Death of a Salesperson (16 page)

‘Well—that's a funny thing to keep in your kitchen cupboard,' said Brian, smiling down from his young height at the display, and not seeing as Bessie darted forward and plunged the kitchen knife cleanly into his stomach, over and over, fearfully, fatally, until he rolled over on to the floor, his face creased into an expression of agony and inquiry.

• • •

‘It was something we never thought about,' said young Mr Bateson at the Probation Office, shaking his head. ‘I mean, you check out on the offenders, but you wouldn't think you'd need to check out on the old people they're supposed to help.'

‘Incipient paranoia,' said his superior, looking up from the report. ‘Of course, she was released from the Institution as cured, two or three years ago. Still, she had killed the lodger. Got the idea that he was going to rape or murder her, and struck him with a knife, just the same way.'

‘Whoever would have thought?' said Bateson, shaking his head. ‘To me she was just like any other old lady.' He was quiet for a moment, but being a congenitally optimistic young man he shook off his pensiveness and added with a smile: ‘Still, there's one good thing, isn't there? The fact that it was that way round means there's no danger to the rehabilitation programme.'

W
hen the act of love was over, or the act of intimacy, or whatever lying euphemism you cared to call it by, Gordon Chitterling rolled over on to his back, stared at the off-brown ceiling, and sighed. The girl, who had said her name was Jackie (didn't they all?) reached over for her cigarettes on the bedside table, took one as if this was an invariable habit, and lit it.

‘Come a bit quick, didn't you?' she said, in her horrible Midlands accent. ‘You can have another go for an extra twenty. I've nothing fixed till half past eight.'

‘I'm not made of money,' said Gordon irritably. ‘I'm a journalist.'

‘Shouldn't have thought journalists went short,' said Jackie. ‘There's a gentleman on the
Sun
has me regular on expenses.'

‘That doesn't happen with the
Catholic Weekly.'

‘Is that religious?' Jackie asked, blowing out smoke. Gordon immediately regretted having told her.

‘Not really. It means we are catholic in our interests. Wide-ranging,' Gordon lied.

Jackie frowned, trying to understand, but soon gave it up.

‘Fifteen,' she said. ‘I can't say fairer than that, can I? It'll save me the hassle of going out again.'

Gordon raised his eyebrows to heaven. This was beginning to resemble a street bazaar in Cairo. At any moment she'd be throwing in Green Shield stamps. He jumped off the bed and began pulling on his clothes.

‘Some other time,' he said, buttoning his flies. Gordon was one of the few men in London who still had button-up flies. There was an all-or-nothing quality about zips that he
distrusted. ‘Duty calls,' he added, in his tight-lipped way.

He grabbed at his attaché case, but either because he was clumsy, or because he hadn't shut it properly before, it fell open and spilled its contents on to the linoleumed floor.

‘Damn and blast.'

‘There, I told you you shouldn't rush away, all excited like that.'

About as worked up as Calvin Coolidge on a wet Monday, thought Gordon, as he bent down to retrieve his papers. Jackie had idly rolled over on the bed to have a look.

‘Coo, look at that. It's old Mossy. One of my regulars.'

She was pointing to a large, glossy photograph of a distinguished gentleman in his fifties. Gordon snatched it up.

‘You are quite mistaken.'

‘ 'Course I'm not. Comes regular. Real old sport. I think he's something in the world of finance.'

‘You certainly are mistaken. He was a Bishop.'

‘Go on! Well, he never lets on. Dirty old Bish!'

‘I mean you are altogether mistaken in the man,' said Gordon, shutting his briefcase with an irritable click. ‘You must have confused him with another . . . client. Bishop Bannerman was a highly respected figure in the Catholic Church. In addition to which he is dead.'

‘I didn't say he'd been recently.'

‘He was a very fine man. Highly respected. Unimpeachable character. Almost saintly.'

He was shutting the door when Jackie shouted:

‘And he had a strawberry birthmark the shape of Australia on his left shoulder.'

Gordon gave the game away by his pause after he had shut the door. Jackie must have registered that it was a full ten seconds before he clattered down the bare floorboards on the stairs and out into Wardour Street. In fact, he knew she had registered, because he heard her hideous shrill laugh as he descended.

Gordon Chitterling walked through Soho in the direction of Victoria Street, a frown on his rather insignificant face.

The first thing that concerned him was that Bishop Bannerman might become a subject for scandal and concern—or, rather, that
he
might be the cause of his so becoming. If he hadn't spilled that damned attaché case . . . If he hadn't gone to her straight from work. But somehow it was straight after work that he most felt like it.

His profile of Bishop Bannerman, who had died two months previously, was already fully researched and was only waiting to be written up. The outlines of his career were clear. Born in 1930 into a middle-class family in Warwick, where his father had been a chartered accountant, Anthony Bannerman had begun the process of conversion to Catholicism at the early age of seventeen. Many such early enthusiasms were to be put down to the powerful tug of religion working on the impressionable adolescent mind, but Bannerman's had held, and had stuck with him through university, so that by the time he had his BA, his aim of then studying for the priesthood had been accepted both by the church into which he had been received, and by his family.

After that it had been onwards and upwards: exemplary parish priest, much-loved broadcaster on
Lift Up Your Hearts
and
Thought For The Day
, eventually Bishop of West Ham, and strongly tipped for the Westminster job, when or if it became vacant. That was not to be: he had been struck down by a heart attack while attending a conference in Venice . . . Death in Venice . . . Well, at least he had not been
that
way inclined.

Gordon Chitterling let himself into the
Catholic Weekly
offices, and went along to his own neat little cubicle. There was nobody much about, and he switched on his desk light and sat there thinking. Imagine! that much-loved pastor, that fearless campaigner against apartheid, that helper among AIDS sufferers, that tireless worker for peace and
reconciliation in Northern Ireland—to patronize a common prostitute. Regularly. But then, to patronize one regularly would be safer than picking up just anyone off the streets. Safer too to choose an ignorant little tart like Jackie.

Ah well, that was one aspect of the Bishop that would not get into the Profile.

Yet everything else,
everything
, had been so positive, so enthusiastic, so admiring. He opened his bottom drawer, and pulled out the thick sheaf of transcribed interviews. He leafed through them: ‘caring pastor' . . . ‘concerned, committed crusader' . . . It had all seemed of a piece. Here was the interview with his brother, where he'd talked about the birthmark the shape of Australia: ‘He always said it meant he would end up Archbishop of Sydney, but actually he never even went there . . .'

A phrase caught his eye: ‘He was essentially a man of the people, among people, at home with people.' He stopped and read on. It was an interview with Father O'Hara, a parish priest in the borough of Camden. It went on:

‘I once saw him in a pub in my parish. I'd been visiting the wife of the publican. It was the Duck and Whistle—
not
an up-market pub, in fact rather a dubious place, with a lot of dubious characters among the regulars. Bishop Bannerman was in ‘civvies', talking and laughing with Snobby Noakes, a petty crook who'd been in and out of jail. They were completely man-to-man. I even saw money changing hands. I expect he was putting a bet on a horse—something he loved to do now and then. When he saw me he came over, and he talked to me just as naturally as he'd been talking to Snobby. You got the feeling that he'd chat with the Queen in exactly the same way he'd chat with a housewife in a block of council flats. That was the kind of man he was . . .'

It had seemed admirable at the time. The man of God who was at home in all worlds. Now it made Gordon wonder. There was no reason why it should: bishops went
into pubs: bishops talked to criminals. The fact that, apparently, on occasion he used a prostitute did not mean there was anything less than innocent about his talking in a pub with a petty criminal.

And yet . . . and yet . . . That money changing hands. Gordon Chitterling did not like that at all.

The next day, when he sat down to write the Profile, his pen seemed to be weighted with lead. Not that his words were normally winged. Gordon was a reliable, competent journalist rather than an inspired one. Yet it was that very reliability that prevented the clichés of his pen-picture attaining any sort of conviction. Words and phrases like ‘saintly humility', ‘committed campaigner', ‘a man of God who was also a man among men' seemed to snicker back at him from the page. ‘You don't believe that, do you?' they seemed to say. It is not easy to work for a religious newspaper. You have to believe what you write. So much simpler to work for Murdoch.

To light upon a Bishop who broke his vows worried Gordon. His own sins worried him only a little, but then—he had taken no vows as a reporter on the
Catholic Weekly.
He knew he was going to have to go to the Duck and Whistle. What he was going to do when he got there he did not know, but he knew he was going to have to go.

In the event the Duck and Whistle, over the next two or three weeks, came to know him quite well. It was, as Father O'Hara had said, a decidedly down-market pub, with men doing dubious deals in nooks and corner. There was a juke-box, the blare from which was used to cover muttered conversations. The first evening Gordon spent there Snobby Noakes simply breezed in, downed a whisky and water, and breezed out again. Gordon did no more than identify him, from the landlord's greeting, and the talk of other customers. Snobby was a thin, perky character, rather better or more flashily dressed than the others in the bar. These mostly had a look that was decidedly seedy, and as his visits became
regular Gordon—for his was the outlook and talents of the chameleon—came to merge with his surroundings and become seedier: he resurrected an old raincoat, made sure he wore a shirt with frayed cuffs.

His first talk with Snobby was innocuous—about horses and dogs, the kind you bet on, of course. Snobby was man-of-the-world, and rather condescending to Gordon's shabbiness. Snobby had once worked as a bookie's runner, and was adept at the smart disappearance when a big pay-out was due. What Snobby loved, it became apparent in later conversations, was a ‘wheeze'—a smart idea for a quick financial killing. Any other kind of killing was way outside his territory, for his heroes were shysters and con men. Where others might hero-worship Cromwell or Napoleon, Snobby saved his admiration for an Horatio Bottomley or a Maundy Gregory.

Gordon he accepted as a small-time con artist, rather on his own level, though less prosperous. ‘Though you've got a touch of class in the voice,' he once said, flatteringly. ‘You could sell encyclopædias, you could.'

‘The best cons,' Snobby would say expansively over a drink, especially if Gordon bought it for him, ‘are the simple cons. Look at the South Sea Bubble. Learnt about that at school—always stayed with me. Simple, effective, beautiful!'

Gordon nodded wisely. He was never quite sure when Snobby was being humorous. Snobby had a sense of humour, where Gordon had very little.

‘The other thing about your simple con is, it's them that clean up the biggest,' Snobby went on. ‘Take the bloke that thought up the wheeze that Venice is sinking. Brilliant. He must have pulled in millions over the years.'

‘You're not suggesting Lord Norwich—'

‘Whoever he was. Some smart little Mafia con I'd've thought. A real little beauty. Because bleedin' Venice isn't sinking, any more than Southend is. All high and dry and
dandy. Mind you the bloke who thought of building it there in the first place was something of an artist too. Did you ever see a more obvious tourist trap? A man ahead of his time he must have been.'

Snobby winked. Quite unprompted by Gordon, the conversation had begun to take a turn he liked.

‘You seem taken with Venice,' he said casually.

‘Oh, I was. Lovely little place. Only drawback that I could see was you couldn't do a good snatch there, because the getaway presents problems.'

‘Been there often?'

‘Just the once. A church conference.'

Gordon's heart rose.

‘Well!' he said. ‘I wouldn't have thought of you as a Christian.'

Snobby laughed.

‘That's why I was there, though. The Fourth Ecumenical Conference. You know: Catholic and C. of E. clergymen holding hands in gondolas.
That
was a right occasion. Tell you about it some day.'

He didn't, though, not over the next two evenings spent chewing over the great cons, past and present. In the end Gordon had the brainwave of bringing the conversation round to clergymen.

‘I don't know about you,' he said, with the air of long and disreputable experience, ‘but I never found there was much to be got out of the clergy. They're supposed to be so bloody other-worldly, but somehow there's never anything much to be got there. Maybe they're too hard up.'

Snobby's face assumed a relishing smile.