Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  But Sutcliffe had gone. He slipped into the Public Bar, and got from the landlord the location of the Partridge cottage: down to the end of the main street, then the first turning on the left—a lane that had a couple of stone cottages at the end of it, a matter of fifty yards or so from the main street. Up for sale it was, the landlord believed. Was the gentleman interested?

  “Interested,” said Sutcliffe gnomically—but it was truthful, so far as it went.

  When he turned off the principal thoroughfare of Moreton-in-Kirkdale (which had a butcher’s, a small supermarket and an all-purpose clothes shop), he slowed down his pace, so as to approach the cottage in a leisurely way, gazing at it with considering eyes. The first of the two stone buildings had the look of still being a countryman’s home, but the second of them, the Partridges’, had the distinct air of being a “cottage” rather than a cottage—something adapted to the townsman’s needs, and the townsman’s idea of necessary comforts, even in the country. Mrs Partridge, he felt sure, didn’t come out into the country to work like a countrywoman. The house itself, he eventually realized, was in fact two two-up-two-downers, made into one reasonably large house. It was built of good stone, and both it and the garden were kept in good order. Partridge would have wanted that, as long as he was the local MP, and his widow no doubt kept the gardener on, for the benefit of potential buyers.

  His approach, he should have realized, had been observed. One’s approach always was observed in the country. A woman’s head popped up from behind the hedge of the first of the cottages.

  “I saw you lookin’ at the cottage. Was you the gentleman Mrs Partridge said ud be comin’?”

  “Very possibly,” said Sutcliffe, which was also truthful as far as it went. He had mentioned to Mrs Partridge that he might be pursuing the case in Yorkshire.

  “Ah—she said a gentleman ud be comin’ to ‘ave a look, with a view to movin’ in, just until it’s sold. That’d be you, then. I’ll just get you the key. I hope you like it, sir. Always nice to have someone near, that’s what I say, and since my Albert died it’s always felt that bit lonely here. Be glad when the house is sold, that’s for sure, so long as it’s not these weekenders, like before. Though Mr Partridge, he was a lovely man, God rest him. You’ll find it’s very nice in there, sir, beautiful furniture, and that . . . Here you are, then, that’s for the front.”

  She had fetched the key from a nail inside her front door, and Sutcliffe took it and made off from her garrulity, promising himself a chin-wag with her later if it seemed likely to repay the trouble. The cottage was set back somewhat from the lane, and surrounded by the inevitable privet. The front garden was lawn and roses, cut back but not yet pruned; round the back he could see pear and plum trees. The front door was newly painted dark blue and the paintwork around the windows was spruce. Sutcliffe let himself into the cottage.

  The downstairs of the two little houses had been entirely refashioned; the front door now led into a small hallway, with on one side a small dining-room, and on the other a very good-sized drawing-room. Both of them had been furnished on the good old principle of “See Maples and die,” but it was the rooms that had died. Large pink plush sofas and chairs declared their domination of the space, heavy oak tables and chairs rendered human beings an intrusion in the dining-room. Penelope Partridge’s choice, Sutcliffe surmised: her tastes could not be adapted to a cottage setting. Behind the dining-room there was a kitchen and scullery, and here there were a washing- and a washing-up machine, and a dominating fridge and deep-freeze. There was a breast-high Husqvarna oven, as little cottage-like as it was possible to imagine. Oh, the simple life for me, thought Sutcliffe. In the deep-freeze there was a series of little foil dishes, labelled Lepre in Agrodolce, Stufatino alla Romana, and so on.

  Like the index to an Elizabeth David book, Sutcliffe thought to himself. Was Penelope Partridge bequeathing all these as a rich gift to the gentleman who was coming, or to the cottage’s purchaser? Or had she, in fact, not been here since her husband’s death? The cottage was extremely tidy (and could never have had much of a lived-in feeling), but when he peered into the waste-paper basket, it was full of duplicated Parliamentary handouts, trivial letters dated late November or early December, and advertising circulars. Presumably someone had been in to clean—the next-door neighbour, very probably—but she had not liked to throw away anything remotely personal. Why? Sutcliffe wondered. The open verdict at the inquest, perhaps. Intelligent woman! His eye honed in on a little cabinet that obviously folded out to make a writing desk. He went over and opened it up.

  Inside were the remains of James Partridge’s last weekend’s work as MP for Bootham. Letters from constituents were paper-clipped together with carbon copies of Partridge’s replies. Looking under the cabinet, Sutcliffe found stored away the machine on which they had been typed—an old portable Olivetti. To read through the letters was to get a vivid sense of an MP’s job and the mental strain of it if he were conscientious and compassionate, as apparently James Partridge was. The letters alternated between the silly and the sad, and even many of the silly ones had an undertone of sadness—exposing the inadequacy, the panic, the frustration of small minds caught up in a web of misery in a town plagued by unemployment and the accumulation of years of industrial decay. There were small problems that had mounted up into big ones, there was bafflement at the ways and words of officialdom, there were personal difficulties compounded by the misery of poverty and idleness. James Partridge’s replies were models of quiet helpfulness or regret at helplessness, but once or twice Sutcliffe sensed, coming through the flat prose, a wail of frustration at the wretchedness which lay at the heart of his constituency’s problems.

  But there was only one letter that seemed of relevance to Sutcliffe’s investigation. It was headed, in embossed print, Manor Court Farm, Ltd, Cordingate, Bootham, Yorkshire, and it was on a fine paper, neatly typed, doubtless by a secretary. But the signature at the bottom was a large, brutal scrawl, almost in itself a gesture of defiance. The letter read:

  Dear Partridge,

  What you say is absolute twaddle. The British public wants cheap food and it’s firms like this one that make it possible. Conditions here are second to none, and I’m taking legal advice about what you’ve written about us. You’ll soon get a bloody nose if you start sticking it into our affairs, I can tell you. I make a bad enemy. As a life-long Tory it makes me sick that one of your sort should be our MP, with your lily-livered pseudo-scruples. You should be getting business back on its feet again, not trying to bring it to its knees to satisfy your so-called conscience. I tell you, I not only won’t be voting for you, but I’m organizing several of the Conservative Association members who have the business interests of the constituency at heart to see if we can’t bring about a change of candidate before the next election. That’s what your meddling is likely to bring about.

  Sincerely,

  Walter Abbot

  The carbon of Partridge’s reply read simply:

  Dear Abbot,

  I see no point in prolonging this correspondence.

  Yours,

  James Partridge

  Sutcliffe slipped the letters into his inside pocket, had a swift last look around, and then left the cottage.

  “You like it?” said the next-door neighbour cheerfully, still in the garden, when he handed over the key.

  “Yes. Yes indeed. Very nice.”

  “All nice stuff they got, though large for the place I always think. They’re lucky it’s still all there.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Nearly had a break-in t’other night. Half twelve or so it was. I don’t sleep well, never ‘ave done since my man died, so I heard ’em. Got on the phone to the police, but the silly buggers come from Bootham with their sirens goin’, and they was clean gone by the time they got here.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No—no, I didn’t. Just lights and shadows like. What I say is—”

  But she was inter
rupted by the phone inside. She had taken the key, and as he was continuing on down the lane, Sutcliffe heard her say:

  “Oh, Mrs Partridge. How are you, then? Getting over it? That’s right. Well, your gentleman’s been to see the house. Very nice gentleman, very nicely spoken . . . No, a middle-aged gentleman. Quite fifty, I’d say. But—”

  But Sutcliffe was out of earshot, going down the lane very much quicker than he had come up it.

  Chapter 8

  Manor Court

  Manor Court Farm (Ltd) was about eight miles from Moreton-in-Kirkdale, apparently situated near a village even smaller than Moreton. Wanting to see it in daylight, Sutcliffe left it till the morning, and spent the evening listening to gossip about the campaign and its personalities from the motley collection of journalists at the Happy Dalesman. These turned out to be mostly from the provincial dailies—Johnnies-come-lately, or men whose editors had tight budgets—with only a sprinkling of men from the nationals—men like the Grub reporter, who had come out to Moreton because Bootham was so nasty. There was also a melancholy little Spaniard, doing a report for Spanish television, who had been going round Bootham asking people their views on the Gibraltar question, and the London correspondent of a German daily, who seemed to have no more than ten or fifteen words of English, all of them guttural.

  The next morning he set out for Cordingate.

  The village itself turned out to be fifteen or twenty cottages and small houses, clutching the side of a hill. No such village in Yorkshire is entirely lacking in attraction if it is built of the local stone, but there was about Cordingate something skimped and furtive, as if it had never had much reason for being there, and apologized for disturbing the rural calm. It was not the sort of village that anyone would choose to have a country cottage in—not even a Conservative MP whose constituency gave him a limited choice in the matter. Sutcliffe inquired at the village shop the way to Manor Court Farm, and after driving half a mile on tarmac, turned off on to a rough track that soon landed him up outside a large and heavy farm gate.

  That gate, in fact, was the most conventionally rustic thing about Manor Court Farm, though its Constable-esque quality was impaired by a notice which read:

  MANOR COURT FARM LTD

  NO ADMISSION EXCEPT ON BUSINESS

  RING BELL AND WAIT

  Sutcliffe got out of his car, rang the bell, and waited, leaning in a traditionally rural pose across the gate, taking in what little he could see of Manor Court Farm.

  What had once been the farmhouse was now merely a wing to a solid and assertive main block, which faced the gate and said “Here I am” in a tremendous manner to the visitor. It was red-brick and regular, in a vaguely eighteenth-century way, with its porched main door set in the middle, and the windows on both floors arranged symmetrically around it. It was a dull day, and through the windows Sutcliffe could see strip lighting in all the rooms. The house fitted its environment about as well as if Wuthering Heights had been set down in the middle of nineteenth-century Manchester.

  Beyond the house were long, barrack-like sheds, more like hangars or warehouses. They stretched into the distance, so many of them that one could barely glimpse the fields beyond. They were long, roofed in corrugated iron, and shut in; and from them came very little noise: no warmth, no natural vigour, no sense of the unpredictable, the dangerous, the vital. Sutcliffe was not a fanciful man, but he found the place eerie. More like a concentration camp than a farm, he said to himself.

  That door in the centre of what he could only call the admin block opened. The young man who came down to the gate was lithe and jaunty, in a slightly shabby grey suit and a collar and tie that seemed to have been brought together especially to encounter this visitor. The cheeriness of his manner was entirely urban.

  “Good morning, good morning. And what can I do for you?”

  It was the accent of a cockney barrow boy, whom you might like, but wouldn’t trust an inch.

  “I wonder if I might have a word with Mr Abbot?”

  “Not easy, mate. He’s a very busy man. Could you give me an idea of your business?”

  “No. Would you just tell him that Superintendent Sutcliffe would like a word with him?”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Right. Won’t be a tick.”

  He bustled back, less cockily, into the house, and was succeeded after a further wait by a very different figure. Walter Abbot was not tall, but he was square and enormously powerful, giving the impression of a rugby player gone to seed. He was brown-suited and bristling with energy that seemed likely to spill over into aggression at any moment—the sort of man whose natural arena would seem to be the boxing ring or the American football field. Not a man to work for, or to live with. Forewarned that his visitor was a policeman, there was a patina of geniality over his aggression, but it was the fleeting geniality of the pugnacious, not the geniality of the genial.

  “Well, well, Superintendent. What can I do for you? You’ll excuse my not inviting you in, but we are very busy today. Just a matter of routine, is it?”

  “Not quite routine, sir. I’m investigating the death of Mr James Partridge.”

  The man’s bushy eyebrows raised themselves.

  “Really? Funny, I thought everyone agreed that was suicide.”

  “The inquest returned an open verdict, in fact. Why did you assume it was suicide?”

  “Thought they were just being tactful. The rumour around these parts is that the marriage wasn’t going too well. She hadn’t been up here much of late, his lady. Fine figure of a woman, but a handful, I’d guess. Wouldn’t have thought he was much of a dab with the whip hand, the late Mr Partridge. But it was a sad business altogether. He was a fine MP.”

  “You thought so, did you?”

  “Yes, indeed. I’m a member of the local Association—was on the committee that short-listed him for the seat, as a matter of fact. That would be—what?—five, six years ago, just before the ’seventy-nine election. We thought he’d go far—high office and all that. Didn’t quite make it, but a fine man all the same.”

  “So you didn’t have any disagreements with him, later on?”

  The eyes narrowed, and a rasp entered the voice.

  “No. I’ve said I thought he was a fine MP. Has some sillyarse been talking?”

  “Not so much that, Mr Abbot. But I found your letter yesterday when I went to his cottage.”

  The man’s face was an open playground of emotions. He must certainly be quite unused to hiding them, which surely meant that life was sticky for his workers. Clearly he would have liked to bawl Sutcliffe out for snooping. On the other hand, he was a policeman, and quite possibly he had a warrant or Mrs Partridge’s permission. For the moment prudence was victorious in this man of sudden rages and perpetual ill-will.

  “Oh, that. Just a little local difficulty. That blew over in no time. We smoothed it over before he died.”

  “Really? When would that be?”

  “Oh, he wrote me a conciliatory reply, and I accepted his apologies by phoning him. We ended the best of friends.”

  “You couldn’t show me his reply?”

  “ ’Course I couldn’t. I wouldn’t keep things like that.”

  “I would have thought you would—any business would keep correspondence with an MP. In any case, Mr Abbot, I have a copy of his reply. And it was not conciliatory.”

  “God damn it!” shouted Abbot, banging his fist down on the gatepost. “If you had a copy of his reply why didn’t you say so?”

  “To spare you the need of a lie? Why should I? Look, I’ve got some idea of what this business is all about. Why don’t you give me your side of it?”

  Abbot looked hard at him, then with an effort brought himself down below boiling point. Sutcliffe had half hoped to be invited into the “farmhouse,” but Abbot showed no inclination to do that. Instead he continued leaning on the gate, a massive and intimidating presence.

  “I tell you, the man was a busybody and an ignoramus. As you’ll know if you�
��ve seen the letters, he got a bee in his bonnet about factory farming. I needn’t spell it out to you: you’ll know the general line these cranks take. ‘Will you tell your constituents how much meat will go up by?’ I asked him, when I heard about this damned bill of his. It was sheer do-goodery, and ignorant into the bargain. Got it into his head that our animals are mistreated—”

  “And are they not?”

  “Don’t be daft. It’s like a four-star hotel in there. Anyone can inspect our premises, and I defy them to find a suffering animal.” Since he made no effort to shift his bulk from the gate, Sutcliffe realized his words did not constitute an invitation. “No, it was starry-eyed nonsense. I ask you: would it make sense? Any fool can see it wouldn’t be in our interests to mistreat them.”

  “Isn’t that the sort of thing Southern slave-owners used to say?” asked Sutcliffe. The man flashed brick-red and seemed about to explode, so Sutcliffe went on hurriedly: “But I’m not primarily interested in your farm. I’m interested in your quarrel with Jim Partridge. When did you first write to him?”

  “When I heard about this bill. A load of sentimental twaddle that was. I hear it’s stone dead now—”

  “Quite. Like James Partridge.”

  “Yes, well . . . Sorry. Unfortunate turn of phrase. Well, I wrote to him when I first got wind of what you might call the general tendency of this bill. Brought a few facts to his attention.”

  “And he replied?”

  “Yes, he did. Impertinent bloody piece of work. Acknowledged the truth of some of what I said, but . . . well, talking a lot of rot about the unnaturalness of the life. Bloody fool. I wouldn’t call an MP’s life natural, but that doesn’t mean I want to abolish Parliament!”

  “And that was when you wrote that rather intemperate letter that I saw?”

  “Intemperate! You call that intemperate? When the man is threatening my livelihood!”

  “And after you received his reply, there was no more communication between you?”

  “No, there wasn’t. There was only a week or two, and then he was dead.”