Political Suicide (6 page)

“He didn't?”

“Indeed he did not. He lived in the house next door to me!”

“And where is that?”

“No. 62, Flannagan Road, Battersea. I'm number sixty. Sixty-two is split in half—an upstairs and a downstairs flat. He had the upstairs.”

“And how long had he lived there?”

“Not long. Matter of two, perhaps three months.”

“And you're quite sure this was James Partridge?”

“Quite sure. Absolutely and without question. I saw him quite often—leaving or coming home. He was a bit of a walker—didn't catch the bus if he wasn't in a hurry, so often I'd be just behind him part of the way, as I went to the shops or the library, and he went—as I
now
realize—towards Westminster.”

“You didn't talk to him?”

“Not beyond ‘Good Morning' or ‘Evening.' ”

“But you did see him well?”

“Perfectly well. On countless occasions. And another thing: I used to see him come home at night, very late, and then I'd see his face in the lamplight, as he looked for his key. I keep a good watch on, I do. What with these terrorist cells springing up everywhere—first thing you know you've got a bomb factory next door. Oh, I keep an eye on things, don't you worry!” He leaned forward, to clinch the matter:
“And
I saw the initials on his briefcase—J.S.P.”

“James Spenser Partridge.”

“That's right. That was in his obituary. Some sort of family connection with a poet. How many J.S.P.s the spitting image of James Spenser Partridge, MP, do you think there are? No, no, no—it was him all right. You can be quite certain of that.”

“Well, Mr Dowson,” said Sutcliffe ruminantly, stroking down the greying moustache which gave him the look of a pessimistic seal, “I find this information very interesting—puzzling, too . . . Of course, many MPs have a
pied-à-terre—”

“Not if they have flats in Chelsea, they don't,” said Mr Dowson triumphantly.

“Not as a rule. And I've certainly seen the flat in Chelsea . . . He did
live
there, you say, in the house next door to you? It wasn't some sort of business office? He came home every day?”

“He did indeed, except sometimes at weekends. Constituency business, see. Otherwise he was there every day: I'd be sure to see him, either morning or evening. Erratic times, because they don't keep regular hours there, but I'd see him.”

“Do you happen to know the landlord of that house?”

“Not personally, but I know who it is. Lives down the road at No. 40—Harold Bly, the name is. Inherited the house when his mother-in-law died, and converted it into two flats—very tastefully done, I believe. I've known one or two of the gentlemen who lived there. He gets in a very nice little rent, so I've heard.”

“I think I'd better talk to Mr Bly. If you'd put your coat on, Mr Dowson, I'll drive you home.”

• • •

To have saved on his bus fare both ways was pure heaven to Mr Dowson, but to complete his enjoyment the adventure would have had not to have ended there.

“I could come along with you and introduce you,” he said as they drew up at No. 60. In view of his declared lack of acquaintanceship with the landlord, this seemed a particularly empty offer. Sutcliffe was an experienced officer, experienced with civilian ghouls as well as criminals, but he maintained a tired courtesy with both. He declined Dowson's offer civilly, and as he drove off towards No. 40 he imagined Wilfred Dowson taking up position behind the best window in his house for observation, hoping for sensational developments.

James Partridge's landlord, if that indeed was what he was, turned out to be fiftyish, paunchy, quite possibly lazy, but not unintelligent.

“I thought it was funny,” he said, when Sutcliffe had explained his business.

“What was funny?”

“Well, his just going like that. And his wife explaining that he was dead.”

“You've been in contact with the wife?”

“Well, I had to,” explained Harold Bly. “See, the rent was paid to December 31st. First day or two after that I didn't think much to it, it being the festive season, and lots of people away with relatives, and so on. But he'd always been a regular payer, the short time he'd been there, so about the sixth or seventh I began to get worried. So I took my key and went along to see that there was nothing amiss. Well, there was and there wasn't. It was all neat and tidy, except for a saucepan which had had boiled milk in it—the remains were all festering. He didn't look the type to go off for a long period and leave that—not by the look of the rest of the flat. Though it was all perfectly shipshape, it was pretty clear he hadn't slept there for some time. Well, I found an old bank statement in the waste-paper basket, with a Chelsea address. I waited a day or two, walked along to see if there was ever any lights on there, and when it was clear he hadn't come back, I wrote to him at this Chelsea address.”

“And his wife replied that he was dead?”

“That's right. Said that he had only rented the flat temporarily, due to alterations at their home—though that certainly wasn't
my
understanding—and that unfortunately
he had died last month. Didn't offer to pay the January rent. Of course, if I'd read my newspaper better I might have known he was dead, because he was here under his own name all right, but I've never been one for political news, and my paper doesn't have all that much in anyway.”

“Are his things still in the flat?”

“No, they're not. When I got this letter I rang up Mrs P., to ask whether she'd come round and sort through them herself. She sounded surprised. It didn't seem to have occurred to her that he had things there. I stepped into the breach and said I could load the things into my car and drive them round to her. She said, ‘Oh,
could
you be so kind . . . ?' You know the kind of voice. I said I'd come the next morning, and she said that might be difficult, and could I make it the evening—?”

“After dark?”

“Right. Eight o'clock. So that's what I did, and she took it all in, thanked me, and that was that.”

“Gracious,” commented Sutcliffe, who had taken rather a melancholy view of Penelope Partridge from the beginning.

“Gracious
and
generous,” agreed Harold Bly. “I know the type. Mind you, it was no great fag. There was a lot of paper—duplicated stuff, and so on—but not a lot of personal gear at all. More than a change of clothes, but not his whole wardrobe, if you get me. For all I know he could still have been living partly at home.”

“His next-door neighbour says not,” said Sutcliffe. “And it seems likely he would know. How long, by the way, had he lived in the flat?”

“Oh, from early in September, so you'd have thought he would have been more settled in than he seemed to have been.”

“I begin to think he cultivated anonymity, or was that way by nature. Do you think I could see the flat?”

“Surely,” said Harold Bly, fetching his keys.

Not a Conservative MP's road, Sutcliffe had commented to himself as he drove along Flannagan Road. Not a Conservative MP's flat, he thought when Harold Bly let him in. A poky flat in a poky street, watched over by Wilf Dowson next door, and probably by several other lower-middle-class Wilf-Dowson-look-alikes from the other houses around. The flat had been meticulously cleaned, ready for any new tenant, and with that and the removal of his things there was no sign whatsoever left of James Partridge's tenancy. But it still seemed to Sutcliffe, with its “tasteful” redecoration of a decidedly scruffy elderly terrace house, an unlikely place for a Conservative MP, except as a very temporary arrangement. He wondered how to put this tactfully.

“How did Mr Partridge hear about this place?” he asked.

“He just came along and said he'd heard it was vacant. I hadn't advertised, but I didn't think anything of that. These things get around. And I realize now that he must have heard about it from the previous tenant.”

“Who was?”

“Terence Stopford. Conservative MP for East Molesworth. Used to have a constituency up North, but it got redistributed, and he got nominated for a seat closer to London. He had this flat as a
pied-à-terre
while he
was living up North. I don't think he was one of the particularly well-heeled mob, or else he was careful. Anyway, when he got in in East Molesworth he started looking around for a house there, so he could move his family, you see. Eventually he found one and gave up this place. Drove up to Westminster each day, so it wasn't necessary. That's how Partridge heard of it, I'd guess . . .”

“I see. He might be worth talking to. You haven't got anything you could add, have you? Any personal impressions? Anything he once said to you that now seems odd?”

Harold Bly thought, but briefly.

“Nothing. We had very little contact. He dropped a cheque for the rent through my letter-box as a rule. I only talked to him at the beginning, and once when we met in the street—the weather, whether the flat was proving suitable, nothing more than that. He was a very quiet, pleasant, unobtrusive kind of person. Never said anything interesting that I remember.”

It was a fair definition, Sutcliffe thought, of one sort of Tory MP.

• • •

“It's puzzling,” said Sutcliffe, eyeing his superior with his melancholy eyes and pulling at his grey, droopy moustache. “Had he left his wife? If so, why couldn't she have said so? It's no shame, these days. I feel I've been fooled.”

“You've certainly been strung along,” said the Assistant Deputy Commissioner. “And there's every reason for going along and hauling her over the coals—wasting police time by withholding information, and
so on. But I don't know about puzzling. Doesn't it give you that motive for suicide that you were lacking?”

“It could, I suppose. But one would have expected it in September, not December. And if he was shattered by the separation, he was managing to keep it very secret from those around him. I feel there's more in this case than meets the eye. Can I have
carte blanche
to nag away at it for a bit?”

“I don't know about that,” said the Assistant DC. “As far as I can gather, the PM desperately wants the thing decently buried.”

“If we do that at the behest of the PM, we'll have the Opposition baying for our blood as soon as the truth begins to come out. And quite right too.”

“True, of course,” admitted his superior. “But that doesn't make it less awkward . . . What came out at the inquest?”

“Open verdict. Which was the right one, in my opinion. The doc was very non-committal—some rather ambiguous bruises, especially to the face, less water in the lungs than he would have expected. I don't think he was happy, and I think that's a good deal more important than the political convenience of the PM.”

The Assistant DC sat there for a moment, considering. The fact was that, though the Prime Minister was a great and eloquent admirer of the police, the Assistant Deputy Commissioner was (by pure chance) not a great admirer of the Prime Minister. Nor did he think that political pressure should be brought on the police—particularly in a case when a politician was involved. Yet the mere fact that the Prime Minister's views were known meant that political pressure was being brought.
This administration was inclined to interfere with the judicial processes, in ways that the Opposition found it hard to pin down.

“I'll give you a couple of weeks,” he said. “I can't see how I could justify more than that. When are you due to retire?”

“March the fifth,” said Sutcliffe. He looked at his superior. “I'm due for some leave before then.”

His superior looked straight back at him.

“I rather thought you might be. Of course, how an officer spends his leave is not the concern of Scotland Yard. Especially on the eve of his retirement.”

Sutcliffe smiled his thanks. The two men understood each other very well indeed.

“As far as I'm concerned, you're prying,” said Penelope Partridge, draped resentfully along the length of her Chelsea sofa.

“As far as I'm concerned I'm prying too,” said Sutcliffe. “It's a large part of a policeman's job.”

“I don't accept that. To be perfectly frank” (she meant that she would like to be very rude indeed), “I don't see what it's got to do with you.”

“Come, come, Mrs Partridge,” said Sutcliffe, playing his tired-courtesy card, one of his strongest, “a woman in your position can't be ignorant of the purpose of an inquest. It's to determine the cause of death. All relevant facts about the dead man's position and state of mind have to be presented.”

“Nonsense. The separation took place in September. It had no relevance at all.”

“In fact, if the jury had had this information before it, it might have brought in a suicide verdict, and we would have called the case closed.”

A shade of regret wafted across Penelope Partridge's
face, the first he had seen. He leaned forward and rapped out: “As it is, you've put yourself in the position of having lied to the police, both directly and by implication. And that means we simply cannot let the matter rest there.”

“I really don't see why not,” drawled Penelope Partridge, unfazed.

“If you don't see that lying to the police is a serious matter, then there's nothing more I can say to make you see. I can, on the other hand, ask you to come down to the Yard, to help us with our inquiries.” He paused, to let her consider this option. “Or alternatively you can give me a full, a
very
full, account of the separation.”

Something very like a pout appeared incongruously on Penelope Partridge's long face.