Essex Poison

by Ian Sansom

  Mrs Dunbar excused herself and squeezed out to go and prepare tea in the back kitchen.

  Dunbar seated Morley and me at the table. I had the view of the yard: blank brick walls and nothing else, not a plant or a weed, nothing, nothing at all but a blank wall.

  ‘Well, Mr Morley.’ Dunbar was clearly absolutely chuffed: he puffed out his cheeks with pleasure, ‘puffling’, as Morley might have it. (‘PUFFLE (verb): to puff with pleasure or surprise.’ For other examples of Morley’s nonce words and neologisms see his pamphlet, ‘Words – And How to Invent Them’, 1930. Morley always rather fancied himself as Shakespeare, though he was closer to Edward Lear.) ‘I have to say I am uncharacteristically lost for words.’ Dunbar snorted slightly at his own little joke. ‘But I’ll be honest, I have no idea why you’re here!’

  ‘As I say, Mr Dunbar, I was very impressed by your … performance in the council chamber. My colleague and I here …’ Morley looked in my direction for support. He was having one of his George Washington moments. He needed a surrogate liar.

  ‘… are writing a book about Essex,’ I said, ‘and are interested in providing some sketches and portraits of regional and local politics and the … characters involved.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Dunbar, sitting up rather straighter in his seat. ‘I don’t know about being a character, but it is certainly a subject on which I have strong opinions.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Morley. ‘Quite quite plain from your speech in the council chamber.’

  ‘I see it as my job to make this council accountable,’ said Dunbar. ‘To the people of Colchester.’

  ‘And you clearly feel you have an uphill struggle on your hands, by the sound of it?’ said Morley.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘As far as I can see, the council is run for the benefit of its councillors and not for the benefit of the town.’

  ‘’Twas ever thus, Mr Dunbar,’ said Morley. ‘’Twas ever thus. Sic semper tyrannus. And what about Arthur Marden?’

  ‘Marden?’

  ‘The mayor?’

  ‘Ex-mayor,’ said Dunbar. ‘You know he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morley.

  ‘Do you need to take notes?’ asked Dunbar.

  ‘Notes?’ asked Morley.

  ‘About what I say.’

  ‘Oh no. No, no, no,’ said Morley.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘I wouldn’t want to be misquoted or misunderstood.’

  ‘No, no need,’ said Morley. ‘It’s all up here.’ He tapped his head. ‘And my assistant here takes notes for me. Don’t you, Sefton?’

  I reached into my pocket for my notebook, which I knew wasn’t there, and which Morley doubtless knew wasn’t there; fortunately the mere act of looking for it seemed to have satisfied Mr Dunbar of our bona fides.

  ‘Arthur Marden?’ Morley prompted.

  ‘Marden?’ Dunbar gave a sharp dismissive laugh. ‘Marden was harmless. Marden was only ever a pawn in the game,’ said Dunbar. ‘He wasn’t a big player.’

  ‘So who are the big players?’

  ‘In Colchester?’ said Mr Dunbar.

  ‘Indeed, in Colchester,’ said Morley.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’ asked Mrs Dunbar, nervously popping her head round the door.

  ‘Neither for me, thank you,’ said Morley.

  ‘Milk and three sugars if you have it, Mrs Dunbar, thank you,’ I said, as she disappeared again.

  ‘Who are the big players in Colchester?’ asked Morley.

  ‘The big players in Colchester? The big players in Colchester are the same as they are everywhere, Mr Morley.’

  ‘I’m sure they are. Just remind me, though? For our readers, who may not be as familiar as you are with Essex council politics.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with being familiar with Essex council politics,’ said Basil. His brow furrowed. ‘This is Realpolitik, Mr Morley. This is the politics of the boardroom. The politics of government. The deals and the arrangements behind the scenes.’

  ‘Ah. I see. The politics of the hidden hand? The Machiavellian workings of town hall politics?’

  ‘Yes. Correct. And as always and everywhere, the big players in the game are the landlords and the landowners. The people with inherited wealth, the upper classes and the arriviste businessmen. The paymasters.’

  ‘Ah. I see, Mr Dunbar. Are you by any chance a communist?’ Morley could often be rather to the point. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I certainly do not mind,’ said Dunbar. ‘And I most certainly am not. I am an independent, Mr Morley. I pride myself on my independence.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Morley. ‘I am of a similar mind myself.’

  ‘Independent of Mind and Independent of Spirit,’ pronounced Dunbar. It was the slogan of Morley’s ill-fated British Liberal Independent People’s Party (founded 1931, foundered 1935). Morley preferred not to talk about the BLIPP. Suffice it to say he was not a natural political leader – he found the views of many of his supporters unsavoury and uncongenial. And it probably didn’t help that the party was called the BLIPP. ‘The BLIPP?’ said Dunbar, smiling with pleasure at the memory of it.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘Gone but not forgotten. So are you suggesting Marden was taking money from people, in order to influence council policy?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,’ said Dunbar.

  ‘That’s quite an accusation.’

  ‘Well, it’s quite a scandal,’ said Dunbar. ‘It deserves telling. It deserves telling to the widest audience possible. It deserves the kind of audience you command, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Do you have proof?’ asked Morley.

  ‘Proof? Proof? I have been gathering proof my whole life, Mr Morley!’ said Dunbar. ‘This is our chance to expose them, sir. Together we could work on a campaign to expose and root out the canker at the heart of local government in this country!’

  ‘Well, we’ll see, shall we, Mr Dunbar?’

  Morley was often pestered by cranks and crackpots who sought to enlist him in some campaign or cause. There was the Society for the Prevention of Smoking Among Girls, for example, a cause that Morley believed in but for which he felt Miriam had prevented him from expressing his public support. There was the Campaign for Peace Through Silence, another cause that in principle he supported but for which he felt his loud vocal support was perhaps inappropriate, given the nature of the campaign. Plus all sorts of personal crusades by men and women bearing grievances and grudges who saw Morley as a potential high-profile supporter and ally. I spent much of my time at St George’s and on the road replying to the endless petitions and importunities of England’s great disgruntled: I have never seen the contents of an MP’s postbag but I think I probably have a pretty good idea of what they have to put up with.

  ‘And what about Marden’s daughter?’ asked Morley.

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘Florence? Did you ever come across her?’

  ‘No. Can’t say I did. Why? Do you think she might be involved in the conspiracy as well?’

  ‘We’ll just have to think about that.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘You never know.’

  We briefly exchanged polite conversation with Mrs Dunbar when she returned with our tea and then Dunbar took us upstairs to what he called his ‘office’, which was the tiny front bedroom of the house, crammed from floor to ceiling with shelves and papers. Actually, ‘crammed’ is wrong; ‘crammed’ implies that the room was merely full, that what was there was perhaps merely a throng of paperwork, a busy little gathering of material. It was not a throng. It was not a gathering. It was an explosion. It was chaos. There seemed to be no order to the room at all: papers had been piled, bundled and stacked to form a rockfall of paper, an avalanche of evidence. It was a place, in its way, as ruined as the Balkerne Gate next door. Dunbar stood at the doorway, staring ahead, eyes swivelling frantically from left to right and back again, as if searching for something. Morley and I stood
shoulder to shoulder on the landing.

  ‘Now,’ said Dunbar, rubbing his head like Aladdin rubbing his lamp, wishing for wishes, seeking guidance. ‘I know it’s here somewhere.’

  ‘What exactly is it you’re looking for, Mr Dunbar?’ asked Morley.

  ‘Proof!’ said Dunbar.

  ‘And what kind of proof exactly?’

  ‘Proof, Mr Morley, that will reveal what’s behind all this. The full extent of the conspiracy. The paperwork.’

  ‘You certainly have quite a lot of paperwork,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dunbar. ‘I have to. I have council minutes and agendas going back thirty years. And look, if you’ – he had started burrowing into his hoard – ‘if you carefully cross-reference them with the newspapers and company reports and … all sorts of other sources, you’re able to read between the lines and begin to see what’s actually happening here.’ He held two pieces of paper triumphantly in his hand. ‘See! Proof!’ He grabbed some more. ‘Proof!’ And then more. ‘Proof!’

  ‘I see.’ Morley looked at me despairingly. ‘That sort of proof.’ And then, mumblingly, ‘Argumentum non probatur, Sefton.’

  Mr Dunbar began gathering armfuls of paper but Morley put out a kind and restraining arm: if there was one thing he understood it was obsession.

  ‘Mr Dunbar?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Dunbar, continuing to ferret away at the papers.

  ‘Mr Dunbar.’ Dunbar ceased. Morley chose his words carefully. ‘This material is so interesting and so significant that I think it’s probably going to take all of us some time to work through the implications of what you’re saying.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘The implications are huge.’

  ‘Massive,’ agreed Morley.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re really going to have to quarry your way in to dig up all your evidence.’

  ‘Yes, quarry in,’ said Mr Dunbar.

  ‘Quite an excavation.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘So I think perhaps today is not the time to begin.’

  ‘No?’ said Mr Dunbar.

  ‘Perhaps we could return another time to help you dig through the material more thoroughly?’

  ‘Yes, that would be excellent, Mr Morley. That would be excellent! Thank you!’

  Morley thus skilfully extricated us from what might have been a rather long afternoon’s paperchase.

  ‘Good God,’ I said, as we got back into the Cadillac. ‘Mad.’

  ‘Now, now, let’s not dismiss him out of hand, Sefton.’

  ‘He was a raving lunatic.’

  ‘Hardly. Perfectly harmless and rather charming, I thought.’

  ‘But all that paperwork? It was absolute chaos.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with chaotic paperwork, Sefton. You should remember, young man, that Britain and indeed the entire British Empire has triumphed in large part precisely because of our chaotic paperwork!’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Morley,’ I said, lighting a cigarette and starting up the engine.

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely. Mark my words,’ said Morley. ‘As administrators we English have always been rather indifferent – which is of course the art of true mastery. And what does indifference rely upon for its smooth and proper functioning?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Chaotic paperwork, Sefton! If no one quite knows what’s going on then things just sort of – well, they go on. Look at the Spanish. And the Romans. And the Germans, I dare say. Terribly well organised, the lot of them – and their empires hence doomed to failure.’ (This theme of the importance of messy versus tidy paperwork is one that Morley elaborated upon some years later in an article, ‘Paper Work and Print Runs’ in the International Paper Manufacturer’s Magazine, August 1939. His own approach to paperwork was, I have to say, according to his own crude categories and typologies, rather more German than it was English. He was fanatically well organised.) ‘Mr Dunbar with his paperwork seems to me in fact the archetypal Englishman, and a jolly good thing too.’ If I had a penny for every time that Morley claimed during our time together that the average eccentric was the archetypal Englishman I would be a wealthy man.

  We were about to drive away when Dunbar came rushing out of his house.

  ‘I’ve found it!’ he said, running up to the car. ‘I’ve found it!’

  Morley pulled down the window of the car.

  ‘Mr Dunbar! Lovely to see you again. Found what exactly?’

  ‘A crucial piece of evidence.’

  ‘Really? Crucial in what regard?’

  ‘It’s Ken Cowley.’

  ‘Ken Cowley?’

  ‘Yes! The High Sheriff. You talking about excavating made me think.’

  ‘Excavating?’ said Morley. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Cowley’s been in a long-running dispute with the mayor over the electrification of the town.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘All the roadworks.’

  ‘Ah yes, we had noticed.’

  ‘Cowley and his family run an oil company. They have everything to lose with the electrification of the town.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Morley. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘And there’s more! When you mentioned the quarrying I remembered that Marden had sold Cowley some land many years ago – a part of what used to be the site of one of his old quarries, for Cowley to use as a depot.’

  ‘Right-o,’ said Morley.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ said Dunbar.

  ‘I’m not sure I do, Mr Dunbar, no.’

  ‘Cowley might have felt that Marden had swindled him on the deal, and so years later, and now with the electrification of the town taking place, he has been driven to take his revenge!’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s certainly one possibility, Mr Dunbar. Thank you for raising it.’

  ‘Shall we go to the police?’

  ‘Erm. I think we might perhaps conduct our own enquiries first.’

  ‘I’ll come with you!’ said Mr Dunbar, ready to yank open the door of the Cadillac and jump right in.

  ‘No, no. I’m afraid I – we …’ Morley looked to me in panic to come up with a convincing lie.

  ‘We have some meetings – important meetings – to attend to first, Mr Dunbar.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘Yes, we’re really working flat out at the moment, to try to get this next book completed.’

  ‘Oh. OK. So what do we do now?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Mr Dunbar,’ said Morley. ‘Shall we sleep on this thing with – what’s he called again?’

  ‘Ken Cowley,’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘The High Sheriff.’

  ‘Yes, with Mr Cowley. We’ll sleep on it tonight and get to it first thing tomorrow. How about that?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could see if I could find some more proof tonight.’

  ‘Yes. Good idea. Excellent. And we’ll maybe pay a call on Mr Cowley tomorrow, just to get his side of the story.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘If we suspect him of murdering Marden?’

  ‘Well, let’s not jump to any conclusions. These matters require careful handling, Mr Dunbar.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Right.’

  ‘Where might we find Mr Cowley? Is he local?’

  ‘He has a mill down by the Hythe.’

  ‘And he’s not related to the Cowley Brothers, by any chance?’ I asked.

  ‘The Cowley Brothers?’ said Mr Dunbar.

  ‘They’re independent oystermen out at West Mersea,’ I said.

  ‘Probably,’ said Mr Dunbar. ‘There’s a lot of Cowleys. Do you want me to come with you tomorrow?’

  ‘Erm …’ said Morley.

  ‘We’ll call for you, Mr Dunbar,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. That’s it. We’ll call for you. Thank you very much,’ said Morley. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  As it turned out, Mr Dunbar had been very helpful, though not at all in the way he’d intended.

  CHAPTER
22

  KURSAAL

  WE RETIRED TO THE HOTEL to join Miriam, exhausted from our dealings with the utterly wearisome Dunbar, who was, I realised, basically Morley without Morley’s iron self-discipline, his good luck, his moustache and his charm. I met many such men during my years with Morley, men with great passions and enthusiasms who were – thankfully – too disorganised to cause anyone any harm. The dangerous ones were those with the energy and the organisation. As Morley might say, Nisi Dei gratia, sim, and Hunc tu, Romane, caveto.

  While Morley set to work in the hotel dining room, racking his brains, making notes and diagrams, forging connections, trying to piece together what he regarded as all the various ‘clues’ about the death of Arthur Marden – ‘When is a clue not a clue, Father?’ asked Miriam. ‘Answer: when it’s a red herring!’ – Miriam and I busied ourselves with a very thorough and very challenging and robust Essex afternoon tea: sandwiches thick with paste, and crusts, slabs of yellow-buttered fruit cake, scones and cups of scalding tea. No oysters. The food was soothing and delicious but – as seemed to be the Essex way – tempers soon became rather frayed. Perhaps it was something in the Essex air, something to do with Marconi perhaps down in Chelmsford, the peculiar atmospherics of Essex? (For Morley’s theories about the effects of radio waves on the weather and on the human atmosphere generally, see ‘On the Matter of Airwaves’, an article in Wireless World in May 1920. ‘The catwhisker,’ he writes, ‘may be introducing all sorts of interference into our lives which we are not yet able to comprehend.’) Or maybe it was just Miriam, who brought with her wherever she went her own peculiar weather system.

  The problem began when Morley suddenly announced, from deep behind a pile of papers, that Miriam and I were to be dispatched forthwith to Southend for the purposes of research for the book. Miriam, mid-way through a substantial scone, was not impressed; and when Miriam was not impressed, mid-scone or not, she was not one to keep her thoughts to herself. She did not believe in suffering in silence. (Morley, in an article ‘Suffering and Silence’, published in Soul and Spirit magazine, May 1927, and apparently inspired by the teachings of an unnamed holy man he had met on his travels in China, India and Tibet – but who I rather suspected, having seen Morley’s methods up close, was in fact a composite figure, or amalgam, or indeed entirely a figment of his imagination – suggested a method for dealing with suffering which he called the Simmer. ‘Put your troubles not to boil, but to simmer,’ he writes. ‘This simple act of reducing the heat beneath our worldly woes – the adoption of the method we might call the Simmer – would greatly reduce the sum of human suffering.’) Suffice it to say that Miriam did not simmer and had little or no interest in reducing the sum of human misery.