Political Suicide

by Robert Barnard

  “No, darling,” Mrs Masterson was saying, over her second Campari soda, when Sutcliffe brought his attention back to her, “I only had the one, but Virginia goes through husbands as if they were paper tissues.”

  “All well-heeled, I suppose?”

  “Yes, darling, but less so, as she’s got older. Of course it was always her great ambition to get into the aristocracy. I’ve never understood that, myself. To me they’re overrated. Always wanting something new and outré, which can be tedious as well as physically dangerous. Jaded palates aren’t very interesting to the other party. Anyway, she never did get in, though she’s certainly frisked around the fringes.”

  “And what has your grandson done since school?”

  “Oh, darling—why ask me? The last few years it’s just been the ring on my birthday between Virginia and me. If that. So I really haven’t heard. When I lived in London I heard a bit more. There was some scandal about forged ballot papers for an election to the Oxford University Conservative Association. Antony was standing for President, but the election was disallowed. Antony said it was some over-enthusiastic supporter of his, and that this sort of thing happened all the time in the Oxford Conservative Association anyway, so nobody took it too seriously . . . I can’t really imagine what an over-enthusiastic supporter of Antony would look like, can you, darling?”

  “Difficult. Was there anything else?”

  “Oh—so long ago . . . Women—just the odd one or two, I think, who could be useful to him . . . One or two little financial coups, but don’t ask me about them, because I never did understand my husband’s little coups (probably just as well) and I really know nothing at all about Antony’s. Funny how he’s taken after Masterson, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s why I’ve taken against him . . . I do know he has a very good friend who’s MP for Crawley or some such place (I remember the name because it seemed somehow appropriate), and they’ve been in one or two ‘good things’ together . . .”

  She had been talking away, propelled along by Sutcliffe’s discreet questioning. Now she pulled herself up, as if she didn’t quite know how it had happened.

  “But darling—what am I talking about my daughter and my grandson for, to a fan? Naturally you want to talk about me!”

  • • •

  Sutcliffe had become very fond of Isobel Ainslie, and he let her talk about “me” for quite a time, during which the old lady bought two rounds of drinks, and determinedly paid Gianni at roughly 1964 prices. When Sutcliffe emerged again into the street (having seen her to her bedroom and left her to have her “afternoon zizz”), he realized that it was already half past three. Bootham in mid-afternoon was displaying no signs of election fever: it was merely being its listless and depressing self. Sutcliffe did see Albert Scadgett, wandering around rather disconsolately, as if his moment of glory had been much briefer than he had expected, as indeed had been the case. He had, when the march ended, volunteered enthusiastically for anything that Jerry or his Campaign Manager would care to give him to do, but he had been given the same casual brush-off by Jerry that Sue had got earlier in the day. Albert Scadgett had served his turn: he had come, he had said nothing (just five words from Albert Scadgett could mean hundreds of lost votes), but Jerry had been seen with him, to the delight of his militant supporters. Now he could be dropped—and Jerry dropped him. Won’t somebody recognize me? Albert Scadgett seemed to be saying, as he wandered listlessly around. Perhaps even ask for my autograph?

  Sutcliffe made several attempts to phone Bootham Conservative Headquarters, and when he finally got through, another young lady with a Roedean accent (not very wise, surely, in Bootham?) informed him that the Tory Agent was fantastically busy as he could imagine, and really an interview was quite out of the question . . . Unless, perhaps, he was from the Press?

  “Not the Press, the Police,” said Sutcliffe.

  “Ah—oh yes—ah well . . .” It was clearly a matter of comment at Tory Campaign Headquarters that investigation was still continuing into the death of Bootham’s former member. The girl was uncertain what to do, or what tone of voice to adopt. Finally, and in chilling tones, the girl said that she could squeeze him in for ten minutes tomorrow at three-fifteen.

  “I might need fifteen minutes,” said Sutcliffe.

  “That you will have to arrange with Mr Fawcett,” said Roedean, severely.

  So Sutcliffe, in watery, late-afternoon sun, went and did what he had intended to do for some days: pay his respects to the local police. The Bootham superintendent was pleasant and cooperative, but Sutcliffe refrained from telling him that from tomorrow he was officially on holiday. The man was interested in the case, because he had actually met James Partridge, on more than one occasion.

  “Intelligent man. I liked him. Interested and sympathetic—to the police, I mean—without being uncritically fulsome, in that way Tory politicians have. He understood at once the real problem of police work.”

  “Boredom?”

  “Aye. There’s not many grasp that. He was a quiet type (not many politicians like that, in my experience) but you felt he was completely dependable.”

  “Ever meet his wife?”

  “Aye.”

  “Impression?”

  “Bitch.”

  “Got it in five letters. Want to do something that would have pleased Partridge if he were still alive?”

  “I’d be happy to, if I can.”

  “Know a man called Walter Abbot?”

  “I do.”

  “Got anything on him?”

  “Not anything like what I ought to have on him, I suspect. One drunken driving conviction, three years ago. Gets himself driven around by his underlings these days. Makes a great noise around town, that one—a blow-hard and a bully. Still, he’s not one we can cross without good reason.”

  “Could you organize a spot-check on his so-called farm—by your men, who would then submit a detailed report to the Ministry of Agriculture? There’ve been Ministry inspections, but the man has obviously got inside contacts, so none of them have been worth the paper they’re written on. I’d like to see a real report on the state of the place—and I know James Partridge would have done too.”

  “It could be done, I suppose. But is it worth it? Has it got anything to do with the man’s death?”

  “I’ve no idea. But it has a lot to do with his life—what he had been giving his time to in the last few months before he died. Will you do it?”

  “Surely. What you’ve got in mind is some sort of tribute to his memory, is it?”

  “Right. But take your time. I hear my visit has made him nervy. Leave it for four or five weeks, till after the election. Then go in and get him.”

  Chapter 11

  Party Agent

  “You did me a good turn with that suggestion,” said the Grub man to Sutcliffe that night in the Saloon Bar.

  “Suggestion?”

  “About Snaithe’s schooldays. I’ve been following it up, and they’re making a spread of it in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “What was he? The rabble-rouser against clerical tyranny? The Robespierre of the Fourth Form Revolution?”

  “Not at all. Quite the reverse, and it makes an even better story, from our point of view. I’m glad I made the trip there. It was all quite interesting.”

  And so it had been. Grub had driven over to Amplehurst, having first ascertained that it was a Catholic Public School run by members of the Benedictine order. This information conveyed little to him, beyond some associations with a liqueur, but he sat in his car in the centre of the little village of Amplehurst, and waited until he caught sight of a tall, elderly gentleman in a billowing habit. Rightly judging this to be one of the adherents of St Benedict, he followed him into the village store, where he was purchasing tobacco (the founder of the order, whose rule Chaucer’s Monk had found over-strict, had presumably not foreseen the invention of tobacco), and there he struck up a conversation with him. Then he had walked back with him—a leisurely, chatty walk�
��to the gates of the school itself. The conversation had ranged over a variety of subjects, for Grub was under no illusion that the monk, courteously chatty though he was, would talk knowingly about ex-pupils to a member of the Press. But eventually they had got on to the subject of Jerry Snaithe.

  “Jeremy Grayling-Snaithe, as he was always called then,” the monk had explained in his tired, cultivated voice. “The Grayling-Snaithes are rather a good family. A good Catholic family, I mean. Came over in the 1850s. Father was in the Diplomatic, posted here there and everywhere, seldom appearing for parents’ day or things like that. The boy was very keen then—committed Catholic, keen on keeping the other boys up to the mark. In fact, he was terribly committed all round—very sporty, captain of the first fifteen, very useful cricketer, in the school swimming team. Came down very hard on slackers and on the arty types. Very keen on the OTC, and kept all the younger boys up to scratch. I had an idea that he joined the army later, after university, but I may be wrong. I only teach the lower forms, you see. Certainly we never thought of him as a rabble-rouser—quite the reverse. He was a natural leader—the only thing was that one wasn’t quite sure of his judgment of where he should be leading people.”

  “It was all marvellously usable stuff,” said Grub, concluding his pint of beer and his report to Sutcliffe. “I walked two miles there and back and I haven’t done that since National Service days. But it was well worth it. It’ll make a first-rate story.”

  “Interesting,” said Sutcliffe. “A case of the leopard rearranging his spots rather than changing them, wouldn’t you say? Fascinating that while Antony Craybourne-Fisk has acquired his double-barrel, Jeremy Grayling-Snaithe has jettisoned his.”

  “That’s it. Happens all the time. Antony Wedgwood Benn becomes Tony Benn and hopes that everyone will forget all about the Wedgwoods—though he remembered that Grandfather Wedgwood used to hunt around Chesterfield when he wanted to get the Chesterfield seat.”

  “And somehow all this committed Catholic and officer-class stuff got transmuted into committed Socialism and class-warrior stuff. Interesting. One wonders how it happened.”

  “Doesn’t one ever! There’s potential for all sorts of digging there. That sort of thing happened regularly enough in the ’sixties, but this would have happened very late in the radical boom at the earliest, and probably well after it. Was he in the army? I wonder. Still, I mustn’t go on about it. I suppose you’re not really interested in this by-election.”

  It was common knowledge, since he had received the phone call from the Manor Court Farm worker, that he was a police officer, and that he was nosing into the Partridge death. If Sutcliffe had not been so cagey, and if their newspapers had not been Tory to a rag, the various reporters would have made something of this by now, and still might. Sutcliffe kept his cage tightly locked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Here—you did me a good turn, and I’ll do you one in exchange. What I’d suggest to you is: the election you should be interested in is not this one, but the last one.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s it. Stands to reason, if you think about it. From your point of view the interesting election is the General Election of 1983. See, this Tory chap and the Labour chap are just Johnny-come-latelies: they couldn’t have placed Bootham on the map, I bet you, before this constituency became vacant. That’s why they have to dredge up their Yorkshire grandmothers and their Yorkshire schooldays, and so on. And of course none of the loonies was around then, because a General Election doesn’t bring you in the same publicity. What does that leave us with? The only person who’s actually fought Jim Partridge in an election is Mr Oliver Worthing.”

  “And?”

  “And there was a funny rumour going around at the last election that’s beginning to surface again this time. And that is that Mr Oliver Worthing’s education was even more interesting than Jerry Snaithe’s. The rumour goes that he spent part of it in Borstal, and that for a pretty serious offence.”

  “Really?”

  “Might be worth looking into, eh? Now, don’t say I never return a favour. And if there’s a story in it, keep it for me, eh?”

  The story of Jerry Snaithe’s education certainly made a good splash in the Grub on the next morning. But perhaps even better was the story of Jerry’s bruiser in the Strip of the same day. Neither the Grub nor the Strip was in any real sense a newspaper. They were the successors to the weekend strip-and-sensation sheets that Sutcliffe had read and gained his knowledge of the female anatomy from in his boyhood, the only difference being that the Grub and the Strip catered for the same tastes daily. If anything, the Strip was one degree more moronic than the Grub, and the paper really went to town on Reg Bickerstaffe, the Labour Party’s bouncer. After he had been paid off by the Labour agent, he had been followed by the Strip reporter from campaign headquarters and into a pub, where the reporter had bought him many a pint of ale, and had encouraged him, by his human sympathy, to talk not only about his unjust sacking, but also about his political beliefs. These last were perhaps not coherent enough to justify their being called a philosophy, but with judicious prompting from Strip Reg Bickerstaffe enlarged at length on the feelings he had towards Pakis, wogs, Yids, nignogs, black-arse bastards and so on—interspersed with his views on bints, tarts, and various unprintable synonyms for woman, whom he regarded with blanket and uniform contempt. It made a wonderful story for the Strip, the more so as the paper could print the racist and sexist terms, or at least a judicious selection of them, and then hold up its hands virtuously in horror and ask: are these the sort of attitudes that the Labour Party in Bootham upholds? It had it both ways in no uncertain fashion, and the picture of the bouncer’s right arm and chest and belly were among the most fascinatingly off-putting that the paper had run for years.

  Certainly, Sutcliffe thought, as he ploughed through the populars, it wasn’t Jerry Snaithe’s day.

  He had a late lunch in a Bootham pub that offered fare a notch or two above that of the Happy Dalesman. Then he decided to walk to the Tory campaign headquarters. As he approached them up Gordon Street he picked the place out at once, from the frenetic activity that was going on inside and outside the house. But as he neared it, in a leisurely fashion, a little cavalcade of vehicles drove off, one of them bearing Antony Craybourne-Fisk on his way to repel the voters of some part of the constituency or other. So that when Sutcliffe got to the headquarters’ outer office, things were comparatively quiet. In one corner a woman with a hat like a dead hedgehog was addressing envelopes, while at a desk, surrounded by telephones, sat a smart, large and intimidating girl. Obviously Roedean. Probably, like Jerry Snaithe, she had been captain of rugby when she was at school.

  “Yes?”

  “Superintendent Sutcliffe.”

  “Oh yes . . . Yes . . . Well, Mr Fawcett has said he may be able to give you the fifteen minutes.” (Certainly a sense of humour was not one of this girl’s strong points. She should, on past form, go far in the party.) “But please remember how busy he is. Through there.”

  She pointed to a door, and Sutcliffe obediently knocked on it and entered. Harold Fawcett was on the phone, but he cut short the call and came over to shake Sutcliffe by the hand. A comfortable, paunched, cheery type of man—not too bright, perhaps, but reasonably honest if not pushed into a corner.

  “Superintendent? Do sit down. Sorry I’m a bit rushed, but you know how it is in a by-election, or if you don’t I hope you never find out! It’s pandemonium here much of the time, you know. Do you know what they’re calling us? The political focal point of the nation.”

  “The cynosure,” agreed Sutcliffe.

  “Aye. I meant to look that one up. It’s a daunting thought.”

  “Right, sir, then I’ll come straight to the point and save you time,” said Sutcliffe, thinking Fawcett displayed some inclination to time-wasting. “You know what I’m here about.”

  “Aye,” agreed Harold Fawcett carefully.

 
; “I want to ask a few random questions, about things that have come up in the course of my little investigation. Could you tell me anything, for example, about Mr Walter Abbot?”

  “Ah—Mr Abbot. Well, I’d have to watch my step there. He used to be on our Executive Committee, and he’s still what you might call ‘prominent in Conservative circles.’ He’s not a man one would cross lightly. What exactly is it you’d like to know?”

  “About his quarrel with James Partridge. I know all about the causes, and the letters that went back and forth, but what exactly did Abbot do when things blew up?”

  “Well, it was all rather unpleasant, actually. He seemed to regard this ‘Animals Charter’ as some sort of personal insult. And once he’d fired off several salvoes through the post he started charging round the constituency trying to stir up people against Partridge.”

  “What exactly was he trying to do?”

  “I don’t think he knew himself, exactly. He is a political ignoramus, really. We don’t have de-selection in our party, and with the Labour Party pulling itself to pieces with one de-selection after another, the last thing we’d want is for them to be able to point to anything similar happening in our party. I think what he was hoping for was some sort of vote of no confidence, which he thought might make Partridge stand down before the next election, or even resign his seat at once. It was all nonsense.”

  “He didn’t get anywhere?”

  “Of course not. He just huffed and puffed, perhaps got one or two individuals on his side, but in the end he put up more backs than Jim Partridge ever could.”

  “So he’d have known by early December that he wasn’t getting anywhere?”

  “Oh yes. But, Superintendent—”

  “I’m not implying anything. Merely asking. Did you know anything about Partridge’s marital affairs up here?”

  “Know anything—no. Suspect—? Well, it had been noticed that Mrs Partridge had hardly been in the constituency over the last three or four months before he died. That sort of thing gets itself commented on in Conservative circles. The member’s lady is an important person.”