peter was now seventy-six years old, although he showed no signs of retiring: his rampantly illiberal views and irascible personality were so closely identified with the newspaper he edited that it was impossible to imagine the two ever parting company. When Josephine graduated, he temporarily stirred himself out of his state of paternal apathy and offered her, without much enthusiasm, a platform on the newspaper’s website. Josephine took it, of course, but what she really wanted was a regular slot in the print edition. But Sir Peter was reluctant to endorse his daughter’s efforts to that extent. He would relent only occasionally, when a star columnist went on holiday and needed a stand-in, and when this happened Josephine pulled out all the stops. Once, seeking inspiration in the archive of columns from her mother’s glory days, she chanced upon a particularly outrageous example from 1990. Hilary had been enraged by a recent court judgement in favour of a disabled tenant whose landlord had unlawfully evicted her and had railed with unusual vigour against the left-liberal establishment’s skewed value system. ‘The landlord of this property,’ she had written, ‘was a white, middle-class, heterosexual, God-fearing, law-abiding citizen of what used to be Great Britain, and every one of those attributes was a card stacked against her. Were her claims respected? Did her point of view get taken into account? Of course not. Asked to choose between her rights and those of – to choose a scarcely hypothetical example – a black one-legged lesbian on benefits, our judiciary would inevitably come down on the side of the latter.’

  In her own column, more than twenty years later, Josephine set about defending the coalition government’s introduction of the Bedroom Tax. But her larger point was that the climate had not changed much in the intervening decades: Britain was being dragged down by an underclass of scroungers, who lived in a ‘something-for-nothing culture’, and Hilary’s ‘black one-legged lesbian on benefits’ could still be held up as a paragon of modern entitlement. It was high time, and only right and proper, that the government should be doing something radical to cut down Britain’s welfare spending.

  Sir Peter agreed with her sentiment, but he was not impressed with her reasoning. He thought that the archetype Josephine had resurrected from her mother’s column was hopelessly out of date. ‘You fucked up your argument in the last few paragraphs,’ he told her. ‘A black one-legged lesbian on benefits? Even our readers know there’s no such thing. They’re only worried about Muslims these days. Put your little straw woman in a niqab and then you’ve given them something to worry about.’

  Josephine was stung. She went and looked up ‘niqab’ on Wikipedia, and for the next few weeks turned her bile (once again confined to the online edition) on to Britain’s Muslim community, bemoaning its failure to condemn terrorist atrocities and accusing the Left of giving succour to radical preachers. Meanwhile, however, Sir Peter continued to ignore her efforts, and her sense of exclusion stewed. His words ‘Even our readers know there’s no such thing’ gnawed at her soul. Why was her father so dismissive? Why did he assume that, just because he was not paying any attention to her words, nobody else was? Did he not know that her one print column, about which he had been so scathing, had been picked up by a well-known satirical quiz show on television, and mocked and vilified on primetime TV? What was that, if not a badge of honour? Within a few weeks, any stand-up comedian who wanted to milk an easy laugh from his audience had only to mention Josephine’s name. What was that, if not a mark of success?

  As a matter of fact, Sir Peter was aware of these developments, and he was furious about them. It was one thing not to think much of his own daughter’s writing; but it was quite different when other people, both inside and outside the paper, began to make fun of her. One quiet afternoon in the newspaper’s offices, a disturbing scene took place. Neale Thomson, the Deputy Features Editor, and Derek Styles, one of the few remaining full-time subs, were sitting at a computer screen watching something on YouTube. They did not realize that Sir Peter had entered the office and was standing directly behind them. They were watching a section from leading stand-up comic Mickey Parr’s DVD, Would You Credit It? – On Stage and On Fire. It was the section where he attacked Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. The routine was not especially funny, but Neale and Derek were enjoying the feeling of behaving like naughty schoolboys, the cosy subversiveness of having a laugh at the expense of the boss’s daughter, and they chuckled along enthusiastically with the live audience. The words that stopped them in their tracks came from a few feet behind them, and were uttered in the unmistakable patrician tones of Sir Peter himself; although they had never heard him speak quite so quietly before, or with such an icy note of menace.

  ‘Right, you cunts,’ he said, in little more than a whisper. ‘In my office. Five minutes.’

  As Neale and Derek told the story to their ex-colleagues in the pub afterwards, it wasn’t the speed of their dismissal that was so shocking: it was the undertone of quivering, barely controlled hatred in Sir Peter’s voice, and the eye-watering inventiveness and cruelty of the violent acts which he swore he would arrange to have performed on them if they ever came within one hundred yards of the building or, indeed, if he ever saw them again. To say that they had touched a raw nerve would, clearly, be an understatement. A brief account of the sackings was included in the next issue of Private Eye, where readers were also offered a recap of some of the more colourful episodes in Sir Peter’s career (a punch-up with a rival editor at a Press Awards dinner; an allegation of assault against a Kensington parking officer, which never came to court). The magazine’s report concluded with one slightly sensationalized detail: the fire in Sir Peter’s eyes as he dismissed the two disgraced employees was described as ‘murderous’.

  3

  When he alighted upon the word, which Nathan himself had highlighted in pale green, DCI Capes allowed himself a long, grim smile of satisfaction before laying the magazine down emphatically on the beer-stained table.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, that certainly puts a different light on it.’

  ‘Now – I’m not saying that we should jump to conclusions,’ Nathan insisted
.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘This is just gossip. It gives us nothing definite to go on.’

  ‘All the same …’

  DCI Capes sat back and drank from his pint of London Pride, deep in thought. He and PC Pilbeam were seated in the public bar of The Feathers, a stone’s throw from New Scotland Yard. It was an old-fashioned pub, where they had found a secluded booth, at some distance from the other patrons. The lighting was dim and their seats were upholstered in discreet burgundy-coloured leather, adding to the atmosphere of subdued conspiracy.

  Nathan was delighted, of course – and somewhat astonished – that his email to DCI Capes had elicited this invitation, rather than the expected wall of official silence. All the same, he was beginning to feel uneasy. His own as yet vague intuitions, combined with this one unsourced report in a mischievous magazine, seemed already to have planted in his superior’s mind the certainty of a deliberate, cold-blooded assassination campaign.

  In truth, DCI Capes himself was far from certain. But then, certainty was hardly a prerequisite for taking action, in the world of twenty-first-century policing. Many other factors had to be taken into consideration. One factor, in particular, was of paramount importance, and in this case, it loomed very large indeed on DCI Capes’s horizon of considerations. This was the involvement of the media. It was some weeks since he had felt the gaze of a TV camera trained upon him, or had a journalist’s microphone thrust under his nose, and he was beginning to smart keenly from this deprivation. To arrest a national newspaper editor on suspicion of murdering two well-known comedians would certainly bring him back into the limelight.

  A few years ago, such a thought would never have crossed DCI Capes’s mind. While the occasional sensational case might have called for a broadcast press conference, received wisdom held that the majority of police work was best conducted in private, well away from the media’s hungry, intrusive glare. But all of that had changed now. A series of high-profile arrests of British disc jockeys and light entertainment stars of the 1970s on charges of historic sexual abuse had brought DCI Capes into direct and exhilarating contact with top journalists from television, radio and the newspapers. Better still, these arrests had brought him into contact with the stars themselves, a development in his career which he could never possibly have foreseen, and which filled him with a sort of childlike, or at least adolescent, wonder. DCI Capes was in his early fifties. When he was a teenager, many of these celebrities had been, if not heroes to him, at the very least objects of awe and curiosity. In those days he had kept an autograph book, which was filled with the signatures of second-rate TV comics encountered at the dismal seaside holiday camps to which his parents would take him during the summer holidays, and with scribbled messages (‘Keep on rockin’!’, ‘Have a poptastic birthday!’) from disc jockeys he had queued to meet at special local events like Radio One Roadshows or the opening of a new supermarket. Now, more than thirty years later, he still struggled to comprehend that his latest role was to be photographed alongside these same figures as they were led, grizzled, bearded and bewildered, in and out of court rooms to testify in cases of alleged sexual assault which they (if not their victims) could barely remember. Truly, time played the strangest tricks.

  But it was a few months since Capes of the Yard (a feeble, feeble nickname, he reflected, for the thousandth embittered time) had been involved in one of these cases. It was a few months since his name, let alone his face, had been in the papers. It was a few months since he had felt the power of life and death over a prominent figure in public life. He was aching to get back to it – and this was a fantastic opportunity. In this instance, show business met journalism in a heady, intoxicating cocktail. A national newspaper editor so sensitive to personal insult that it made him violent towards those who criticized his daughter. An Achilles heel that might easily – it was not too great a leap of the imagination – make him commit murder (or arrange to have it committed) when he discovered that there were comedians who had dared to pour scorn upon her for the sake of an easy laugh. Frankly, it couldn’t be better. So what if nothing was certain, at this stage? Speculation and innuendo made far better copy anyway.

  ‘So.’ PC Pilbeam leaned forward expectantly. ‘What will your next move be?’

  DCI Capes pursed his lips. ‘It could be that this is too big for us to handle alone. We’ll have to call in some specialists.’

  ‘Forensics? MI5? Special Branch?’

  ‘No – I’m talking about a PR firm. Pott Bellinger, I think – they’re the best in the business. We use them a lot to liaise with the media.’

  PC Pilbeam did not like the sound of it. ‘Before you say anything to the press,’ he cautioned, ‘I think you ought to take a look at this. It came out just a couple of days ago.’

  From his document wallet he produced a DVD. The cover showed a young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a large brightly coloured shirt which was untucked at the trouser. He was talking into a microphone. The DVD was entitled Ryan Quirky – Whimsy A-Gogo – Live and Loquacious.

  ‘Thanks all the same,’ said DCI Capes, sliding it back across the table, ‘but I’m not really a comedy fan myself. I prefer a good Britflick. Something with Ray Winstone or Danny Dyer.’

  ‘No – I mean, this is relevant to the case,’ said Nathan. ‘Extremely relevant. Start watching after forty-two minutes.’

  ‘You mean it’s another attack on …?’

  ‘Ms Winshaw-Eaves? Yes, it is. Not a severe one. Quite mild, by comparison with the others. But still, if I were Mr Quirky, I would be checking that my doors and windows were locked before going to bed at night.’

  4

  Looking back on his conversation with DCI Capes, Nathan could not help thinking that it had some disturbing features. It was not just his superior’s eagerness to go public with the case at the earliest opportunity: PC Pilbeam was equally disturbed by his own willingness to accept at face value the assumption that Josephine Winshaw-Eaves provided the only possible link between the two murders. Perhaps there was more to it than that? Was the fact that both of the deceased comedians had insulted her nothing more than a distracting coincidence?

  Above all, what was starting to alarm him was that, in drawing this premature conclusion, he had betrayed his own philosophy. All he had done, so far, was to watch three DVDs and notice that they had something in common. What they had in common was, of course, potentially very significant, but all the same, his methods had hardly been exhaustive or rigorous. Wasn’t he meant to be England’s first truly intellectual criminal investigator? Didn’t he believe that every crime was best solved by reference to its social and political context? That cultural theory and moral philosophy could often point the way to a solution more surely than fingerprints on a window frame or footprints on a garden path? It was time to do some reading.

  And so, for the next five days, PC Pilbeam rarely left his study.

  He was surprised, initially, to find that so little had been written on the history and philosophy of humour. Apart from a few scattered comments from Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, the ancient writers had not found very much to say on the subject. The earliest significant commentator in the English language had been Thomas Hobbes, who agreed with René Descartes that laughter derived from pride and was an aggressive expression of superiority over one’s peers. Immanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to offer an incongruity theory of humour, asserting that ‘laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing’, leading to ‘a feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines’. Kierkegaar
d had broadly concurred, maintaining that comedy was born of contradiction, although in this case it was a ‘painless contradiction’ rather than the ‘suffering contradiction’ of tragedy. Henri Bergson, on the other hand, had gone back to the superiority theory of humour and refined it, declaring that we laugh at other people when we perceive in them ‘une certaine raideur de mécanique là où l’on voudrait trouver la souplesse attentive et la vivante flexibilité d’une personne’. Only a few years after this, Freud had published his seminal Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, proposing a theory which seemed to be the most penetrating and persuasive of all. The punchline of a joke, Freud believed, created a sort of psychic short cut, transporting us rapidly from one idea to another by a quick and unexpected route which thereby allowed an ‘economy of psychic expenditure’, a saving of mental energy which would then be expelled in an explosive outburst of laughter.

  Nathan read through all these various explanations carefully, highlighting the most suggestive passages and making detailed notes. He realized that very few commentators had specifically addressed the topic of satire or political humour, although he did come across a dismissive observation by Milan Kundera: Kundera, it seemed, looked down upon satire as a ‘thesis art’ which sought to shepherd its audience towards a preconceived political or moral position, falling short of what he saw as the real purpose of artistic creation, which was to make people aware of ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning.