The Sinking Admiral

by The Detection Club

  Yes, it was true that his voting record was a bit dodgy, but damn it – apart from that night he was out for the count after a few too many and missed the tight budget vote – he wasn’t usually missed. Didn’t these pursed-lipped puritans understand that a fellow certainly had better things to do on a Friday than crowd around some droning git of a minister, trying to look interested and intermittently shouting ‘Hear, hear’?

  He felt himself nodding off and forced his eyes open. My God, what a bad day it had been when TV cameras were allowed into the chamber to dominate members’ lives! Empty benches made attendance a matter of importance, besides which a chap couldn’t absent-mindedly scratch his balls or nod off without fear of being publicly held up to ridicule.

  It wasn’t as if the public had ever cared if they never saw a parliamentary debate, he reminisced resentfully. Bloody Labour had pushed it for populist reasons, and even the Blessed Maggie hadn’t been able to block it.

  Had the media had an ounce of decency, they’d explain that if benches were empty it was because members were busy elsewhere in committees or slaving for their constituents, but oh, no, that wouldn’t suit the reptiles, who just loved showing acres of unoccupied green leather and implying that MPs were off somewhere else living the high life at taxpayers’ expense.

  Sayers stopped gazing loyally at the back of the environment minister’s head and looked across to a group of middle-aged women in bright jackets on the opposition benches. Blimey, the hysterical way they were clustering and emoting would have seemed OTT in 1940 when Churchill was thundering about fighting the enemy on the beaches. What a gaggle of schoolmarmy prigs! They’d wrecked the Commons with their so-called ‘family-friendly’ reforms: Friday sittings and hardly any late nights had knocked the heart out of the place. The boozy camaraderie of yore seemed to be as distant a memory as those happy days when MPs were looked up to by the man in the Clapham omnibus. It was only a matter of time before the ban-everything-that-makes-life-bearable brigade imposed limits on how many drinks a fellow could be served in one session.

  A cry of ‘shame’ woke Sayers from his reverie. He’d no idea what had aroused the ire of that harpy in purple – Henrietta thingummy – who seemed today to be the leader of the pack, but she was being copied by the rest of her hen party. Bloody crew of little Dame Echoes, he harrumphed to himself. He caught the eye of Jimmy Wade, who was sitting glumly behind a yelling bird in red, and raised an interrogative eyebrow. Good old Jimmy nodded imperceptibly, they both looked at their watches, and, each trying to look as if he had to leave because of an urgent appointment, they headed purposefully to the Strangers’ Bar.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what you might have been doing if you hadn’t become an MP, Jimmy?’ asked Sayers, as they settled comfortably into their second pint.

  ‘Frequently. Why didn’t I stay in the bloody union? I could have been the boss by now, with a vast expense account that no one in the media would have bothered harassing me about. It was my delusions of grandeur that did for me. Genuinely thought I’d be able to do more for the working man from parliament. Thought being an MP meant something. Didn’t realise we were destined to be whipping boys.’

  Sayers sighed heavily. ‘It meant something before we were demonised and turned into enemies of the people. Corrupt? Us? Because some of us stretched the rules a bit on expenses? Have these sods any idea what political corruption is like when it’s at home? Haven’t they read about France and Italy and secret bank accounts and massive bribes?’

  ‘Not to mention sexual shenanigans at private parties.’

  ‘And as for being ticked off for our excesses by journalists!’ Sayers sat bolt upright with indignation. ‘Dear, God, Jimmy. Do you remember the days when those buggers thought nothing of taking one of us to lunch and claiming for a dozen?’

  ‘Yes. Whereas now they just sit over their laptops in Wapping or some such anaemic hellhole, digging up any dirt on us that they can find. Searching through the internet, trying to get fellow politicians to do the dirty on their colleagues.’

  Willie Sayers was instantly alert. ‘Have you had any experience of that?’

  ‘What – of people trying to dig up dirt on me? Of course I have. These days it goes with the territory.’

  ‘No, I meant more… journalists trying to get you to dish the dirt on your friends and colleagues in the House?’

  ‘They may have tried, but they haven’t succeeded.’

  ‘Ah.’ But Willie didn’t feel completely reassured. He swilled the beer around in his glass before asking tentatively, ‘And have any of them ever asked you about me?’

  ‘About you? What, like asking if you have a secret alcohol habit?’ Jimmy roared with laughter. ‘No, I’d tell them you had a bloody public alcohol problem!’

  Willie Sayers laughed along, but then persisted. ‘I didn’t mean about that. I meant journalists probing about my life back in the constituency… or, you know, things that happened a long time ago.’

  His friend looked puzzled. ‘No, no one’s asked me about anything like that. Why, is there some terrible secret you’re hiding from us all?’

  Again Willie laughed off the idea. Again, though, he didn’t feel fully reassured. Jimmy Wade might not divulge any secrets he knew about his friend. But there were plenty of other people in the House who would. If, of course, they knew any secrets about him…

  He got their conversation back on track by swilling down a large mouthful of beer and saying, ‘Bloody journalists!’

  ‘God rot them! But of course now they’ve been forced to pull in their own horns, they’ve shafted us just for the hell of it.’ They shared a morose moment of disgruntlement. ‘It’s the sanctimoniousness that kills me, Willie. All these striplings accusing us of being lazy and unprincipled. Us! You and I, we got to parliament the hard way, not by going to bloody Oxbridge and getting a pass straight into the bloody metropolitan elite. We understand the ordinary bloke.’

  ‘Too right, Jimmy.’

  Wade looked misty-eyed. ‘I did love parliament in the early days. And being a minister was worth getting up for.’

  ‘Having civil servants jumping to your commands…’

  ‘As long as you didn’t ask them to do anything that broke their unwritten bloody code.’

  ‘How long were you one, Jimmy? Mid-noughties, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Appointed in 2005, but then after eighteen months Tony Blair decided I was too old. And you? You lasted about as long, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. I’d given up my pharmacy and put up with years and years of boredom on the back benches to stand at the despatch box and feel important and maybe do a bit of good, and then in 2012 David Cameron gave me the chop for not being a woman.’

  ‘You missed a trick, there, Willie. If you’d said you were transgendering he wouldn’t have dared fire you.’

  In companionable anecdote-swapping and the cursing of political correctness, they passed away the hour until the House rose and the barman announced he was shutting up shop. ‘What do you reckon, Willie? Get out of this morgue and pop across the road to St Stephen’s?’

  ‘You read my mind, Jimmy. You read my mind.’

  At midday on the Sunday, Sayers finished leafing through the newspapers and left his tiny house in Shrimpton. He didn’t need a map to find his way to Crabwell. He’d lived and had his early education there, before he’d moved on to grammar school (back in the days when there were grammar schools).

  He had decided against taking his car. That Ben bloke had said something about lunch, which Sayers hoped would involve plenty of red wine, and even for such a short journey, it would be mad to take the risk of losing his licence. There were some precautions a person in his position just had to take. He’d walk there and get a taxi back. He was feeling rather low, and hoped the four-mile walk to Crabwell might lift his spirits a bit. Betty would have approved.

  As he walked towards the beach, he thought once more how much he missed her and how diminished he was n
ow he was alone. He went back in time to that conversation they’d had that evening all those years ago when he’d said how bored he was making up prescriptions. ‘I want to make a difference, Betty. Not be a pill-pusher all my life. You make a difference every day delivering babies. I don’t.’

  ‘So why not run for the council?’ she’d said. ‘See if you can make local people’s lives better.’ And gradually she’d given him the confidence to join the party and speak up at meetings, and within three years he was Councillor Willie Sayers, who went on to be a much-respected leader of the council and easily won the nomination for parliamentary candidate. ‘You deserve it,’ Betty had said. ‘You get things done and make life better for everyone.’

  How happy they’d been when she came down to join him in London and work at St Thomas’s. There were frustrations at work for both of them, of course, but they both loved most of what they did, and didn’t mind the irony that she was a midwife who couldn’t get pregnant. Most weekends they’d go back to Suffolk, where Willie found satisfaction in solving problems for constituents in trouble. Betty gardened, and together they thoroughly enjoyed opening fetes and geeing up the party faithful at constituency functions. They were a cheery and popular team.

  ‘We’ll be happy anyway,’ she’d said when he was fired from the government. ‘Now I’m retired, we’ll do a lot more travelling.’ They were animatedly discussing options when Betty was diagnosed with galloping pancreatic cancer and died within weeks. Sayers chided himself for having disintegrated as he had done, but two years on, life still seemed grey except when he was having a drink or three with good mates. Who didn’t include that swine Fitz, he thought, as he remembered why he was striding his way along the beach on a Sunday morning en route to be interviewed on camera in that depressing pub.

  He shivered, more because of the biting wind than because of his memories of Fitz. Should they have fallen out all those years ago? After all, at grammar school they’d been inseparable. As usual, he tried to forget how inseparable. Damn it, in those days, with no girls available, lots of chaps indulged in adolescent fumbles. Didn’t mean they were wooftahs. He’d often smiled to himself about famous politicians who’d been boarders at public school, and wondered if, as they sat around the Cabinet table, they ever remembered what they’d once done behind the bike sheds.

  It had been that silly Jilly who’d messed things up with Fitz that London summer after they left school. What did they see in her? Sayers managed a wintry smile. Well, yes. Jilly’s attractions were very obvious indeed. Those boobs were spectacular, and those legs were made for the era of the mini skirt. To sex-starved teenagers who had just realised the joys of heterosexuality, Jilly was irresistible. And did she know it! What a manipulative little bitch she had been, though she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

  He leaned into a gust of biting wind that made him hunch into his coat and tuck his scarf in more tightly. He thought uncomfortably about that drunken fight. Which of them was more responsible? Probably him. Jilly hadn’t been his girlfriend, so he shouldn’t have accused Fitz of stealing her from him, not least because she was obviously public property. What was inexcusable, though, was what Fitz did after her murder when he suggested to the cops that his best friend might have pushed her into the canal because of jealousy. ‘Get your retaliation in first’ was a great Fitz saying. Well, the sod had certainly done that. And he’d never apologised for it either. Always claimed the cops had got the wrong end of the stick.

  Sayers was still lost in disturbing memories of the agonies and ecstasies of the sixties when he realised that the Admiral Byng was now in view.

  Ben had suggested that owing to the unusually large number of customers – for the combination of TV cameras, unexplained death, and Sunday lunch was packing the place out – the interview would be better conducted in what Amy said Fitz had called the ‘Mess’ – a small shabby snug with a table and wooden benches that could fit six people at the maximum. Sitting in its best-lit corner and waiting for the camera to roll, Sayers made sure that though his posture was relaxed, he didn’t succumb to the temptation to slump. He had combed his hair in the gents, and had noted with pleasure that the walk in the piercing cold had given him a healthy glow. As Betty had so often pointed out, he looked good for his age. Rather to his surprise, his newfound dependence on alcohol didn’t yet show in his face, unlike that of Fitz, who had looked like the old soak he was.

  Willie was dressed in appropriate style for a pillar of the community in the local pub on a Sunday: check open-necked shirt, chinos, brogues, and one of the sweaters Betty said complemented his once striking blue eyes. Having lowered his first pint of local bitter gratefully, and with his second sitting in front of him, Sayers saw the signal from Ben and went on auto-pilot. Phrases flowed from him about the historic role of the public house in English society, its civilising force, its importance for community cohesion, the damage done to the quality of rural life by punitive drink-driving laws combined with poor local transport (all of which he blamed on the last Labour government), not to speak of supermarkets cynically encouraging young people to get tanked up with loss-leading alcopops. Since the young didn’t vote, and no one loved the supermarkets they favoured over the local shops they pretended to care about, this was safe enough.

  For good measure he threw in a few kicks at the nanny state, over-zealous Health and Safety officers, and pointless EU rules and regulations, and ended with an eloquent lament that because of these myriad disasters, the young would never know the happy pub culture of darts and dominoes that in the past had introduced them to sensible drinking and wonderful locally-brewed beers, and had along the way cemented families and communities.

  Sensing – like the old pro he was – that it was time to say something specific rather than general, he segued smoothly into a regretful complaint that a wonderful pub like the Admiral Byng should have fallen on hard times, on the awful tragedy of Fitz’s death, and on a friendship unbroken since boyhood. At grammar school they’d shared a love of cricket. ‘I’m afraid Fitz was an awful lot better than me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I was a bit of a duffer.’ Later on, they’d spent many a happy Saturday afternoon at matches, after which they’d shared many an equally happy pint. ‘Were you a frequent visitor here?’ asked Ben, and Sayers burbled about the first duty of an MP being to his constituents, and how, alas, although of course he’d been thrilled when he’d heard that Fitz had taken over the Admiral Byng, between his surgeries and his other duties he had only rarely had the chance to see his old friend.

  Fed up with the interview and nervous lest Ben press him more about recent history with Fitz, Sayers reached for his pint, said ‘Here’s to Fitz. He’ll be sorely missed,’ took a modest sip, smacked his lips appreciatively, and returned to extolling local breweries. Seeing Ben about to ask another question, he smiled, got to his feet and offered to buy him a drink. ‘OK,’ said Ben, taking the hint and getting Stan to switch off the camera. ‘But I insist it’s on me. As, of course, is lunch.’

  After some negotiations with Amy at the bar, Ben returned carrying a bottle of the Malbec and some cutlery, and reported that though the staff were still under pressure, it was easing, and Meriel Dane had promised that roast beef would appear within twenty minutes.

  ‘Meriel Dane! Do you know I’d forgotten she was still here!’

  ‘A friend of yours?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Great girl.’ Sayers had another mouthful of wine and sniggered. ‘Bit of a goer I understand, but why not?’ Then, realising he had said too much to a member of the untrustworthy classes, he abruptly shut up. Ben’s best efforts could get nothing more out of him except pious recollections of his old friend Fitz.

  It would take another shared bottle of the Malbec, a comforting encounter with Meriel’s beef, the emptying of the pub, a whisky chaser, and Amy’s post-lunch presence at their table to make Sayers let down his reserve. Amy had found the key by mentioning how much she had liked Betty that time they’d met at the c
harity event for the Guides. This precipitated Sayers’s brief collapse into tears, which Amy had dealt with by unthreatening shoulder-patting. ‘Was Betty fond of the Admiral?’ she asked, when he had recovered his somewhat drunken composure.

  ‘Fond? Fond? Of Fitz? No, she bloody was not. She thought he was a treacherous bastard who shafted anyone who had done better than him.’

  Ben opened his mouth and shut it again when Amy kicked him under the table. She took Sayers’s hand. ‘Did he try to damage you?’

  ‘Did he just! And not only me! Anything he ever said about anyone we knew was poison. He was like one of Agatha Christie’s poisoned-pen people, except he didn’t do it on paper. There was that business with Gregory Jepson. Greedy bastard, but I’ve no reason to suppose his fingers were in the till. And I really didn’t believe that lady vicar was dealing in crystal meth!’

  ‘It was kind of you to stay friends with him, Willie. Ben, bring a bottle of scotch from the bar, will you?’

  By the time Ben came back, Willie had told Amy about Jilly, and about his suspicions that Fitz had spread that slander about him.

  ‘So why didn’t you cut him off, stop seeing him?’ the bar manager asked.

  ‘Because I’m a politician. You don’t alienate dangerous people more than you have to.’

  ‘You were with him the day he died, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was indeed. He summoned me. And for the usual reason, I came.’

  ‘And you went up to the Bridge with him… what, about nine fifteen that evening?’

  Willie Sayers looked a little surprised that Amy knew the timing of his meeting with such accuracy, but he didn’t comment. He had a quick nip of his whisky. ‘Strange meeting we had. Not really the Fitz I’d come to hate. Full of apologies and regrets for having been scurrilous about me in the past. He was a reborn Fitz, he explained. Turning over a new leaf and all that sort of thing.’

  He reached again for his glass. ‘I found it hard to take in, to tell you the truth. Wondered if he was up to something even more underhand than usual.’