A Scandal in Belgravia (12 page)

“Have you any idea how many radio and television stations there are in this country? Have you any idea how many
different industries employ electricians? You've got to give the man something, for Christ's sake.”

“I used to go to my civil servants with a question and they'd come up with an answer. I didn't have to tell them what the answer was first.”

“I bet you did. And I bet the answer they came up with was a plausible lie that you could get away with in the Commons. Probably some fiddled statistic.”

My son feels strongly about the misuse of statistics, though I tell him that a statistical lie is morally no worse than all the other sorts of lie that politicians of all parties tell from time to time.

“Well,” I said, a little shamefacedly, “what is the sort of information you think I should try to come up with?”

“A place where he might have settled, the branch of electrical work he might have gone into, some idea of the sort of direction he might have gone in when choosing his name, that sort of thing.”

“Really, one might as well forget the private detective if I'm to do most of his work for him,” I grumbled. “But I'll see what I can do. Love to Helen. Give . . . Howard a hug from me.”

“When are you coming out to see him?”

“You never know. It might be sooner than you expect, if the private eye comes up with anything.”

I put down the phone and tried to settle to a little work on the memoirs, always with the problem of how to get a lead on Andrew Forbes jigging around in the back of my mind. Though the writing of the book is becoming much easier, it is really rather boring, and if it is boring to me, the subject, how much more boring is it likely to be to the reader? I feel it is fortunate that it already has a publisher, and one who has paid me an advance, otherwise it might land up as an unpublished manuscript in the archives of Conservative Central Office. Finally I called it a day, took up the slip on which Sutcliffe had
written Andrew Forbes' home address in the fifties, and dialled Directory Enquiries.

“What town?”

“Nottingham.”

“What name?”

“It's not a name, it's an address: 35 Exhibition Road.”

“Sorry, we have to have a name.”

“Try Forbes.”

Almost immediately, such are the marvels of modern technology, the answer came back: “Sorry, no Forbes at that address.”

So, no joy. Hardly surprising. Still, I decided to put that and the problem of the two friends to Elspeth Honeybourne, who was due in the morning. However, to forestall one of her well-concealed glances of pity at my incompetence I took the precaution of getting down
Who's Who.
There was no entry for Gerald Fraser-Hymes, but under Lawrence Cornwallis I struck lucky:

Cornwallis, Lawrence Edward: b. 20 June 1930; Educ. Harrow; Magdalene College Cambridge; Slough Theological College. Curate of St. Mary's, Kingston-upon-Hull . . .

And so on through various pastoral appointments and better until his (presumably) present post: “1985 Archbishop of Canterbury's special adviser on urban affairs, attached to Rochester Cathedral.”

The entry went on to detail the various Royal Commissions he had sat on, the public enquiries and the prestigious appointments in the seventies that had left his name impressed on my mind as one of the Great and Good. He had been less active in recent years, of course, because the Prime Minister who was my boss did not love the Great and Good, and the feeling
was returned. Anyway, there he was. He named his hobbies as opera and fell-climbing.

I was glad I'd thought to do this elementary piece of research, because Elspeth, when she came with a great bundle of stuff about my activities during the miners' strike and the great shutdown of '73-'74 (God how lacklustre my political career seems, when I have to go through it in detail!), was briskly dismissive about the other problems.

“We can try old telephone directories for the Forbes problem—if their son was only twenty-four in 1956 they probably lived for some time after that. Most people are on the telephone at some period of their lives, especially when they're getting old. Plenty of fallback possibilities if that doesn't work. Now, this other chap, Gerald Fraser-Hymes: you've no information of any sort about him? No school, career, parents? Nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Well, we'll try trade directories, school lists, and so on. Timothy Wycliffe's friends would generally have been of the old-school type, I suppose?”

“No—no, I really don't think that was the case. All across the board I'd have said.”

“Well, with a name like Fraser-Hymes I don't think I'd try the Battersea Comprehensive first off. Leave it to me. I expect I'll come up with something.”

Really she should have been a private detective. Though I suppose the things she works on are a lot more interesting than the things most private detectives work on.

She rang a few hours later with a number. She said that Forbes, F., had been listed at 35 Exhibition Road for nearly twenty-five years, from 1955 to 1979. Presumably he or she had either died or sold the house, but it could be they could no longer afford the expense of a telephone, and it could be that the present occupant, if it was not the parents themselves, would
know something of the family. It seemed worth a try, Elspeth said, and I agreed.

I gave some thought to how to approach the tenant of 35 Exhibition Road, but I encountered the usual problems of area code changes and extra numbers to insert, so that by the time I got through I was flustered and merely improvising.

“Three-five-seven, six-one-four.”

The voice was rich—a light contralto with more overtones of country than of city.

“Oh hello, I wonder if you could help me—it's Mrs.—?”

“Nicholls. Mavis Nicholls. And I should tell you that if you're selling double-glazing—”

“No, no. Nothing of that kind. I'm trying to trace a family that used to live at 35 Exhibition Road. That is your address, isn't it?”

“Ye-es.”

“The family's name was Forbes . . .” There was no response from the other end, not even audible breathing, and I floundered on. “The initial was F. I wondered if you bought the house from them.”

After a time I got a response.

“What exactly do you want to contact the family for, Mr., er . . . ?”

“Proctor. Peter Proctor. Well, it's in connection with a book I'm writing—”

“I can't see why anyone would write a book about our family. No call to do that.”

“Ah—so you're a member of the family?”

There was a definite hesitation, then she said reluctantly: “Yes, I'm the daughter. Fred Forbes was my dad.”

“And he's dead?”

“Died ten years ago—no, eleven. Mum had gone the year before. I came in for the house, so we moved here.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Nicholls. Now, the person I'm interested in wasn't your father, but your brother.” I had put it too baldly.
Again there was absolute silence. I added: “Your brother Andrew.”

“I heard you. . . . Haven't I heard your voice before somewhere? And your name?”

“Maybe. I used to be in politics.”

“I don't want anything to do with politicians! We've had enough trouble with them!”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“If you know about Andy you should know that. Wasn't that Timothy Wycliffe a politician?”

“Well, no: he was a civil servant actually.”

“Same thing as far as I can see. It's all the same mob. And I do know his father was a cabinet minister, because the police went on about it at the time.”

“Yes, that is true. . . . Mrs. Nicholls, please believe that I don't mean your brother any harm—”

“There's no way you can harm him now. He's dead.”

She said it rather quickly, as if she'd suddenly decided to say it. Wouldn't it have been more natural if she had told me that when his name first came up? I decided to reserve judgment as to whether or not it was true.

“Again, I'm sorry. But truly I mean no harm to his memory. The fact is, as I said, I'm a politician, or was, and I'm writing my memoirs. I've become fascinated by Timothy Wycliffe's death. He was a friend of mine, you see—”

“Oh yes?” Definite access of suspicion.

“Not in that way. More of a colleague. We worked together at the Foreign Office. I should tell you that the only person I've talked to who had met your brother liked him, and reports from his landlady and so on say what a pleasant young man he was.”

If that sounds condescending, she didn't take it so.

“Well that's nothing but the truth. Everyone liked our Andy.”

“So there's no question at all of my wanting to blacken his
memory, or anything of that kind. I'm really interested in . . . well, how it happened. So I'd like to talk about him, what sort of a person he was, how he came to . . .”

I paused, not knowing how to put it, and she immediately broke in with “He didn't kill him!”

“I didn't say he did. We both know that it never came to a trial . . .”

“That's right. He's innocent until proved guilty. That's British law, that is.”

“That's right. But as I say, I'd like to talk to you about what you know—”

“I don't know much. Only what I heard. I was here in Nottingham at the time.”

“All the same, I'd be interested to hear about your brother. As I'm going to be in the area next Monday I wondered if I could call on you.”

She had obviously been expecting this, but still there was a long pause.

“Would that be evening? After dark?”

“Well, yes, it could be, if that suited you.”

“I mean, you're known, aren't you?”

“Well, just a little. People sometimes recognise me in the street.”

“No offence, it's just that the neighbours might see you and ask questions. We've had our fill of neighbours and their questions in our time, I can tell you!”

“Yes, I can imagine that. Well, could we say Monday at eight?”

There was another pause before she finally took the plunge.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose that'd be all right.”

T
he business that took me up to Derbyshire yesterday was connected with IMC, the computer firm of which I am a director. I took on a few directorships after I left government and parliament—just enough to ensure I could keep up the house in Barkiston Gardens and not so many as to interfere with work on the memoirs (this was when I was still hopeful of producing something somebody might want to read). My duties with the firm are largely ceremonial, and indeed it was merely a lunch I went up for—I represented the parent company. It was sufficiently tedious, but I had done my directorial duty by the late afternoon. I explored Derby, found it a handsome city, and then took the train to Nottingham as soon as the rush hour had died down.

I was still early for my appointment with Mrs. Nicholls. I checked into my hotel, had a quick shower, then took a taxi. The driver wanted to talk about football, and Nottingham Forest's fortunes. I made the sort of noises I used to make in Cabinet. I asked him to put me off at the end of Exhibition Road. Then I walked down it in the gathering gloom, going up little side streets, round blocks, soaking up the atmosphere and trying to get an idea of a childhood spent in this area. My own childhood had been spent among substantial detached houses in a tree-lined residential area—all rather stuffy and “let's keep
ourselves to ourselves.” The houses in Exhibition Road were Victorian terraced houses of red brick, solidly built, with two good-sized rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor (or so I imagined from what I could see), two bedrooms on the second, and a roomy attic, which most of the houses had converted into childrens' bedrooms, to judge by the modern dormer windows let into the roofs. There were many worse places to live—most modern semis for a start, not to mention the hideous modern estates put up by mass-market building firms. Here the walls would be thick, the ceilings high, the kitchen warm, and the centre of family life. There were corner shops, a pub called the Duke of York, and the occasional family butcher, baker, and greengrocer, holding on still against the odds, like so many small businesses. There were no gardens to speak of, though, and only a rather scrubby patch of open land to play on. Houses such as those on Exhibition Road are beginning to seem desirable now—perhaps one more consequence of the Prince of Wales's evangelism. Forty years ago they would have been much less so: certainly this can never have been a prestige address.

By the time I went up to the door of number thirty-five there was little light left, and no neighbours at windows. Through the windows where the curtains were left undrawn I could see televisions on—“Coronation Street,” probably, or the “Holiday Programme.” The door was answered very quickly—doubtless Mavis Nicholls had been hovering in the hall.

“Oh, hello, Mr. . . . er, Proctor, wasn't it? Come in. Now I can see your face I do remember you from the television.”

She was distinctly nervous, and talked about me as if I had been host on some discontinued game show. She knew my voice and my face, but my name meant nothing to her, and I was sure she could never have named any Cabinet post I had held. Sobering, that. Fame in the television age! She ushered me inside and into the front room, where a gas fire was burning and cups and plates of biscuits had been set out on the table.

“Would you like a cup of tea? I'm just making a pot. Or would you prefer coffee?”

“Tea would be fine.”

She bustled off towards the kitchen, and I looked around. Elderly but comfortable furniture of the usual deplorable British design. All post-Andrew, no doubt. But a homely, lived-in room, which was not always true of “best” rooms.