A Scandal in Belgravia (11 page)

“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.”

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 anyone 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.

These days, you notice, I am a prey to self-doubt, as I seldom was when I was active in politics, and this may be the result of being sacked. On the other hand I do at times seem to be developing the blinkered vision that investigative journalists sometimes develop when on a story—the vision that enables them to see only those facts that fit in with their theory. When
I try to analyse the fascination that the case has for me, two things predominate: the motivation for the crime, and the feeling that, for homosexuals, that was another world. Put your average young person back in 1956 and he would notice big differences, but he would soon acclimatise himself and feel at home. Put a young homosexual back then and for him it would be like going back to the Dark Ages.

Whether I could convey this if I did write a book about Timothy and his death I don't know. I am not an imaginative person.

Ringing my son in Los Angeles is a bit of a problem. He is usually at home in the evenings since they had the child, but, the time difference being what it is, I am always in bed by then. I can ring him at the office, but then I at best catch him on the wing, shouting instructions about this and that and putting other calls on hold, so that it is impossible to have a meaningful conversation. On the whole it's best to do the mathematics (oh for the time when a civil servant would have done it for me!) and try to catch him at home in the morning, before he sets out through, and contributes to, the fog and pollution of the streets.

“Did I get the time right?” I asked when I got through.

“You sure did. It's a quarter to seven.”

“Oh dear: I meant it to be a quarter to eight.”

“Junior woke us anyway.”

“Junior! How is . . . Howard?”

I find it difficult to say the name. Calling a baby Howard is not English, and it doesn't even abbreviate satisfactorily. I am inhibited from expressing any opinion, however, by the fact that Reggie complains bitterly about having been called Reginald. He says quite rightly that no one in Britain in the sixties was christened Reginald, that in the States it is an even more ludicrous name (he is known at the office as Richard), and that it made his schooldays a hell of ridicule. In fact, though I
was very fond of Reggie Maudling, in retrospect he does not seem to have been a happy choice to name a baby after.

“He's fine. All the normal things are happening.”

“Have you put his name down for a good psychiatrist yet?”

“Very funny, Pop. That's your jibe for the day. You don't have to underline what you think of America and the Americans. What did you actually ring me for?”

I had told him last time I had rung about my interest in Timothy Wycliffe's death. He had expressed benevolent approval, in the usual manner of the child who is glad his oldie has got something to occupy his time with. Wonderful how irritating one's own children can be! Now I filled him in briefly with some of the details I had learnt from Sutcliffe, and then came to the point.

“I wondered if you knew any private detectives.”

“The firm uses them quite a lot.”

Reggie is a statistician with a large insurance company. I'd thought that they probably would use private detectives to look into possibly fraudulent claims.

“Could you suss me out a good one?”

“Sure. And what you want is for him to get a lead on this Andrew Forbes?”

“That's the idea.”

“What have you got on him so far?”

“Well, nothing much beyond the fact that he entered the States, presumably illegally, around 1958.”

There were a few moments' silence at the other end.

“I'm definitely beginning to think you've gone a bit odd in your retirement, Pop.”

I felt rebuked.

“Oh, and he'd probably be working in radio or television, or in the electrical industry somewhere.”