A Murder in Mayfair (16 page)

I had decided to find a seat with a good general view around the park. I walked some way in, watching the squirrels, unnaturally tame and skittish, until toward the lake I found a seat, facing the way I had come, that seemed ideal. Casually I wheeled round, sat down, and took a drag at my cigarette. Casual, be completely casual, I said to myself. So I cast my eye slowly, lazily, barely interestedly, at the people coming in my direction.

Tourists, office workers, young lovers, civil servants, clandestine hand-holders, businessmen discussing share options and takeover bids. All as expected. But one figure did catch my eye, cause me to focus more sharply. He had swerved aside from the tarmacked path as soon as he saw me sit down, and was now walking across the grass in the other direction. Clearly he did not want to pass me, did not want me to see his face.

I could make little from his back. Sports jacket, rather ill-fitting, perhaps shabby or just shoddy; gray flannel trousers, again not in first-rate condition, longish hair, uncut rather than styled. A meager haul of impressions. He walked, not turning, until he was several hundred yards away. Then he
stopped under a tree, turning round slowly and pretending, like me a minute or two before, to survey the scene casually. His face was in the shade and I could not clearly discern any particular feature. A front view reinforced the impression the back view had given me of someone poorly dressed—not someone who didn't care what he looked like, but somebody who wore cheap clothes because he was poor.

I finished my cigarette, and put my head back to drink in the sun. When I brought it back upright he was still there, fishing in his pocket. He brought out what I took to be a tube of sucky sweets, and put one in his mouth. I took out my packet in my turn, and lit another cigarette. I told people I was down to four a day, but not that day. I smoked, he sucked, neither of us looking directly at each other, but catching glimpses as we each nonchalantly surveyed the passing scene.

Eventually I decided to return to the Department. I took the same route I had come by through the little streets around St. James's Underground station and across Victoria Street. This time I could not distinguish the footsteps behind me—there were no more people around to muffle his, so presumably he was keeping a greater distance between us. At the entrance to the Department I paused to have a word with Sam Baldry, the doorman. I contrived to turn back to face the street quite suddenly. I saw the calf of a gray-flanneled leg disappearing into a doorway.

I used my official car to get home that evening.

 • • • 

Frieda Brewer and I agreed on the phone that the only place we could discuss her report and the way forward from it was in one or other of our flats. Anywhere more public and we'd be continually looking over our shoulders for eavesdroppers. In the end we decided on mine. When she arrived she seemed to be concealing surprise at the humble nature of my flat and its
location. She looked around the living room briskly, as if wanting to memorize its salient features for a paragraph in her book.

“You haven't let being in the government go to your head,” she said. It could have been one of my more downright Yorkshire constituents speaking.

“Only the very top cabinet ministers get assigned fine homes for their exclusive use,” I explained dryly. “This one is very convenient for Westminster.”

“Of course. Still, I imagine as the sleaze factor shifts from the other side to your lot, expectations will rise and you'll start moving upmarket.”

“You're very cynical,” I said. “We are dedicated to stamping out sleaze. I'm certainly not planning to accept wodges of banknotes in brown envelopes.”

“I'm sure you're not. Still, in politics the offers can come in forms a lot more subtle than that, especially as your lot is obviously intending to stay in power for yonks, barring accidents.” She sniffed. “Smells good.”

I was cooking a vaguely Arab dish of leg of lamb roasted at a fierce temperature on a bed of scalloped potatoes. I got her a gin and tonic and myself a beer, and we sat down with her report. She was much as I imagined her: a full figure, handsome if unsubtle face, in manner direct and exuding efficiency. If she'd been a singer she would have been a mezzo, singing roles such as Amneris and Eboli. I have to admit, though, that her no-nonsense manner put me off—not just from nonsense, but generally. I couldn't quite work out whether this was a traditional male reaction, or simply a personal one.

“Anything strike you?” she asked. I looked at my notes.

“I was interested in what she said about Lord John, and how he would have made contact with the children if he was still alive. If so, Matthew Martindale put on a good performance.”

Frieda shrugged.

“That's hardly surprising. He would have had immense practice in stonewalling curiosity about his father's fate by now.”

I considered the general situation.

“I wonder if Mrs. Gould is right. Lord John could feel that he's done enough harm to his children's lives, and that the best thing he could do would be to keep away from them.”

“That could work the other way,” she said, her analytical mind working overtime. “He could want to make things up to them. Have you thought about the question of whether he
is
still alive—or let's say whether he lived on after the murder?”

“A little. As a sort of side issue. This is not a quest to find my father, though. To me the lack of a body is crucial. We're talking about suicide here, aren't we? There's no question of any revenge killing or any sort of melodramatic thing. Of course it's possible to kill yourself so your body is never found, but why should he want to? On the contrary, if he decided to end it all, he'd want the thing known, cut and dried, so that his children could put him in the past and get on with their lives.”

“Maybe,” she said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “If he survived, was it with the connivance of anyone?”

I shrugged. “Impossible to say. No doubt it would be easier with someone else's help but all that talk there was in the tabloids about society pals closing ranks and making sure one of their number didn't have to face the consequences seems to me so much balderdash. Lord John gives me the impression of rather a lonely figure, someone with few close friends. I did wonder about the Conservative Party—”

She frowned.

“How do you mean?”

“Spiriting him away to avoid embarrassment for themselves.”

“Isn't
that
rather melodramatic?”

“Oh, I don't mean it was done by them as a
party.
That's
never the way political parties do things. I mean Macmillan drawls a word or two to a colleague—‘Isn't there someone who could get him out of the country? Get him a new identity?'—and hey, presto, someone has a word with someone, who has a word with someone else, and in a trice the job is done.”

“Possible,” she said, but she made it obvious she was skeptical. I could see she was a Conservative supporter. But what she said made sense. “How do you think it happened? Did Lord John ring Tory Party HQ the next day and say: ‘This is Lord John Revill here. Look, I'm frightfully sorry but I seem to have murdered my wife. Do you think there's anyone who could get me out of the country to somewhere safe?'”

“No, of course not.”

“The truth is, there's not been sight or sound—
recorded
sight or sound—of him since he left the house in Upper Brook Street.
If
he had help, he must have contacted someone. We don't know who it was, or even who it was likely to be.”

“True. Anyway, it's a side issue.” I went into the kitchen, carved the lamb into great chunks, served it on warm plates on top of the potatoes, and we sat down at the table. I opened a bottle of cheap red wine, which she looked at suspiciously, but we drank and ate companionably enough. “It was interesting to get the names of the professors,” I said, to get the discussion going again.

“Right.” She nodded. “I had one name, but not the other. Now, I've checked up on them both—”

“So have I,” I said. “So far as I can see from
Who's Who
Marryott is dead and Frere is still alive.”

“That's right. Which suits us nicely, because Marryott is the one Hasselbank has already talked to, while we never got on to Frere. I've rung Frere and checked, by the way, pretending to be a scholar wanting permission to quote him in a book. He is still alive, sounds hale and hearty, and lives in Sussex.”

“You're a dab hand at a cover story, aren't you?” I said admiringly. She raised her eyebrows.

“A lie, you mean. If I was working for a newspaper, or a politician in his official capacity, my ethical standards would be a notch or two higher. The fact is, this is so unofficial and personal that it . . . liberates me somewhat. I regard myself as working partly for myself.”

In a niggling way that last remark did not please me, but I brushed it aside.

“So I can go along and talk to Frere? Did you get any impression of him, beyond his being hale and hearty?”

“Not really. Straightforward, still very clear in his mind, so we'll hope in his memory, too. By the way, I think honesty about your reasons for asking him about Lucy would be the best way, and the least dangerous for you.”

“Dangerous?”

“A government minister who goes around getting information out of people by telling lies is asking for trouble.”

“Hmmm. Fair enough, I suppose. What about Marryott? Did you talk to him seven years ago for the color supplement article, or did Hasselbank?”

“Elmore did the questioning, but I went along . . . I didn't greatly like Marryott. Neither of us did. He talked only about Lucy's academic ambitions, but there was something—I don't know—sleazy about him. A leering, smirking kind of man, and one wondered whether a combination of that outlook on life and Lucy's sexual go-getting might have been pretty poisonous, destructive.”

“I see. You're wondering whether there might have been a more personal connection between the two, either before or after the murder.”

“Well, yes. But
just
wondering.”

“You know, one thing puzzles me from your report.”

“What's that?”

“The Revill marriage was in a pretty rocky state, right?”

“Right.”

“And yet they engage as their nanny
not
one of the traditional dragons that the upper crust normally plump for, probably passing them on from one family to another, but a beautiful, sexy young Australian girl on the loose in Europe. I should have thought that anybody could have seen that was a recipe for disaster, and Lord John was no fool.”

Frieda Brewer paused in her eating.

“I get the impression that an upper-class marriage then—perhaps now, too—was very different from the average middleclass marriage today. Though heaven knows that's hardly the dull, stable thing it once was. One reason why I'll never, but
never,
think of getting married is the fact that it's almost meaningless. Imagine going into it with the sort of dim hopes and expectations people have of it today! But I wonder with the Revill marriage being in such a poor state of repair whether they didn't go into the engaging of Lucy Mariotti with their eyes open—deliberately, with an end in view.”

I tried to get her drift, and failed.

“I must be naive. I can't imagine what that end could be.”

“Stimulus for a marriage that had gone stale? To provide sex for him to relieve her of something she found distasteful? To leave her freer to go with other men?”

I considered the suggestions, but without finding them convincing as they stood.

“Well, I'll say one thing: if that was the intention, it certainly went disastrously wrong.”

As we drank our coffees we talked of other things. She was very frank about herself, said she was looking for a father for a child she wanted: someone who would make no demands,
leave her entirely free to bring up the child in her own way, in return for which she would make no financial demands.

“You have a relationship and, however much he may seem to be unbroody, unpaternal, there's a danger that when the baby comes he'll want to muscle in and have his say.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“Yes, from my point of view. I go through the pain and danger of having a baby, so it's going to be my child. I'll do all the business of juggling baby and career, and I'd rather not even have him around as a baby-sitter.”

“And how are you going to manage this?”

“There's various ways, but if I pick on a man and engage him for the purpose he's going to sign a deed disclaiming not just responsibility but rights.”

“Perhaps you could advertise in a legal journal,” I said wryly. “You might find a dry-as-dust solicitor who's just what you need.”

“Could be,” she agreed. “Anyway it will have to be someone very unlike you.”

“Oh?”

“You wouldn't be any good at all,” she said briskly. “Much too much into the families' business.”

I tried to understand her, to respect her motives, but somehow the conversation left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. It's the old argument about whether you have a child for the child's sake, or as an appendage to yourself. My own parents had quite obviously adopted me for my sake, and had put themselves last through all the years of my growing up, and beyond. Frieda Brewer's future child I felt rather sorry for.

I began to feel I wanted as little as possible to do with Frieda, and nothing at all to do with any book she might write about the Revill case. She would ride roughshod if it suited her over
any personal susceptibilities or squeamishness. About her abilities as a researcher I had no doubts, and she showed her worth at the end of the evening as she got her things together with her usual briskness and prepared to go out to her car.