Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  She reeled off the modest explanation she had given many times before to her friends and relatives, the familiar phrases helping her to regain a measure of control. She spoke in the present tense, like many who find difficulty in coming to terms with a death.

  Now Lambert spoke slowly, making sure she understood him through her distress. ‘What we need to know, Despina, is whether you can think of anyone who has had a fierce dispute with Mr Keane in the last year or so. These things sometimes escalate, you see, especially if the person involved is not balanced enough to be objective about the answers he or she is given.’

  ‘No!’ The word was out almost before he had completed his explanation. Then, as if she realized it had been too impulsive for them, she said apologetically, ‘I have thought about it, you see. I’ve been wondering ever since he was found and the papers said foul play was suspected. But there just isn’t anyone.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Lambert, rising. ‘Let us know if you have any second thoughts.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, like a student who felt she had failed some kind of oral exam. ‘You might get something more useful from Miss Probert. That’s Mr Keane’s secretary. She has dealings with a much wider circle of people than I do, through his correspondence.’

  Daphne Probert was a formidable, grey-haired woman, who oozed efficiency and had no doubt protected Keane from unwanted encounters when he had been alive. But she produced coffee for them, and drew from the top drawer of her desk the diary she had kept of her employer’s parliamentary engagements.

  She was around fifty, and far more detached from this death than the tremulous girl they had just seen. Because they were experienced in their questions and she was efficient and precise in her answers, they built up a picture of Keane’s working life quickly. He had spent most weekends in his constituency, travelling down more often than not on Friday mornings, ignoring the Friday Commons business like two-thirds of his fellow MPs. Sometimes he had come back with the rest of the West Country weekenders in the jams of Sunday night, but he had preferred to motor up the M4 on Monday mornings whenever his engagements permitted it. She looked in her diary. After that last weekend before the parliamentary recess, he had come back to London on the Sunday night.

  She knew little of his life in Gloucestershire, and gave the impression that she had always thought it of minor importance. She was one of those people who, having lived in London all her life, considered that not much that mattered occurred outside the capital, and therefore saw no reason to leave it except for the occasional holiday.

  Hook was kept busy writing, building up that profile of the dead man which was the core of all murder investigations. Lambert eventually said, ‘This has been very helpful, Miss Probert. One of the difficulties of this case for us is obviously that a man of Mr Keane’s background is dealing with a large number of people, by the very nature of his work. Are you aware of anyone who had a particular dislike for him?’

  ‘Who disliked him enough to kill him, you mean?’ For a moment, she rejoiced in the precision with which she dismissed what she perceived as a euphemism. ‘No, definitely not. Most of the people who met him here were politicians or senior business people, of course.’

  It was Lambert’s turn to smile, at the notion that all such men and women should be above suspicion. ‘What about your correspondence files? You must have dealt with some letters which were critical of Mr Keane, amongst the hundreds you receive, I suppose.’

  She nodded. ‘Every MP knows that he is bound to have a few nutters.’ She produced the word daringly, as though this departure into slang showed how modern she could be when she unbent. ‘There isn’t anyone I remember as being particularly dangerous. I can check the files, if you like.’

  Lambert smiled. ‘I’m sure if there was a dangerous lunatic lurking among your correspondence, you’d be well aware of him, Miss Probert.’

  She smiled, preening herself a little at the compliment. Then her brow furrowed and she said, ‘There was one chap, now I come to think of it. But he didn’t write to us, or I’d have remembered it. He rang, that was it. Came through to me on the telephone, very excited.’

  ‘Do you recall his name?’ said Lambert, studiously low key. People remembered things much less easily once you told them it was important.

  ‘I don’t. But I may have it somewhere in my notes. He left messages, you see.’ She reached into the top drawer of her desk, pulled out a loose-leafed dictation pad, and began to turn its many sheets. ‘Yes, here it is!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I remember it now, because Mr Keane said I was never to put this man through. I was to tell him to attend one of the constituency clinics, or put his complaint in writing. I gathered the exchanges had been going on for some time.’

  ‘And what was the source of this man’s displeasure?’

  This time she liked the understatement. It seemed to her the proper parliamentary phrasing for that wild screaming she had had to deal with on the phone, when she had refused to put the man through and offered to take a message. ‘Source of displeasure’ was the sort of phrase she might have put in one of her letters, when someone had been really angry. ‘I couldn’t tell you exactly. The man wasn’t very articulate, you see. But I gathered it was something to do with his daughter’s death.’

  ‘And his name?’

  She looked down at her scribbled shorthand again, then smiled triumphantly. Joe Walsh. That’s what he called himself.’

  They were waiting for a taxi in the busy street outside when Hook raised his voice above the traffic noise to say, ‘She’s right, I suppose. The electorate is about a hundred thousand in our constituency, even though not all of them vote at elections. Our MP is bound to have been pestered by a few nutters.’

  Lambert smiled. ‘And a minority of all nutters are dangerously violent. At the moment, I’m hoping Joseph Walsh might be one of them.’

  *

  They went into the murder room in CID when they got back to Oldford, to check with Detective Inspector Rushton that there were no dramatic developments in the case from the team of officers operating the routine enquiries a murder investigation always sets in train.

  ‘The Scene-of-Crime team have finished at the pond where the corpse was found and moved to Keane’s cottage,’ Chris Rushton reported. ‘No evidence of a burglary there, they say. Nor of a breaking and entering. Of course, we don’t know yet where he was killed. If it was anywhere near that pond, he must have been lured there by someone, or driven out there in a car: it’s quite a remote spot.’

  And a good one for the disposal of a body, thought Lambert. Had it not been for an ebullient boxer bitch, the pool might have held its secret for a good deal longer. Hook handed over his notes from their meetings in London. Rushton would incorporate them in the appropriate file on his computer in due course. They left him working his way through a pile of notes at his elbow, his concentration upon the flickering green type on the monitor in front of him, as he fed in and cross-referenced the information that was coming in from the team of eighteen men and women now involved in varying degrees in this investigation.

  When the work in a case like this one was at its most intense, Rushton had almost to be prised away from his machine on some nights, his desire to incorporate each new scrap of information into his records bordering on the obsessive. Since his wife had taken his child and left him two years earlier, he had little social life and did not disguise the fact.

  It was dark when a tired Lambert eased the big Vauxhall into the garage which had been opened for him at his home. ‘I’m ready to eat as soon as you are,’ he called through to the kitchen as he put away his coat in the big hall. ‘God, this travelling exhausts me these days. Bert and I went up to London on the train. Perfectly comfortable, but—’

  He stopped abruptly as he came into the kitchen and saw a white-faced Christine standing with her back to the sink. She said, ‘I’ve been to the doctor, to get the results from that second mammogram. I told you it was today.’ She
had not meant it to sound like an accusation, but he had forgotten, and she knew it.

  ‘Was everything all right?’ he said lamely. Suddenly, he was hoping against hope that she was upset with him for forgetting, rather than because of what the doctor had said.

  She smiled at him, seeing a strong man made suddenly weak by a thing he did not know how to deal with. ‘You’d better sit down to hear. I had to.’

  John Lambert lowered himself on to a kitchen chair, feeling for it behind him, his eyes not leaving her face. Christine switched off the radio which had been playing classical music at low volume on the windowsill behind the sink. ‘Invasive carcinoma,’ she said. The doctor had delivered the phrase to her as though announcing a bout of flu. She wondered what sort of message the words sounded now in her husband’s ears.

  Lambert raised his hands and set them carefully on the scrubbed deal of the kitchen table in front of him. It was as if the symmetry of their arrangement had become very important to him with the news. ‘Will they operate?’

  ‘Yes. No alternative. And as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose that’s good. That they’re going to get on with it, I mean.’ He dropped his eyes to his hands, big, strong, and totally useless in front of him. After a moment he said, ‘Will you lose the breast?’

  ‘I expect so. I didn’t enquire too thoroughly. I thought they’d better just get on with it.’

  ‘Yes. So long as they clear it up, that’s the main thing.’ And with that banality, they were in each other’s arms, without either being aware that they had moved. He held her tightly, wondering if even now as he crushed her against him he might be exacerbating the awful thing that gnawed at the body with which he was so familiar.

  Christine broke away from him and went into the bathroom and stood looking at herself in the mirror, looking at the crow’s feet around her eyes, at the lines on the forehead of the oval face beneath the brown hair that was still without any grey. She felt the left breast that was going to be cut away, remembering when she had been a college student of nineteen, giggling with her friends at a dance when that same wilful breast had escaped from a cheap bra and she had fled in comic confusion to the ladies. That moment seemed at once a long time ago and very close to her. She wondered where her life had gone.

  An hour later, after a meal with John that was punctuated by sporadic small talk, as if they had been polite strangers, she said, ‘I’ve to go in tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Jacky will come over tomorrow night, I expect. I rang her. She said she’ll bring something for a meal.’

  ‘I can look after myself. But she’ll want to see you.’ It would be the first occasion when their daughter would be the strong one, looking to minister to her parents’ needs instead of depending on them for support. He felt both old and weary; helpless, when he wanted to be a cheerful rock for Christine to rest on.

  Later, he held her in the darkness, feeling her still wakefulness, moving his hands carefully over the cotton nightdress, too shy to let his touch stray to the breast which was the cause of all this trouble.

  Long after his steady breathing had told her he was asleep, Christine Lambert lay quietly afraid in his arms.

  *

  Bert Hook was sometimes a source of amusement to his colleagues because they supposed him soft-hearted. So it was he who got the job of going to see old Mrs Keane about the death of her son. He could have been accompanied by a WPC, but preferred to go alone, knowing he operated these things best when he did not feel his own behaviour was being studied.

  The big, ivy-clad Georgian house was very quiet as he drove between the high gateposts and up the curving drive between the banks of rhododendrons. There were a surprising number of houses like this still standing in Gloucestershire, many of them now occupied by successful post-war industrialists. Some of the larger ones which had kept their estates were occupied by the aristocracy; one or two of the grandest had even attracted royal residents.

  This more modest but still gracious house might have been empty, for there was no vehicle, no sign of activity on the wide expanses of gravel in front of the impressive oak door. But Bert was admitted within a few seconds of his arrival by the middle-aged maid who seemed to be the only servant working in the big house.

  Mrs Keane rose to meet him as he was shown into the spacious drawing room with its marble fireplace and three rectangular windows. She was clad from head to foot in black, as a mourner might have been in her grandmother’s day. It was a custom which like many others had not long survived the 1914-18 war, but it seemed to a lonely old woman a fitting final gesture to the son she had never expected she would survive.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt now that it’s your son,’ said Hook. He had felt like an intruder as he stepped into the imposing hall. Now he spoke like a health visitor, watching the bereaved old woman for signs of collapse. Yet she had to be interviewed: she was the last person known to have seen Raymond Keane alive.

  ‘I accept it’s Raymond. Katherine rang me when she’d been to identify him. Was it you who was there with her when she did that?’ Hook nodded. ‘She said you were very kind.’

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude at a time like this, Mrs Keane. We need to know whatever you can tell us about your son and the people he knew, you see.’

  ‘Yes. But I’m afraid I knew very little about the life he led in recent years, Sergeant Hook.’

  She looked infinitely sad at the thought, and he knew she was confronting a fact she found very unwelcome.

  ‘We’re pretty certain now that someone killed your son, you see, so we need to know what enemies were near to him in the last weeks of his life.’

  ‘Yes. And obviously I want to help you. But I know very few of his new political acquaintances. Or any of the people he has met since he moved into politics, in fact. Parliament rather took him away from the family, but I suppose that was inevitable. He was doing rather well at Westminster, I believe.’ Her pride surged suddenly through her reserve with the last sentence.

  Hook said, ‘Did he seem at all disturbed or nervous when he left here on Christmas Eve?’

  ‘No. Rather the reverse. After a day and more with his aged mother, he was probably only too anxious to get away. But he was going to see that nice young woman Zoe Renwick, whom he was going to marry.’

  ‘Yes. We shall be seeing Miss Renwick. I’ve already arranged an appointment with her.’

  ‘I expect she’ll be able to tell you more than me about his life in these last few months. He was expecting to meet her at the cottage. He’d tried to ring her from here, but he hadn’t got hold of her.’

  ‘And he was looking forward to seeing her?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They were going to have Christmas together, just the two of them. But he was bringing her here on New Year’s Day.’ She was suddenly anxious to defend her dead son against any charge of neglect. Bert had seen the reaction often enough in old women of humbler station; it was curiously touching in this straight-backed, patrician figure.

  ‘We shall be seeing Miss Renwick very shortly. Is there anyone else who you think may be able to help us fill in our picture of your son? That’s the way we work, you see. The fuller the picture we have of the way a person lived his life and the people he came into contact with, the better our chances of finding out how he died.’

  She nodded, intelligence shining through her grief. ‘There was another young woman, you know. A nice lady. Raymond decided that she wasn’t for him a few months ago. Young people have to work these things out for themselves; it’s more complicated than it was in my day. But I was sorry that they split up. I liked her very much.’

  ‘And her name was?’

  ‘Moira. Moira Yates. Lovely, lively girl. Excellent tennis player: I saw her win a tournament once. And a very good horsewoman too, I believe. She used to come here quite often, when she and Raymond were close. She and I got on very well together. I thought she’d have been good for him. No
t that I’ve anything against the new girl, of course.’

  She added the last sentence as a hasty qualification, still the anxious parent at seventy-six, anxious about her relationship with someone who might become a daughter-in-law, forgetting for a moment that there was no longer any need for such diplomacy.

  Hook said, ‘Thank you. We shall be seeing Miss Yates in due course, I’m sure. I believe your son had a business, in addition to his work as an MP?’

  ‘Yes. Though he seemed to me to be neglecting it, leaving everything to his partner, since he became so interested in politics. But he said it was making good money, that they could get along perfectly well without him. It didn’t seem very fair to Chris, but I couldn’t interfere.’

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘Chris Hampson. Raymond’s partner at Gloucester Electronics. Nice chap; I used to see a lot of him in the old days.’ There was sadness again in the old, lined face, at the realization that she was now excluded from the developing projects in which she had once been so interested.

  ‘Had he seen Mr Hampson in the days before his death?’

  The old eyes glistened at him from their grey-black sockets; perhaps she was appreciating for the first time that the people she was mentioning would be involved in the investigation of her son’s murder. ‘Yes. Raymond went to see him on his way down here, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Was there any sort of dispute between them?’

  ‘I don’t know. Raymond wouldn’t say any more about their meeting.’ She looked down at the thick Persian carpet; plainly she thought as he did that there were implications in the dead man’s reticence.

  She did not call the maid, but saw him to the door herself. She stood still at the top of the wide stone steps as he drove away, dressed in black from head to foot, as static as a figure from Greek tragedy. The parent’s loss of a child is the worst loss of all, thought Hook, who had never known a parent of his own.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The huge room took up half of the ground floor of the building. It was thickly carpeted and very quiet. Only about a quarter of the heavy armchairs and settees were occupied, and save for the occasional rustle of the turning pages of a newspaper, there was silence. It seemed another world from the busy streets of Cheltenham outside. You would never have known it was a hospital, thought Hook. Obviously you got the benefits from going private, even before you had paid.