The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  “And I don’t want them thinking I was content to let them pull you down with me,” he said. “What I suggest is that we bring the whole thing to public notice by your suing for divorce, citing Miss Whitstable. I will not defend the action. We will behave as if we had nothing of interest to conceal, and if all goes well the press will assume that that is indeed the case. They are certain to paw our affairs over to some extent, but we may be able to arrange for the process, though unpleasant, not to be unspeakable.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “It feels like running away.”

  “There are the children’s interests, as much as yours and mine,” he said.

  I’m afraid I’d forgotten about them. Tommy was always a much better father than I was a mother, though I got fonder of them as soon as they started to grow up. Anyway we left it at that for the moment, though I rather gloomily decided he was probably right.

  I rang David later that day, and he told me the man had come back only a few days before, and this time David had been ready with a lot of technical difficulties, only the man just wanted money now, and not an awful lot of it either, and he hadn’t any idea what David was talking about. In fact David said he got the impression that the time before the man had been sent by somebody and told what to say, and this time he was acting on his own for what he could get, so as soon as David realised he couldn’t do him any harm with anyone who mattered he started to ring up the police, and the man saw that he meant it and ran off. He said he thought the whole thing was now over.

  He was in for a shock. We all were. It began with the TV programme about racketeering landlords, the one Teddy Voss-Thompson had started off with and then left because of Michael being his brother-in-law. I never saw it, but I heard about it over and over and over. It was almost the first time TV had really shown what it could do about something like that. They talked to the tenants, ordinary, harmless old people, who’d been frightened and harassed out of their homes. Most of them wouldn’t talk, but they managed to trap one of the frighteners on the job and question him, and he got rough, but they had pictures of him and connected him with a lot of criminals in the East End—remember that party Michael took me to? I think that was them—and they didn’t just do frightening, they drug-trafficked and did protection and ran call-girls, and so on, and all that was exciting enough.

  But on top of that they’d got a lot more stuff about Michael, and how he did things. Remember Nan telling me that she’d got a stick for Gerry as well as a carrot? What it was was that before she’d agreed to marry him and start the family he so longed for she’d made him tell her a lot of stuff, names and dates and money and so on, about what he and Michael had really been doing, so that she could force him to break with Michael and force Michael to let him go by threatening to publish it all herself. With Gerry dead, that was too late, of course, but she still didn’t want Michael to get away with it, so she asked me how I’d found out what I’d told her, and I explained about Teddy Voss-Thompson’s talk with Paul, so she passed everything on to him. That was enough for the TV people to take the risk of giving Michael’s name and asking a lot of suggestive questions about him.

  So next day there were reporters trying to get hold of Michael and he was threatening everyone with libel writs, and other reporters swarming all over the East End, and I think somebody must have run into the man with the big ring, because next thing wasn’t a newspaper story but a question in Parliament about the Lord Seneschal (that was Tommy) and his connection with people who were in turn connected to the Yugoslav security services. Not all in one go like that, of course—a harmless-seeming question first and then a snide supplementary and points of order and a terrific burst of excitement like you get when you’re hunting and the hounds all get a scent together and give tongue.

  It was all absolutely typical of the whole business. Most of what anyone said was just hints and guesses and nosing around, and a few lies, but just enough truth oozing out all the time to keep the excitement going. Apart from Tommy (and me) it was poor David who took the worst hiding. The man with the ring must have passed on those photographs too, and said where they were taken, and somebody else (I bet it was Biddy Trollope, who never means any harm but just blurts things out and causes havoc—it keeps happening to her, like being accident prone) let on that David and I had been lovers. Heavens, it had been six or seven years before, and it had lasted about a couple of weeks, but now David had gone to Yugoslavia and some idiot in the secret police had tried to blackmail him, and then it came out that our friend Mikowicz, who everybody thought was rather a jolly Yugoslav playboy enjoying the fleshpots of London and pretending to run UFTFA, hadn’t just been a pretty bloodthirsty resistance leader against the Germans but had moved on to becoming a high-up in Tito’s secret police. And what’s more, Sammy Whitstable was spending just as much time with him as she was with Tommy. And while they were still frothing at the mouth about that, one of the reporters who were nosing round the East End met somebody who remembered me going to that party with Michael. And to cap it all there was Michael’s crony dead in an explosion in a country house. Luckily the inquest was over before any of this came out, but even without that, just imagine! Two titles, a government minister, a kinky tart, the minister’s wife who’d been a society beauty but slept around with mysterious businessmen (that’s Michael, David and poor Paul), East End criminals, racketeering landlords, a dead body, and cricket! (They’d got on to Blatchards v. The World and kept making frightful cricketing puns in the headlines.) It all simply reeked of the Establishment leaping in and out of bed with each other and having kinky sex on the side, between driving poor honest pensioners out of their homes and betraying their country to the Reds.

  Some of it was a hoot, such as the notion of David being part of the Establishment, let alone a mysterious businessman. The only mysterious thing about David was that nobody else had a clue how he made his money. But most of it was hell.

  I never met Sammy Whitstable again, after that one party where she’d come dressed as a man, but there we were in the newspapers day after day, me looking cold and upper-crust and her looking earthy and sexy. Actually she behaved rather well. One of the papers paid her a lot of money for her life story, and according to Teddy Voss-Thompson the hack tried to make her say all sorts of things that weren’t true and she dug her heels in, and wouldn’t name names of other men or say what they’d done together. So perhaps Mrs Mudge was wrong about her. I hope so. I’d rather liked the look of her. Then she just disappeared. I don’t think I saw her name again till she died (much too young) and the obituaries raked the whole thing over again. Apparently she’d got religion and become a Buddhist. That’s all I remember.

  I had a pretty bad time, of course. I was used to being photographed, but not like that, stalked, lain in wait for, peeped at, ambushed. They actually found out I was visiting Paul in hospital, and some of them dressed up as orderlies and sneaked in and tried to interview him. Fiends. Then, mercifully, Suez happened, and then Hungary, and they had other things to think about.

  People still remember the Affair, of course. Every few years there’s another book, or a TV programme. When Michael died there was a flurry, because you can’t libel dead people and at last they were allowed to say things about him which he’d have sued them for. But because people are so obsessed with sex and spies there’s always more in them about poor Tommy and Sammy Whitstable, and the fancy orgies our friend Mikowicz was laying on. Usually there are bits about me. You can’t imagine what a cold-hearted, man-eating bitch some of them make me out. And then there’ll be a chapter about Gerry. I remember one year there were two books which came out almost together and one of them said he’d been killed by the CIA and the other said it was the KGB. A few times people have said it was Michael, or Michael’s East End cronies, but they couldn’t say how anyone had got into the room. And most of the sensible writers decided in spite of the inquest that Gerry had been Michael�
��s stooge and he realised what he’d let himself in for and he’d killed himself for the insurance for Nan and the baby. That’s what anyone who remembers the Affair comes up with. “Gerry Grantworth, that crook who killed himself.”

  Now I’ve got to tidy up. I hate stories which don’t explain bits and leave all the characters dangling in mid air. I want to know how they all got on after. So I’ve made a list—explanations first, then loose ends.

  Let’s start with all the sexy bits—David and his girl in Yugoslavia, Tommy and Sammy Whitstable, Mrs Mudge, the man with the ring on his finger who had the photographs, all that. Despite what Nan said, I don’t think this had anything to do with Michael. Michael would have known there wasn’t a hope of blackmailing Tommy, but he easily might have chatted to Gerry about Tommy’s hang-ups, and told him what sort of a girl he’d go for. I think it was something Gerry and Mikowicz cooked up between themselves, because they needed the money, Gerry to take over paying for Blatchards, and Mikowicz for the orgies and his general life-style. Mikowicz was one of Gerry’s group in the war, Tommy told me. They knew that something like Suez was going to happen, and they knew it was bound to mean trouble for sterling. (Paul says Michael talked in the Yellow Room about the Americans not letting us get away with it, and Gerry believed Michael was pretty good at that sort of thing.) So they needed three things: an exact date, which they thought they could use Sammy Whitstable to get out of Tommy, and someone like David to put the deal through, and enough money—about two hundred thousand pounds, David told me—to set the deal up. If Mikowicz had been acting for his bosses he could have got it from them, so I don’t think he can have been, because that must be what Gerry was trying to borrow money for, first from Bobo, then from Paul, and last of all (I’ll come to this later) from Michael.

  Have I left anything out? Oh, yes. David said he’d been moaning to everyone about not being able to get to Yugoslavia the way he wanted. He’s bound to have told Biddy Trollope, who was always trying to help people about that sort of thing and getting it wrong, and she could easily have asked Gerry because he was in Yugoslavia during the war.

  By the way, I don’t think Gerry ever spied for anybody. I think he was supposed to be what they call a ‘sleeper’, which is why somebody had got silly Annie Dunwoody to snitch his file from the F Block, but I don’t think they’d have had much luck if they’d ever tried to wake him up. Oh, yes, and I think Gerry really meant it when he told Paul he didn’t want to involve Michael in getting hold of Sammy Whitstable. He might even have talked to Michael about the idea, and Michael had told him to leave it alone because it was far too risky. Michael was doing quite well enough out of his horrid property deals. And—I know this sounds extraordinary after all the things I’ve said about him, but even the foulest people have little good patches—Tommy was his friend. There can’t have been a lot of people who actually liked Michael. Tommy did.

  So Gerry and Mikowicz set things up to blackmail Tommy and David so that they could make a pot of money buying sterling futures on margin, but then Gerry got killed and the plot came to bits and the man with the ring, who was acting for Gerry, tried to make some money for himself by ordinary blackmail but both Tommy and David told him to buzz off so he sold the pictures to newspapers instead.

  I think that’s all about David except, just tidying up, to say that Teddy left Janet for a TV newsreader and Janet married David instead and they had three more children and were rather happy together—in fact they became more and more like Father and Mother apart from David making pots of money until he died—it was a coronary—and then Janet cut loose and went New Age and lived in Devon where she became a witch and joined a coven and had a generally terrific time, channelling and things, until she had a stroke at one of the meetings and went into a coma but the others thought it was all some sort of spiritual transfer and left her alone so it was too late by the time they realised and got her to hospital.

  Well, then, what really happened in the Yellow Room? The first thing is, I don’t believe any of it was planned. I agree with Paul about that. Of course I know Paul’s other theory, the one about us all being in it, is nonsense because I wasn’t. I did hit that ball, for fun, not on purpose. It was beautiful, everything just right, the bat feeling part of me, weightless as my own arms, and the timing spot on, and the ball sailing away. Of course it would have been even better if I’d done it to Ben’s bowling, but you can’t have everything.

  Sorry, I must stick to the point. Nobody planned it, nobody made Gerry get drunk and lock himself in. He did. And it wasn’t an accident. There was nothing wrong with the Yellow Room fire. Mr Chad was terribly conscientious about the gas system, and he always checked everything over. But Gerry didn’t turn the gas on again to kill himself after Michael had turned it off, because Michael had never turned it off. He must have lied at the inquest. That is, if Paul’s right about picking up the chair from in front of the fire and finding the back of it was burnt and the front was still wet. Michael said he took his clothes off the chair, where they’d put them to dry, and then turned the fire out. That’s why the chair was wet, because the clothes had been sopping. But if the clothes had been hanging over it, how did the back get burnt? It couldn’t have. They must have left the chair standing there to dry out after Michael had taken the clothes away, with the fire still burning, long enough for it to char. Gerry would have passed out by then, or he’d have noticed the smell of burning. So he didn’t kill himself. So somebody made the fire go out, after Michael had left the room and Gerry had locked himself in. I’m certain as I possibly can be that it was Michael.

  I don’t know what Nan had said in her letter to Ben, but I guess Ben showed it to Michael, or asked him about it. All Michael would think was that Gerry must have told Nan some of what was going on. That’s why he rushed ahead and married Ben, to have some kind of a hold over Nan. I don’t know whether Michael had had it out at all with Gerry in London. They may not have had a chance, because first Michael was on his honeymoon with Ben and then Nan and Gerry had theirs at Blatchards, mainly because Nan wanted to keep him out of Michael’s way. So that meeting in the Yellow Room may have been the first chance the pair of them had to try and sort things out.

  So Michael showed up with his clothes all sopping and they turned the fire on and put his coat on the chair to dry. Gerry knew that Nan would be listening, so he started to say what they’d agreed, loud enough for her to hear, but after that they mostly kept their voices down. Why? Because Gerry as well as Michael was talking about things they didn’t want her to hear. You remember Gerry locked himself in and deliberately passed out when it was over? I thought it was funny at the time, though Nan seemed to think it was alright, that he didn’t at least let her in to tell her how things had gone, and I’m pretty sure the reason was that he’d got Michael to agree to something he—Gerry—wanted, but it wasn’t what Nan had wanted.

  He wanted to borrow money.

  Alright, I don’t suppose it was as simple as that. Michael probably hadn’t got the money—not enough of it—m—to lend him. What Gerry was probably asking for was to use some of their joint property as security for a loan, or something like that. Yes, that makes sense, because in that case he actually couldn’t ask for a split-up. The point was, a split-up wasn’t going to get him the money for the currency scheme soon enough, and even when it came it wasn’t going to provide enough for him to run Blatchards. He absolutely had to get his scheme through first, and then he’d be in a much stronger position to deal with Michael.

  And, just as he had with Paul, he tried to blackmail Michael into letting him do what he wanted. He said what Nan had told him, about how much he’d found out about the way Michael had been setting him up to be a stooge in case what they’d been doing ever came out. The funny thing is, I think Michael gave in, at least for the moment. It sounds like that. Perhaps he was hoping to find a way out by Monday. Or perhaps he was prepared after all to let Gerry take the risk, a
nd hope he got away with it. I don’t know.

  But then he heard Gerry lock himself in. He waited outside the doors into King William’s Room to see if Gerry let Nan in, and try and hear what they said, I expect, but Gerry didn’t, so he went upstairs to Ben.

  I don’t know when he had his idea. After they’d made love, I should think. He used to lie on his back and think then, and he shut you up if you tried to talk. Then he went quietly down and along to King William’s Room to see if the Yellow Room lights were still on. They were, so he went on down to the cellars and found the equaliser tank and traced the separate pipe that led up to the Yellow Room—Mr Chad had showed him all this, Paul says, remember? It would have its own tap. Turn it off, using his handkerchief because of fingerprints. Wait for the elements to cool so that the fire doesn’t relight, and turn it on again. Then back to bed with Ben. He’d wake her up and make love again, I bet, because he was feeling pleased with himself.

  So why was he so keen at the inquest to make sure it was suicide, not just an accident? What did it matter to him? Because, when the Affair broke and everyone was after his blood, then he said that he hadn’t quite told the truth at the inquest. It was to spare the family, he said. What he and Gerry really talked about, he said, was that Gerry had admitted he’d got their partnership into a mess in various ways, a lot of them crooked, without telling Michael. He’d done it because he was desperate for funds with which to run Blatchards, and could Michael help him out of the jam? And Michael had told him no, it was too serious for that, and they’d have to split up because he wasn’t going to have any part of it. He’d been Gerry’s last hope, he said, and that was why Gerry had killed himself. He announced that he was doing everything he could to make up for Gerry’s crimes, and he made a great public fuss about it, but he didn’t really do much, just enough to get by. Nobody who knew him believed him, but nobody could prove anything either.