A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  When we had introduced ourselves and sat down he said:

  “What’s in it for me, then?”

  The assumptions of the chequebook journalist died hard, it seemed. I took out a packet of cigarettes I had brought along specially and handed it over.

  “Money’s what I’m talking about,” said Pardick, though he pocketed the cigarette packet. “You want the results of my researches on Timothy Wycliffe and I’m willing to sell.”

  “I’m not a newspaper reporter, you know,” I said rather pompously. “I’m not after a story.”

  “I don’t give a fuck if you’re the Queen of Sheba,” said Pardick. “You’ll still have to pay. I’m not asking the earth. Twenty pounds will do the trick.”

  I said nothing, but I took out my wallet and peeled two tenners from the wad, watched by the intent eyes of every old person in the room. It may have been my imagination but they seemed now full both of jealousy and contempt. Terry Pardick took the money and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

  “That’s what I call businesslike. Mind you, I can’t see why you’re interested in Timothy Wycliffe. There’s a lot bigger fish than him in my files, and pretty much for the same reason. Plenty of politicians too. When I first heard your name I thought you might be interested in some of your old colleagues—a bit of tit-for-tat for the sacking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “There was a lot of talk about—”

  He mentioned one of my former colleagues who had fallen like Lucifer a year or two before I did.

  “It was just talk, and anyway he’s no longer in the Cabinet.”

  He shook his head in a horribly knowing way.

  “They talk a lot about preserving the family, your lot, but they can’t half put it around when they feel like it, can’t they? There’s that minister for—”

  “The person I’m interested in is Timothy Wycliffe.”

  “Oh, right . . . yes. Well, it’s a long time ago.”

  I was beginning to lose patience with him. I’ve always expected value for money.

  “You were told that’s who we wanted to talk about. You’ve had time to remember.”

  “Oh, I’ve been putting my thinking cap on, I can tell you. . . . ’Course, I had him marked down long before he was done in.”

  “You did?”

  “Son of cabinet minister. Foreign Office man. We were interested in the Foreign Office in those days. It wouldn’t have made a first-rate story, but it would have been a nice little earner, if anyone had run it.”

  “Where did you do your researches? Who were your sources?”

  “Well, for example, I’d hang around the clubs he went to.” He leaned forward till he was closer than I liked, twisting his horrible old face into a lubricious grin. “Didn’t go in, o’ course: didn’t want to feel strange hands around my hind quarters.” (Looking at him now, and imagining what he looked like then, it struck me as eminently unlikely that he would have done.) “But I’d watch and see who did, and talk to some of the boys who came out with them afterwards. You had to be on the ball, so to speak, because these clubs sprang up overnight and vanished in the same way. Sometimes the police tolerated them for a bit and infiltrated, but sometimes they came down on them like a ton of bricks as soon as they twigged what they were. Over the years I built up a dossier, not just about young Wycliffe, but about all sorts of people. Did you realize the Duke of—”

  “Timothy Wycliffe!”

  “Oh, all right. . . . Well, as I say, I got quite a lot of info on young Tim—where he went, where he picked ’em up, who his real pals were—his regular pals, as opposed to his one-night stands. I was just waiting for him to do something really outrageous, then all the editors I worked for would come running for the dirt on him. Trouble was, the outrageous thing he did was get murdered.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Well, of course I wanted to be the one who delivered the dirt on him and the nancy boy they said had murdered him. Naturally. Trouble was that in the days—weeks—after the murder, all the newspapers were full of was bloody Suez. By the time they got back to normal the story was as dead as a duck. The only thing that might have revived it was his murderer getting caught.”

  “Did you know anything about his murderer?”

  “I had his name in my files. Andrew Forbes. Went around with Wycliffe, visited at his flat, all that sort of thing. I got that from his cleaner—Wycliffe’s cleaner. As far as I was concerned he was a working-class lad who’d joined the hand-flapping brigade. Then, weeks, maybe months, after the murder I heard a whisper that he was working in a bar on Majorca. It was a pretty firm story. But in those days you didn’t just hop on a plane and go. It cost money. I didn’t need a photographer—I could do my own. In fact, I tell this mob”—he gave a derogatory handwave in the direction of the ten or twelve pairs of eyes that were still intent on us—“that I was the original of these Pappa-whatsits.”

  “Paparazzi.”

  “That’s the ticket. You ever been followed by them, Mr. Proctor? Not interesting enough, I don’t suppose. But anyway, it still cost money, and I needed a firm commitment from an editor that he’d run the story and play it big. But it was no go. All I got was shifts and evasions.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “It was just after Suez, wasn’t it? Tory party fortunes at rock bottom. They might have run the story when the party was riding high, but they weren’t going to kick their party when it was down.”

  “But there were Labour papers.”

  “One or two. But they always got into a bit of a quandary when a story like that came up. The high moral tone didn’t come natural to them. There were too many in the party who wanted to let the queers do what they liked provided they did it behind closed doors for them to be entirely easy when they were handed a story like I hoped to get hold of. . . . Makes you sick, doesn’t it? . . . Mind you, it’s not surprising. There was that Tim Driberg—”

  “Yes, we all know about Tom Driberg.”

  “The things I had on him! Anyway, the long and the short of it was they wouldn’t take it either. If it had been a cabinet minister I expect they’d have swallowed their scruples and sent me after it, but a cabinet minister’s son . . . He just wasn’t big enough, not worth the risk of alienating a lot of people in the party. So I never got to sunny Spain. . . . Mind you, I did wonder later on whether I hadn’t been barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, it was a couple o’ years later. They sent me up to Nottingham to dig up some dirt on this Alan Sillitoe—he was in the news, one of those Angry Young Men, and they wanted lots of dirt about what a hell-raiser he’d been, all the women he’d put in the club, just like the bloke in his book. . . . Dead loss it was: seems to have spent most of his time in the Public Library. . . . Anyway, it was nothing but dead ends, so I had plenty of time to spare, and I went along to this street where Andy Forbes used to live, and I talked to all the neighbours. Now, there were some that were shocked and there were some that were sorry, but there were none that I could find that had a hard word to say about Forbes when he was growing up in Nottingham, not one. . . . Got a fag?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  Reluctantly he took out the packet I’d given him, opened it up, and lit one. The faces watching seemed to say “Basking in his moment of glory, isn’t he?”

  “Well, I thought that was odd. And eventually I knocked at his parents’ home, and when his old man came to the door I put my foot in it and made sure I got all my questions answered. He was a nice enough bloke, upset of course, but I kept on at him, and what he said was that his boy had beaten up—well, what he said was ‘had a fight with’—Timothy Wycliffe, because he’d been forced into bed with him. He’d beaten him up pretty badly, the father admitted that, but he’d definitely been alive when he left his flat. And thinking about it, that made sense to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, quite a lot of my contacts at
the time of the murder had insisted Forbes wasn’t one of the limp-wristed brigade, and of course I’d said to myself, ‘Like hell he wasn’t.’ And they’d said Tim and he weren’t bed partners, and I’d said to myself ‘Tell that to the marines.’ Wasn’t being cynical, just realistic. But all the neighbours and now the dad seemed to back this up. And I’d always worried about the phone being off the hook. I just couldn’t see your nancy friend trying to telephone in the middle of the fight. It made more sense if he’d been left badly beaten up, had then tried to ring for help, and had then blacked out.”

  “Yes, I agree. But did you get any line on who might then have come along and finished him off?”

  “No.” He shook his head regretfully. “Could have been anyone, couldn’t it? Any of his pals, for instance. Unbalanced, most of that lot. Get mad with jealousy. They’re all either on a mad high or a mad low. Mind you, I didn’t try very hard to find out. That was a story there was no hope of resurrecting.”

  “But you think someone just happened to come along, and took advantage of Tim’s situation?”

  “No, I don’t. I think that would be too much of a coincidence. I think it was whoever he rang.”

  “But—”

  “Because I’ll tell you this: one thing a homosexual who’d been attacked by his boyfriend would not do in 1956 is ring the police. And I don’t believe he’d ring ambulance either. I think he rang someone for help, and that was the help he got.”

  17

  TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

  On the road back to London, Sutcliffe and I discussed, and laughed about, the man we had just talked to.

  “One of the things I remember about my really important cases,” said Sutcliffe, a reminiscent expression on his face, “is that the men covering the case for Fleet Street, as it was then, always turned out to be so much more dislikeable than the criminal when we caught him. Terry is at the grubbier end of the spectrum for the sort of men I had to do with then.”

  “He is the pits,” I agreed. “And don’t his attitudes really take you back?”

  “Maybe. I can see why you’d think that. But you’ve been cut off, all those years you’ve been minister. In fact you could hear the same in any East End pub today. Pardick has that dirty-minded relish that you always get at the lower end of the tabloid press. And that press knows its audience.”

  “I suppose so. Depressing thought. And yet, and yet . . .” I looked at him meaningfully to see if he agreed with me.

  “What he said made sense,” said Sutcliffe, nodding. “He was on to the innocence of Andy Forbes, which I take it is the assumption that we’re working on. So far as we know no one else at the time had got there. And I’m damned sure he was right about not phoning the police. I don’t like to say it, and I should have thought of it earlier, but we were the last people any homosexual in the fifties would put himself in the hands of voluntarily.”

  “Absolutely. The point about not ringing for an ambulance is more dubious, though, isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. The medical authorities could have felt duty-bound to inform the police about what had been a serious attack. He was also the sort of person who would have used private medicine anyway, isn’t he?”

  “I’ve no idea. Not necessarily. But in any case it may have been Tim’s instinct in an emergency to get help from family or friends. Tim was always very hot on friendship.”

  We drove on in silence for some time, and then I said:

  “I need to find a way to talk to Tim’s brother.”

  We tossed this to and fro, wondering how best to manage it, but Sutcliffe’s experience was mainly of turning up on a doorstep, flashing his ID, and then asking questions. Clearly something else was needed here, but I was hampered by knowing nothing about Tim’s brother beyond the fact—gleaned from Marjorie’s way of speaking about him—that he is still alive. When I got back home I tried to ring Marjorie, intending a bit of tactically vague questioning, but there was no reply. I sat thinking for a bit, and then got to work with Burke’s Peerage and Who’s Who. I came up with the information that the address for both Lord John Wycliffe and James Wycliffe was Maddern Hall, near Formby, in the county of Avon. Now that I did find interesting.

  Tonight over dinner I talked it over with Jeremy. He was in favour of my using my old ministerial clout to barge straight in on them and ask my questions. I think he would rather have liked to come along to this bearding of father and son. He is getting quite involved in the matter, though in a much more light-hearted way. I told him I felt that would be counterproductive. Jeremy thought there would have to be some sort of trick to get the son out of the way so that I could talk to Lord John. I had to agree that getting to talk to Tim’s father alone might well present a problem, but I pointed out that even if James were got out of the way, there was presumably still the wife, who I had gathered was the more formidable of the pair. Ways of getting both out of the way and leaving me in the house did not present themselves readily.

  “Who is James Wycliffe anyway?” asked Jeremy. “I mean what is he? What is his claim to fame?”

  “He has been Lord Lieutenant of Avon,” I answered. “Otherwise he is described as ‘farmer.’ ”

  “You don’t think my ringing at a prearranged time and saying ‘T’owd cow’ave got into clover meadow’ would do the trick, do you?” asked Jeremy, his mock-rural accent gloriously bad.

  “No, I don’t. I think he must have scraped into Who’s Who by a combination of his birth, his Lord Lieutenancy, and his being a very big farmer indeed. So I don’t see him being the sort who drags on his wellies and stumps out after stray cows, let alone one who takes his lady wife along with him. But thanks for the thought. As for the accent, don’t ring us . . .”

  So tonight I am left pondering, without any firm plan, but with the strongest possible desire to get to see Tim’s other surviving relatives.

  • • •

  Three days after I wrote the above, yesterday, I went down to Formby. I drove down with little more than the shadow of a notion of what I would do when I got there. I went, reluctantly, on my own. I loathe motorway driving on a weekday—loathed it, in fact, even when I had a chauffeur doing it for me in a ministerial limousine—so there was no chance of thinking as I went. Nor did the much narrower roads after I’d left the motorway encourage anything but dedicated concentration. At a few minutes after eleven I stopped at a gap in the grass verge where there was a gate into a meadow and surveyed the ordnance survey map I’d provided myself with.

  Formby is just two miles within Avon, near the boundary with Gloucestershire. Of course twenty years ago it would have been in Gloucestershire. When I was in the government I couldn’t say it, but now I can: I abhor and detest the reorganisation of the British counties undertaken by the first administration of which I was a member. What a botched, misconceived, antihistorical job it was! Why, in fact, do it at all? Does anybody today say “I am an Avon man” with the pride he might say “I am a Yorkshireman” or “I am a Cornishman”? Of course not! I doubt even a young man, one who never knew the old counties, would say it. We have destroyed the pride of centuries for supposed administrative advantages which never materialised. Sermon over. So anyway here I was in Avon, of which James Wycliffe had been Lord Lieutenant. I calculated I was three miles from Formby, and a mere one and a half from Maddern Hall.

  I set off for the Hall, driving slowly. The road was narrow, and of the rolling-English-drunkard variety. I passed through a hamlet called Nethley: a post-office-cum-shop and about eight small houses, one of them for sale. A quarter of a mile down the road, on my left, I found the gates to Maddern Hall—open, giving a view of a handsome early nineteenth-century manor house: not a large one, but a regular and satisfying one. It had a Jane Austeny feel to it which I relished—red brick, warm, inviting. The drive up was lined by trees, and around and behind it rolled acres and acres of excellent farming land.

  And ahead of me along the road were three cottages, no doubt once tied to one o
r other of the various farms in the area. I drove on slowly, and saw that the one nearest the gates had a For Sale sign up. Now that could be a stroke of luck! The agents were named as Wetherfield and Markham, of Formby. I drove on and took the first turning that would take me there.

  Formby was little more than a large village. The girl in the outer office of Wetherfield and Markham’s looked at me without recognition, and without a great deal of interest either. She nodded routinely when I named the cottage I was interested in, and rummaged in a drawer for the key.

  “There’s still furniture in the property,” she said in a rote-learned voice. “Mr. Wycliffe will arrange a house clearance, unless the buyer wants to come to some other arrangement.”

  “I see. Is that Mr. James Wycliffe of Maddern Hall?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ah. I once knew his brother.”

  She looked quite blank, as well she might, being hardly over twenty. Even in the country scandals do eventually die.

  “Any questions or offers should come through us,” she intoned, in the sort of voice better suited to making “tuppence off” announcements in supermarkets.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t dream of troubling Mr. Wycliffe,” I lied.

  I told her I would have lunch before I went to view the cottage, and asked where I might go. She said, “There’s the Plough,” rather in the manner of someone behind the counter of a Soviet food store reciting the one sort of sausage they had in stock. So the Plough it was, and it seemed warm and comfortable enough, with a real fire going and a few early-lunchtime drinkers. It would probably have been safer to order a sandwich, but to get on the landlord’s good side I ordered steak and kidney pie (with chips, naturally), and a pint of his best bitter.

  “I’m on my way to look over a cottage out near Nethley.”

  “Oh aye? Would that be old Mr. Dereham’s as was?”