Political Suicide (3 page)

Terry, it turned out, was just out of university, well-groomed
but amiable, with a shapely haircut of medium length that failed to hide the fact that he was wet behind the ears. Yes, actually he had known Jim Partridge, not just since he took up this job, but—well, his father was in the House, actually (“On the government side?” asked Sutcliffe innocently), and he'd got to know a lot of the members, well—ever since he was a kid, actually. And then he'd had a bit to do with Partridge more recently, actually over this Animals' Charter as the papers were calling it, so really you could say that he'd known him quite well. Actually.

“And what sort of man was he?”

“Quiet, conscientious, a bit of a plodder. The sort Ted Heath used to like. Give him a job, and you knew he'd do it, and well, though he might take quite a lot of time over it. A good enough speaker, slightly dull—but actually this isn't the golden age of political oratory, is it? They used to call Michael Foot one of the great speakers, so the standard
must
be low. If you were really prepared to listen, Jim's speeches were worth the effort.”

“You never heard of any personal problems?”

“No. But I wasn't on those terms. I'm frightfully junior here, actually. We came into contact over this animals bill, and that was giving him problems enough, heaven knows.”

“You think that might have been the reason—?”

“Oh, I didn't say that. Jim was a professional politician, and he'd probably learned to take that sort of thing in his stride.”

“What sort of thing, exactly? What were the problems that the bill was giving him?”

“Well, you might say it was a bill designed in one way or another to offend the maximum number of people. Actually, if you want to know, it was my job to try and warn him off. There was nothing in it for us—as a party, I mean—and there were pitfalls every inch of the way. It was a very comprehensive bill, designed to protect domestic and wild animals against all sorts of cruelty and exploitation. If you want to know who it offended, I could just name, for starters: the hunting and shooting lobby; research scientists; farmers—particularly the intensive kind; furriers; the cosmetics industry—well, you name it, they disliked it, except for the ecology lobby.”

“It seems odd I haven't heard more about it.”

“It's still in its early stages. But all the specialist journals of these various pressure groups got whiff of it long ago, and they were beginning to alert their people and emit squawks of outrage. I tell you, as far as his career was concerned, it was political suicide . . . Oh, I say, rather an unfortunate phrase, actually, eh?”

“But surely there was nothing much there to offend the electors of Bootham?”

“I don't know about that: dearer food, steep increase in dog licences . . . But I wasn't thinking of that, I meant only that he could say goodbye to any thought of getting high office.”

“Since he'd been dropped, there wasn't much thought of that anyway, was there?”

“Well, I suppose, looking around at all the people who have been dropped, no—not very much. They tend to stay dropped. Most of them start giving more and more of their time to the City—directorships in
big companies, and so on. Jim took up animals. Really, it was
awfully
un-Conservative.”

“Conservation isn't a Conservative thing, then?”

“Hardly. Game conservation, of course, but that's in order to shoot them afterwards.”

“Can we come back to the unpopularity of this bill? You implied there'd been squawks in the
Chicken Farmers' Gazette
, or whatever. Had the opposition taken any other form? Threats?”

“That sounds awfully melodramatic. If an MP gets a threat, he generally takes it up with the Speaker as a matter of privilege. But anyone in the public eye receives an amount of hate-mail, you know. Almost all from nuts, and usually pretty mad and full of violence. I'd have thought the pro-animal lobby usually had a fair number of those people in their ranks: there's nothing more violent than the Annual General Meeting of the RSPCA. I think that if Jim received any mail of this sort it was less the manic type, more from the sort of people who felt their livelihood was being threatened.”

“You don't know of any specific threats?”

“No. Jim talked generally about ‘pretty nasty letters,' but he didn't give any details. You'd have to go along and ask Arthur Tidmarsh—he might know more.”

“Who's he?”

“The Labour MP who was sponsoring the bill with him. It was a sort of cross-bench effort—probably more support on their side than on ours, if the truth be known, though the Leadership was wary there too: dearer food isn't popular with anyone except battery hens. If there were any threats—that was what you had in mind?—”

“Yes.”

“Then I'd guess he would know more about it than I would, since perforce they'd got pretty close . . . I say, this
was
a suicide, wasn't it?”

“That's for the jury at the inquest to decide,” said Sutcliffe, in classic phrase.

“No, but I say, I mean—the inquest will decide pretty much as you tell them to, won't it?” The schoolboy face had gone quite red with consternation. “This business is causing embarrassment all round, you know. I can tell you, we weren't pleased you had to rule out accident. The PM was pretty shirty, because suicide doesn't make the best impression, does it? I mean ‘the Almighty hath fixed his canon against self-slaughter,' or however it goes.”

“Is it God, or the Prime Minister you're more worried about?” asked Sutcliffe, and murmuring his thanks for assistance he escaped out into Smith Square.

Arthur Tidmarsh proved gratifyingly easy to contact. He was MP for a South London constituency, and lived on the spot in a semi whose living-room was given over entirely to his constituency work: piles of letters, reports, forms and applications, blue books and newspapers. Arthur Tidmarsh seemed at home in the room—more so, in fact, than with his resentful-looking wife and family.

“He was a good bloke in his way,” he said, settling Sutcliffe down in an armchair and taking a seat himself at his desk. “Stiffish, reserved, but once you got to know him, tremendously fair. And conscientious to a fault.”

“You did get to know him?”

“Oh yes. On a business level, a political level.”

“But he didn't, for instance, tell you anything about problems in his private life?”

“Oh no—never anything like that. Not even when we were having a drink together in the bar. We never got within miles of the personal. Was he having problems?”

“That's what I'd like to know.”

“All politicians have problems with their private lives: they either have too little of it, or too much. Some dance on the tightrope all their lives—like Lloyd George—and never fall off; and others ruin their career the first time they step off the strait and narrow. It's all bloody unfair, but I suppose you just have to have a flair for it.”

“A flair for adultery? It's an idea. Would you say Jim Partridge had it?”

“Well, frankly, no. Jim was more like one of us than a Tory, in some ways. If he'd had an affair, he'd have agonized about it in his conscience. All a Tory cares about is not getting caught.”

“About this bill—you're having a bit of hate-mail, I gather.”

“Some. It's early days yet. As far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't be worth it if we weren't.” He grinned with what was meant to be engaging candour, though Sutcliffe recognized it as a “we're all crooks underneath” smile, such as he had received from innumerable hardened cases. “I'm in it for the publicity as much as anything.”

“Was there anything particularly vicious in any of the letters?”

“Not that I recall. Fairly standard stuff, in point of
fact. ‘You care more about animals than humans'—that kind of thing. Odd argument that, isn't it? They're not alternatives at all, but people keep wheeling it out. I'd be less worried about the nuts—because not one in ten thousand is actually going to do anything about it—than about the people with special interests: the intensive farmers, the cosmetics industry, the mink farmers: they'd be the ones most likely to act. Though I can't see them doing so in this case.”

“Why not?”

Again there was that grin, intended to express engaging honesty. Probably Tidmarsh had built his career on that grin.

“Because it hadn't a chance. Can you imagine a House with a large Tory majority passing a bill that restricts fox-hunting, abolishes stag-hunting, controls game shooting, sets up standards for factory farming more stringent than anywhere else in the world has—and so on, and so on. The only possible way it could get on the statute book would be for us to drop or water down the provisions, one after another, and get left at the end with a totally toothless bill. It's what
will
happen, now he's gone. If I don't decide to drop it altogether. Partridge was a good manager—he'd have been very good in the Whips' Office. I don't fancy all the drudgery now he's gone.”

“Going back a moment, do you remember if there was any one of these letters from the various special interest groups that particularly upset him?”

“Well, of course, if he worried about any, he'd worry about ones from his own constituency. We all would. After all, we have to go back and ask the buggers for their votes every four or five years. Jim had one pretty
unpleasant one from a battery farmer in his constituency—abusive, said he could whistle for his vote in the future.”

“A farmer? In his constituency?”

“That's right. It takes in a bit of rural land to the east of the town. Otherwise I doubt Bootham would ever have had a Tory MP at all . . . That's the only one I can remember affecting him. And I don't think it was the threat, such as it was. He said he'd seen that farm, seen those hens . . . And you know, we all get that sort of letter from time to time. We get our own little formulas for writing back. No doubt Jim had his, and I expect he forgot it in a day or two.”

“It certainly doesn't seem much of a motive for suicide.”

“No. Beyond the fact that Jim was decidedly a worrier, in his quiet, ingrowing way. And of course, to use a cliché, things can pile up. I see it all the time in my constituency work: you're unemployed, your wife has left you, but it's the big electricity bill through the letter-box that's the last straw.”

“Maybe,” said Sutcliffe, getting up to take his leave. “But that's not the kind of thing that's easy to put to an inquest jury.”

Driving back to New Scotland Yard, Sutcliffe tried to sort out the various uneasinesses he had felt during his day of interviews. In the end, he whittled them down to two questions: if Jim Partridge was currently worried over his Animal Protection Bill, why had it never once been mentioned by Penelope Partridge? And hadn't she accepted rather too readily his failure to return on Thursday night? Sutcliffe hadn't a very detailed knowledge of House of Commons procedures,
but he had a vague notion that by Thursday things at the Palace of Westminster were often beginning to wind down, so that members could if possible have a long weekend with their families, or go off to their constituency. As soon as he got back to his office he got on the phone to Arthur Tidmarsh.

“Sorry to bother you again, but did you in fact have business with Partridge on Thursday?”

“Yes, I saw him briefly in the afternoon. Just a little technicality of phrasing. We talked for ten minutes, no more.”

“The bill wasn't coming before the House next day?”

“Not this week, no. Yesterday there was just the Coastline Protection Bill, which is a great yawn.”

“The House didn't sit late on Thursday?”

“No, it didn't. It was what we call a Dead Thursday.”

“Dead Thursday?”

“The government gets all the week's business over early, so we can all get off. Not more than a handful would be in Westminster for the Coastline Protection Bill.”

“I see.”

“Matter of fact, we hardly ever sit late these days. To the best of my recollection the House rose about eight on Thursday.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

It was all vaguely intriguing. But when Sutcliffe looked down at his desk, putting down the phone, he found the report of the post mortem, as well as reports from various men on the beat who had been drafted on to the case. Sutcliffe stewed for some time over the post mortem. The pathologist was clearly not entirely happy.
Deceased had drowned, and the body contained only a small amount of alcohol. He had apparently eaten lunch and afternoon tea, the latter a few hours before he died. There were bruises on the body that
could
be consonant with violence having been used, but there was nothing that could
not
have been caused by his hitting a boat, or the pillars of the bridge, when he first fell into the river. All in all, the pathologist had found nothing specific on which to pin his unease. One of the detective-constables had reported that a night watchman in one of the large office blocks on either side of the Tate Gallery end of the Vauxhall Bridge had reported a loud cry around 10:30 on Thursday night, followed by a splash. He had been out on the embankment wall, having a quiet can of beer, the constable thought. He had peered into the water, seen nothing, then gone back inside.

All in all, there seemed nothing to do but go for an open verdict. But Sutcliffe expressed his unhappiness to the Assistant Deputy Commissioner.

“I'm going to wait,” he said. “I've got a feeling in my bones that things are not quite right. And I've also got a feeling that something will turn up.”

“Micawber,” said the Assistant Deputy Commissioner. “But you're probably right. In politics, something or other usually does turn up.”