A Murder in Mayfair (7 page)

“I've been collecting it up here,” she said. “Is it convenient for you to come round?”

“Of course.”

“I'm a bit diffident, seeing that I'm talking to a government minister,” she said slyly.

“It will wear off quickly when we meet, I imagine. Actually I've still got the key to the flat. Pure forgetfulness. I'll give it to you when I see you.”

“Oh, eventually. It could be useful to you while I'm doing this for you. Shall we say Friday at eleven? Let yourself in if I'm not there.”

I felt oddly pleased Susan didn't seem anxious to have her key back. She was not out when I got to her Greenwich flat, which was part of an early-nineteenth-century house, but she was under the shower. As I rang the bell I could hear the water cascading, as I often had in the past. Susan was a country girl who believed that London was so disgustingly dirty and polluted that you needed to shower often. She was right, of course, but fighting the most hopeless of losing battles. I let myself in, went through to the living room, and stood contemplating the piles of newspapers and photocopies that she had stacked up on the floor.

“Those are the initial reactions,” said Susan, coming through from the bathroom with a towel around her, and pointing at two piles, “the coverage of the first two or three days.
Those
are the more measured treatments of two or three weeks after that, and
those
are the later things, so far as I've gone, and many of them are more concerned with the disappearance rather than the murder, as I suspected. I'll be adding to that pile, but the first piles are more or less complete.”

She disappeared into the bedroom we had shared, and I heard her getting clothes out of the wardrobe and brushing her thick auburn hair. I felt my stomach churning with—with I know not what: old love returning, old love remembered, lust, regret. I could no more sort it out than I could ignore it.

“Well, there's plenty to be going on with,” I shouted, in what was not quite my normal voice.

“Should be,” she said, appearing at the door in a simple red dress that contrived to be striking and intriguing on her. “I've got a lunch date, but I'll be back about two or half past if you want to talk over what I've collected.”

I felt what was definitely a stab of jealousy toward whomever she had the lunch date with.

“I will want to talk it over,” I said.

She nodded, gesturing toward the piles, and went back into the bedroom. When she returned immediately with a light coat on she just raised her hand and said, “Bye.” I stood for a moment, somehow dissatisfied. Then I shook myself. What had I wanted? Had I hoped to go back, pick up the pieces of the relationship? Of course not. I settled down to the first two piles, one of actual newspapers, one of photocopies. All of them were dated March 1962.

They wrote good, sharp headlines even then. All of them were a variation on a simple theme:
MURDER IN MAYFAIR. MINISTER SOUGHT.
Those with more space tended to say
GOVERNMENT MINISTER SOUGHT,
to avoid giving the idea that it was a mere fashionable cleric who was involved. This story had a political dimension, and was all the better for it. Those were the initial, morning-after reactions, and they all realized it had a class dimension as well as a political one:
MAYFAIR SLAYING; WEST END SLAUGHTER,
and so on. All got the crime-in-fashionable-circles angle through. Not bad, considering that the police had not been called till toward midnight. By the second day after the
murder they had latched on to another aspect: the sex angle. Friends of the couple had mentioned the nanny.

I sat back at this point and reviewed my impression of the instant coverage of the affair. One thing that had been lacking had been photographs. Of course no one had expected the Minister for Overseas Trade as he then was to emerge distraught from his house and disappear into the night, so no one had been there to record it. As a consequence most of the photographs of Lord John Revill were posed, respectable, formal affairs. They could have been, and very likely were, put on his election addresses. The best the popular papers could achieve was some blurred ones taken at a party, where he appeared raffish, slightly drunk, and with a high color. At first glance there appeared nothing worse to these photographs than the fact that he was holding a glass, but when I looked more closely at the one in the
Daily Sketch
I felt that the eyes looked desperate.

I saw no resemblance in that face to myself.

What were the facts, so far as they had been gathered by the reporters covering the initial breaking of the story? The bare outline of events was that Lady John Revill—christened Veronica Martindale—had been murdered in her bed by her husband, who had then left the family home in Upper Brook Street. Police had been called to the house, and the photographic coverage was of a massive, floodlit presence there. Those were in the evening papers of March 5, a Wednesday. The Thursday papers had pictures of Lady Veronica's parents driving away from the town house, very much in mourning, with the two children, Caroline and Matthew. Reporters had chased the car, but its destination was predictable. Hadleigh Grange in Northamptonshire, the home of Sir George and Lady Martindale, the grandparents. A substantial police presence there kept the posse of reporters at the high, wrought-iron gates half a mile from the house. Little more was heard of the people
inside. The children, obviously, had been very efficiently protected, with the cooperation of the police.

That same day mention had been made of the nanny. Reporters asserted confidently that the only people in the house apart from Lord John and his immediate family had been the nanny and the housekeeper in her basement flat. By the Friday the usual “friends of,” sometimes varied to “sources close to,” the family had told the newspapers that Lord John and the nanny had been having an affair. Several papers printed a fuzzy photograph of a window in the house in Upper Brook Street, behind which there seemed discernible a female face. By Friday the police were saying that the nanny had helped them with their inquiries and had left the house. They were also saying that reports that fingerprints on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, had been identified as those of Lord John were “speculative.” On Saturday they revealed just how speculative they were. Lady John had been strangled. By Saturday Lord John's post at the Department of Trade had been filled by an obscure backbencher. Sources close to the government emphasized that the Prime Minister was making no judgments on the case, but had come to the conclusion that government had to be carried on. Ho-hum, I thought. I knew political flimflam when I read it. Government could survive the absence of a junior minister for a few days. Mr. Macmillan was engaged in damage limitation.

By then attention had begun to switch to the whereabouts of Lord John. Here the reporters had even less to go on. Literally speaking they had nothing to go on. He had left the house and had never been seen again. Oh, of course there were “sightings,” but even newspapers desperate for something,
any
thing, on the subject had to admit that the sightings were always vague and unconvincing, sometimes absurd. It didn't take them long to decide that someone must have seen him, someone
must have talked to him, someone must have shielded him, and taken him in. By Monday, always a lean day for news, several had decided that one or some of Lord John's aristocratic friends had arranged for his disappearance.

There was never, as Margaret Stevens had said, any convincing indication that that was the case, let alone proof of any kind. Yes, the Revills had mixed in an upper-crust circle, had—in a fairly modest way—partied, nightclubbed, crush-barred in places where they were likely to meet and mingle with people of their own kind. But there was little indication from the newspapers that Lord John was part of a tight-knit group who were so devoted that they would feel they had to sacrifice reputation and even liberty by spiriting him out of the reach of the law.

“How are you getting on?”

I had been so absorbed that I hadn't heard Susan's key in the door of the flat. She swung in, still looking as fresh as a morning meadow in a butter ad, carrying an interesting-looking plastic bag stuffed with paper.

“Not too bad,” I said, still having to make an effort to keep my voice normal. “I've got through the first two categories, and I've still got the longer-term coverage to go.”

“And what are your impressions?”

I followed her academic example and pondered long before answering.

“I've got a stronger sense of the
situation,
the ménage à trois, than of the people.”

“Was it a ménage à trois?” Susan asked, something that it hadn't occurred to me to question. “To me that means a willing threesome. But I haven't seen any evidence that the wife was complaisant.”

“Well, she'd chucked him out of the marital bed, according to one or two of these reports. How on earth would they know?”

“Could be the housekeeper. Could be the police. They tend
to leak little droplets of information to keep a story alive. I think it's on the principle of using a sprat to catch a mackerel. The more alive a story is the more likely they are to get further information.”

“Well, it doesn't seem to have worked in this case.”

“Not so far as we know. So you got no sense of the main players in all this from the early reports?”

“Actually I'd got some sense of Lord John and of his wife from the permanent secretary at the Department—very much an outsider's view, but strongly held. It needs to be checked and modified, to say the least. But I didn't get any idea from these reports of the character of the nanny.”

“No,” Susan agreed, nodding vigorously. “I had the feeling that the police very much kept her under wraps, and eventually spirited her away.”

“There seems to be a lot of spiriting away in this case. Why would the police do that?”

“Maybe they thought that as the main witness she was in danger. Maybe they thought she'd sign up for a ‘Nanny Tells All' exclusive in one of the papers.”

That was a new angle. I'd grown up in the era when any such stories before a trial were inconceivable.

“Could she do that? Could they print it?”

“I'm pretty sure they could at that date. And it could have prejudiced any trial—given a handle to the defense.”

“Of course. That's presumably why the rules were changed. . . . And yet the nanny must have been crucial in all this.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it was the wife who was crucial and that's why she got murdered. . . . I rather wish I hadn't set you on to reading the early reports first.”

“Why?”

“Early reports in popular newspapers are very misleading.”

“The reports in the posh papers convey pretty much the
same information in a different way. The
Telegraph
has always been very hot on sensational cases—murder, sex, or whatever. And particularly combinations of the two, as here.”

“You hadn't got to the third category, you say, Colin?”

“Not yet.”

“A bit more came out later on, about the nanny. She was Australian, by the way.”

“Yes—one paper picked that up in the piles I have read.”

“A graduate—Sydney University. She and the Revills went around to plays, opera, and so on.”

“Was that in the early days, before Lord John seduced her, or vice versa?”

“What an old-fashioned word! You have no evidence who seduced who, or if anything that could be called a seduction took place. It was probably mutual attraction and shared enthusiasm. I don't think it was only before the affair began. There's mention in one of the gossip columns of their having been seen at
Turandot,
and
Chips with Everything
and
All's Well
as a threesome. That was in the month leading up to the murder.”

“Could still be before the affair began, or before it was found out by the wife. . . . Presumably someone baby-sat the children.”

“What do you mean? Someone who could have known or got to know what was going on? It could be the housekeeper. She's another shadowy figure.”

“Yes, she is,” I agreed. “So, with the nanny, it wasn't just a matter of having a typical upper-class servant. The formidable dragon, passed on from one aristocratic family to another. It was more in the nature of an au-pair arrangement, with her doing the cultural sights in return for housework and child-minding.”

“That's right. Lucy Mariotti was her name—christened, presumably Lucia. English graduate, but no English relatives to get
hospitality from when she came over to do the cultural scene. There was a big Italian migration to Australia just after the war. In fact the Mafia took over a lot of the markets and raised the crime profile no end. Not that that's relevant in this case. As far as the reports went there was nothing to suggest that her background was anything other than respectable.”

“Did the Revills advertise for a nanny in Australia?”

“No, in
The Times.
She was already over here, and replied.”

“Well, that starts filling in the picture . . .” I cast my mind back, lighting up a cigarette to Susan's predictable annoyance. I went over and puffed smoke out of the open window. “What were you looking so pleased about when you came back?”

She smiled her slow smile.

“I'd been lunching with someone who's doing a thesis on the color supplements.”

Oddly enough I felt a sudden spurt of joy: she hadn't been lunching with a boyfriend. Oddly, and stupidly, too—because she could have been doing that on any or every of the four hundred or so days since we had split up. I tried to keep my voice low and natural when I spoke, though I guessed she had observed my reaction. Susan was a first-rate observer.