A Very Good Hater

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I do my best, but things aren’t what they used to be. Why do you ask, Bill? You’re not beginning to hanker after a younger vintage, are you? Or two or three?’

  “Not particularly,’ he answered, carefully hanging his suit in the wardrobe.

  ‘I thought I saw you a couple of weeks ago with a young thing in tow,’ she said casually. ‘Is she not coming across then?’

  ‘My niece probably,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Really?’ she said with light disbelief. ‘Come to Auntie.’

  “These have been good years, Billy. Bloody good years.’

  Templewood leaned back in his chair and sighed with retrospective satisfaction.

  ‘Yes,’ said Goldsmith.

  Templewood had been one of a small party of businessmen he had entertained to lunch in the House and he had contrived to be the last to leave.

  ‘We’re big now. Very big. Another year, who knows? J. T. Hardy’s International. How does that sound?’

  ‘You’ve done wonders, Tempy.’

  ‘But you can’t mark time, Billy. And you’ve got to remember your roots. Now, Edmunds is going to be a miss.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks for ringing.’

  ‘I thought you’d like to know. Now, I’ve got a couple of prospects for his replacement. No one with his kind of contacts and authority yet, of course. That’s why I wanted to consult you. Which of these two do you think’s the best bet?’

  He mentioned two names.

  ‘They’ve both nibbled, have they?’ asked Goldsmith.

  ‘Naturally. One’s had a couple of consultancy fees. The other took a trip to Ibiza at our expense last year. But the next step’s the big one. You know where you are then, no more self-deception.’

  ‘Yes, I know the step. Give me a bit of time to think about it. I’ll let you know.’

  That’s fine. You’ll be going up to the funeral? Give you a chance to hear what the talk is.’

  ‘True.’ Goldsmith finished his drink and looked impatiently at his watch for the benefit of any spectators. An MP trapped by an influential and overfed guest was a common enough sight.

  ‘How’s Jennifer?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Templewood said. ‘Er, she said that Dora mentioned you in one of her letters. You’ve seen her then? She didn’t mention it when I looked her up last week.’

  Oh yes. Now that she’s studying at the University here, I thought I should keep an avuncular eye on her,’ said Goldsmith blandly.

  ‘Avuncular, is it?’ said Templewood. ‘Well, no funny stuff, mind. Not with Dora.’

  ‘It would bother you? Strange. Well, never fear, Tempy. You know I’m the soul of honour.’

  ‘So you tell me. Well, I’d better be off.’

  ‘Making another million for us?’

  ‘Not this afternoon,’ Templewood grinned. ‘No, I met this khaki bird at some wog reception last week. She wears a blonde wig. Jesus, you should see her. It makes you understand Livingstone.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Goldsmith. ‘Remember Munro.’

  Templewood paused half out of his chair and looked quizzically at his host.

  ‘I remember him,’ he said. ‘And he got sorted out all right, didn’t he? Watch how you vote, Billy. See you.’

  Goldsmith stood up and watched him go, stifling back a yawn. As he made for the door himself, he caught the eye of his opposite number on the Opposition benches who smiled sympathetically. They knew each other well.

  ‘I’ve got the same lot next week,’ he said.

  ‘Serves you right. They’re the price of capitalism,’ answered Goldsmith.

  ‘He makes a lot of jobs for a lot of people,’ replied the other in a Pavlovian reflex that was quite without heat.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ agreed Goldsmith. ‘He does.’

  The same afternoon he had another guest for tea. It was Dora Housman. At nineteen she had all her mother’s neat elegance and self-containment, but matched with a vivacity whose visible symbol might have been the golden hair which poured down over her shoulders.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hello. How’s the work?’

  ‘It stinks.’

  ‘Be precise.’

  ‘I thought that because I like books, reading English would be my thing. But all the time, it seems to be about coming at it from such odd angles.’

  ‘Doesn’t it sometimes improve the sensation when you get there?’

  ‘Does it? I don’t know. I think the thing is I’m no scholar and I don’t fancy three years going through the motions.’

  ‘What do you fancy, Dora?’

  He smiled at her affectionately, conscientiously playing the uncle.

  ‘I’m not sure. There’s nothing for me in the university world, not at the moment. Perhaps I’d like to write, but everyone says that, don’t they?’

  ‘Will you go back north?’

  She opened the cool, grey eyes wide.

  ‘You’re joking! No, I’ll stop here and serve in a shop if necessary. You said something last week when you took me out to dinner. Something about a job. Were you serious?’

  ‘If you are.’

  ‘I’m not sure. Can we talk about it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could have dinner again.’

  She played with her long hair, curling it into ringlets, and looked at him speculatively.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘She seems fine. Just the same, only more so.’

  ‘And your step-father?’

  ‘Oh, Rodney. No change there either. He’s down here at the moment, did you know? Bought me a lunch on Monday. I took a girl-friend along, thought I might as well squeeze as much as poss for the worthy needy from him. He was a bit annoyed at first, I think, but after the soup, he was gazing deep, deep into her peerless eyes and sending out the bedroom signals.’

  ‘Did she answer?’

  I don’t know. I gave her my blessing – and warning – afterwards. They’re both human beings.’

  She pulled her hair out straight once more and gazed assessingly directly into Goldsmith’s face.

  ‘Talking of which and such, I mean, where is all this taking us?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I mean, it’s all very flattering and so on to be wined and dined by a big, important politician …’

  ‘A very junior Minister,’ he corrected.

  ‘… but you’re nobody’s uncle, Bill. That’s why I liked you when you first came round, I think. You made such a rotten job of the uncle bit that I could see someone real inside. So where are we going?’

  ‘God knows,’ he said, ‘and he’s not going to tell us. We all end up doing things, being things, that none of us could have foreseen. You can make plans, have visions, but something gets in the way. And generally speaking, when you look at the obstacle closely, it might be disguised as a war, or an accident, or a duty, but it’s only yourself.’

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘If that rhymed it could have been by Patience Strong. Or even Mary Wilson.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’m forty-five tomorrow, put it down to that. Why not join me in a little birthday dinner and we’ll try to find out where we’re going from there? But don’t come if you want to stay safe with Super-Uncle. And I’ll see about the job either way. No strings. What do you say?’

  She took hold of her hair again and pulled it across her face till only the grey eyes, momentarily blank, were visible.

  Then, ‘All right,’ she said.

  He relaxed in his chair and poured himself another cup of tea.

  ‘Forty-five,’ he said. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a birthday so much.’

  CHAPTER II

  He awoke early the following morning and was seated in his office by seven-thirty. He spent an hour meticulously checking through a file marked J. T. Hardy’s. In it were records of all his contacts, official and unofficial, with the firm over the past six years. He had simil
ar files on half-a-dozen other large concerns; merely to have concentrated on one would have been a way of causing suspicion rather than removing it. They all contained evidence of his scrupulous refusal to accept anything which might be construed as a form of inducement. On occasions he had permitted himself to keep, say, a single bottle of brandy or box of cigars. It was important to appear as a human being rather than a moral stone-wall. But the return or disposal of larger gifts was carefully documented.

  The difference between the J. T. Hardy’s file and the others was that the former contained a great deal more and that much of the documentary evidence of rejection in it was fraudulent.

  It had been a difficult task and had become progressively more difficult as his career went into its dramatic up-swing three years earlier. Templewood’s pressures on him for advice, assistance and influence had also increased, and though whenever possible he refused reward, Templewood was astute enough to realize that the first job of the corrupter is to get those involved to step in so deeply that there can be no going back. So the consultancy fees, the gifts, the hospitality offers had rained down.

  The money problem he had dealt with by apparently playing into Templewood’s hands and refusing to accept unrecorded payments in cash. To explain away accepting several thousand pounds wrapped in a brown paper parcel handed over in a cinema would be an impossible task. But ‘consultancy fees’ appeared on balance sheets and the progress of the money could be easily checked. The file contained (as did all the files where consultancy fees had been paid) a carbon of a letter in which Goldsmith reminded the firm’s officials that he had expressed his unwillingness to accept any fee but had agreed to do so on the understanding that he would not retain the monies but pass them on to one of a number of registered charities.

  Each file contained certified receipts from a variety of charities for the total amount received.

  In the case of J. T. Hardy’s the letter had never been sent, but the carbon was there and the receipts were genuine. If the absence of the letter from the company’s own records was ever noticed, it would only be in circumstances where this would reflect very badly on the integrity of its executives.

  Similarly with gifts; according to Goldsmith’s records, everything had been returned or occasionally passed on. A letter from a Community Welfare Group in his own constituency described with a mixture of gratitude and awe the difference his gift of six cases of malt whisky had made to their Pensioners’ Christmas Party. One local Meals-on-Wheels group were happily using a Royal Doulton dinner service, and the few people who ever asked for a cup of coffee at the Trades and Labour Club were likely to have it poured out of a Georgian silver coffee-pot.

  Templewood had been far from pleased and very close to suspicion when he had read about Goldsmith’s generosity in sending a retired miner and his wife on an all-expenses-paid luxury holiday in the Canaries, but had accepted Goldsmith’s explanation that he preferred to arrange his own dirty week-ends on a much more discreet scale. It was an argument which appealed to the Templewood philosophy.

  Templewood was also amused and impressed by the assiduity with which Goldsmith supported the demands for a register of MPs’ business interests. ‘Like a tart demanding an examination to prove she’s still got her maidenhead,’ he described it, adding seriously, ‘and it works, because most of the others are tarts too and the last thing they want is a bloody doctor in the House!’

  So for six years, Goldsmith had aided and abetted Templewood in developing J. T. Hardy’s into the huge concern it had become. He had in the process become a businessman, and in a sense it was the public effects in speech and debate of this undercover activity which had brought him to the notice of the party hierarchy and eventually to his present lowly eminence.

  But initially it was for his own protection that the expertise had been acquired; and with his acquisition of influence and authority, so enthusiastically welcomed by Templewood, he had come to realize that what he could help create, he could help destroy. His file had at first merely been an insurance; now it became the cornerstone of a defence case which no one else yet knew was going to have to be made.

  During his association with J. T. Hardy’s, he had talked to no one except Templewood himself, and he had avoided writing any letters other than those he was willing to go on public record. There was no way of checking what Templewood might have said to any of his associates about his connections at Westminster; he was the kind of man who might not have been able to resist the boastful hint; but hearsay was no evidence. Only one other man existed who could significantly involve Goldsmith in a corruption scandal, and that was the man whose influence and authority had got him adopted as the Party candidate.

  Edmunds.

  And now Edmunds was dead.

  So now it could begin.

  J. T. Hardy’s and all its subsidiaries were slightly overstretched. Templewood’s eagerness for expansion had always been accompanied by this danger and Goldsmith had done what he could to encourage it. It was not that there was much obvious cause for concern, merely that at the moment, the company was relying a little too heavily on confidence and a little too lightly on capital. Such moments, Goldsmith had come to realize, occurred in the lives of all flourishing businesses. If you leap forward, there has to be a time when both feet are off the ground. There was no reason in the world for concern.

  Unless the confidence the business world felt in the firm could be undermined.

  He opened his appointments book and looked through the list of his engagements that day.

  There was a tap on his door and Jenkinson, his private secretary came in.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ he said briskly. ‘And a Happy Birthday to you.’

  ‘You remembered,’ answered Goldsmith. ‘But then you’ve had a long time lying in bed to brood on the events of the day, haven’t you?’

  Jenkinson looked pained. It was just eight-thirty a.m.

  ‘It looks fairly busy today, but I’d like to fit Tranter from the Board of Trade in somewhere. Just a chat. See what you can do.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll try. It is a busy day. Now tonight …’

  ‘Tonight I’m going out to dinner. It is my birthday, after all. Get Miss Alcott to book me a table at the Peacock. Eight-thirty. For two.’

  He gave other instructions, Jenkinson disappeared and returned half an hour later like a spaniel with a stick to announce all had been done as requested.

  ‘And I’ve fitted Tranter in at three o’clock,’ he concluded.

  ‘Fine. That’s fine.’

  This was the way to start things. Nothing in writing; a quiet word expressing vague concern about certain rumours which had reached him from his constituency about the way in which J. T. Hardy’s were conducting their business; reluctance to speak – personal knowledge of many of the people concerned in the business – but duty was duty; and he dimly recollected there had been some police interest in the firm six, seven years ago …

  So the mills would start grinding.

  And next would come a few words in the financial and business world. Interest being shown in J. T. Hardy’s – no, not an investigation exactly, but …

  It was a downward spiral and the first curves would be so wide-sweeping and so gently inclined that they would hardly be perceptible. The bottom was months, perhaps even years away and by the time it was reached, the starting point would be untraceable.

  In the early stages, however, there was always the chance that a perceptive and resourceful man could grab the sides and hang on. But he would need all his wits about him and all his energy concentrated in one direction.

  Goldsmith smiled humourlessly at the thought of another file he had been compiling. This one he kept in the safe in his flat. It contained enough evidence of Templewood’s many adulteries to win a dozen divorces. Goldsmith knew Jennifer well enough to believe that with this in her possession, she would not hesitate to start proceedings. She was a woman who could live with suspicions if she chose to, but
who would refuse to close her eyes to the truth. And Templewood was a man who despite his many infidelities retained a disproportionate pride in his elegant wife and home.

  So if he grabbed the sides, thought Goldsmith, this will prise the bastard loose.

  There was another reason why he would like to see a divorce between Jennifer and Templewood.

  Dora.

  He shifted uneasily in his seat at the thought of her. Only in this area did he find his motives at all ambiguous. With Templewood he was paying off an old score, one which went back to the beginnings of their acquaintance. If there were any external object from which all that was undignified, and culpable, and rotten in his life stemmed, it was Templewood. He could even, were he so inclined, argue that by disposing of Templewood, he was doing a public service by fitting himself better to carry out the duties of his office. But he rarely claimed in his internal debates motives so altruistic.

  Jennifer he felt nothing for now. Templewood had had her before he met her, had enjoyed her for the past six years. To the world at large she still appeared the same elegant, delicate beauty she had always been. To Goldsmith she was irrecoverably tarnished.

  Dora was different. Her childhood affection for ‘Uncle Rodney’ had been replaced by that most devastating of attitudes, total comprehension without moral judgment. The real enemy of the immoral is the amoral; and Templewood, deprived of his ability either to shock or to justify himself, was at a loss. With any other woman, his answer would have been to go into his seduction routine, but he had established a relationship with Dora which made this impossible for him.

  But not for Goldsmith. Tonight he might well end up in bed with Dora and he was not sure why.

  It would be the most devastating blow of all to Templewood. It would perhaps at last surprise Jennifer. But what it would mean to himself he was not clear. Or to Dora, for that matter.

  Could he marry her? He had no idea how she would react to the suggestion. But the vaguest possibility of this happening made it essential that her mother should divorce Templewood. Otherwise the connection would be uncomfortably close when the J. T. Hardy’s affair finally broke.