Corridors of Death

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘But how could he possibly get all this down on paper?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t connected prose. Scribbled notes really. It was dreadful to read. The handwriting was shaky and he ended up scrawling “I’m sorry”.’

  ‘Why did he stay on for Question Time?’

  ‘Too ill to leave, I expect. Anyway the note implied that he was making a public statement of remorse by dying before an audience.’

  ‘The poor devil,’ said Ann. ‘He must have been in more than one kind of agony.’

  ‘I haven’t got too much sympathy, Ann,’ said Milton. ‘Harvey Nixon was in agony too, and if Robert hadn’t had that brainwave he’d probably have ended up serving a life sentence. Parkinson can’t have been thinking straight to write a suicide note that could so easily be missed.’

  ‘Well, of course he wasn’t thinking straight,’ said Amiss. ‘It’s my guess he was intending to hand the note to the attendant to give to Nixon, but the convulsions hit him before he expected them. At least you’ve got to admit that he atoned pretty comprehensively. He must have had a very tender conscience to put himself through that.’

  ‘Oh, I know you’re right, Robert. It’s just that I feel ill every time I think how close we came to missing it. Nixon and I both owe you an enormous debt.’

  ‘Nixon’s been very nice about it. Full of relief and gratitude. Sanders seemed very chuffed too, and not just about Nixon’s innocence, either. Parkinson’s suicide means the papers won’t get hold of the story of Sir Nicholas’s little japes, which is a load off Sanders’s mind. He’s also relieved at the discovery that his Private Secretary hasn’t gone mad.’

  ‘So were we all,’ laughed Milton. ‘When you dropped Nixon’s coat and scrammed like that there were raised eyebrows all round. I was the only one who nurtured the hope that you’d suddenly had an inspiration.’

  ‘What happened when he arrived back with the note?’ asked Ann.

  ‘He came running up shouting “I’ve found it, I’ve found it”. Had some difficulty in getting us to stop and listen. The A.C. was set on getting Nixon off to the Yard as quickly as possible. Two minutes later and he’d have had to throw himself under the front wheels of the car.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to Nixon now?’

  ‘I think he’ll probably have to hang on in his job for a while,’ said Amiss. ‘Otherwise it’ll look as if the P.M. thinks there was something shady about the whole business. Still, I don’t suppose he’ll mind that too much. He’s in a state of euphoria at the moment.’

  ‘But isn’t that newspaper going to blow the story of his visits to the call-girl?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ said Milton. ‘She rang Gifford at the Yard this afternoon and said they’re killing it. Apparently the proprietor is a friend of hers.’ He’d been saving that, and he wasn’t disappointed in the reaction. They drank the lady’s health.

  ‘Well, it seems to be a happy ending all round—except for the Parkinsons. We’re even going to be able to go to Paris on Saturday,’ Ann beamed.

  ‘Lucky old you,’ said Amiss dispiritedly. ‘I’ve got the twin delights facing me of Sir Nicholas’s funeral tomorrow and Gladys’s on Saturday. It’s not fair that you’re escaping all that.’

  ‘I’m going to need that break,’ said Milton. ‘This has been the most intellectually exhausting case I’ve ever had. I’d have given up hope days ago if it hadn’t been for you.’

  ‘Come now, Jim. I spent a lot of the time muddying the waters with information that proved to be totally irrelevant.’

  ‘Well, yes, but even all the irrelevant information helped me personally. When the A.C. got over his embarrassment with Nixon he congratulated me warmly on having handled the case so well. He made much of the brilliant way I’d conducted the interviews, and, as a bonus, the way my telephone call to Parkinson’s secretary had flushed him out. It was all very embarrassing really, taking the credit for your cleverness.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t think many of your colleagues would have thought of recruiting me. I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help if it hadn’t been for that—and more specifically if you hadn’t agreed to that exchange-of-information clause. I knew it was a big risk for you—there’s enough in common between our working environments, so I couldn’t fail to know it. That’s when I started to like you. I still don’t know how far you were throwing yourself on my mercy and how much of it was insidious manipulation, but it worked. If you hadn’t told me day by day the way the investigation was going, I’d never have given a second thought to the missing appointments diary when Phil started complaining about it.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Phil. That reminds me, did you know I met him at lunchtime today? Of course not, he won’t have told you—I didn’t leave my name.’

  ‘He told me all right, Jim,’ said Amiss, chuckling. ‘He sussed out who you were. Said some senior pig had been looking for me.’

  ‘How the hell did he know?’ said Milton in a hurt tone. ‘I take great pains to avoid looking like a policeman.’

  ‘Sorry, Jim. All I can tell you is that he claimed you smelled like one.’

  When Ann had finished laughing at her discomfited husband she turned to Amiss, serious again. ‘But have you solved the real mystery of the whole affair—what Sir Nicholas was up to?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t worked out why he did what he did, but I’m morally certain that it was an elaborate way of committing suicide. Let’s go through the story now. You’re a psychologist of sorts. I knew him well enough. Jim’s a copper, as any fool can smell, and he’s met all the principals. There are all sorts of contradictions when you look at the people he hated and the ways he decided to get at them.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘Shall we take it chronologically?’ said Amiss. ‘I mean as far back as we can go. We know from Lady Clark that Sir Nicholas began to change character in his first few years in the civil service—mainly, it seems, as a result of various personal disappointments he suffered around then—having to give up politics, the various miscarriages and her illnesses. The first question is, was he fundamentally a nasty piece of work whose true nature asserted itself when times became hard? Or were the problems so distressing to him that they affected his mental balance?’

  ‘I don’t think we know enough about him to say,’ said Ann. ‘A fundamentally decent person could react the way he did initially, just withdrawing into himself and putting all his energy into his work. It’s what came later that suggests an evil streak.’

  ‘Well, presumably his failure to get on well with his only child helped to increase his feeling of isolation.’

  ‘We’re talking about a highly intelligent, rational man here,’ said Milton. ‘He brought most of his isolation on himself. It wasn’t the fault of Lady Clark or his colleagues that he became so distant in personal relationships.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ann. ‘But he may have found himself caught in a vicious circle. People can deliberately cut themselves off from others and yet feel hurt that no one makes overtures of friendship or love. They’re driven further into themselves and can even develop a sort of persecution mania—a conviction that others are lined up against them.’

  ‘It was a funny kind of persecution mania that led him to persecute others,’ said Milton.

  ‘On the contrary. Hurt often makes people turn against those they think are responsible for making them unhappy. The deeper the hurt gets, the harder it is even to contemplate the fact that it might be self-inflicted.’

  ‘But he doesn’t seem to have been trying to hurt his wife or son,’ said Amiss. ‘What Lady Clark has described was in Nigel’s case just misguided attention, and in her own simply impatience and a touch of contempt. Applying high standards. Lots of fathers and husbands behave like that. No, what bothers me is why he became so obviously vicious eight years ago when he began his persecution of Parkinson.
I can’t see any reason why he should have hated him. After all, they had been friends for a long time.’

  ‘No,’ said Ann, ‘I can’t think of any reason for that either. Unless it was jealousy. Maybe he began to hate Parkinson for being so handsome and successful—even happy. Lost all capacity to enjoy his old friend’s personal progress, got guilty about it, and set about destroying the source of his guilt. Jim?’

  ‘Makes a rough kind of sense. But why continue the persecution for so long—I mean, once he’d scotched Parkinson’s career, why go for total destruction? Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he hated anyone else in the way he hated Parkinson—until recently, that is. Sanders talked about him having gradually become more and more difficult to work with, but there’s been no suggestion that he was anything other than indiscriminately malicious.’

  ‘Until he started on Nixon a couple of years ago,’ Ann broke in. ‘From what we’ve heard about that his hatred was pretty carefully directed.’

  ‘But Nixon is a thoroughly nice bloke. What could he possibly have done to merit such a degree of malice?’

  ‘I think I understand that, Jim,’ said Amiss. ‘Nixon’s incompetence seemed to annoy Sir Nicholas personally. I think he was trying to show him up as someone who didn’t deserve to be in the job.’

  ‘I’ll buy that. He could have convinced himself that he was acting quite properly in making Nixon’s life difficult. And his reasons for disliking Wells are pretty obvious too. Remember your reaction to him, darling.’

  ‘I can’t blame him for that,’ said Amiss. ‘His view of Wells was shared by most of us, and until last week he didn’t behave towards him outrageously. He just made life a bit more difficult for him. We all dreamed of scuppering Wells—Sir Nicholas had the opportunity, once he’d forsaken all sense of official duty.’

  ‘Right,’ said Milton. ‘So the crucial changes in him seem to go back twenty-nine, eight and two years. First a distancing of himself from everyone, then the beginning of a long-drawn-out campaign to destroy Parkinson and finally a consistent attempt to make Nixon’s life a misery. Disappointment, jealousy-cum-guilt, and contempt, respectively.’

  ‘Right,’ said Amiss. ‘It was as a part of that that he started to follow Nixon to try and get some dirt on him. Notifying the journalist about his visits to the call-girl was a logical step. But what about the hiring of the private detective to get the goods on his family? What prompted that?’

  ‘He must have been completely twisted by then. Some psychologists might say that, having noticed they were unusually happy, and happiness having become the enemy, he decided to have it investigated.’

  ‘So the discovery that they both owed their new happiness to other people turned him suicidal?’ Amiss had been working for this wretch for eighteen months. He pushed his plate aside in disgust.

  ‘But why didn’t he take it out on them?’ Milton was no more comfortable with Ann’s theory. ‘After all, he could have made terrific scenes about betrayal and deception by both of them. Wouldn’t that have been the normal thing to do?’

  ‘We’re not talking about normality, Jim,’ said Amiss. ‘We’re talking about Sir Nicholas. The only conclusion I can come to is that he lost all interest in living when he found out that his family didn’t need him any more, and he decided to stir the shit in all possible directions and provoke someone into killing him.’

  ‘But how could he be sure someone would kill him?’

  ‘He couldn’t.’ An idea flashed into Amiss’s mind. ‘But what if he had a contingency plan to commit suicide if nobody obliged him? Must have. Otherwise, why would he have sent the note to the Yard about his wife and Martin Jenkins? I expect he was going to make the suicide look like murder in order to get one of those poor devils locked up for it.’

  ‘You’re reading too much into that, Robert. If there had been no murder we would simply have ignored such a note. It would have been filed away with all the other cranky tip-offs we get every day. It seems to me he was fighting off boredom with Russian Roulette.’

  ‘No, Jim. I think Robert’s right. He would have had nothing to live for except disgrace and loneliness. He must have been preparing himself for death. It’s a strange way to go about it, though. Most people try to make peace at the end, not war. I presume he didn’t believe in an after-life.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what he believed in,’ sighed Amiss. ‘We didn’t go in for conversations like that. He obviously must have had a pretty bleak view of the universe.’

  ‘I can understand—although with some difficulty—what made him act so maliciously during his last few days,’ said Ann. ‘What makes my blood run cold is the thought that his spitefulness would extend to wanting to drive any of his victims—including his son—to murder. Maybe we should take the charitable view and conclude that he had simply gone insane. The alternative is too appalling to contemplate.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Milton, ‘but from what I’ve learned about Sir Nicholas, my feeling is that he knew what he was doing and would have been delighted at the outcome. I think you’re both being sentimental in talking about lovelessness and all that sort of thing. He was a vicious bastard who had lost interest in living and wanted to make other people pay for it. We could speculate forever. Let’s order another round and drink to Robert’s success in ensuring at least that we didn’t add to Sir Nicholas’s posthumous fun by pinning his murder on the wrong man. Let’s also make a resolution to forget about Sir Nicholas and devote our next evening together—which I hope won’t be too far distant—to more uplifting subjects. And better food.’

  Friday Morning

  Chapter Forty-one

  ‘’Ere you are,’ said Phil, dropping a file in front of Amiss. ‘You wanted to see this today.’

  Amiss looked at the title on the front. ‘“Retrospection”? What the hell is this? I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Must of done. There’s a note in the diary sayin’ you’re s’posed to have it today.’

  Amiss shrugged. Maybe he had forgotten about it. Noting in the diary that something should be looked at on some specified date in the future often meant that it had been too boring to contemplate when first seen and could better be faced at another time. ‘Retrospection.’ Probably some tedious analysis of the genesis of some policy or other. At least there wasn’t much in it. He’d have more than enough time to read it before setting off with Sanders to say a public goodbye to his lunatic old boss.

  The envelope pinned to the inside of the file was addressed to him, and when Amiss saw the handwriting he went cold. He tore a page inside as he opened it. The signature to the letter held no surprises; the date did. Sir Nicholas had written to him the previous Monday. Below the date he had written ‘6.00 a.m.’

  ‘My dear Robert,’ it began. Amiss rubbed his eyes at this unaccustomed friendliness.

  If my plans work out correctly, you will receive this four days after my death. You will, I imagine, be surprised that I have chosen to write to you. My reason will ­probably surprise you even more. There is no one else about whom I now care enough to offer an explanation of my actions in recent weeks. Nor is there anyone else for whom such an explanation may be useful. I hope that what I am going to tell you may help you, in the future, to maintain that sense of perspective which I have at times sought, but never found.

  You will almost certainly be surprised to learn that I have an affection for you. I realize that my conduct to you during the time you have worked for me has given no hint of this. That is because I have long been incapable of showing any emotions other than contempt or dislike. There has been within me for years a devil which has made me unable to see any of those around me as anything other than unworthy of positive feelings. You have been an exception. You have seemed to lack the venality, stupidity, unjustified arrogance or unwarranted ambition which I see all around me. I have liked in
you what people once liked in me—intelligence, honesty, humanity and a sense of the ridiculous. You will counter by saying that there are many people we know who share those qualities. I can say only that if that is true, my perceptions of others have become too warped to enable me to perceive their virtues. It may well be that I am seeing industriousness as careerism, warmth as obsequiousness, silence as cowardice. I don’t know and it is too late now to find out.

  I intend to kill myself today, either by provoking my own murder or by taking cyanide, a small supply of which I have concealed at the back of the drawer in which I intend to place this file. If it is murder, the police will have found a sufficiency of suspects. If it is suicide, I intend that they will be equally well provided for, as I intend to call in to see me this evening—and one by one—as many as possible of those at whom my venom is presently directed, leaving each of them alone for a moment or two in the room with an open sherry decanter, from which I will later drink with fatal consequence. It will be quite in character, given the conversations I intend to engineer, for me not to offer them a drink.

  Amiss got up and went over to the filing cabinet. A moment later, with a small bottle in his hand, he continued reading his letter.

  My intention is to ensure that a small number of people have a bad few days, and that the circumstances which have led them to become suspects be brought into the open. I don’t know what you will have heard of the investigation by the time you read this letter. You will certainly be aware of what I have done to bring about the downfall of Nixon and Wells. Unless I am very lucky in the circumstances of my demise you may not know that I have also sought to embarrass my wife, her lover, my son, Richard Parkinson and Archibald Stafford.

  You will be wondering first, why I should have decided to bring about my own death, and second, why I should do so with such apparent malevolence. The answer to the first question is that I can see no point whatsoever in going on with a life so arid as mine. As for the second, I consider these people to deserve whatever I can do to them.