A Murder in Mayfair (22 page)

I learned what had happened the next evening. The man who had called 999 was someone whom I had helped a year or two before with some small business matter—the sort of thing that often comes up in constituency surgeries. He had come to me because he had found the then MP for my part of London “useless.” Anyway Ron Price, who lived in the same block as me, had more than repaid me when he had driven up, seen my unconscious body, and immediately called help.

“I thought you were a goner,” he said, sitting by my bed with
an ease he'd never showed before when talking to me. “You do when there's all that blood, don't you? I felt your pulse though, and it was still pretty good, so I dialed nine-nine-nine on my mobile.”

I'll never sneer at mobile phones again, nor even at those fatuous and gabby users on trains who broadcast the trivialities of their lives or businesses to those unfortunate enough to sit near them. I could even imagine getting one myself, I thought, particularly in current circumstances.

“What time was this?” I asked.

“Ten, quarter past maybe.”

“No point in asking whether there was anybody nearby at the time.”

“No—you'd been there a while without being spotted.”

“Ten minutes at least.”

“Oh, the mugger would have been long gone. Did he get very much?”

“Hardly anything,” I said, without a pause. “I was intending to go to the bank today.”

Whether “hardly anything” is any less of a lie than “five hundred pounds” would have been, I don't know. Anyway, it added verisimilitude to his presumption about my attacker. The Metropolitan Police constable who was sitting in my room in the Pimlico Hospital didn't raise his eyebrows. I had already been questioned by Scotland Yard and together we'd established that nothing had been taken from me.

I had a visit too from PC Marrit of the Palace of Westminster police. I'd always liked him, felt he was reliable and straightforward, and to tell the truth had rather resented his skepticism, and that of his fellow policemen, about my stories of being marked and persecuted.

“A bit less cynical about all this now, are you?” I said, wincing as I tried to get up straighter and look him in the eye.

“Cynical, sir? You've no cause to say that, I'm sure.” He relaxed a little and almost winked. “Mind you, we've always got the odd nutter in the House of Commons—the odd self-important crank or the teeterer on the verge of outright paranoia. We know the problem, and we have to look at all the stories they bring to us on their own merits, not seen through the eyes of the people bringing the story. We had an MP once who firmly believed he was being targeted by alien forces from outer space.”

I grinned. I knew whom he was talking about.

“Good to know I've ranked comparatively low in your nutter gradings up to now.”

“A very mild skepticism is the most that you can charge us with.”

“But that's all changed now, I hope.”

“Ye-e-es.” He was going to concede, if he conceded at all, reluctantly. “Mind you, muggers who've got out of their depth, young lads who've done something serious they didn't really intend to, quite often do run off empty-handed.”

“I assure you this man did not suddenly find himself out of his depth. He was waiting for me, he chose his moment when I was at a disadvantage, then struck out of the blue, as he had obviously intended to.”

Marrit nodded.

“Yes, that does seem to be the view that the Scotland Yard people are taking. Why did he strike
there,
do you think? Not by your garage, I mean, but that part of your body.”

I felt gingerly round to my lower back.

“It was what I was presenting to him.”

“It was hardly a deadly area.”

I was recovering so fast I had to agree.

“I'm no anatomist, but I'm sure you're right. But the fact that it wasn't deadly squares with everything that's happened so
far—pinpricks at first, metaphorically speaking, then getting more and more serious. And then that feeling of the whole thing being slightly ridiculous, calculated to raise a guffaw rather than real concern. Stabbing me just above my bum squares well with that.”

“It does.” He looked me in the eye. “Your worry is that the increasing seriousness is going to end up with something that is absolutely for real, isn't it?”

“Yes. That's what I'm beginning to think.”

“And why the long buildup?”

“To relish the slow process of first making me uneasy, then really worrying me, and finally terrifying me. The psychology behind the whole campaign is entirely consistent. A quick kill wouldn't supply him with half the pleasure.”

“Equally it could be someone who is having difficulty working up the nerve to do the ultimate thing. Someone lacking in confidence, basically rather timid. . . .” He saw a flicker in my eye. “Do you have anyone in mind, sir?”

“Possibly. It's no more than a suspicion, an alternative scenario.” I thought and made a decision. “I find I have a twin brother. We were both adopted, but separately. I think he is the man who has been following me. Not very bright, I would guess, or maybe psychologically scarred. He was adopted by a totally unsuitable couple, but a cultured one. It would explain his readiness with operatic excerpts. They rather suggest he may have an obsessive resentment both of his mother—his natural mother—and of me.”

“Of you, sir? Why?”

“Adopted into a happy home, successful quite young, getting into government and starting on the career ladder there. It could feed an unbalanced mind.”

We chewed over this for some time, and I gave him my brother's surname, though with the cavil that if I were called
Hayden-Gryce, and if I had a justified resentment at my adoptive parents, I'd have changed it either formally or informally. He promised to check police records, and I suggested he check not only both components of his name but perhaps Revill too, and even Mariotti. The total silence my parents maintained on the subject of my origins was probably not reproduced by the Hayden-Gryces, who had obviously been neither sensitive nor restrained. They could have thrown the facts of his birth at him, taunted him with them, and in the process given rise to all sorts of obsessive fantasies.

“No improvement in my daughter's school yet,” he said, as he got up to go. “They're still the same collection of wankers peddling the same no-hope philosophies.”

“Give us time!” I said. “You can't work change in institutions in a few months.”

“Oh, I'll give you time,” he said, grinning evilly. “Until the next election.”

I had other visitors in the four days I was in hospital—friends, colleagues, my minister, Susan. I also had one who was entirely unexpected. I was in a National Health hospital but in a private room with a guard, for obvious reasons. He mostly sat tactfully (and boringly for him, I'm sure) on an upright chair outside my door. On my third day in he came in and over to my bed, holding a card, and looking a little bemused.

“There's a lady outside, says you don't know her, but she thinks you'll speak to her if you feel well enough.”

I took the card. It said Caroline Martindale, with an address in Notting Hill and the words Millennium Modes in the bottom right-hand corner. My heart skipped a beat.

“Yes, I'd very much like to talk to her,” I said. “Please show her in.”

She came straight over and shook my hand carefully, then stood at the foot of my bed.

“Good of you to see me,” she said.

No, it was good
for
me to see her, satisfying at last to see my half sister. I don't know what I'd expected of someone in the fashion trade, but it was nothing like Caroline. She was slim, almost skinny, and was dressed in a floppy jumper—not dirty but definitely not new—and a calf-length skirt. Her hair was tidy but no more, and she had no detectable makeup on. She looked like a lady of the manor caught at the wheel of her Land Rover on a very busy morning, but her body language contradicted such a figure: her gestures were unconfident—sharp, unexpected waves of the hands, exaggerated twistings of the mouth. She seemed unsure whether she should have come, uncertain of her relationship with me and how to talk tome.

“You're thinking I'm not your idea of a fashion buyer,” she blurted out after letting herself be inspected in silence. With a jerky movement she pulled out a chair and sat by my bed. “We don't go around in our spare time looking like fashion plates, you know.”

“I'm sorry. I must have been staring rudely. It's just—”

“I apologize for ‘Millennium Modes' on my card. That really is naff. It was my partner's idea, and
not
one of his better ones. We act as buyers to a lot of the chains, and for a few definitely exclusive shops. I
see
so much fashion I prefer to dress as a drab when I don't have to sustain an image.”

“Actually you look very good,” I said. To me she did.

“Horse manure,” she said, cheerfully and without rancor. “You wouldn't think I'd been a model for a while, would you? In the early seventies, in the wake of Twiggy and a lot of other skeletal types. Worst time of my life. Sheer slavery. Treated like a carcass and dressed up like a pantomime dame. I think I only got jobs anyway because of who I was, and the scandal. Well, let's get down to business. As soon as I heard about you from
Matthew I wanted to see you, and when I read about the attack—”

“You thought you'd better look me over before it was too late.”

She nodded, keeping the tone light.

“Well, something like that.”

“Actually, I thought your brother was a bit unforthcoming about the possibility of our getting together. I wondered whether he was being protective.”

“He was. He is—very. He thinks I live on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Like a lot of nervy people, I'm very tough because I have to be. I suppose I'm nervy because of what happened to my mother. Or perhaps it's earlier than that—the breakdown of the marriage, the fact that my mother didn't care whether I lived or died. Did you think Matthew was being protective because it was actually me who killed my mother?”

My eyes widened involuntarily.

“Nothing of the kind! Don't be absurd. But I was a bit suspicious because he said you traveled all over the world on business, but also said he was in London the day my picture was in the
Evening Standard
because he was meeting you from New Zealand.”

“A tarradiddle. Quite harmless. He was gaining time, wanting to think whether he would tell me about you, whether I should be encouraged to speak to you. Protective, and awfully old-fashioned, you notice. Actually he picked up a copy of the
Standard
in Wellingborough to glance at the final election results and he saw the picture there. He got on the phone to me straightaway.”

“Why?”

“He thought if I saw it I might get an awful shock. Actually, I'd registered your by-election victory years before. He was out of the country at the time and I wasn't, and I saw you on television.
There wasn't a lot of coverage, was there? I suppose that was because the Tories lost every by-election going at that time. But I saw the declaration of the count on television, and an interview with you afterward.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I thought you had to be a relative somewhere along the line. It wasn't just the likeness to Matthew. I remember my grandfather quite well, you see, and I've grown up with pictures of him as a young man—in his robes for the 1937 coronation, and so on. The resemblance is unmistakable. I didn't think you were a sin of his old age, but I knew that resemblances often skip a generation, as they had with Matthew. The possibility that you were the nanny's child occurred to me, still more so when I read reports of the by-election in the papers next day and saw how old you were. Born in the year of the murder.”

“But you and Matthew, when you talked, decided to do nothing about it.”

“Of course. We didn't know whether you knew, whether you would want to know, whether it might even be a hindrance to a political career. And Matthew, of course, being protective, tends to shield me from all mention of the murder.”

“You seem to have talked about it quite a lot at the time.”

“That was the frightened ghoulishness of young children. Over the years Matthew has changed from being the younger brother to being the older one, if you get my meaning.”

I was getting a weird feeling.

“It seems funny to me, talking to someone of about my own age who knew my mother.”

“Well, don't think of me as about your age,” she said, with one of her sharp, dismissive gestures. “I'm not. Did you sense when you were talking to Matthew that he didn't really know your mother?”

I considered.

“Something like that. He was so young.”

“I suppose what I mean is that he doesn't really
remember
her. What he remembers is us talking about her after the . . . after our mother's death. I think he may have given you a slightly wrong impression of our relationship with Lucy Mariotti.”

“Too harsh, you mean? After the murder you blamed her for it and you couldn't find things to say nasty enough about her?”

“Not even as simple as that. The fact is we definitely liked her when she first came. We'd had a couple of those square, hard-faced tyrants who seemed to be just waiting for the time when concentration camps would be set up in Britain. Too free with the hairbrush by half, and devoted to bed-with-bread-and-water punishments as well. Lucy was a wonderful change after those two. She was pretty, she was funny, she played with us, stimulated us, read us the sorts of books which actually fed our imaginations, not books which someone in a library thought children ought to read.”

“So, not all bad then.”