Corridors of Death (25 page)

‘I don’t think we know enough about him to say,’ said Ann. ‘A fundamentally decent person could react the way he did initially, just withdrawing into himself and putting all his energy into his work. It’s what came later that suggests an evil streak.’

‘Well, presumably his failure to get on well with his only child helped to increase his feeling of isolation.’

‘We’re talking about a highly intelligent, rational man here,’ said Milton. ‘He brought most of his isolation on himself. It wasn’t the fault of Lady Clark or his colleagues that he became so distant in personal relationships.’

‘Right,’ said Ann. ‘But he may have found himself caught in a vicious circle. People can deliberately cut themselves off from others and yet feel hurt that no one makes overtures of friendship or love. They’re driven further into themselves and can even develop a sort of persecution mania – a conviction that others are lined up against them.’

‘It was a funny kind of persecution mania that led him to persecute others,’ said Milton.

‘On the contrary. Hurt often makes people turn against those they think are responsible for making them unhappy. The deeper the hurt gets the harder it is even to contemplate the fact that it might be self-inflicted.’

‘But he doesn’t seem to have been trying to hurt his wife or son,’ said Amiss. ‘What Lady Clark has described was in Nigel’s case just misguided attention and in her own simply impatience and a touch of contempt. Applying high standards. Lots of fathers and husbands behave like that. No, what bothers me is why he became so obviously vicious eight years ago when he began his persecution of Parkinson. I can’t see any reason why he should have hated him. After all they had been friends for a long time.’

‘No,’ said Ann. ‘I can’t think of any reason for that either. Unless it was jealousy. Maybe he began to hate Parkinson for being so handsome and successful – even happy. Lost all capacity to enjoy his old friend’s personal progress, got guilty about it, and set about destroying the source of his guilt. Jim?’

‘Makes a rough kind of sense. But why continue the persecution for so long – I mean, once he’d scotched Parkinson’s career, why go for total destruction? Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he hated anyone else in the way he hated Parkinson – until recently, that is. Sanders talked about him having gradually become more and more difficult to work with, but there’s been no suggestion that he was anything other than indiscriminately malicious.’

‘Until he started on Nixon a couple of years ago,’ Ann broke in. ‘From what we’ve heard about that his hatred was pretty carefully directed.’

‘But Nixon is a thoroughly nice bloke. What could he possibly have done to merit such a degree of malice?’

‘I think I understand that, Jim,’ said Amiss. ‘Nixon’s incompetence seemed to annoy Sir Nicholas personally. I think he was trying to show him up as someone who didn’t deserve to be in the job.’

‘I’ll buy that. He could have convinced himself that he was acting quite properly in making Nixon’s life difficult. And his reasons for disliking Wells are pretty obvious too. Remember your reaction to him, darling.’

‘I can’t blame him for that,’ said Amiss. ‘His view of Wells was shared by most of us and until last week he didn’t behave towards him outrageously. He just made life a bit more difficult for him. We all dreamed of scuppering Wells – Sir Nicholas had the opportunity, once he’d forsaken all sense of official duty.’

‘Right,’ said Milton. ‘So the crucial changes in him seem to go back twenty-nine, eight and two years. First a distancing of himself from everyone, then the beginning of a long-drawn-out campaign to destroy Parkinson and finally a consistent attempt to make Nixon’s life a misery. Disappointment, jealousy-cum-guilt, and contempt respectively.’

‘Right,’ said Amiss. ‘It was as a part of that that he started to follow Nixon to try and get some dirt on him. Notifying the journalist about his visits to the call-girl was a logical step. But what about the hiring of the private detective to get the goods on his family? What prompted that?’

‘He must have been completely twisted by then. Some psychologists might say that having noticed they were unusually happy, and happiness having become the enemy, he decided to have it investigated.’

‘So the discovery that they both owed their new happiness to other people turned him suicidal?’ Amiss had been working for this wretch for eighteen months. He pushed his plate aside in disgust.

‘But why didn’t he take it out on them?’ Milton was no more comfortable with Ann’s theory. ‘After all, he could have made terrific scenes about betrayal and deception by both of them. Wouldn’t that have been the normal thing to do?’

‘We’re not talking about normality, Jim,’ said Amiss. ‘We’re talking about Sir Nicholas. The only conclusion I can come to is that he lost all interest in living when he found out that his family didn’t need him any more and he decided to stir the shit in all possible directions and provoke someone into killing him.’

‘But how could he be sure someone would kill him?’

‘He couldn’t.’ An idea flashed into Amiss’s mind. ‘But what if he had a contingency plan to commit suicide if nobody obliged him by sparing him the trouble? Must have. Otherwise, why would he have sent the note to the Yard about his wife and Martin Jenkins? I expect he was going to make the suicide look like murder in order to get one of those poor devils locked up for it.’

‘You’re reading too much into that, Robert. If there had been no murder we would simply have ignored such a note. It would have been filed away with all the other cranky tip-offs we get every day. It seems to me he was fighting off boredom with Russian Roulette.’

‘No, Jim. I think Robert’s right. He would have had nothing to live for except disgrace and loneliness. He must have been preparing himself for death. It’s a strange way to go about it, though. Most people try to make peace at the end, not war. I presume he didn’t believe in an after-life.’

‘I’ve no idea what he believed in,’ sighed Amiss. ‘We didn’t go in for conversations like that. He obviously must have had a pretty bleak view of the universe.’

‘I can understand – although with some difficulty – what made him act so maliciously during his last few days,’ said Ann. ‘What makes my blood run cold is the thought that his spitefulness would extend to wanting to drive any of his victims – including his son – to murder. Maybe we should take the charitable view and conclude that he had simply gone insane. The alternative is too appalling to contemplate.’

‘We’ll never know,’ said Milton, ‘but from what I’ve learned about Sir Nicholas my feeling is that he knew what he was doing and would have been delighted at the outcome. I think you’re both being sentimental in talking about lovelessness and all that sort of thing. He was a vicious bastard who had lost interest in living and wanted to make other people pay for it. We could speculate for ever. Let’s order another round and drink to Robert’s success in ensuring at least that we didn’t add to Sir Nicholas’s posthumous fun by pinning his murder on the wrong man. Let’s also make a resolution to forget about Sir Nicholas and devote our next evening together – which I hope won’t be too far distant – to more uplifting subjects. And better food.’

Friday Morning

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41

‘ ”Ere you are,’ said Phil, dropping a file in front of Amiss. ‘You wanted to see this today.’

Amiss looked at the title on the front. ‘ “Retrospection”? What the hell is this? I’ve never seen it before.’

‘Must of done. There’s a note in the diary sayin’ you’re s’posed to have it today.’

Amiss shrugged. Maybe he had forgotten about it. Noting in the diary that something should be looked at on some specified date in the future often meant that it had been too boring to contemplate when first seen and could better be faced at another time. ‘Retrospection.’ Probably some tedious analysis of the genesis of some policy or other. At least there wasn’t much in it. He’d have more than enough time to read it before setting off with Sanders to say a public goodbye to his lunatic old boss.

The envelope pinned to the inside of the file was addressed to him, and when Amiss saw the handwriting he went cold. He tore a page inside as he opened it. The signature to the letter held no surprises; the date did. Sir Nicholas had written to him the previous Monday. Below the date he had written ‘6.00 a.m.’

‘My dear Robert,’ it began. Amiss rubbed his eyes at this unaccustomed friendliness.

If my plans work out correctly, you will receive this four days after my death. You will, I imagine, be surprised that I have chosen to write to you. My reason will probably surprise you even more. There is no one else about whom I now care enough to offer him an explanation of my actions in recent weeks. Nor is there anyone else for whom such an explanation may be useful. I hope that what I am going to tell you may help you, in the future, to maintain that sense of perspective which I have at times sought, but never found.

You will almost certainly be surprised to learn that I have an affection for you. I realize that my conduct to you during the time you have worked for me has given no hint of this. That is because I have long been incapable of showing any emotions other than contempt or dislike. There has been within me for years a devil which has made me unable to see any of those around me as anything other than unworthy of positive feelings. You have been an exception. You have seemed to lack the venality, stupidity, unjustified arrogance or unwarranted ambition which I see all around me. I have liked in you what people once liked in me — intelligence, honesty, humanity and a sense of the ridiculous. You will counter by saying that there are many people we know who share those qualities. I can say only that if that is true, my perceptions of others have become too warped to enable me to perceive their virtues. It may well be that I am seeing industriousness as careerism, warmth as obsequiousness, silence as cowardice. I don’t know and it is too late now to find out.

I intend to kill myself today, either by provoking my own murder or by taking cyanide, a small supply of which I have concealed at the back of the drawer in which I intend to place this file. If it is murder, the police will have found a sufficiency of suspects. If it is suicide, I intend that they will be equally well provided for, as I intend to call in to see me this evening – and one by one – as many as possible of those at whom my venom is presently directed, leaving each of them alone for a moment or two in the room with an open sherry decanter from which I will later drink with fatal consequences. It will be quite in character, given the conversations I intend to engineer, for me not to offer them a drink.

Amiss got up and went over to the filing cabinet. A moment later, with a small bottle in his hand, he continued reading his letter.

My intention is to ensure that a small number of people have a bad few days and that the circumstances which have led them to become suspects be brought into the open. I don’t know what you will have heard of the investigation by the time you read this letter. You will certainly be aware of what I have done to bring about the downfall of Nixon and Wells. Unless I am very lucky in the circumstances of my demise you may not know that I have also sought to embarrass my wife, her lover, my son, Richard Parkinson and Archibald Stafford.

You will be wondering first why I should have decided to bring about my own death and second why I should do so with such apparent malevolence. The answer to the first question is that I can see no point whatsoever in going on with a life so arid as mine. As for the second, I consider these people to deserve whatever I can do to them.

I believed, you see, in my youth, that I had qualities that would make it possible for me to make a valuable contribution to society. In adverse circumstances I got to Oxford, and I was successful there. I believed that I could become a political figure of significance and that, through the exercise of energy and ability, I could change the face of this country. That that was a foolish ambition I now recognize. In a society as undisciplined as ours all leaders are powerless. Over the years I have watched the idealism go out of politicians as they come to understand that the realities of democracy make them prisoners of the greed of their electorate. Yet, foolish as I may have been as a young man, at least I had a sense of purpose which made my life seem worthwhile. Perhaps if I had been lucky and obtained political power early I might have adjusted to its constraints and been a useful and well-balanced citizen instead of the sterile and repellent creature I have now become. It is difficult to say. Sometimes I think that frustration and resentment at the direction my life has taken have been paramount in changing my outlook on life – in other words, that I am bitter because – and only because – I see myself as a failure. At other times I see my contempt for the way we run our society as the only intellectually valid point of view. Almost certainly, both these elements are present in some proportion. I have at all times sought a philosophical basis for my position. I have read – almost exclusively and increasingly desperately in recent years – about people who have brought change, and about the beliefs that led them to act as they did.

My researches have been as sterile as my life. I can believe in no religion. What God could so ordain things that our world should be dominated by a species so feeble and vicious? And what philosophy has ever proved to be more than mental masturbation or a failure in practice? Perhaps Nietzsche came closest. He at least recognized that an intelligent élite should control events – not a collection of fools whose only merit is their ability to hoodwink the mindless populace. Even his philosophy, though, did nothing in practice save provide the basis for a distorted justification of the nastiest régimes I have seen in operation in my lifetime. No. I have accepted that it was naïve ever to think that special abilities fit one for the improvement of mankind. They are a curse and not, as I once thought, a blessing. They enable one to see the truth about the human condition, without enabling one to do anything to improve it.