Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  “After dark?”

  “Right. Eight o’clock. So that’s what I did, and she took it all in, thanked me, and that was that.”

  “Gracious,” commented Sutcliffe, who had taken rather a melancholy view of Penelope Partridge from the beginning.

  “Gracious and generous,” agreed Harold Bly. “I know the type. Mind you, it was no great fag. There was a lot of paper—duplicated stuff, and so on—but not a lot of personal gear at all. More than a change of clothes, but not his whole wardrobe, if you get me. For all I know he could still have been living partly at home.”

  “His next-door neighbour says not,” said Sutcliffe. “And it seems likely he would know. How long, by the way, had he lived in the flat?”

  “Oh, from early in September, so you’d have thought he would have been more settled in than he seemed to have been.”

  “I begin to think he cultivated anonymity, or was that way by nature. Do you think I could see the flat?”

  “Surely,” said Harold Bly, fetching his keys.

  Not a Conservative MP’s road, Sutcliffe had commented to himself as he drove along Flannagan Road. Not a Conservative MP’s flat, he thought when Harold Bly let him in. A poky flat in a poky street, watched over by Wilf Dowson next door, and probably by several other lower-middle-class Wilf-Dowson-look-alikes from the other houses around. The flat had been meticulously cleaned, ready for any new tenant, and with that and the removal of his things there was no sign whatsoever left of James Partridge’s tenancy. But it still seemed to Sutcliffe, with its “tasteful” redecoration of a decidedly scruffy elderly terrace house, an unlikely place for a Conservative MP, except as a very temporary arrangement. He wondered how to put this tactfully.

  “How did Mr Partridge hear about this place?” he asked.

  “He just came along and said he’d heard it was vacant. I hadn’t advertised, but I didn’t think anything of that. These things get around. And I realize now that he must have heard about it from the previous tenant.”

  “Who was?”

  “Terence Stopford. Conservative MP for East Molesworth. Used to have a constituency up North, but it got redistributed, and he got nominated for a seat closer to London. He had this flat as a pied-à-terre while he was living up North. I don’t think he was one of the particularly well-heeled mob, or else he was careful. Anyway, when he got in in East Molesworth he started looking around for a house there, so he could move his family, you see. Eventually he found one and gave up this place. Drove up to Westminster each day, so it wasn’t necessary. That’s how Partridge heard of it, I’d guess . . .”

  “I see. He might be worth talking to. You haven’t got anything you could add, have you? Any personal impressions? Anything he once said to you that now seems odd?”

  Harold Bly thought, but briefly.

  “Nothing. We had very little contact. He dropped a cheque for the rent through my letter-box as a rule. I only talked to him at the beginning, and once when we met in the street—the weather, whether the flat was proving suitable, nothing more than that. He was a very quiet, pleasant, unobtrusive kind of person. Never said anything interesting that I remember.”

  It was a fair definition, Sutcliffe thought, of one sort of Tory MP.

  • • •

  “It’s puzzling,” said Sutcliffe, eyeing his superior with his melancholy eyes and pulling at his grey, droopy moustache. “Had he left his wife? If so, why couldn’t she have said so? It’s no shame, these days. I feel I’ve been fooled.”

  “You’ve certainly been strung along,” said the Assistant Deputy Commissioner. “And there’s every reason for going along and hauling her over the coals—wasting police time by withholding information, and so on. But I don’t know about puzzling. Doesn’t it give you that motive for suicide that you were lacking?”

  “It could, I suppose. But one would have expected it in September, not December. And if he was shattered by the separation, he was managing to keep it very secret from those around him. I feel there’s more in this case than meets the eye. Can I have carte blanche to nag away at it for a bit?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said the Assistant DC. “As far as I can gather, the PM desperately wants the thing decently buried.”

  “If we do that at the behest of the PM, we’ll have the Opposition baying for our blood as soon as the truth begins to come out. And quite right too.”

  “True, of course,” admitted his superior. “But that doesn’t make it less awkward . . . What came out at the inquest?”

  “Open verdict. Which was the right one, in my opinion. The doc was very non-committal—some rather ambiguous bruises, especially to the face, less water in the lungs than he would have expected. I don’t think he was happy, and I think that’s a good deal more important than the political convenience of the PM.”

  The Assistant DC sat there for a moment, considering. The fact was that, though the Prime Minister was a great and eloquent admirer of the police, the Assistant Deputy Commissioner was (by pure chance) not a great admirer of the Prime Minister. Nor did he think that political pressure should be brought on the police—particularly in a case when a politician was involved. Yet the mere fact that the Prime Minister’s views were known meant that political pressure was being brought. This administration was inclined to interfere with the judicial processes, in ways that the Opposition found it hard to pin down.

  “I’ll give you a couple of weeks,” he said. “I can’t see how I could justify more than that. When are you due to retire?”

  “March the fifth,” said Sutcliffe. He looked at his superior. “I’m due for some leave before then.”

  His superior looked straight back at him.

  “I rather thought you might be. Of course, how an officer spends his leave is not the concern of Scotland Yard. Especially on the eve of his retirement.”

  Sutcliffe smiled his thanks. The two men understood each other very well indeed.

  Chapter 5

  Prying

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re prying,” said Penelope Partridge, draped resentfully along the length of her Chelsea sofa.

  “As far as I’m concerned I’m prying too,” said Sutcliffe. “It’s a large part of a policeman’s job.”

  “I don’t accept that. To be perfectly frank” (she meant that she would like to be very rude indeed), “I don’t see what it’s got to do with you.”

  “Come, come, Mrs Partridge,” said Sutcliffe, playing his tired-courtesy card, one of his strongest, “a woman in your position can’t be ignorant of the purpose of an inquest. It’s to determine the cause of death. All relevant facts about the dead man’s position and state of mind have to be presented.”

  “Nonsense. The separation took place in September. It had no relevance at all.”

  “In fact, if the jury had had this information before it, it might have brought in a suicide verdict, and we would have called the case closed.”

  A shade of regret wafted across Penelope Partridge’s face, the first he had seen. He leaned forward and rapped out: “As it is, you’ve put yourself in the position of having lied to the police, both directly and by implication. And that means we simply cannot let the matter rest there.”

  “I really don’t see why not,” drawled Penelope Partridge, unfazed.

  “If you don’t see that lying to the police is a serious matter, then there’s nothing more I can say to make you see. I can, on the other hand, ask you to come down to the Yard, to help us with our inquiries.” He paused, to let her consider this option. “Or alternatively you can give me a full, a very full, account of the separation.”

  Something very like a pout appeared incongruously on Penelope Partridge’s long face.

  “I don’t see how I can give you a very full account. I mean, there is so little to say about it. We got bored—that’s the beginning, middle and end of it. We found there was nothing left in the marriage, and we decided to separate. As far as I was concerned, James had become thor
oughly boring, the original nowhere man, and I wasn’t interested in staying tied to him. No doubt he saw things differently.”

  “How do you think he saw them?”

  Penelope Partridge was clearly about to suggest that he go and ask him, but she pulled herself back in time.

  “I imagine he thought that when his ministerial career ended, I lost interest in the marriage. I expect he told himself I was a cold bitch—that’s one of the things men do say about women, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Sutcliffe, with something like feeling. “And what about the children?”

  “Well, he was intending to take them off my hands as much as possible. It was a trial separation. When and if we made it official—I said I’d do the odd constituency appearance, where it absolutely couldn’t be avoided, until Christmas, just in case we either of us changed our minds—he was going to make the cottage in Moreton his main home, and take them there as often as possible. The flat in—where was it?—Battersea was simply a temporary pied-à-terre. I suspect it was rather tatty, wasn’t it?” She asked that with a contented cat smile, which she seemed immediately to regret. “As it was, he came to see them or took them out quite often, because he was very fond of them.”

  “There was no other woman?”

  She shrugged.

  “Not so far as I know. He wouldn’t be likely to tell me.”

  “Nor anyone in your own life?”

  “No one at all.”

  She was looking straight, coolly at him, in a way he found thoroughly untrustworthy.

  “Why in fact did you lie about this?” Sutcliffe asked.

  “I didn’t tell you about it to save myself unnecessary embarrassment. Is there anything wrong in that?”

  Sutcliffe left a few moments’ silence.

  “You’d been married—how long?”

  “Eight years.”

  “Why did you marry?”

  It was an unconventional question, but one Penelope Partridge had frequently asked herself. Indeed when, a few days before the wedding, a friend had told her that her married name would make her sound like something out of Beatrix Potter, she had damned near called the whole thing off there and then. Perhaps the truth was that she had been twenty-six, had come from a glacially traditional family who regarded that age in the light of “high time she was off our hands,” and she had taken the best on offer. But she had collected together in her mind other, slightly more presentable motives.

  “James had built up a whole string of businesses almost from nothing. It wasn’t very fashionable, that sort of enterprise, then, but I admired him for it. He’d made a good deal of money, and frankly I enjoy money. Only hypocrites pretend not to. At that time Lord Knowles—do you know him?—had a little knot of promising Conservative thinkers and young candidates, and they used to meet regularly at Mertlesham, his place.”

  “Sort of Cliveden set?” (Sutcliffe pronounced it Clive-den).

  “Clivden. Yes. Only less a set than a random assortment. I was into politics myself then, and I was invited along because there were too few women . . . I must have been dazzled . . . though James was not in himself dazzling . . . Anyway, we were married, and happy enough, but somehow after the children were born, and even when his career was going well, he lost interest.” She did her characteristic look around the drawing-room, as if it held all that a heart could desire. “I mean, he inexplicably didn’t seem to care any more. Don’t ask me to explain. I never could.”

  Sutcliffe, on the other hand, thought perhaps he could.

  “And you say he came back now and again to see the children?”

  “Oh yes. Frequently.”

  “When was the last time you saw him, then?”

  “Oh, Good Lord—I wasn’t myself here necessarily when he came to see them. Helga would always be around. It must have been . . . oh, four weeks or more before he died when I saw him last.”

  “And he seemed—normal?”

  “Perfectly normal.” She looked at her watch. “And now, I do have an appointment, Superintendent . . . er . . .”

  Sutcliffe waited several seconds before he responded.

  “I have no more questions.” He got up, but added with the merest suspicion of a threat in his voice, “I’ll be following things up, here and in Yorkshire. As soon as anything comes up that I need to consult you about, I’ll be back.”

  He looked at her hard.

  “Oh—er—yes, of course.”

  And Penelope Partridge actually rang for him to be shown out. Sutcliffe was pleased to see that the Danish au pair made no effort whatever to fit in with such an olde-world scenario. She bounced through the door, held it open for him, breezily banged it shut, and in the hall, from her six feet one to his five feet ten, winked at him. As they progressed down the hall towards the street door, Sutcliffe heard the drawing-room door open again, and Penelope Partridge walk briskly upstairs. He did not hear her go beyond the landing. He scuffled in his pocket to find one of the cards he always kept there, with his name and Yard extension number on it. At the door he handed it to Helga and mouthed “Ring me.” She nodded massively, smiled, and shut the door behind him.

  Sutcliffe’s car was parked unobtrusively round the corner. As he dawdled thoughtfully down the Chelsea street, thinking of the emptiness from which James Partridge had flown, he saw among the people coming towards him a young man: blue, expensive suit, umbrella, Burberry over his arm, a round, unlovely face set in an expression of some complacence. Nothing remarkable about any of those things; he could have been duplicated many times over in the streets of Chelsea at any hour. And yet the face—hadn’t he seen it before? If not in the flesh, then as a photograph. Where? Not, surely, in the Yard’s rogues’ gallery of portraits. In connection, though, with a case, he felt. And since the young man looked a genuine smoothie, and since his cases seldom involved classes so well-heeled as this one, then didn’t he have some vague connection with the Partridge suicide? He turned and looked round. The young man had rung the doorbell of Penelope Partridge’s Chelsea house, and was now standing waiting on the step.

  When he got back to the Yard he went straight to his file on the case. There, in the identical cutting that had sent Mr Wilfred Dowson along to him, he found what he wanted. Along with the picture of James Partridge whose death “has not yet been satisfactorily explained,” he saw staring at him the candidates adopted for the by-election by the three main parties. Among them he recognized the suavely self-absorbed features of Antony Craybourne-Fisk.

  • • •

  The call from Helga came earlier than Sutcliffe had expected, later in the same day.

  “She is gone,” she announced.

  “Gone?”

  “To Herod’s,” said Helga, as if Penelope Partridge was bidden to a party at which the Dance of the Seven Veils might be expected to be performed.

  “When can we meet and talk?”

  “I finish nine o’clock. I go vid my boyfriend to the pub—the Nelson, off Whitehall. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “You come?”

  “I come.”

  In the interval Sutcliffe spent some time trying to imagine what sort of a figure the boyfriend of the Wagnerian Helga could be. He came up finally with a diminutive Portuguese waiter, on the principle of the attraction of opposites. When he walked into the Admiral Nelson at twenty past nine he found he could not be more wrong. Sitting draped around Helga, the pair of them looking like one of Vigeland’s more monstrous imaginings, was an immense young man who looked in his combination of flesh and muscle like an Olympic discus thrower, or a Smithfield porter at least. What bed could hold their couplings, Sutcliffe wondered, as he fetched himself a pint. Most likely they did it at night in Hyde Park, and the earth moved under them. Helga improbably introduced the young man as Seymour, and he sat there saying little but beaming amiably.

  “Now, what you want to know?” asked Helga.

  “The situation in the household, before and after the sep
aration.”

  “Before I don’t know. I come in September, and he had moved out already. She say he is busy, important politician, all that stuff. Then a few weeks later, she tell me they have—what do you call it?—trial separation. I say OK—is perfectly usual.”

  “But he came back fairly often?”

  “To see the children, yes. Mostly he take them out—to films, to the park, to tea.”

  “What was your impression of him?”

  Helga shrugged.

  “Not very strong. Was a bit—dempet ned—subdued. Not so much later when he got use to me. Quiet man, not much personality on the surface, perhaps very strong underneath, I donno.”

  “You didn’t feel he was taking the separation badly?”

  “Oh no. Perhaps a relief. He say to me once, ‘When Parliament is in re—re—’ ”

  “Cess?”

  “Yes—‘recess, then I fix up the cottage in Yorkshire and have the children with me up there.’ And I say: ‘Good—then I have more time free.’ ”

  Helga and Seymour indulged in giant panda embraces that threatened to overturn the small table they were all sitting at.

  “What about her?”

  “Her?” Helga shrugged. “Cold, snobbish, selfish—you see her, you judge. She is always the same. Can’t hide it. Not the intelligence to see what impression she make, or maybe she don’t care.”

  “Is she having an affair?”

  Helga thrust out her lower lip.

  “Affair. Affair. Who knows? She is having something. Yes, I think she is probably having an affair.”

  “Who with?”

  “This young man with the fishy name.”

  “Antony Craybourne-Fisk?”

  “That’s right. She try to make me announce him, but I always get the name wrong in intention, so she stop me. Fishy name, fishy nature.”

  “Has this been going on since you took the job?”