Political Suicide (22 page)

The declaration of poll was expected about midnight, and, popping his head into one of the central hotels, Sutcliffe found that several of the media persons intended driving south as soon as their stories were filed, apparently their way of showing their opinion of Bootham. He therefore managed to engage a room for the night, though still at a quite exorbitant rate. He spent the rest of the day sampling the sights and sounds and smells of the by-election, and glimpsed all the main candidates at one time or another, in loud-speaker vans, or hail-fellowing in the streets: Antony Craybourne-Fisk was being driven around by Walter Abbot, which could not have done him much good in most people's eyes; Oliver Worthing was wandering distractedly in the vicinity of the Town Hall, having lost his entourage; Jerry Snaithe was being driven around on the back of a lorry, exuberant, shouting slogans, but somehow managing to resemble some aspirant Führer, still in the preliminary, beer-cellar-putsch phase of his career.

It was quite by chance, later, that Sutcliffe came upon
Jerry again, just as polling ended. Jerry had kept it up all day: personal appearance at a polling station here, impromptu speech there, driven here there and everywhere by one or other of his “team,” and talking most of the time. The end of polling was bound to be a bit of a let-down for Jerry, the time when his fix began to wear off. Normally he wasn't a great fraternizer, unless there was something to be gained from it. Others went off from meetings to a pub, but Jerry went off on his own to plan the next meeting. Now, however, in the last minutes of polling and before going to the Town Hall with the other candidates for the count, Jerry let himself be pulled into a pub by a little group of his London young men. Several of these were teetotal, refusing above all to drink beer, on account of the fortunes that flowed into Tory Party funds from the major breweries. Some, however, had managed to square it with their principles to drink Real Ale, and it was that that Sutcliffe found them supping when, having observed their progress from Labour Party Headquarters to the Ironmaster's Arms, he followed them in at a discreet distance and bought himself a pint of the normal commercial brew. He stood by the bar for a moment and watched the group: in among them was Jerry's pet Machiavel whom he had met before, and he was raising his mug in a toast: “All power to the workers! To the great swing to the Left!” They all let out a good-humoured roar at this, but Jerry was responding with his mouth; he was not responding with his eyes.

For Jerry—and this explains what was to follow—was an experienced political animal who, still better than Oliver Worthing, could read signs and do calculations.
And, whatever the more naive expectations of his henchmen might be, Jerry did not believe that he had won. Nothing, of course, was certain with the blessed British electoral system, and the blessed British voter, but Jerry was pretty sure that he had not made it. So, in fact, was Fred Long, Jerry's electoral agent. There had been enough Labour supporters who had said they would not be voting for him—because he was too left-wing, because he was not a solid Union man, because he was an interloper from London, however much he might think to fool them by putting on a fancy Yorkshire voice—to convince them both that he could not have made it to the top of the poll. For a left-wing candidate will always find it hard to bring over significant numbers of floating voters, and if he has alienated some part of his own people, that was what he imperatively would have to do. It was a bitter pill for Jerry, but he now realized that tomorrow morning he would be just one more member of the doomed Greater London Council—no more, no less.

It was partly the bitterness of this feeling, partly the vacuum at the heart of his emotional being as his fix ended, partly his flair for the theatrical, his kamikaze instinct, that moulded his response when Sutcliffe came over to the red-rosetted little group.

“Mr Snaithe? I don't want to spoil your party, but my name is Sutcliffe. You may have heard I'm looking into James Partridge's death. You're the only one of the major candidates I haven't had a word with so far, but I wonder if some time I might? If you can't manage tomorrow, perhaps I could ring you up and arrange a time when you get back to London?”

A graveyard hush had fallen over the group. The Enemy was at hand, was within the walls.

“Good Lord,” said Jerry, looking at him as if he were some kind of insect, yet with an element of calculation in his eye. “It's the fuzz, boys! How bloody bizarre! What on earth can you want with me? I never knew Jim Partridge, you know. I'm one of the bogeyman figures for people like that.”

“I realize that, sir. It's purely a matter of routine.”

“Then why,” said Jerry, draining his glass, “not make it the present?” He looked meaningfully at his infant Mafia. “If there's going to be victimization, let's make it as public as possible. I suppose you want me to step along to the station?”

And he walked Sutcliffe out of the pub, rather than vice-versa, leaving his little squad of henchmen to feed sensational stories to the media that would make him the hero of left-wing myth-making for many months to come. It was, Sutcliffe decided, a wonderful display of confidence. Electoral humiliation would be forgotten, and only memories of police victimization would remain.

The police station was two minutes away. Mostly they walked in silence, Jerry striding it out, with a tiny, almost schoolboyish smile playing on the corners of his mouth. The only time he spoke he said:

“This is pure totalitarianism.”

(Jerry was an expert on totalitarianism. He had been loud in condemnation of it in El Salvador, the Philippines and South Africa, loud in praise of it in Cuba, Ethiopia and the Soviet Union. You could say he had an open mind on the subject.)

“I don't think they generally give you the choice of when you are to be taken in, in totalitarian countries,” said Sutcliffe.

At the station, most of the policemen on duty were out on the streets, or at the Town Hall for the count and declaration, when things could sometimes get rough. There was a sergeant on the desk, of course, and he took one look at Sutcliffe's companion and responded to his polite request for a room by showing him to a superintendent's office. Sutcliffe had become quietly familiar to the Bootham police, and Jerry, over the last few weeks, had become as well known in Bootham as second-rank royalty, or the people who do pet-food commercials on television.

“Basically you're quite right, sir,” said Sutcliffe, as they settled in comfortably with a cup of machine-coffee in front of them. “There isn't any particular reason why I should interview you. Though of course I wouldn't want you to feel left out, either.”

Jerry was tensed up, and Sutcliffe was conscious, as he had never been when seeing him on his campaign, of the physical rather than the political animal—strong, in peak condition, trained. He was entering the interview like a crack marksman preparing for a duel.

“Most amusing,” Jerry said, stretching his mouth.

“So far a lot of my time has been spent looking at Mr Partridge's parliamentary work, and I've been specially interested in this so-called Animals' Charter. There were a lot of what you might call special interests involved there.”

“Too bloody right. A real little nest of them,” said Jerry, stirring his coffee with his large, strong hands.
“I heard you'd been around to that Fascist bastard Walter Abbot. I notice nothing has come of it, though.”

“We have to be careful, sir. You in the House of Commons—should you be elected—can say pretty much anything you like about anybody, and be protected by privilege. We have to be sure we have a case before we say anything at all. That's a particular problem as far as the death of James Partridge is concerned: we're not even sure it
is
a case of murder.”

“Quite,” said Jerry Snaithe.

“It was natural to take a look at the man's political opponents, as well as the people he antagonized in his own party. After all, politics has become a pretty violent game in the last ten or fifteen years, and the violence can spill over on to anyone, however uncontroversial. A reporter gave me a tip that the election I ought to be looking at was the last one—the one at which Mr Worthing was also standing.”

“Oh yes, those rumours,” said Jerry casually, stretching out his legs rather in the manner of Derek Manders, and quite as irritatingly. “I don't think there was anything in them. Anyway, I believe in fighting on the issues.”

“I'm sure you do. Only in one respect what the reporter said was wrong: he said that you and Mr Craybourne-Fisk and the rest were Johnny-come-latelies who had only been adopted as candidates since the death of Partridge. Now that, I realize now, is one of those things that may be classed as true in fact but misleading in implication.”

“Oh? I don't see that. It certainly is true in fact as far as I'm concerned. I was adopted on January the fourteenth.”

“Quite, sir. But your nomination was virtually certain from the moment your group—the WRA isn't it called? So confusing all these initials—got control of the Bootham party. One of your young helpers told me that—a very helpful, friendly young man.”

“He was speaking out of turn. It's nonsense.”

“Well, I've checked up with local Labour stalwarts, and they all agree that the WRA had things sewn up in the constituency party by November.”

“So what?”

“It's a motive, sir. You were sure of the nomination, if you wanted it, but there would have been no poll before the General Election, which is anything up to two years away. Only by Jim Partridge's death was there a chance of your being MP for Bootham before that.”

Jerry Snaithe stretched his mouth again.

“It's pretty bloody flimsy.”

“Not to someone in my line of work. I assure you, I've seen murder done for very much less than a parliamentary seat. Or, rather, the chance to fight for a parliamentary seat. Particularly as in your case there was an added spur.”

“What was that?”

“The abolition of the Greater London Council. In a matter of months, or so it seems, it will have disappeared, and so will your platform. The best you can hope for is a seat on one of the London local councils, which is all that will be left. There won't be much national or media interest in
them.
In my experience, sir, politicians usually have something of the performer in them. They like an audience, reviews. Going from the GLC to the Pimlico District Council would be like
going from the West End to one of those little pub theatres. And then, all at once, there came the chance to get into the National Theatre . . .”

Jerry smiled, this time a genuine smile. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He was, indeed, shaping up to give a performance.

“Well, well: you really seem to have adopted the media view of politicians, Superintendent. Shall I allow you motive? Right. I had a motive—along with many others.”

“Quite. Along with many others. But Mr Craybourne-Fisk didn't have
that
motive: his selection was highly uncertain, and he'd never been heard of in this constituency before James Partridge's death. And, for all my digging, I never found the shadow of another motive for him, not for murdering James Partridge. Into all sorts of murky financial skulduggery—with Mrs Partridge, Derek Manders, and dreaming up something with Walter Abbot, should he become the MP here—all that, yes. But I couldn't make any connection between his financial skulduggery and the murder of James Partridge.”

“So you blithely forget about it?”

“I am about to retire from the CID, sir. I have a restricted brief. No doubt before very long he'll sail so close to the wind that his boat overturns. It's not, I suspect, a very good boat. Well, now, I grant you there are others with motive around, and a motive doesn't actually get us very far. So we come to opportunity. Here we have great problems, because we don't really know the time he died. So that Walter Abbot, arriving home from a meeting of European farmers in an organization called EuroAg—I fancy you
and I might agree about
them
, sir—got into Heathrow from Strasbourg at ten o'clock and spent the night in a Kensington hotel. Penelope Partridge was apparently home all evening, Craybourne-Fisk had a meeting that ended before ten, Oliver Worthing had a college meeting, but I gather it was an early evening one, and it was over by eight. He could have been in his car, down the Ml, and been on the Vauxhall Bridge well before midnight.”

“And I? What was I doing? I haven't the remotest recollection.”

“You, sir, were at a meeting of the Leisure Activities Committee, as I gather you frequently are on Thursdays. Now this interested me. Your wife tells me you are not a fraternizer after meetings. Your meeting that night ended about nine-forty—as they often do, or around that time. Jim Partridge finished a conversation with an MP friend at the Commons about ten—also a common occurrence on a Thursday. Now, if we set you walking along the left bank of the river towards Battersea, and Jim Partridge along the right bank of the river towards Pimlico—you the faster walker, I would guess, sir, a strider, if ever I saw one . . . then you might well cross the Vauxhall Bridge towards Pimlico, and he cross it towards Battersea, let's say about half past ten. Which is when the night-watchman in the office block heard a cry, and went to have a look over the river.”

“Oh? Who was that? I hadn't heard about him.”

“Just a solitary chap, soaking up cans of lager to while away the long winter evening.”

“Not a very reliable witness, then, I would have thought, Superintendent.”

“Not reliable at all, sir. I can imagine a defence lawyer making mincemeat of him if we ever put him up in court. The trouble is, though, that I've always placed a fair bit of trust in that report, because after all that
was
about where he'd be on his way home, and if, say, Abbot or Worthing had killed him on the bridge much later, what was he doing there? How had they got him out of his flat and over to that spot? No, I've always fancied ten-thirty as the time of the killing. And you, sir, could well have been there. And, what's more, been there before.”