“The Belgrave Square mafia?”
“That’s right—that’s the impression the interview reports gave me: a really tight-knit community. There was a desire to hush up warring with a desire to gossip. If the police had had better links with homosexual circles they might have got to Forbes quicker, but for obvious reasons they didn’t. And in fact it doesn’t seem that Forbes was Wycliffe’s principal boyfriend at the time of the murder.”
“No?”
“Not according to the Belgrave Square residents. There was a great wad of interview reports in the records, and Forbes’s name was never mentioned once.”
“Whose names were?”
“Well, there were two men who had been at the flat—staying there—for longish periods over the summer and autumn of that year. One was called Gerald Fraser-Hymes, and the other Lawrence Cornwallis. I have addresses for them at the time of the investigation, though I don’t imagine there’ll be a great deal of joy there. They were both in flat or bed-sitter territory, with a transient population.”
“The name of Lawrence Cornwallis seems to ring a vague bell,” I said, trying to make concrete vague memories of reports read rather than people met. Nothing definite came. “I suppose these two were, to put it frankly, the sort of young men whom people in Belgravia might know. Their mob.”
“That’s my impression. Or, more distantly, that someone had known someone who’d known the mother—that sort of thing, and then the names and details had gone the rounds of the Square.”
I remembered the unblushing snobbery of Lady Charlotte Wray and smiled.
“That figures. Name, school, family tree—‘I knew his poor grandmother’—that sort of thing. That’s how the Square was at that time.”
“No doubt there was a lot of that. Anyway, having those two names kept the police busy for a day or two, before they realized they had to look further.”
“The two had alibis?”
“No—at least, not very convincing ones. The fact was, it wasn’t either of their fingerprints all over the flat.”
“But surely they could have worn gloves, and the Forbes prints remain from an earlier visit?”
He gave me the sort of pitying look that I probably give to people who show their ignorance of procedure in the House.
“You’re talking like an amateur, Mr. Proctor . . . Peter. There are fingerprints and fingerprints. You don’t hold a glass in the same way as you hold a crowbar. The police were pretty sure that the Forbes prints—as they turned out to be—were made in the course of the fight. Some were even bloody.”
“I see. Yes, I can imagine you’d make a different sort of print, in different places than usual, in the course of a fight. At what stage, by the way, did the police realize that Tim was a practising homosexual?”
“The moment they began talking to people in the Square.”
“Of course. Silly question.”
“They may even have had their eye on him earlier—I got a hint or two of that from the records. Remember when this was. In the early fifties there’d been a number of what you might call ‘show trials’: an actor, a peer, and so on.”
“I remember. To encourage the others. The son of a government minister might have been a suitable follow-up. That was something I was always trying to impress on Tim at the time. He was convinced the police used their own men in plain clothes as bait.”
“They did. I’m not defending or apologising, just stating: they did.”
“You weren’t yourself involved?” I asked mischievously.
“Not attractive enough by half!” Sutcliffe grinned as he got a mental picture of his youthful self. “And by the way it was the sort of job you could refuse, and I would have. Quite a lot rather enjoyed it.”
“Which says something about them.”
“Right. Well that’s enough breast-beating. Let’s get back to Andrew Forbes. The police didn’t get hold of the name from the Belgrave Square mob, though later several confirmed that they’d seen a chap like that visiting the flat from time to time. As you say, Forbes wasn’t the sort whose mummy they knew back in the twenties. His name came from Fraser-Hymes, one of the two friends. No doubt both men were feeling pretty hard-pressed, and with reason, and Fraser-Hymes named names. In fact there was a whole list of people whom the police contacted and took prints and statements from.”
“Which led eventually to Andrew Forbes?”
“Or rather to his flat. By then the bird had flown: he’d taken the night ferry to Dieppe on the second of November, the night after the murder. His landlady let our chaps into his flat, and there they found prints everywhere which matched the ones from Craven Court Mews.”
“Had Forbes given up his flat?”
“No, he hadn’t. He’d just said to his landlady that he’d be away for a few nights. He’d taken a case full of clothes, toilet things, and that’s about all.”
“Did the police get to know much about him? All that I know is that he was an unemployed electrician.”
“Even that’s misleading—technically true, but misleading. Makes him sound like a down-and-out or a male prostitute who couldn’t give his real job. It wasn’t like that at all. Forbes had had a good job with the BBC for two and a half years. Commercial television had started up the previous year, and he had a job lined up with them, at better pay. When the BBC heard this they sacked him. They were very snooty about ITV in those days. So Forbes had money in the bank, a small but nice flat, good prospects.”
“Not quite the picture I had of him.”
“No. Background: respectable working class in Nottingham. I’ve got the address of his parents—here, I’ll leave it with you, though I doubt it will be of much use. Curriculum vitae: good reports from his Secondary Modern school, though he certainly wasn’t the academic type; apprenticeship at fifteen, job at the end of it, then moved to London and the job at the BBC in 1954.”
“Did the landlady know him at all?”
“Oh yes—she lived on the ground floor, and Forbes had the flat at the top. Chatted to him a lot, gave him cups of tea. Liked him very much, said he was quiet, kept the flat clean, never any trouble beyond once or twice returning home drunk.”
“Boyfriends?”
“No. In fact she was convinced he had a girlfriend. But you’ve got to remember, Peter, when we are talking about. As far as the landlady was concerned they would be friends, not boyfriends. ‘Coming out’ at that date could have meant being put inside. The landlady said he had a few friends, chaps of his own kind from work, and some of them she recognised, but no one specially close, she said. He kept in touch with his family, rang them once a week, went home for holidays and the odd weekend. Liked pop music and football, supported Arsenal, went to the occasional dance. And that was about it: the typical young man of the fifties.”
“That’s the picture of an unlikely murderer. Did that strike the police too?”
A slightly cynical smile wafted across Sutcliffe’s lips.
“Are you sure you’re not on to one of these ‘miscarriage of justice’ kicks, sir?”
“Not at all—I’m just interested in the pressures that made this particular young man into a murderer.”
“As far as that goes you could say that to the police there is no such thing as an unlikely murderer: depends on the person, depends on the pressures. I think the police at that time took it as some kind of lovers’ tiff.”
“Some tiff.”
“Quarrel. Again, remember the times: there was a tendency among the investigating policemen to regard homosexuals as by definition excitable and unstable.”
I followed this up.
“Then again, a lover’s tiff. I can’t see that it was established that they were particularly close.”
Sutcliffe nodded.
“Certainly the impression I got was that the other two men were much closer to him: both of them had spent periods of ten days or more in the flat in the months before the murder. So far as I can tell from the notes, Andy Forbes se
ems to have been more in the nature of an occasional lay—ugly word, sorry.”
“What about his family?”
“Denied indignantly that he was a homosexual. What you’d expect, really. Probably that was the reason he came to London. They certainly weren’t able to point to any regular girlfriend while he lived in Nottingham, or anyone he’d brought home since. Remember that the working-class reaction to homosexuality is a gut one: they are less liberal than the middle class even, and certainly less so than the upper classes.”
I thought hard for a while.
“Right, well I think I’ve got a much better picture of the murder. What about afterwards? Did the police get any further leads on Andrew Forbes?”
“Leads? I don’t know if you’d call them that. Rumours, really. The sort of thing you get in all missing-and-wanted cases. Is there anywhere in the world, I wonder, where Lord Lucan hasn’t been spotted? The best authenticated were that he was working as a barman in Las Palmas in the spring of 1957, and as an electrician in Barcelona in 1958. Remember this was at the height of the Franco era.”
“I know: no extradition.”
“That’s right. And a police force better at intimidation than investigation. There was a request to the Barcelona police to investigate the last report, but by the time they got around to it he had got hold of a false passport and flown.”
“Where to?”
“America, they thought.”
“The States? Canada? Dear old South America, haven for all the world’s undesirables, and fit punishment for them too, from all I’ve heard?”
“The word from the Barcelona police was that it was the States. I don’t know how much trust I’d put in that.”
“And there the trail ends, I suppose.”
“Pretty much so. I gather from the case notes, though, that there was a reporter interested at the time.”
That made me sit up.
“Really? That does surprise me. The lady who does research for the memoirs hasn’t turned up anything of substance from the newspapers yet.”
“I don’t suppose she will. Terry Pardick was a crime reporter for the Daily Mail. What they’d have done if it had been a child of one of the Labour Party notables, say Hugh Gaitskell or Jim Callaghan, I don’t know, but as it was the son of a Tory cabinet minister they weren’t interested unless it was absolutely hard.”
“So presumably he never got that far?”
“Presumably not. I knew him some years later. He was a nasty little muckraker, was Terry Pardick—a terrier with a nose for rotting meat.”
“I don’t recall having heard the name. He was no Chapman Pincher, obviously.”
“Definitely not, if only because he couldn’t distinguish the truth from rumour.”
“A Private Eye man before his time.”
“Something of the sort. He may well have got no further than the fact that Timothy Wycliffe was a homosexual. Certainly the Mail didn’t print that, or anything else. Whether he got anything into any other rag I don’t know—even then there were rags that would print any dirt provided it was dirt. All the police knew was that he was following them around, getting on to the ring of his boyfriends and so on.”
“I’ll tell Elspeth Honeybourne to look at the seamy end of Fleet Street, but I rather imagine she’s doing that anyway. This Pardick is dead, is he?”
Sutcliffe pulled at his ear, and looked very like a beagle who has been distracted from an interesting scent.
“I’m assuming so. I haven’t heard his name for years.”
“I made that assumption about Tim’s father, but I was wrong. Look, John, I’m very grateful. All this has really put me in the picture. I don’t like to ask this, but are you willing to do a little more?”
Sutcliffe smiled.
“I thought you’d never ask. Yes, I am. A little light work—isn’t that what the experts always recommend for us superannuated professionals?”
I thought hard.
“Now, I’m off to Derbyshire next Monday. I could well take in Nottingham on the way back. Not that I expect any joy there. Even if I traced any member of his family, it’s not likely that they’d know anything.”
“I’m not so sure, sir . . . Peter. He could have contacted them again. He could do that easily enough without our knowing. In fact, he could have been in contact with them the whole time.”
“It’s a thought.”
“You’ve got their old address there. It’s a start.”
His optimism perked me up. Of course if they were a close family Andy Forbes would have tried to keep in touch. Not that what he told them was necessarily reliable.
“Then there are the two friends. I could put Elspeth on to them. . . . Why does that name Lawrence Cornwallis ring a bell?”
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Proctor, because it doesn’t.”
“It has a ring of the Great and Good—the sort of person who sits on a Royal Commission, is a governor of the BBC or The Observer, gets interviewed on radio about homelessness or pornography. . . . Not in politics, of course, or I’d know him. . . . Could it be in the literary world. Or the church?”
“Shouldn’t be difficult to trace, if that’s the case.”
“True. Now, I was wondering if you could get on to Terry Pardick. You must have contacts in Fleet Street.”
“Oh yes, I have a few still. I suppose the main thing is to find out if he’s still alive?”
“And if he’s not, if anyone was working with him on the Wycliffe case at the time. He may have had some sort of junior or cub reporter with him. . . . That’s all that springs to mind at the moment. Can you think of anything else?”
Sutcliffe flicked through his notebook and then stood up.
“I think I’ve told you everything of any importance. Oh, but there was one detail, though, in all the stuff about the Belgrave Square residents, and the account they gave of Mr. Wycliffe and his friends.”
“Yes?”
“When they interviewed a Lady Charlotte Wray, one of the names she mentioned was yours.”
9
STRATEGIES
I heard you and that policeman when I came in,” said Jeremy over dinner, with a mildly derisive smile on his face. “You sounded like a couple of schoolboys.”
“Nonsense—we were planning strategies. But he did tell me something rather ironic: in the original investigation of Tim’s death my name came up.”
“Really? Reminder of your gay youth?”
“Not at all,” I said with dignity. “Merely a nasty-minded and stupid old lady enjoying her moment in the limelight by naming any and every young man she could think of. Still, it was pretty funny after all this time, and made me feel I’d come full circle by going into Tim’s death as I am.”
“So how come Special Branch at the time didn’t come round demanding to see your sexual credentials?”
“I should think I was pretty far down on the list, and long before they would have got to me they found their man.”
“I thought they never did find their man?”
“They never got him. He’d done a flit to Spain.”
“You think they got it right?”
“I suppose so. But from everything we’ve dug up so far he seems to have been such an ordinary working-class chap . . . I imagine they were very relieved that he was, so to speak, such a long way from Belgravia. Sighs of relief all round. In the fifties Belgravia spelt influence as well as money.”
“Didn’t it always?”
“You’d have thought so, but I don’t think it always did. I’m reading Philip at the moment—”
“So I noticed. Why Philip of all novels?”
Jeremy did a degree in English literature, but he’s in the City at the moment. He reads painfully little.
“Some hope of finding an undiscovered masterpiece, I suppose,” I said. “The childish hope that the ugly duckling will turn out to be a swan.”
“And is it?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve never known anyon
e tell an all right story in a more infuriatingly desultory way. I think Thackeray started going senile the moment he’d finished Vanity Fair. Anyway, at one point somebody is advised to stop living above their means and take a house in ‘a quiet little street in Belgravia somewhere—nobody will think a penny the worse of you.’ That rather puts Belgravia in its place.”
“Was it Belgravia put the police on to this chap?”
“No, though doubtless it would have if it had ‘known’ him. Unfortunately their view was restricted to their own little circle. But I bet they were quietly cock-a-hoop when the police decided it was him.”
Jeremy nodded. I think he’s beginning to get interested.
“What next then, Dad?”
“I don’t know. . . . Andrew Forbes seems to have landed up in the States. I think I’ll give Reggie a ring.”
“He’ll start pressing you to go out on a visit, and then you’ll start getting all broody about seeing your grandson.”
“I am broody about seeing my grandson.” My only grandson was born in America, and has not been brought over for my inspection. I do very much look forward to seeing him. “I’d like to make sure he isn’t being choked by the smog of Los Angeles, or turning into a gum-chewing, wise-cracking little smart alec.”
“How old is he now? Eighteen months?”
“They grow up early there.”
Jeremy had a point, of course. I suppose I was feeling a bit dynastic, and wishing that the son and heir of my son and heir could grow up in this country. All rather silly. One thing I am quite sure of is that Downing Street is not going to offer me a hereditary peerage!
“You’re very prejudiced,” Jeremy said. “I’ve known lots of charming Americans.”
“So have I,” I agreed. “It’s just that the charming ones are rarely the ones in politics, and it’s people in politics I’ve mostly met.”
“I don’t think politicians in this country are long on charm either,” said Jeremy meanly.
Perhaps that is one reason why I remain fascinated by Timothy’s fate: he had a charm which I have seldom encountered in my daily life since. And that charm was so at odds with the manner of his death. Jeremy, in spite of his burgeoning interest, doesn’t really understand why I should be so preoccupied with a straightforward murder (or manslaughter) case of thirty-odd years ago. When I sit down and think about it I am never altogether sure of my motives. For example, I sometimes think I might make a book out of it. It would be a damned sight more interesting than my memoirs. Then when I wonder whether Andrew Forbes was in fact Tim’s killer I start wondering whether I’m hoping this, to make a more interesting book.
A Scandal in Belgravia Page 8