A murder in mayfair, p.8
A Murder in Mayfair, page 8
“I could be your father’s son by the nanny,” I said.
He nodded without surprise or consternation. He had considered this already.
“Yes. Of course you could be my father’s son by any number of women, but I have never had the impression that he was a promiscuous man. And she was pregnant at the time of the murder.”
“How do you know that?”
“My sister is two years older than me. It was one of the things we whispered about in the days, weeks, after the murder, in bed at the Grange. Then at school it was spoken of. My grandparents chose an exceptionally good and concerned school for me—it’s something I will always be grateful to them for. They also had my name changed, adopted us officially—eased our passage in every way they could. Still, schoolboys will be schoolboys. One or two little shits made sure I knew that they knew who I was: that my father was a murderer, and that he’d been having it off with the nanny, and that she was going to have his child.”
“I suppose by then she’d had it—me.”
“You’re making assumptions. Yes, I suppose she had, though. I never heard anything concrete about her after the day of the murder. She was a taboo subject at the Grange.”
“But the taboos must have broken down when you and your sister were alone.”
“That’s true. We did talk about Nanny, as I said, but she hadn’t been there long, we didn’t particularly like her, and of course we were more interested in our mother and what had happened to her.”
“You knew she was dead?”
“Oh yes, we knew that. That was the reason given for taking us from London to the Grange.”
“But not that she was murdered.”
“That idea got through to us very gradually.”
“How?”
“Probably by overhearing the servants talking, or my grandparents when they thought they were alone.”
“And the fact that it was your father who had done it?”
“The two ideas made their way simultaneously into our minds. People talking about one thing inevitably talked about the other.”
“You say you were more interested in your mother than the nanny, which is only natural. You must have been fond of her.”
He pondered, not wanting to make a snap answer, perhaps because he was talking to a virtual stranger, perhaps because he didn’t lightly embark on any act of disloyalty.
“I think not. Of course one had the conventional notions of a mother and what one ought to feel toward her—those had been dinned into us by earlier nannies. But I don’t think we really felt them. And I don’t think we had any reason to. She was . . . a distant figure. Emotionally reserved—no, cold is the right word. She kissed us now and then, but as if that was one of the things one was expected to do. She never held us. No, I don’t think we felt a great deal for her.”
“That must have left the nanny to supply her place, then.”
He shook his head vigorously.
“Oh no. Not just Lucy—the two before her didn’t try to be stand-in mothers either. They were massive elderly dragons, rather quick to use the hairbrush, but at the wrong end. They were very traditional nanny figures. The upper class entrust their children to extraordinary types: first a nanny, then public school teachers. They tried a different type with Lucy, but one always thought she was interested in other things than us.”
“This must have left a big gap in your lives,” I said. I hazarded a guess: “Did your father supply the missing affection?”
“Yes.” It was said with great love and enthusiasm. “It was our father who was at the center of our lives. He wasn’t always there, of course—not by any means, since he had his political career, as MP and as minister. Still, one always felt that that was a bit of a hobby, that he was at best a dabbler in matters of state. He was there a lot for us—in the house, taking us to the park, to circuses, and pantomimes. Oh, Mother would sometimes come along, but it was father who took us.”
“I see.”
“He was loving, involved, interested, charming, and funny.”
There was a break in his voice as he went through the catalog.
“And suddenly you lost him.”
“Yes. . . . I don’t like talking about that. And it couldn’t be relevant to the question of who you are.”
“Maybe not. Unless just possibly after he disappeared he resumed the connection with Lucy Mariotti.”
“I doubt that, though of course I know nothing. I do know she was in Britain for some time after the murder. Caroline heard people say the police wouldn’t let her leave, had confiscated her passport.”
“Do you think he lived for some time after the murder?”
He shook his head, disclaiming knowledge again.
“I just don’t know. I was too young to follow things at the time, and I’ve preferred to leave him in peace since I’ve been an adult.” I was covertly watching his face. It was blank, almost ingenuous. I think he knew I was watching him. “They want me to have him declared dead.”
I pricked up my ears.
“Oh? Who does? Your family?”
“No, no. It’s never discussed in the family. But the Conservative leader in the House of Lords does, for one.”
“But why?” In a second, though, I had worked it out. “Of course. You are by rights the Marquis of Aylesbury.”
“If my father is dead,” he said firmly. “The last Marquis, his brother, died four years ago.”
“Yes, I’ve just been reading his obituaries, such as they were. He was not the marrying type, they all said or implied. I’d gathered that already.”
Matthew laughed.
“The archetypal sad gay.”
“Not a distinguished holder of the title, I guessed from what I read.”
“Far from it. Almost invisible. He had a life of sorts, I suppose. A sex life with vigorous Australian and South African visitors whom he paid or boarded. Intellectually his one interest was early Victorian genre painters. He had enough money to live as he wanted, but not enough to do anything good with it, or splash it effectively on anything.”
“You weren’t close, I take it?”
“Barely knew him. He threw a party on my twenty-first—the sort of occasion he wished he didn’t have to hold and I wished I didn’t have to go to. I suspected he was trying to discover my sexual orientation, and that of my friends. He was, by and large, disappointed. But I shouldn’t slang off at him. He left me the house in Upper Brook Street, which was a family one, and a lot of bad pictures. I sold the house sight unseen, but I was silly enough to look at the pictures. Anyway, they fetched a tidy sum: I could stop working tomorrow, or work for myself, but I’m happy as I am.”
“Happier than you would be as a working peer?”
“Good heavens, yes! To be fair I don’t think anyone is suggesting I be that. They’d just like my vote against your lot’s plans to reform the House of Lords, and also against things like the ban on hunting. I’m afraid I don’t give a damn about hunting either way, though I’d rather die than turn out myself—I don’t fancy poncing around in a red coat with a collection of prats who most of them work in the City or in Canary Wharf or places like that.”
“So I take it you’re not ready to become Marquis of Aylesbury?”
“No. I went up a week or two ago to talk to the Tory leader in the House of Lords. I told him it wasn’t on.”
“Because you don’t want to be Marquis? Or for some other reason?”
He left a pause before he replied.
“Because I don’t want to be the one who has my father declared dead.” He leaned forward and looked at me. “Think of it. At the time of the murder my father was thirty-five. Now, if he’s alive, he’ll be about seventy. That’s no age. Who am I, of all people, his son, to assume that he’s dead?”
“What do you really think?”
“I tell you I don’t know. Any number of people have asked, but I always say the same: I don’t know. I suppose I hope he’s dead, because he can’t have had much of a life. But then, what if he’s in a Greek monastery or something, happy and at peace? I don’t know, and I see no reason to take action. The Marquises of Aylesbury have been pretty undistinguished figures for generations, apart from my grandfather, who held something or other at the coronation of George VI and became ambassador to Russia when Khrushchev was in power. The country as a whole can jog along quite happily without a Marquis of Aylesbury. The estate went long ago, and most of the family wealth with it. Good riddance. Anyway, I’m not even sure I’m a Tory anymore. And before you start trying to sign me up for your mob I should say I genuinely don’t think I’m anything politically.”
“I’m not in this as a recruitment officer for the Labor Party,” I said.
“That brings us back to the question: What are you in it for?”
“To find out whether I am the son of your father and Lucy Mariotti,” I said promptly. “And to find out how I came to be brought up by my mother and father—by Claud and Elizabeth Pinnock.”
“You haven’t got a quixotic subagenda to prove that my father wasn’t a murderer?”
“No. The idea hadn’t crossed my mind.”
“Because I think it’s quite certain that he killed my mother. Nothing I’ve ever heard has suggested that there’s any doubt about that whatsoever. Nothing.”
“I’m interested in myself only,” I said, “proving where I come from. I just want to talk to people who might help me. Your sister, for example.”
He waved his hand dismissively.
“Oh, Caroline comes and goes a lot. She’s a fashion buyer, often out of the country. If she’s ever stationary long enough to see you I’ll let you know. But Caroline doesn’t know anything that I don’t know.”
“The housekeeper too—I’d like to talk to her.”
“Mrs. Gould. Mrs. Selena Gould.”
“You remember her?”
“Just the name. Nothing at all about her. She didn’t figure much in our lives, I suppose.”
“I’m wondering about the American who did the color supplement piece on the case—wondering if he had any information that he didn’t use, or which was cut by a subeditor.”
Matthew nodded. He knew about all the coverage.
“Elmore Hasselbank. We didn’t cooperate, of course.”
“Naturally.”
“But he did a very thorough job. He had several of these razor-sharp researchers behind him.”
“Interesting. Maybe that’s what I need.” We were interrupted by the sound of a large estate car drawing up at the back of the house. “I’d better go.”
“No—don’t scuttle away. At least stay and say hello to the children and Janet.”
There wasn’t much option anyway. In a matter of seconds three big and boisterous children, ranging from about nine to fourteen in age, had burst in and taken over the room, shouting things like “Daddy, it was absolutely awful!” “Daddy, that was the worst film I’ve ever seen” and “They wouldn’t even show that film on Channel Five,” and so on. They were followed by a substantial lady, big-boned and getting plump, with a tolerant smile.
“Well, our children may not be the brightest in the world but at least they seem to be developing a critical sense. Oh!—”
She had caught sight of me. I think she wanted to look back inquiringly at her husband but was too polite to. Instead she came over and shook hands.
“Hello. We haven’t met.”
“Colin Pinnock.”
“I rather thought so. I am glad you and Matthew have made contact. I think in his heart he wanted that. You will stay to dinner, won’t you? We eat early because of the children.”
And stay to dinner I did, had a very happy time at the heart of a family, got to know the children and their mother, and felt safe and settled—more so than I had in years. The children, much to my surprise, noticed no resemblance between their father and me: he was Dad—known, accepted, loved, hardly noticed. I was someone else. Janet Martindale on the other hand was fascinated, looked surreptitiously from one of us to the other, as if making an inventory of similarities and differences, then smiling in embarrassment and forcing herself to look away. The dinner was splendid: pork chops with taste, vegetables with taste. I suspected part at least of the Hadleigh Grange estate was farmed organically. We talked about me, my upbringing, my work, the political situation. Nothing of interest came up about my particular preoccupation until the children had noisily got up and gone out to visit their friends in the village. Then Matthew said:
“You know, I’ve remembered a scrap of information about Lucy.”
“Oh?”
“I told you Caroline used to say Lucy wasn’t really interested in us. What she often said after the murder was: ‘She was only interested in her professors.’”
“Her professors? Who on earth were they?”
“I think Lucy was only filling in with us before doing more work at university. What do they call it—postgraduate research, is it? Caroline used to say she never had any friends round to visit her in Upper Brook Street—no fellow Australians in Britain, no other young people. When she talked about herself what she mainly went on about was ‘her professors,’ and the work she was going to do with them.”
“I see,” I said carefully. “Do you think this is relevant?”
“Probably not. But if she didn’t have any friends much here, wasn’t too bothered about making any, and wasn’t in with any expatriate Aussie set of people of her own age, then I did wonder what she did when she was forced to stay on here, without a job—she wouldn’t have found it easy to get one, after what had happened—without money probably. It seemed to me possible that the people she might have turned to for help might have been ‘her professors.’”
CHAPTER EIGHT
An Inspector Calls
I am beginning to understand how people in Eastern Europe felt, in the days before glasnost, about the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
I am being neurotic. Actually it was about half past nine, because I’d just watched the BBC news. By now all the politicians were returning from their summer vacations and we were entering the run-up to title autumn party conference season. Politics was rearing its ugly but unavoidable head once more. And the conference season has become over the last few years the time when the newspaper moguls delight in embarrassing politicians—not, as a rule, about their politics, but about their private lives.
I jumped when the knock came. I was rereading Great Expectations and had got to the return of Magwitch. I would not have been surprised by the telephone ringing, because it had rung all the time since I became an MP, but I was surprised that anyone should call on me in person at that hour. I left the door on its chain and peered through the crack.
The man in the corridor outside was in plain clothes, but everything about him shouted policeman. He was approaching fifty, heavily built, with cold eyes and a set mouth. There is a particular sort of policeman—a small but appreciable minority—who entered the force because they have rigid certainties, over tidy minds, and an idea that they have the right to force other people into a mold of their making. Over the years their blinkered confidence in themselves makes them cut corners, and subsequently in some cases slide toward the absolutely illegal. This one was tightly encased in a brown suit with a nondescript tie and brightly polished shoes. In the background, shadowed by the dim lighting in the corridor, was another, younger man. Nothing particular about him shouted policeman, but everything shouted stooge.
They flashed their cards at me in a way that was menacing rather than reassuring.
“Mr. Colin Pinnock? I’m DI Rawson and this is DC Miller. Could we come in?”
“Please” would clearly have been a sign of weakness. My stomach churned over in anticipation. This was the next stage.
“Please do. Come through.” My voice played no tricks because I consciously forced it not to. I was becoming experienced.
I unhooked the chain and opened the door wide. They both wiped their shoes on the mat, and then I led them through into the bright light, in which they looked no more comforting than in the dimness. I waved them to the sofa. DI Rawson sat with his knees neatly together, then took out a notebook and spoke by rote.
“Mr. Pinnock, we have reason to believe, based on information received—”
“From whom?”
“That need not concern you, sir. Based on information received, that you may have in your possession a collection of pornographic material of an illegal nature. Our information—”
“Your informant, did she tell you that I was a government minister?” I asked, trying not to sound pompous or bullying.
“As I said before, the source of the information is immaterial. We are aware that you are a member of the present government, and we are anxious to keep this whole thing low-key.”
I refrained with an effort from shifting uneasily in my chair. His tone belied his words. He said “the present government” in a way that announced that he wasn’t one of those who thought New Labor betokened a new heaven and a new earth. And his stated anxiety to keep things low-key contained an undercurrent of threat that he could raise the key at the first opportunity.
“So you have no search warrant, but you’d like to go through my flat with my consent?” I hazarded.
“Well, sir, that would—”
“And do you know what, Inspector?” He was beginning to lose his bully’s confidence, and said nothing. “I’d be willing to bet that you find something. I don’t know where it will be, or what it will consist of, but I’d bet you’ll find something.”
