A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Ah—politicians always do seem to, these days. I suppose we have Churchill to blame for that.”

  “No, it goes further back than that. Asquith and Lloyd George both wrote theirs. Politicians in general have an affinity for fiction. Anyway policemen seem to do pretty well by their memoirs these days. Aren’t you going to cash in too?”

  “Not me, sir. Policemen shouldn’t write autobiographies. They play up their involvement with the sensational cases, hoping the newspapers will buy the serial rights.”

  “Politicians claim to have drafted all the popular legislation,” I admitted, “and never have had anything to do with things like the poll tax or water privatisation. But anyway, the thing is, I’ve got sidetracked by something in your line.”

  “Oh?”

  “By a friend who was murdered in his flat just off Belgrave Square in 1956.”

  “In 1956 I was a uniformed constable on the beat. And my beat certainly wasn’t Belgrave Square.”

  “I never imagined that it was. The fact is, I want to find out as much as possible about the murder.”

  “Why?”

  “Difficult to explain. I think it’s a sort of guilt that it made so little impact on me at the time.”

  “I can understand that, sir. I’ve had colleagues who were killed in the line of duty, and it’s always irked me that there’s never been time for more than a tear or two and a shake of the head before we’ve had to get down to the next case. You’re not thinking of one of those ‘miscarriage of justice’ books, are you, sir? I’d never have imagined that was your line of country.”

  “No, no. There was no miscarriage of justice. The boy fled the country and was never tried for the killing. It’s not a question of who so much as of how and why. Timothy Wycliffe was such an engaging person, so popular and inoffensive, that I want to know how he came to be killed.”

  “Wycliffe . . . Would that be the political family, Mr. Proctor?”

  “That’s right. His father was Minister of Planning and Public Works at the time.”

  “One of your mob, sir. Some of your contacts in the party would know the details, wouldn’t they?”

  “They are clamping down. There are elements of scandal. Timothy was in the F.O. at the time, and a practising homosexual.”

  There was a chuckle from the other end of the line.

  “Terribly afraid of scandal, politicians, aren’t they, sir? It makes you wonder sometimes how they get up the courage to do the things they do. Well, I’ll try to be of help. What exactly is it you want me to find out?”

  “Quite simply I’d be interested in any information you can dredge up: who the murderer was, how they fixed on him, whether they were sure that it was him, any details of interest.”

  “Did the chap who did it flee the country immediately, or did they have a chance to interview him?”

  I thought.

  “I’m not sure. I suspect immediately.”

  “That would be a pity . . . still, I’ll see what I can get hold of.”

  “You still have contacts?”

  “Of course. An ex-copper always has ways of finding things out.”

  “Really? An ex-politician is as dead as a doornail.” I said this entirely without bitterness. I was beginning to find there was life, and a thoroughly good life, after politics. “Will you drop round and see me when you’ve got something? We could have a drink and go through it.”

  “I’ll get on to you in a day or two’s time, sir.”

  When I had put the phone down I sat thinking for a while. I was going back over that one memory I had had while talking to Marjorie Knopfmeyer, the memory I had not wanted to share with her. I tried to date it: it was not in the lead-up to the murder, because it was something that happened while I was still at the Foreign Office. I rather thought we were agonising at the time about our relationship with Europe—talking about how we couldn’t go in with them because of our Special Relationship with the U.S., our Commonwealth ties, and all that, rather like the woman who doesn’t want to have too much to do with her next-door neighbours in case they get too pushy. Still, that doesn’t exactly date it. I think it must have been round about 1953, by which time Tim and I were good friends and shared confidences quite naturally.

  The memory starts with my coming upon Tim in the corridor. When I saw his face I said, “My God!”

  “Had an argument with a revolving door,” he said breezily.

  “It obviously fought back.”

  He was lying, of course. The left side of his face was not only bruised, it had small cuts as well—the skin was livid, and the eye was swollen. I wouldn’t have made the joke if there had been anyone else in the corridor, because we both recognised that within the context of the Foreign Office Tim had to lie. Whatever confidences he might make to me, officially a front had to be kept up. Of course Tim could have invented something better: a fight in which he had intervened to protect a young lady—something of that kind. But it was typical of Tim that he should come up with a minimal lie—a standard gesture, a tiny bob towards the official front.

  We went about our business, but I had detected behind the breeziness an edge of worry or unhappiness. No one said anything much beyond the odd “Tim’s been in the wars.” Those, I suppose, were the outsiders’ bobs towards the official front. But I am still not sure, in fact, just how much the average diplomat or civil servant in the F.O. knew at the time about Tim and his activities.

  We finished late, and almost without needing to arrange it we went for a drink after work. The Waggon and Horses, near the St. James’s Park tube station, was a quiet pub except at lunchtimes and at five o’clock. We got a corner to ourselves where we could talk, and I bought the first round. I noticed that Tim, unusually, asked for a double Scotch.

  “All right, tell me about it,” I said when we were settled. Tim smiled wryly.

  “I got into a fight.”

  “I know you got into a fight, you ass. I gave up believing in aggressive revolving doors years ago. What kind of a fight? Not an after-hours brawl in the Old Kent Road, I take it?”

  “A purely private brawl.”

  “You and him, behind closed doors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a blessing. A fight between consenting adults in private. No witnesses. You should have taken a couple of days off work with a cold.”

  “This bruise isn’t going to go away in a couple of days.”

  “Come on, how did it happen? I just can’t imagine you getting into a fight.”

  “I don’t know how it happened. . . . Funnily enough, I really don’t know. You’ve got to believe that I’m not one of those people who get their kicks from violence. There are those who do, but I’m not one of them.”

  “I never thought you were. But you do go with rough trade.”

  How worldly wise I had become! The phrase just rolled off my tongue. Tim grimaced with distaste, then flinched in pain.

  “I don’t like the phrase.”

  “But it is trade, isn’t it? You pay them.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “They’re working-class boys who do it for money.”

  “Yes, most of them. Don’t go all Mrs. Grundy on me.”

  “And you take them to your flat.”

  “Well, it’s a lot more comfortable than a quick go in the park. Yes, they usually come to my flat.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Why not? Do you mean they might steal things from me?”

  “Well, there is that, but it wasn’t what I was thinking about. Don’t you think they might be struck by the contrast? Between your life and theirs?”

  He sat for a moment looking into his glass.

  “Do you think it could be that? I’d never thought of it. It’s not as though it’s an enormous flat, or a luxurious one. I don’t set any great store by money—or comfort or possessions, come to that.”

  “That’s all very fine when you have them,” I said tartly.

  He lau
ghed, with a touch of his usual self.

  “All right, that sounded pretty self-righteous. But give me a break, Peter. You can’t say I’ve ever flaunted what I have.”

  “I didn’t say you had. You don’t have to flaunt them for the boys to be conscious that they’re there, and to contrast them with the homes they come from, or the bed-sitters they live in. Don’t you think they might be resentful that they’re selling the most basic thing, their body, to someone who has so much?”

  “Christ, you make me feel awful,” Tim said, and went to the bar to get a second round.

  “All right,” I said when he came back. “Tell me what happened last night.”

  “Well, it was my birthday yesterday—I’m Virgo, believe it or not—and I picked up this boy in Trafalgar Square: nice lad, from Glasgow—could hardly understand a word he said.”

  “And you went back to your flat?”

  “That’s right. We made love, I threw together a meal, we watched television—”

  “Good God! I didn’t know you’d bought a television set.”

  “The boys often like it. This Gavin did. He’d only seen it two or three times in his life before.”

  “Well, that’s certainly the first time I’ve heard that given as a reason for buying television!”

  “You are a frightful snob, Peter. You should get a set yourself. The programmes may be awful, but it’s going to revolutionise the way people regard politicians. Anyway, we made love again, had a drink, and he got ready to go.”

  “Was there any . . . pent-up violence about this chap?”

  “No. He was just very quiet.”

  “Had he anywhere to go?”

  “Yes. Otherwise I’d have asked him to stay the night. He was down in London on a visit to an aunt in Islington.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I’d paid him—well. We were going towards the door and—I really don’t remember in detail, but I think I put my arm around him and was going to kiss him goodbye when he shouted ‘Keep your fuckin’ hands to yoursel’’ and pushed me, then punched me hard, then again, and I knocked my head against the side of the cabinet—very painful—and as I was reeling he kicked me in the groin and rushed out of the door.”

  “And you say he hadn’t got any pent-up violence in him!”

  “He hadn’t, not before.”

  I thought for a long time before I said: “You must have got him to do things he didn’t like doing.”

  “Then he made a bloody good pretence of liking them.”

  “People do, Tim. Look, it’s got to be one of three things, hasn’t it? Either he was doing things with you that he really found unnatural and disgusting, or he felt inferior, condescended to, and patronised—”

  “I do not patronise or condescend to them!”

  “But maybe your whole way of life makes them feel condescended to. Or thirdly he was just one hell of a violent young man. Glasgow’s no town for softies.”

  “You can be tough without going in for unprovoked violence.”

  “You can be. But some tough people are just on the look-out for an excuse for a punch-up.”

  Tim sat meditatively over his second large whiskey.

  “It’s upsetting . . . unnerving. I know these boys. . . . I thought I knew them.”

  “You don’t get to know people on one-night stands.”

  At this time I had a flat in Victoria, and I remember thinking as I walked home how the basis of our relationship had changed. I still immensely admired Tim’s political insight, his social savoir faire, his irrepressible gaiety, but I felt his superior in that worldly wisdom which comes from dealing in depth with people. There was, it seemed to me then, a naiveté about his view of others—maybe because of his fleeting sexual encounters, maybe because he had never had the experience of a close family life, maybe because of a temperamental inclination to see only the best in people. There was, still, something of the innocent about him. I didn’t then wonder whether it would be the downfall of him, but I do wonder now if it was.

  Looking back I see that, in those reflections, I was being very smug and self-congratulatory. My knowledge of people was not so much deeper than Tim’s, my knowledge of myself much less. But remembering that incident does convince me of one thing: that a taste for violence was never part of Tim’s sexual nature. Far from getting any masochistic pleasure from the incident, Tim reacted with bewilderment, pain, shock. He didn’t understand how someone could behave in that way to him—someone to whom he had shown only friendship. I know people can develop tastes, sexual as well as any other sort, but I would be very surprised if Tim developed a liking for being on the receiving end of violence. I do not believe, then, that his death could have been the culmination of a beating-up of which he had at least begun as the willing victim.

  I do think, though, that one of the three possibilities that I put to him at the time for the Scottish boy’s violence may provide the explanation for what happened to him that night in 1956.

  8

  PORTRAIT of a KILLER?

  Yesterday Sutcliffe rang me to tell me that he’d got hold of the basic facts of the case. He said he was free in the evening—in fact he said he was free every evening—so we arranged that he should come round here about half past six. When Nina showed him in (Nina is one half of the Filipino couple who live in the basement and cook and clean for us) I felt a lift when I saw his amiable and doggy form again—a lift, and also a spurt of fellow feeling: he had about him that indefinable something that said “retired.” The feeling I had was the fellowship of the discarded: he and I were both rummaging on the rubbish-tip of life. He, pretty clearly, was enjoying it less than I.

  “What will you have?” I asked. “There needn’t be any nonsense about not drinking on duty now.”

  “That’s very kind of you, sir. I’m really a draught bitter man—”

  “I can manage an Australian beer.”

  “Don’t make me laugh. I’ll have a Scotch and water, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  “Couldn’t we get on Christian name terms? I’m Peter, as you know.”

  Sutcliffe shuffled his feet and looked a mite awkward.

  “It doesn’t slip easily off my tongue—I’m too wary of politicians—but I’ll try. I’m John, though mostly in the force I was known as Sutty.”

  “That sounds too much like burning Indian widows. I’ll stick with John.” I came over with the drinks. “How does retirement suit you?”

  “It’ll be all right when I can stop my mind from being active,” Sutcliffe said dourly. “And when I can get people out of the feeling that suddenly I need cossetting or ‘brightening up.’ And when I can stop my daughters bringing me round things in casseroles that ‘only need heating up.’ ”

  “Bad as that?”

  He gave a slow grin.

  “Not really. I’m leaving out the things that I’m glad to have got away from. Still, I’ve enjoyed looking into this.”

  He tapped his notebook, and I gestured towards the armchairs so we could go through it in comfort.

  “I didn’t push my luck by asking for photocopies,” Sutcliffe said as a preliminary, “so I made a lot of notes, and the rest is in my head. Where shall we start?”

  “Where the police came into it, I suppose,” I said. “With the finding of the body.”

  “Right. That’s perfectly straightforward. The cleaner came in on the Friday morning at ten past nine. She had her own key, of course, saw the body immediately and phoned the police. The phone was off the hook, but that was about the only thing she disturbed. She seems to have been a sensible body.”

  “What state was the flat in?”

  “As you’d expect if there had been a roughhouse: chairs overturned, furniture displaced, a vase and a chair broken. It didn’t look, though, as if there’d been any deliberate orgy of destruction.”

  “Ah—I wondered. The boy seems to have been quite an ordinary lad, and a flat like that—”

  “Right. What y
ou might call a social resentment. It was something that occurred to me, and to the police at the time, but in fact most of the disorder and destruction seems to have been incidental to the fight.”

  “What about the violence to the body?”

  “That was very considerable—bruises all over: to the face, legs, groin, and so on. There was a bad cut on the side of the face that had bled a lot before death. There were no abrasions or other damage to the knuckles, suggesting that he didn’t actually counter the violence, merely tried to restrain his attacker. Does that surprise you?”

  “No, it doesn’t. He’d been attacked by a casual pickup once before, and he was very upset—hurt, if that’s not a silly word. It would be very much in character for him to try to restrain rather than hit back.”

  “That was the picture the police had of the fight. At some point he got to the phone, presumably to call the police, but he was stopped—no 999 call was received from him. Eventually, the police hypothesize, he was simply knocked out.”

  “And then murdered?”

  “Yes—a brutal blow on the back of the head, as he lay there. Some time later, the doctor thought—though like all such gentry he wasn’t prepared to commit himself.”

  “I see . . . As if the boy thought about what he’d done, the seriousness of the assault, then decided he’d be safer if he actually finished him off?”

  “Yes, something of that sort, the police thought. His fingerprints were all over the flat, by the way, but he didn’t have any police record, so he probably banked on that saving him. . . . I don’t imagine he was thinking very straight.”

  “Probably not.” I sat thinking about the scene for some time, the last hour of Timothy Wycliffe. It was an ugly picture. “How did the police get on to him, this Andrew Forbes?”

  “Ah, that’s quite interesting. It wasn’t for some time, and when they did they found that he’d already left the country.”

  “No interview with him then? That’s a pity.”

  “It is. The fact is, they relied for their information about Mr. Wycliffe’s habits and friends on his neighbours.”