A Murder in Mayfair (12 page)

But when sleep came the shadow side took over. I was running down dark, narrow streets at night, fleeing from something which took no shape except a black coat or cloak, with no human features visible. The more I ran, the narrower and darker the streets became, until they were little more than alleyways, foul and litter-strewn. It was like being trapped in a Soho that was continually contracting until it seemed the very streets would crush me.

When I awoke I got up at once, unrefreshed. I showered and made myself some black coffee. As I waited for the locksmith I realized that I had never felt exhilarated by London, as some do, never felt a sense of limitless possibilities, of an exciting world that would open up for me. Instead I had felt
shut in.
My dream, as well as a reaction to the policemen's visit, was also a reflection of this.

Perhaps I should have had a summer holiday walking in Yorkshire with George Eakin.

 • • • 

Three or four days later I was having a drink with Susan in a Greenwich pub. We had gone over the visit of Inspector Rawson and its implications, and it led me back to my usual preoccupation.

“Would there be some kind of directory of American journalists?” I asked her.

“Sure to be. They go in for that kind of thing. And there'd be some kind of professional association as well. Do you want to contact Elmore Hasselbank?”

“Spot on as usual.”

“What other American journalist has come up in this matter, and what else do you think about?”

“My work for a start.”

“Well, what else do you think about in your spare time?”

“I would like to talk to him if it's practicable,” I said, trying to ignore her implication. “Matthew Martindale said he was very sharp, and agreed he did a good job.”

I'd told her briefly on the phone about my visit to the Martindales. Now she pressed me for more.

“What was your overall impression of him?”

“I liked him, as I said, very much. Straight, strong-minded, and remarkably unscathed by it all. After all, it's not everyone whose father has killed his mother.”

“He was the younger, wasn't he?”

“Yes. I wondered—”

“What?”

I shifted in my seat, trying to sort out vague impressions, niggling discrepancies.

“Well, in general, he took my arrival on the scene surprisingly well. As if he had half expected it—as possibly he did. Perhaps all his life he'd wondered about his half-brother or sister by the
Australian nanny. That news had filtered through to the children. So he accepted me, there was no edginess—you could say we got on famously. But when I mentioned his sister—”

“Yes?”

“It's difficult to pin down, but thinking back I feel there was a sort of oddity, an inconsistency. On the one hand he said his sister was hardly ever around—was always off here, there, and everywhere, and he gave the vaguest of promises that if she was ever settled for any length of time he'd arrange for me to see her.”

“What does she do?”

“Something in the fashion world.”

“Figures.”

“Oh yes. But on the other hand he talked about being in London on the day I got my government job—the day my picture was in the paper, where he saw it—in order to meet his sister off the plane from New Zealand.”

“I see,” said Susan, chewing over this. “Slightly odd, but no more than that. Flights from that part of the world are horrendous—a lot different from a quick flip from Milan or Paris.”

“Fair enough. Maybe I'm seeing evasions where there were none.”

“Did you talk about his father?”

“Our father. Yes.
Apparently
he showed no sign of wanting to trace him. Took the view that if he's had a life on the run then he rather hoped it was over, and on the other hand, if he's found peace somewhere or other, then that's great, but he doesn't want to disturb it. He certainly doesn't want to be the one to have him declared dead, which the whips in the Lords have been pressing him to do. I don't know how I'd feel in the circumstances.”

“On present evidence you'd want to trace him, or at least find out what happened to him.”

“But I haven't had the trauma of losing him in that terrible way. Anyway Matthew and I only
look
alike. We're probably very different characters, and we were brought up in very different backgrounds. He's happy to get on with his own life—or that's the impression he tries to give.”

“What about his mother?”

“Cold bitch. He realizes it now, if not then.”

“And the nanny?”

“Hardly remembered, except that the children didn't much like her. It was the father who gave them love.”

I went up to get us another round of drinks, and when I came back to our bench seat I put my arm around Susan's shoulder. I tried to make it look as if unconsciously I was slipping back into old routines, but in fact I'd thought over whether I should while I was at the bar. Susan removed it.

“Colin, I'm not getting into that again. Starting up a second time with an old boyfriend is something you shouldn't do unless you've really thought through why it didn't work in the first place and why it will be different now. We split up because your whole life was politics and I was just a fringe interest. That's still true—and in spades, now you're a government minister. Let's have it that we're good friends, shall we?”

“I've no choice, if that's what you want,” I grumbled. “Still—”

“By the way, do you know there's a Pinnock still living in Southampton?” she said briskly.

“I realize you're changing the subject, but no, I didn't. You think it might be a relative?”

“Seems quite likely, the name not being particularly common. Would you like me to take it further—try to set something up? I got the name and address from the telephone directory. I could ring her up.”

“On what pretext?”

“Oh, research into family history—something like that. It's
not far from the truth. I could inquire whether she is any relation to the Claud and Elizabeth Pinnock who lived in Southampton in the 1950s. If she was I could arrange to visit her.”

That definitely attracted me as an idea.

“Sounds interesting.”

“You could come along, as my husband or boyfriend or something.”

“That seems to be as close as I'm ever likely to get to being either,” I grouched.

But the truth was I had no clear desire even to resume the relationship, let alone become Susan's or anybody else's husband. My life seemed to go on independently of any emotional drives—or at least of any other than sexual ones. Educating the disabled and the underprivileged, investigating my origins and the identity of my persecutor—these were my twin preoccupations. Putting my arm around Susan meant little more than that I wanted to go to bed with her. Putting it away meant she wasn't having that, thank you very much. And of course she was quite right. I was beginning to fear too that she was right when she implied I was becoming obsessed.

She was also extremely effective as a research assistant. The next day she was on the phone to me with Elmore Hasselbank's current job, though she warned me the directory of journalists she had consulted could well be out-of-date. The day after that, home in the evening, I discovered by ringing the paper named that he had gone from a high-sounding job on the
Seattle Star
to another high-sounding job on the
Chicago Observer.
These high-sounding jobs either mean you're very important or that you've been shuffled to one side. With Elmore Hasselbank I suspected it was the former. I used my status as a government minister to get him on the line in person. He sounded very important and very interested.

“Well, well, Mr. Pinnock—one of the New Labor ministers! I'm afraid I didn't recognize your name, I apologize for that, but I'm very pleased to talk to you. There's a lot of interest in your government over here.”

“Yes, we seem to have been taken as a straw in the wind.”

“You're rather more than that, with the majority you gained. The question here is how left wing you are, and how right wing. Left on what, right on what? At least it means there's a
political
content to the discussion over there. Here nobody talks about anything but the President's penis.”

So we swapped ten minutes of political talk before I got on to my own matters.

“What I was ringing about—”

“I didn't think you were going to appoint me your American contact for disseminating leaks and rumors.”

“Perish the thought we should ever use such tactics! It's the matter of Lord John Revill.”

There was a moment's silence on the other end.

“Good Lord! That old business? You won't get any political capital out of raking that up again, will you?”

“Of course not. Three quarters of the electorate either won't have heard of it or won't remember it. And in fact there was never much political capital in it, even back in 1962. It's the mystery and the human interest that has kept the story alive, as you must know. I'm afraid it was a bit naughty of me to use my government title when I rang you. This is a personal matter.”

“I see.” I could hear all sorts of journalistic questions buzzing around in his agile brain. “New Labor meets Old Tory. There could be a story in this somewhere. In the past I understood you were born ‘either a little Liberal—substitute Laborite—or else a little Conservative.'”

“There's been a meltdown since then. As in your country.
Pretty much the same could have been said of your people till the late sixties. And
no
—there won't be any story if I can help it.”

“That's a shame. I'll restrain my curiosity for the moment. What can I do for you?”

“Well, for a start, I thought your coverage of the story brilliant—much the best I've seen so far.”

He was obviously pleased. Americans are so often accused of getting things British ever so subtly wrong.

“Thanks a bunch. I enjoyed covering it: it had everything except religion, and it gave spice to my time in London. I had two brilliant researchers. If you set researchers on with the right questions, they'll do three quarters of the work for you. Then the rest is interviewing the key people yourself—particularly if they're bigwigs—and writing the thing up.”

“Did you interview many bigwigs?”

“Some. The family clammed up, of course. We knew they would. I talked to his closest political friend, Sir Donald Fairbanks, but I didn't get a great deal out of him. Never got the feeling that politics was close to Revill's heart.”

“I get the same feeling.”

“The housekeeper refused to speak to us.”

I perked up.

“You located her then?”

“Oh yes—in a nursing home in one of your seaside places. Bournemouth—that was it. Went there to try to change her mind, but I never got within a whisper. The nanny I never located, as you'll have gathered from the article. So most of the people I talked to were friends, real or so-called.”

“What about friends of Lucy Mariotti?”

“We didn't get the impression she had any, at least in Britain. We talked to some in Australia—never very satisfactory, interviewing by telephone. They said the usual things: bright, fun-loving,
ambitious. She'd been very interested in furthering her academic career.”

“So I gathered.”

“We talked to a couple of contacts in universities, but of course she hadn't actually started her work, so they didn't have a great deal to contribute.”

“Do I take it she didn't start on her research after the murder, when the fuss had died down?”

“Oh no. Unless she went elsewhere.”

“Do you remember who the academics were?”

“Oh dear . . . Frieda will know—Frieda Brewer, the main research assistant I had. I can give you her phone number, because I still use her on British things. Wait a minute . . . It's one-eight-one, six-nine-two-seven-six-eight-seven. She's a poppet . . . Warnock was one of the names. Shakespearean wallah. Can't recall the other name.”

Well, that felt like getting somewhere, at least.

“Can you tell me anything about the people involved, or anything—just an impression maybe—that didn't get into the article?”

He thought, but quickly, like any good journalist.

“Lucy Mariotti: sexually adventurous, and when they said ambitious her friends were putting it mildly. A brainy go-getter with enormous drive and nervous energy. Wife cold and ruthless, and I have the impression there was a new man in her life. Husband nice guy, funnily enough. Everybody seemed to feel that.”

“That's my reading of him too. Did you form any idea of whether he was alive or dead?”

“No. I'd have put it in if I had.”

“Nor whether he actually did the murder?”

“Oh, he did it all right! Nobody doubted it. I think the marriage had been on the rocks for some time.”

“That's a reason for divorce, not murder.”

“You'd be surprised, young man! You'd be surprised!”

Yet there were explanations needed here. Nobody doubted he'd done it, but they all thought he was a nice bloke. And in ninety-nine point nine percent of cases, breakdown does lead to divorce, not murder.

“Have you got any suggestions of further avenues to explore, or ones that might bear going over again?” I finally asked.

“Obvious ones: family, if you can get them unawares. The housekeeper. Any surviving policeman, the higher up the better. We got no joy there. . . . Then there's the child of the nanny. You knew she was pregnant? But perhaps you don't need to contact him. . . .” He was playing with me. I left a silence. “Beyond that, I'd talk to Frieda. She's got a ferret's brain. If there's anything we left undone she'll want to get back to it.”