A graveyard hush had fallen over the group. The Enemy was at hand, was within the walls.
“Good Lord,” said Jerry, looking at him as if he were some kind of insect, yet with an element of calculation in his eye. “It’s the fuzz, boys! How bloody bizarre! What on earth can you want with me? I never knew Jim Partridge, you know. I’m one of the bogeyman figures for people like that.”
“I realize that, sir. It’s purely a matter of routine.”
“Then why,” said Jerry, draining his glass, “not make it the present?” He looked meaningfully at his infant Mafia. “If there’s going to be victimization, let’s make it as public as possible. I suppose you want me to step along to the station?”
And he walked Sutcliffe out of the pub, rather than vice-versa, leaving his little squad of henchmen to feed sensational stories to the media that would make him the hero of left-wing myth-making for many months to come. It was, Sutcliffe decided, a wonderful display of confidence. Electoral humiliation would be forgotten, and only memories of police victimization would remain.
The police station was two minutes away. Mostly they walked in silence, Jerry striding it out, with a tiny, almost schoolboyish smile playing on the corners of his mouth. The only time he spoke he said:
“This is pure totalitarianism.”
(Jerry was an expert on totalitarianism. He had been loud in condemnation of it in El Salvador, the Philippines and South Africa, loud in praise of it in Cuba, Ethiopia and the Soviet Union. You could say he had an open mind on the subject.)
“I don’t think they generally give you the choice of when you are to be taken in, in totalitarian countries,” said Sutcliffe.
At the station, most of the policemen on duty were out on the streets, or at the Town Hall for the count and declaration, when things could sometimes get rough. There was a sergeant on the desk, of course, and he took one look at Sutcliffe’s companion and responded to his polite request for a room by showing him to a superintendent’s office. Sutcliffe had become quietly familiar to the Bootham police, and Jerry, over the last few weeks, had become as well known in Bootham as second-rank royalty, or the people who do pet-food commercials on television.
“Basically you’re quite right, sir,” said Sutcliffe, as they settled in comfortably with a cup of machine-coffee in front of them. “There isn’t any particular reason why I should interview you. Though of course I wouldn’t want you to feel left out, either.”
Jerry was tensed up, and Sutcliffe was conscious, as he had never been when seeing him on his campaign, of the physical rather than the political animal—strong, in peak condition, trained. He was entering the interview like a crack marksman preparing for a duel.
“Most amusing,” Jerry said, stretching his mouth.
“So far a lot of my time has been spent looking at Mr Partridge’s parliamentary work, and I’ve been specially interested in this so-called Animals’ Charter. There were a lot of what you might call special interests involved there.”
“Too bloody right. A real little nest of them,” said Jerry, stirring his coffee with his large, strong hands. “I heard you’d been around to that Fascist bastard Walter Abbot. I notice nothing has come of it, though.”
“We have to be careful, sir. You in the House of Commons—should you be elected—can say pretty much anything you like about anybody, and be protected by privilege. We have to be sure we have a case before we say anything at all. That’s a particular problem as far as the death of James Partridge is concerned: we’re not even sure it is a case of murder.”
“Quite,” said Jerry Snaithe.
“It was natural to take a look at the man’s political opponents, as well as the people he antagonized in his own party. After all, politics has become a pretty violent game in the last ten or fifteen years, and the violence can spill over on to anyone, however uncontroversial. A reporter gave me a tip that the election I ought to be looking at was the last one—the one at which Mr Worthing was also standing.”
“Oh yes, those rumours,” said Jerry casually, stretching out his legs rather in the manner of Derek Manders, and quite as irritatingly. “I don’t think there was anything in them. Anyway, I believe in fighting on the issues.”
“I’m sure you do. Only in one respect what the reporter said was wrong: he said that you and Mr Craybourne-Fisk and the rest were Johnny-come-latelies who had only been adopted as candidates since the death of Partridge. Now that, I realize now, is one of those things that may be classed as true in fact but misleading in implication.”
“Oh? I don’t see that. It certainly is true in fact as far as I’m concerned. I was adopted on January the fourteenth.”
“Quite, sir. But your nomination was virtually certain from the moment your group—the WRA isn’t it called? So confusing all these initials—got control of the Bootham party. One of your young helpers told me that—a very helpful, friendly young man.”
“He was speaking out of turn. It’s nonsense.”
“Well, I’ve checked up with local Labour stalwarts, and they all agree that the WRA had things sewn up in the constituency party by November.”
“So what?”
“It’s a motive, sir. You were sure of the nomination, if you wanted it, but there would have been no poll before the General Election, which is anything up to two years away. Only by Jim Partridge’s death was there a chance of your being MP for Bootham before that.”
Jerry Snaithe stretched his mouth again.
“It’s pretty bloody flimsy.”
“Not to someone in my line of work. I assure you, I’ve seen murder done for very much less than a parliamentary seat. Or, rather, the chance to fight for a parliamentary seat. Particularly as in your case there was an added spur.”
“What was that?”
“The abolition of the Greater London Council. In a matter of months, or so it seems, it will have disappeared, and so will your platform. The best you can hope for is a seat on one of the London local councils, which is all that will be left. There won’t be much national or media interest in them. In my experience, sir, politicians usually have something of the performer in them. They like an audience, reviews. Going from the GLC to the Pimlico District Council would be like going from the West End to one of those little pub theatres. And then, all at once, there came the chance to get into the National Theatre . . .”
Jerry smiled, this time a genuine smile. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He was, indeed, shaping up to give a performance.
“Well, well: you really seem to have adopted the media view of politicians, Superintendent. Shall I allow you motive? Right. I had a motive—along with many others.”
“Quite. Along with many others. But Mr Craybourne-Fisk didn’t have that motive: his selection was highly uncertain, and he’d never been heard of in this constituency before James Partridge’s death. And, for all my digging, I never found the shadow of another motive for him, not for murdering James Partridge. Into all sorts of murky financial skulduggery—with Mrs Partridge, Derek Manders, and dreaming up something with Walter Abbot, should he become the MP here—all that, yes. But I couldn’t make any connection between his financial skulduggery and the murder of James Partridge.”
“So you blithely forget about it?”
“I am about to retire from the CID, sir. I have a restricted brief. No doubt before very long he’ll sail so close to the wind that his boat overturns. It’s not, I suspect, a very good boat. Well, now, I grant you there are others with motive around, and a motive doesn’t actually get us very far. So we come to opportunity. Here we have great problems, because we don’t really know the time he died. So that Walter Abbot, arriving home from a meeting of European farmers in an organization called EuroAg—I fancy you and I might agree about them, sir—got into Heathrow from Strasbourg at ten o’clock and spent the night in a Kensington hotel. Penelope Partridge was apparently home all evening, Craybourne-Fisk had a meeting that ended before ten, Oliver Worthing had a college meeting, bu
t I gather it was an early evening one, and it was over by eight. He could have been in his car, down the Ml, and been on the Vauxhall Bridge well before midnight.”
“And I? What was I doing? I haven’t the remotest recollection.”
“You, sir, were at a meeting of the Leisure Activities Committee, as I gather you frequently are on Thursdays. Now this interested me. Your wife tells me you are not a fraternizer after meetings. Your meeting that night ended about nine-forty—as they often do, or around that time. Jim Partridge finished a conversation with an MP friend at the Commons about ten—also a common occurrence on a Thursday. Now, if we set you walking along the left bank of the river towards Battersea, and Jim Partridge along the right bank of the river towards Pimlico—you the faster walker, I would guess, sir, a strider, if ever I saw one . . . then you might well cross the Vauxhall Bridge towards Pimlico, and he cross it towards Battersea, let’s say about half past ten. Which is when the night-watchman in the office block heard a cry, and went to have a look over the river.”
“Oh? Who was that? I hadn’t heard about him.”
“Just a solitary chap, soaking up cans of lager to while away the long winter evening.”
“Not a very reliable witness, then, I would have thought, Superintendent.”
“Not reliable at all, sir. I can imagine a defence lawyer making mincemeat of him if we ever put him up in court. The trouble is, though, that I’ve always placed a fair bit of trust in that report, because after all that was about where he’d be on his way home, and if, say, Abbot or Worthing had killed him on the bridge much later, what was he doing there? How had they got him out of his flat and over to that spot? No, I’ve always fancied ten-thirty as the time of the killing. And you, sir, could well have been there. And, what’s more, been there before.”
“Before?”
“I mean that there could have been previous occasions on that bridge when you could have been coming home from your Thursday meetings, and Partridge could have been coming back on a Dead Thursday from the House of Commons, and you could have passed. Perhaps if you realized that this was his bridge, the one he always crossed the river on, you yourself might have chosen that one, rather than, say, Westminster, and chosen to walk home rather than take a bus or tube. In case you had the chance of seeing the sitting MP for the seat that you were conspiring—”
“Loaded word, Superintendent.”
“Manoeuvring?”
“Still loaded.”
“—working to get the Labour nomination for yourself. Now, don’t say you wouldn’t have recognized him, sir. You’re a political animal, he had been a junior minister. You would have made it your business to know the sitting member for Bootham. You may have been unknown to him, but he can’t have been to you. And if your paths had crossed on the bridge once, twice, or more often before, one can imagine a little idea, a possibility, sporting around in the back areas of your mind.”
“Right. I get your drift, Superintendent. It’s possible, I grant you that—though I think that ordinary minds would find it a touch fantastic.”
Jerry Snaithe’s accent, as he sparred with Sutcliffe, had taken on a sort of drawl—really, in fact, an upper-class drawl.
“I’m inclined to agree with you, sir. In fact, there is much about politics that the ordinary mind finds a trifle fantastic.”
“What comes next? What about the means? How did I, do you think, kill him?”
“Ah, well, there I had a tiny idea from the moment I saw the pathologist’s reports. I’ve had a fair bit to do with deaths, in the course of my police career. Now I’m retiring I hope to have much less, while preparing for my own. When I heard about those dull bruises on the left-hand face and temple—bruises that could have been caused by contact with a boat, or the supporting pillars of the bridge, but which the doctor was somehow rather dubious about—I remembered the body of a man who’d been killed in a brawl in the back yard of a pub. He’d been killed by one of the killer karate blows that leave practically no trace—a blow with the open hand against the side of the face and temple. Fortunately in this case there were witnesses, and no question as to who had done it. Actually, sir, he was an ex-SAS man like yourself: received his karate training in the Service.”
Jeremy Snaithe shifted in his chair, but looked at Sutcliffe hard and long.
“My army service is a matter of record. I’ve never tried to hide it.”
“Certainly it’s a matter of record. But you’ve never actually proclaimed it, have you, sir? It would hardly go down well with most of your supporters.”
“It was a youthful aberration, a hangover from public school. Thank God I grew out of that phase.”
“But did you actually grow out of that phase, sir? My information is that you left the SAS, very reluctantly, under a cloud. What was the story, now? Three rather pathetic Palestinian terrorists, obviously incompetent, holding a hostage in the Israeli consulate in Liverpool, back in 1974. The police were expecting to be able to talk them out without much difficulty, but the SAS were there in reserve, as usual, and you went in through a back door, on your own initiative, and the result was one dead terrorist, two severely injured, and a hostage with a bullet through his thigh. It was shortly after that, by mutual agreement, that you parted company with the Service. When you first went into Labour politics you swung, as people like you so often do, from one extreme to the other—one set of whites becomes black, another set of blacks becomes white. You have to have absolutes to believe in totally. What certainly didn’t alter was the fact that you had the training of a killer.”
“Which you think I used on Jim Partridge?”
“Which I think you used on Jim Partridge. Let’s put the most charitable interpretation possible on it: which I think, completely on impulse, finding that bridge unusually empty of traffic, you used on Jim Partridge.”
There was silence in the interview room. Jerry Snaithe continued looking hard at Sutcliffe. Then suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he smiled.
“Prove it,” he said.
Oh, that smile! How often had Sutcliffe seen it in the course of this investigation. From Arthur Tidmarsh, from Antony Craybourne-Fisk, from Derek Manders. It was the smile of engaging political roguery. It was the smile that said: Look—you know, I know, that I’m in it for what I can get out of it, but—what the hell—aren’t there rogues in your profession too? It was a smile that mixed complicity with a dare, a smile that invited you into the circle of clever rogues, a smile that presupposed a camaraderie of the self-seeking and the morally suspect. It was a smile that told Sutcliffe that his long-shot guess had been right.
“Oh, there’s really no question of that, sir,” he said, easily and amicably, and as he said it he got up.
“Oh?” said Jerry, looking up at him almost aggrieved, as if he had a sense of anti-climax, as if a duel he was going to participate in had been called off.
“No question at all. I’ve known that pretty much all along, sir. That’s why I’ve done much of this in my own time. Once the boys doing the leg-work had established in the first day or two after the murder that nobody had actually seen anything suspicious, and taking that in conjunction with the state of the body, which presented no indisputable signs of murder, I knew this meant there was hardly the remotest chance of getting a conviction. After motive, opportunity, means, there comes that vital question of evidence. Anything I’ve done in this case, sir, has really been for my own satisfaction.”
“An abstract passion for justice?” inquired Jerry, sardonically.
“An abstract passion for truth, sir. I’m afraid there is little chance of justice. You will go back to your political career, whatever it may be, I’ll go into retirement. You will know, I will know, and perhaps one or two others will suspect. But justice? No, alas—because I believe in justice—you’ll never be brought to book.”
“And you’re just letting me go now?” Jerry asked, with that aggrieved bewilderment.
“That’s right, sir. What else can
I do? Are you thinking it would make a better story if I kept you here all through the count and the declaration? Make you more of a victim-hero to your friends and supporters, after you’ve lost? I’m sure your young henchmen have prepared the ground. No, sir, you’re free to go. It’s only five past eleven, and three minutes to the Town Hall. You’ll probably have an hour before the declaration. I don’t have to throw you out of the station, do I, sir?”
With another smile of complicity, which somehow came out slightly cracked, Jerry got up and marched out of the room with that long, striding, military walk, that Tory country landowner’s walk, that suddenly made Sutcliffe think that in a way, James Partridge had been killed by one of his own party.
• • •
When Sutcliffe had gathered up his papers, he went out to the front office and found the duty sergeant looking intently at a portable television set placed unorthodoxly on his counter.
“Seems like we’re famous, sir. Fancy a cup of cold tea?” And he looked hard at Superintendent Sutcliffe with a policeman’s version of that smile of complicity.
“Thanks. I often find cold tea warming on a night like this.” And so, gratefully, it proved. “What have they been saying?” he asked, nodding at the set, with its chaotic pictures of piles of ballot papers and distraught officials.
“Speculating about this Snaithe’s absence from the count, first of all. Then they got this rumour that he was at the station here. That gave the commentators a chance to talk about rumours concerning James Partridge’s death that they said had been surfacing now and then in the course of the campaign.”
“Hmmm. Jerry’s little helpers have been busy.”
“Why would they do that, sir?”
“At a nod from their boss. I think he knows he’s lost the election and he aims to divert attention by some sort of sensation about police victimization. It will go down very well with all the people who support him, except that I let him go so soon everyone will know we hardly had time to do more than pass the time of day. Anyway, it’s a new source of excitement for him, it will satisfy the craving for a bit. But when I let him go, you could feel the disappointment: he was banking on an all-night grilling, and inch-high headlines.”
Political Suicide Page 17