Body Politic (12 page)

Raymond
Keane’s parliamentary research assistant was waiting for them when they arrived. ‘Despina Mottershead,’ she said, holding out a thin hand with a nervous smile. She had dark straight hair and very large spectacles, which gave her the look of a startled owl.

It
emerged quickly that she was genuinely upset by the news of Keane’s death. She would lose her job with his going, Hook supposed, but he fancied her distress ran a little deeper than that. Clearly she was starry-eyed about the deceased man; he wondered how far Keane had reciprocated her feelings. He might have slept with her, or he might not even have noticed her. It was always one of the difficulties that you could never see a dead man from his own point of view, but only from those of a succession of other people.

Lambert
eventually said, ‘You told the press when he was missing that you thought he might be abroad. What was the basis of that thought?’

She
looked both embarrassed and apprehensive. ‘I didn’t really say that. The reporter said perhaps Mr Keane might be living it up on the Riviera. I said I didn’t think he would be; and then he said had I any reason to think he might not have gone abroad. And of course I hadn’t. I didn’t really know where he might be if—’

‘
And the paper twisted it to suggest you thought he was abroad. I shouldn’t worry too much about that.’ Lambert spoke with the resignation of one who had been misquoted often enough himself. ‘In any case, that’s all irrelevant, now that Mr Keane’s been found.’

‘
Yes. I can’t understand who—’ Her fist was suddenly at her mouth and she was fighting for control. Hook looked up at her from his notes, automatically estimating her emotions; policemen are professional cynics. But this time there was no doubt about it: the tears which now started into her eyes were genuine.

Lambert
said gently, ‘You’ve anticipated my most important question. Do you know of anyone who hated Mr Keane? Hated him enough to kill him?’

‘
No. No, I don’t!’ She fought for the control she felt she should possess: as a twenty-three-year-old; as a history graduate; as a new woman; as a person with a responsible job in the mother of parliaments.

To
Lambert, who had daughters of his own, she looked behind her big, misting lenses more and more like a brave schoolgirl. ‘You did research for him when he needed information, I believe.’

‘
Yes. Most of it isn’t research as most people would understand the word. He gets letters and complaints from his constituents and the like. I follow them up for him, getting answers from various governmental departments and sometimes from other sources. I’m just a time-saver, really, in most of my work.’

She
reeled off the modest explanation she had given many times before to her friends and relatives, the familiar phrases helping her to regain a measure of control. She spoke in the present tense, like many who find difficulty in coming to terms with a death.

Now
Lambert spoke slowly, making sure she understood him through her distress. ‘What we need to know, Despina, is whether you can think of anyone who has had a fierce dispute with Mr Keane in the last year or so. These things sometimes escalate, you see, especially if the person involved is not balanced enough to be objective about the answers he or she is given.’

‘
No!’ The word was out almost before he had completed his explanation. Then, as if she realized it had been too impulsive for them, she said apologetically, ‘I have thought about it, you see. I’ve been wondering ever since he was found and the papers said foul play was suspected. But there just isn’t anyone.’

‘
Fair enough,’ said Lambert, rising. ‘Let us know if you have any second thoughts.’

‘
I’m sorry,’ she said, like a student who felt she had failed some kind of oral exam. ‘You might get something more useful from Miss Probert. That’s Mr Keane’s secretary. She has dealings with a much wider circle of people than I do, through his correspondence.’

Daphne
Probert was a formidable, grey-haired woman, who oozed efficiency and had no doubt protected Keane from unwanted encounters when he had been alive. But she produced coffee for them, and drew from the top drawer of her desk the diary she had kept of her employer’s parliamentary engagements.

She
was around fifty, and far more detached from this death than the tremulous girl they had just seen. Because they were experienced in their questions and she was efficient and precise in her answers, they built up a picture of Keane’s working life quickly. He had spent most weekends in his constituency, travelling down more often than not on Friday mornings, ignoring the Friday Commons business like two-thirds of his fellow MPs. Sometimes he had come back with the rest of the West Country weekenders in the jams of Sunday night, but he had preferred to motor up the M4 on Monday mornings whenever his engagements permitted it. She looked in her diary. After that last weekend before the parliamentary recess, he had come back to London on the Sunday night.

She
knew little of his life in Gloucestershire, and gave the impression that she had always thought it of minor importance. She was one of those people who, having lived in London all her life, considered that not much that mattered occurred outside the capital, and therefore saw no reason to leave it except for the occasional holiday.

Hook
was kept busy writing, building up that profile of the dead man which was the core of all murder investigations. Lambert eventually said, ‘This has been very helpful, Miss Probert. One of the difficulties of this case for us is obviously that a man of Mr Keane’s background is dealing with a large number of people, by the very nature of his work. Are you aware of anyone who had a particular dislike for him?’

‘
Who disliked him enough to kill him, you mean?’ For a moment, she rejoiced in the precision with which she dismissed what she perceived as a euphemism. ‘No, definitely not. Most of the people who met him here were politicians or senior business people, of course.’

It
was Lambert’s turn to smile, at the notion that all such men and women should be above suspicion. ‘What about your correspondence files? You must have dealt with some letters which were critical of Mr Keane, amongst the hundreds you receive, I suppose.’

She
nodded. ‘Every MP knows that he is bound to have a few nutters.’ She produced the word daringly, as though this departure into slang showed how modern she could be when she unbent. ‘There isn’t anyone I remember as being particularly dangerous. I can check the files, if you like.’

Lambert
smiled. ‘I’m sure if there was a dangerous lunatic lurking among your correspondence, you’d be well aware of him, Miss Probert.’

She
smiled, preening herself a little at the compliment. Then her brow furrowed and she said, ‘There was one chap, now I come to think of it. But he didn’t write to us, or I’d have remembered it. He rang, that was it. Came through to me on the telephone, very excited.’

‘
Do you recall his name?’ said Lambert, studiously low key. People remembered things much less easily once you told them it was important.

‘
I don’t. But I may have it somewhere in my notes. He left messages, you see.’ She reached into the top drawer of her desk, pulled out a loose-leafed dictation pad, and began to turn its many sheets. ‘Yes, here it is!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I remember it now, because Mr Keane said I was never to put this man through. I was to tell him to attend one of the constituency clinics, or put his complaint in writing. I gathered the exchanges had been going on for some time.’

‘
And what was the source of this man’s displeasure?’

This
time she liked the understatement. It seemed to her the proper parliamentary phrasing for that wild screaming she had had to deal with on the phone, when she had refused to put the man through and offered to take a message. ‘Source of displeasure’ was the sort of phrase she might have put in one of her letters, when someone had been really angry. ‘I couldn’t tell you exactly. The man wasn’t very articulate, you see. But I gathered it was something to do with his daughter’s death.’

‘
And his name?’

She
looked down at her scribbled shorthand again, then smiled triumphantly. Joe Walsh. That’s what he called himself.’

They
were waiting for a taxi in the busy street outside when Hook raised his voice above the traffic noise to say, ‘She’s right, I suppose. The electorate is about a hundred thousand in our constituency, even though not all of them vote at elections. Our MP is bound to have been pestered by a few nutters.’

Lambert
smiled. ‘And a minority of all nutters are dangerously violent. At the moment, I’m hoping Joseph Walsh might be one of them.’

*

They went into the murder room in CID when they got back to Oldford, to check with Detective Inspector Rushton that there were no dramatic developments in the case from the team of officers operating the routine enquiries a murder investigation always sets in train.

‘
The Scene-of-Crime team have finished at the pond where the corpse was found and moved to Keane’s cottage,’ Chris Rushton reported. ‘No evidence of a burglary there, they say. Nor of a breaking and entering. Of course, we don’t know yet where he was killed. If it was anywhere near that pond, he must have been lured there by someone, or driven out there in a car: it’s quite a remote spot.’

And
a good one for the disposal of a body, thought Lambert. Had it not been for an ebullient boxer bitch, the pool might have held its secret for a good deal longer. Hook handed over his notes from their meetings in London. Rushton would incorporate them in the appropriate file on his computer in due course. They left him working his way through a pile of notes at his elbow, his concentration upon the flickering green type on the monitor in front of him, as he fed in and cross-referenced the information that was coming in from the team of eighteen men and women now involved in varying degrees in this investigation.

When
the work in a case like this one was at its most intense, Rushton had almost to be prised away from his machine on some nights, his desire to incorporate each new scrap of information into his records bordering on the obsessive. Since his wife had taken his child and left him two years earlier, he had little social life and did not disguise the fact.

It
was dark when a tired Lambert eased the big Vauxhall into the garage which had been opened for him at his home. ‘I’m ready to eat as soon as you are,’ he called through to the kitchen as he put away his coat in the big hall. ‘God, this travelling exhausts me these days. Bert and I went up to London on the train. Perfectly comfortable, but—’

He
stopped abruptly as he came into the kitchen and saw a white-faced Christine standing with her back to the sink. She said, ‘I’ve been to the doctor, to get the results from that second mammogram. I told you it was today.’ She had not meant it to sound like an accusation, but he had forgotten, and she knew it.

‘
Was everything all right?’ he said lamely. Suddenly, he was hoping against hope that she was upset with him for forgetting, rather than because of what the doctor had said.

She
smiled at him, seeing a strong man made suddenly weak by a thing he did not know how to deal with. ‘You’d better sit down to hear. I had to.’

John
Lambert lowered himself on to a kitchen chair, feeling for it behind him, his eyes not leaving her face. Christine switched off the radio which had been playing classical music at low volume on the windowsill behind the sink. ‘Invasive carcinoma,’ she said. The doctor had delivered the phrase to her as though announcing a bout of flu. She wondered what sort of message the words sounded now in her husband’s ears.

Lambert
raised his hands and set them carefully on the scrubbed deal of the kitchen table in front of him. It was as if the symmetry of their arrangement had become very important to him with the news. ‘Will they operate?’

‘
Yes. No alternative. And as quickly as possible.’

‘
Yes. I suppose that’s good. That they’re going to get on with it, I mean.’ He dropped his eyes to his hands, big, strong, and totally useless in front of him. After a moment he said, ‘Will you lose the breast?’

‘
I expect so. I didn’t enquire too thoroughly. I thought they’d better just get on with it.’

‘
Yes. So long as they clear it up, that’s the main thing.’ And with that banality, they were in each other’s arms, without either being aware that they had moved. He held her tightly, wondering if even now as he crushed her against him he might be exacerbating the awful thing that gnawed at the body with which he was so familiar.

Christine
broke away from him and went into the bathroom and stood looking at herself in the mirror, looking at the crow’s feet around her eyes, at the lines on the forehead of the oval face beneath the brown hair that was still without any grey. She felt the left breast that was going to be cut away, remembering when she had been a college student of nineteen, giggling with her friends at a dance when that same wilful breast had escaped from a cheap bra and she had fled in comic confusion to the ladies. That moment seemed at once a long time ago and very close to her. She wondered where her life had gone.