A Scandal in Belgravia (14 page)

“Sad life,” I said.

“Don't see what's sad about it.”

It was in fact the man propping up the bar who spoke—a man just next to me, watery-eyed and droopy moustached. I put him down immediately as the resident whinger: the no-one's-had-a-harder-deal-than-I-have type. But he was sixty or so—the right age for my purposes. He went on, working himself up: “Her husband's got a job, hasn't he? Lost his old one, just like me, but he landed on his feet. I got the push when
I was sixty. Sixty! You try getting a job when you're that age. They're in clover, the Nichollses, mate.”

“I was thinking of the brother,” I said.

“Oh, you're a friend of Andy's, eh?”

It was said with an incipient leer. He really was a very unpleasant old man.

“No, I'm afraid I've never met him.”

“You're better off not meeting a shirt-lifter like that one. Mind you, I was at school with him and nobody never suspected he was a pooftah, not then. I expect it was these London queers as got to him. Anyway, I don't see what's tragic about Andy Forbes. He got away with murder, didn't he? Did that bloke in, and then got clean off. Them days he could have been strung up, 'stead of living the life of Larry in America.”

“I was thinking of it from his sister's point of view. She was obviously very fond of him.”

“Well, she goes to see him, doesn't she? It's no different from if he'd emigrated to Orstralia. Better, because it's nearer and nicer. I tell you, mate, I wish I had a relative in America who'd pay for me to swan off on holiday there.”

“Ah yes, she said she did once go there.”

“Once? She goes there every two or three years. Sometimes Les goes with her, sometimes one or two of the children.
He's
fallen on his feet, that's for sure.”

“Andy? But I thought he was dead.”

I didn't, but I thought it as well to stick to the official line. The man shrugged.

“First I've heard of it if so. Mavis was out there last year, so it'd have to be recent if he is. Mind you, Mavis Nicholls would never say.”

“She doesn't talk about her brother round here?”

“ 'Course she doesn't. Use your loaf, mate. Would you talk about him if you had a pooftah brother who'd killed his nancy friend? According to her she goes to visit a cousin. Doesn't fool anyone. Did you ever hear of a cousin as generous as that? No,
it's Andy, and whatever he's doing he's doing well out of it. Don't tell me he's had a sad life, nor her either. They don't know the meaning of the word trouble.”

Before he could define it for me, with examples drawn from his own experience I hurried in with: “Still, he can't come back to this country.”

“Who'd bleedin' want to?”

He had pressed in me the button marked “politician,” and I was about to launch myself into a spiel about the transformation we have wrought in this country's fortunes and so on and so on, when I realized where I was and what I was doing and held back.

“Any idea what he does in America?” I asked.

“Search me, mate.”

“Or where he lives?”

“No idea. She's very cagey about that, plays her cards close to her chest. That makes it even more sure it's Andy she visits. She says they travel around when they're there.”

“No specific towns?”

“Wouldn't mean much to me if they'd said. I couldn't tell Oklahoma from New Orleans. They have mentioned things they've been to. . . .”

“What sort of things?”

“Empire State Building, Space Museum, Golden Gate, that sort of thing.”

New York, Washington, San Francisco. That wasn't going to help much. My companion was off on his grievance.

“It's obvious he's not wanting for the ready, isn't it? Standing them holidays like that. A pooftah kills his boyfriend, and that's how he ends up. Talk about luck—some people scoop the pool.”

I bought him a drink and took my leave. I'd had enough whingers in my constituency surgeries to last me a lifetime.

O
n the train back to London, after one of those hotel breakfasts where you help yourself to a selection of near-cold victuals, I did some thinking. My first conclusion was that Andrew Forbes is still alive. If he were dead, why would his sister give the date of his death as 1988 when she had apparently visited him in 1989? Of course it was just possible that she had visited his widow and children, but I remembered her saying about the letters he wrote home: “He still—right up to the time he died—sent them to her.” To me that seemed an odd, if cleverly improvised, formulation. I believe the sentence started out as “He still sends them to her,” and was hurriedly modified.

There had been another place where she had pulled herself up. That was also when she was talking about letters from America. She had said that the police would be suspicious of them
especially
with his—and at that point she had changed tack and said something feeble about his being on the run. I felt sure that she had been going to say something like “especially with his name on it having the same initials”—or the same initials in reverse, or something of that sort. People who have to choose false names for themselves are notoriously prone to choosing ones which have some connection with the original ones, as if that original name were part of their personality which they can not bear entirely to obliterate. There had never been any
suggestion that Andrew Forbes was a man of any imagination, and I guessed this was what he had done. Of course he didn't have to put any name on the envelope, but aerogramme forms and most American airmail envelopes have a special place for the sender's name and address, and an unsophisticated person might take it to be obligatory to write it. So he had sent the letters to friends down the road, and later to his married niece.

It seemed to me, now that I was getting a fuller view of the murder and its investigation, that the police had not made any great effort in this case. Oh—it was not surprising that by now the thing was as dead as a dodo: that would be normal, for all the police cant about never closing a file on an unsolved case. But
at the time
 . . . It would surely have been a simple enough matter to get a look at the incoming mail of the Forbes family and their closest associates. I had a sense of the police, once they had decided the murderer was Andy Forbes and that he had left the country, washing their hands of the case. The interesting question was why? Was it a feeling that having to live abroad rather than wonderful old England was punishment enough for the poor begger? Was it a feeling that this was a quarrel between two queers, just what one would expect, and who cared? That would have been pretty characteristic of some police attitudes at the time, though a vengeful itch for persecution was a more common one.

Or was it political pressure?

Had there come down from on high a message—doubtless a whispered confidence from someone at the Home Office—a message which in cultured, confident tones said: well, the case was solved, wasn't it? Was there anything to be gained by pursuing this young thug any further? It would only cause a lot of added grief and embarrassment to the victim's highly respected family . . . and so on. The unspoken subtext being: to his highly respected family who, quite by chance, happened to be represented in the government of the time. I do know how these things work. The Macmillan government was
conscious of the danger of scandal long before the Profumo affair. There was a whopping one very close to the Prime Minister himself, after all.

I rather suspected that this was it; that if there was a lack of zeal among policemen in the pursuit of Andrew Forbes, it was because of a few whispered words from on high.

So I concluded provisionally that Andy Forbes is still alive and well and living in—where? Not Santiago anyway. I had my own ideas about that, and I was willing to bet that when I checked up in my atlas on my return home I would not find any Santiago in the U.S.

I turned out to be half right. There was no Santiago there, but there was, I found—squinting, even with my reading glasses, at the horribly small print of the
Times Atlas's
index—some Santiago Mountains in Texas, and a Santiago Park in California. Mrs. Nicholls had mentioned taking the children to Disneyland, not Disneyworld, which probably indicated the West coast, though in view of other places they apparently told people they had visited that was not conclusive. Still, the state of California had acted as a magnet, in the decades since the war, to a host of way-outs and undesirables, as well as to some very desirables indeed, so my attention kept coming back to the West. Santiago Park was to the South of Santa Ana, apparently also a mountainous area. Whether Andrew Forbes had ever lived there, or his sister had ever visited it, I did not know. What I did think was that Mavis Nicholls had begun inadvertently to say the name of the place where her brother had lived, maybe still did live, and that she—an unpractised liar, lying for love—had then changed it for another town whose name was very close in sound. I believed that the place that she had just stopped herself from naming was San Diego.

I wondered about San Diego. I knew from my Defence Ministry days, '79 to '80, that it was very much a naval town, with a yachting fraternity well to the fore. This might mean that there was quite a distinct British community there. That
might make things easier for me—or more difficult, if Andy Forbes was a member in good standing, and they clammed up.

I rang Reggie's home in Los Angeles tonight, but I miscalculated the time again, and got only the answering machine. I loathe those things, like all right-minded people, but against my better judgment I put the phone down, got my thoughts together, and then rang his number again.

“Reggie,” I said when the recorded message finished, “get me a good private detective and tell him I want him to find this man: his original name was Andrew Forbes, his current name will either have the initials A. F. or F. A. He has an American wife, probably called Grace, or possibly Greta, and at least two children. He works in the electrical business and he lives in the San Diego area. I suggest the British community there might be a help, if they're approached tactfully. Love to Helen and little . . . Howard.”

Better not to talk to Reggie. He'd probably want to know how much of the above information was factual, and how much based on guesswork. I felt a load had lightened on my shoulders, and I was glad not to have my optimism shattered. I went down to dinner and chatted with Jeremy about the City (a subject that now bores me inexpressibly) with excellent grace.

• • •

Today I went to morning service in Rochester Cathedral.

I have to admit that these days I am only an occasional churchgoer. That may seem like hypocrisy, since all the time I was a constituency MP I was a pretty regular attender, and this influenced two of my children: both the twins, Fiona and Christopher, are very committed Christians, and inclined to regard me as a backslider. Very well then—I am a backslider and a hypocrite.

I did not ask Jeremy to come with me. I doubt if he has been inside a place of worship since he left school.

As a prelude to going to Rochester, which I knew I would be doing sooner or later, I have taken up
Edwin Drood.
I had in any case given up
Philip
—or it had given up me: its wittering verbosity after a time went straight in one ear and out the other, leaving not a wrack behind.
Drood
is no masterpiece, but it is much more engaging and it gives an added point to my visit, and an excuse for it which I thought might come in useful.

After a good breakfast cooked by Nina I drove down there. Sunday is the only day when driving is any pleasure in the London area these days. The weather was fine, and I enjoyed pottering around the High Street, the gate-house, and the close, where the Dean enquired after Mr. Jasper's nephew. I had taken the precaution of ringing the Diocesan secretariat and ascertaining that the Archbishop of Canterbury's special adviser on urban affairs would be conducting the service that Sunday. A quarter of an hour before it was due to begin I went into the wonderful old building and found a place towards the high altar. Uncharacteristically I sat on the aisle, directly in view of the pulpit. I wanted to be noticed.

I tried not to mock the service of worship by treating it purely as a means of observing the Archbishop's special adviser. When he first came in I was genuinely at prayer, asking for guidance in my public and personal life. Some minutes later I got an excellent view of Lawrence Cornwallis in profile: it was an impressive one—regular, fine-drawn, ascetic, set on a tall, lean body. He had a distinguished presence, yet he gave off no impression of arrogance or intolerance. Rochester—sleepy, self-satisfied Rochester, as Dickens saw it—had been lucky to get such a man, even if it presumably only got a marginal amount of his time and attention. Here was one of the Great and Good that one did not have to be cynical about. Such, at any rate, were my first impressions.

The service he conducted veered in the direction of High—shall
we say in political terms fifteen to twenty degrees right of centre? His sermon was short, trenchant, relevant, and beautifully spoken. It was at the end of the sermon that he noticed me. I could see that he recognised me, as I always know when people recognise me in the street—a mere flicker of the eyelid will tell me. In the past I would flash a politician's smile when this happened. Now I no longer do. I saw Lawrence Cornwallis later in the service cast another look in my direction. I wondered about his position in Rochester, and whether he would shake hands and mingle after the service. I thought he probably would, and almost certainly would today—not out of any desire to fawn over a politician, but from a sort of courtesy: his views might be radical, but I suspected his personal standards were old-fashioned. A visitor of some note should be singled out and welcomed. At the end of the service I lingered a little, savouring the spaces through which John Jasper's voice had echoed, at least in Dickens's imagination. Then I went out with the last of the congregation.