A Coat of Varnish (28 page)

Humphrey had done what Frank Briers asked, with nothing sharp-edged emerging, he thought. True, it was clear that Tom Thirkill hadn’t done it; but Humphrey had never believed that he had and was sure that Briers had never believed it, either. There was a small interval of time later, which others got interested in; but Humphrey disregarded that, too.

Still, Tom Thirkill’s movements that night had a certain grotesque fascination of their own. What had he been up to? Humphrey had no doubt by now that old Higgs knew. Humphrey speculated on a familiar problem of former days: how could conspicuous persons meet inconspicuously? Once, in his official life, he had been asked to find a solution, and had dismally failed. There wasn’t a solution. Persons who had never tried it often had great faith in disguises. That was brilliant if, as in Elizabethan plays, you could rely on putting on a wig and not being recognised by your own wife.

It would be impossible – Humphrey found the prospect diverting – for a man like Thirkill to hide for a couple of weeks in any sizeable town in the Western world. On the other hand, his clandestine manoeuvres did appear, at least for one night, to have succeeded. They didn’t deserve to have succeeded. Any decent agent would have been ashamed of them. And yet, Humphrey had seen nothing in the Press, and it seemed certain that Thirkill had been evading journalists. As to why, Humphrey had a vague idea or guess. It had all the flavour of some negotiation, with Thirkill being used as a front man. Probably the negotiations had been initiated on this side. It was deceptive that the Americans had sent a big team: the Americans always negotiated in big teams. Whether this negotiation was political or not, creditable or discreditable, semi-official, para-official, or simply a deal, Humphrey couldn’t know. He had guessed a lot; he thought he knew a little; but he didn’t know anything like all.

So he was surprised as much as others, when a few days after he had made his enquiries about Tom Thirkill he saw the name on the front page of
The Times
. He had passed on his results, such as they were, to Frank Briers. After that, Thirkill had gone out of his mind. Now he came back.

Promotion for Mr Thomas Thirkill.

It is announced from 10 Downing Street that Mr Thomas Thirkill, Labour MP for Leicester East, has been appointed an additional Financial Secretary to the Treasury. He will not at present have a seat in the Cabinet, but will have direct access to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He will have special responsibility for international financial exchanges.

That was the end of the announcement. The newspaper put in its own gloss:

Mr Thirkill is an acknowledged expert on the international money market, and has added to his reputation by his recent series of speeches in the Commons and outside. Mr Thirkill is known to be a leading figure on the right wing of the Labour Party, and first indications are that the appointment will not be popular on the left. Reactions of major spokesmen of the Tribune group were – ‘this is a sign that the Government are selling out’ and ‘Thirkill will see that they break all the promises they haven’t already broken in the manifesto’.

Official statements had a cryptic eloquence of their own. This one, saying that Tom Thirkill wouldn’t have a seat in the Cabinet, meant that he would have one soon. He had almost certainly bargained and exacted the price. His bargaining position must be strong, Humphrey thought. He must have been used as an emissary in the summer’s dealings with the world financial institutions, not only the IMF – used as an emissary but, it now appeared, as something more.

The gossip about Tom Thirkill had for months been subsiding. His lawyers had done their job. Senior ministers must be well assured.

Nevertheless, they were taking a risk. Humphrey didn’t like being nagged by the meaner emotions, but he was feeling them. This was too unfair to be borne, he was thinking, just as Kate had cried on hearing of Lady Ashbrook’s death. Only a fool expected life not to be unfair, said the detached side of Humphrey. That was a feeble comfort. Humphrey was thinking, of all the people he knew, most were more tolerable than Tom Thirkill, most were more honest with themselves, and nearly all were more balanced. Thirkill’s kind of derangement, one would have thought, ought to have been a handicap, but it seemed to have proved a strength. Quite a few of Humphrey’s acquaintances were cleverer than Thirkill, and some much abler. None, he had to admit, had his flair for money.

Unfair, unfair. Thirkill issued a statement that afternoon, saying that he would not have accepted the position unless he had felt it was his duty to the country and to his party. He had no ambitions but to help the country out of a dangerous patch. The pound should not be allowed to sink farther. It had just reached its lowest level. It would take a long haul to restore confidence, but it could be done. We had to re-establish sound money. But we all had to form ranks and pull together, that was all. We had to build a spring-board for prosperity.

He might be something of a film star, he might have a flair for money, thought Humphrey resentfully, but he wrote with his feet. Others cared less about that deficiency. On the exchanges that same afternoon there was a movement. Against the dollar, the pound rose twenty cents.

By this time, Briers had told Humphrey all that the police had discovered about Lady Ashbrook’s finances. They had gone on false trails, they had made mistakes, they couldn’t find any connection with what they had suspected of Loseby and Susan. When they had convinced themselves that Loseby’s account of that night was unbreakable, they concentrated on her. It could have been a collaboration, though no one had yet imagined any reason why.

From the beginning, certainly, after the disclosure of the will, they had been sifting out how Lady Ashbrook contrived to live. The will had set them back, but then Flamson, followed by young detectives more vocal than he was, had insisted that it was altogether too tidy. That was no credit to Briers himself. With Humphrey, now Briers was telling all, he took a leader’s pleasure in pointing out where his lads had been clever. He also took a sardonic pleasure in pointing out where he himself had been dense. It was George Flamson, chiefly, though not alone, who had stuck to it. George Flamson looked like a simple puce-cheeked country boy. Actually, he wasn’t a country boy: his father was a minor pithead official on one of the Midland coalfields. He might have been simple, but he had a sense of fact.

As Humphrey listened, he thought that he also had been obtuse: how dim-witted could one be? On the facts known, Lady Ashbrook couldn’t have lived as she did. Nor could her grandson. He was a little in debt, but very little. Brother officers like Douglas Gimson were well off, and Loseby lived up to their standards. He couldn’t have done that on his pay.

The explanation was not complete, and was still emerging in bits and pieces. Humphrey heard it in a more ordered fashion than the detectives collected it, and so might have found it less bewildering or more obvious than at first sight. As to Lady Ashbrook’s sources of income, they were now established. She had a trifle from her investments. She had an annuity of £1500. She had her old-age pension. Some of the grand and rich were too lofty to take their pensions, but not many. Lady Ashbrook was not among them. There was no other income on which she had paid tax. From what Flamson and colleagues at the Yard could identify, she had about enough to pay her rates, heating and lighting, and perhaps the £15 a week she paid to Maria, the cleaner. The bills for rates and the rest, and her minute income tax, she paid by cheques on Coutts Bank.

Then what? She existed parsimoniously in food and drink, but it cost something. She still bought good clothes, and frequently, for a woman of her age. A smart hairdresser came to her house once a week. She might be mean, but it seemed that she didn’t stint herself of what she had thought appropriate in her days of fashion. All those accounts, and Maria’s wages, were paid in notes.

Where did the money come from? Occasionally, she drew sums from her bank, but only small ones. This expenditure on herself, year after year, was hard to compute, but couldn’t have been less than £2000 a year, and probably much more. Further, there were indications – not yet definite – that she passed quite large tips to her grandson.

For weeks, the police could find no answer. They searched among her old acquaintances. A good many were rich and could have helped her. Could even have helped her in some convoluted fashion devised to avoid taxation – for that some experts at Scotland Yard, used to fiscal dodges, were already looking. No sign anywhere. Then what might have seemed like a fluke or an inspired guess broke through. It was neither. It was the apparatus grinding on. The detectives pored over names of her contacts. In the will which had been superseded by her final one, there was a bequest and a message of thanks to Desmond O’Brien, at a Wall Street address. Who was he? The information was easy to gather. He was a well-known New York lawyer, head of a reputable firm, the only oddity of which was that all the partners were Catholics. He had died, nearly eighty, in 1974.

More than being a successful lawyer, he was better known as an influence behind the scenes in the Democratic Party. For many years he had been one of the powers in the New Jersey democratic machine, and confidant of presidents. He was said to be in politics one of the toughest of operators. In private, on the other hand, he had a reputation for benevolence and propriety. He was a bachelor, pious, believing and practising. He had a famous collection of pottery. As an Irish Catholic who was on good terms with English politicians, during the last war the White House used him as a high-powered messenger between Washington, London, Dublin.

At the same time, the Ashbrooks had been in Washington, as they were again during the second Churchill government. It was common knowledge there that they had been close friends of Desmond O’Brien. He lived an ascetic life, apart from whisky, but he liked escorting beautiful women. It was also possible that he had an amiable weakness for the high-born. When Lord Ashbrook died, the attachment between the other two went on without a break – innocent, so the worldly said, which must have been a change for Lady Ashbrook, while the less worldly were gossiping about the chances of a marriage. O’Brien wrote her letters, telephoned her across the ocean and, while he was still able-bodied enough to travel, visited her in London.

Those bits of information had been extracted from his office by the FBI, who had been invoked by Scotland Yard officers in New York. The FBI couldn’t extract much more. O’Brien’s office was drilled to secrecy. But it was discovered, though through other sources, that, quite early in their friendship, she had transferred her holdings in American securities into O’Brien’s name. Very nice of her, said a time-worn FBI executive, trying to keep the wolf from the door of a very rich man. Further, the O’Brien office volunteered that, among the private funds handled by his firm, there was one which he dealt with strictly by himself. It wasn’t a large one, perhaps two hundred thousand dollars, though that was nothing but a guess.

In September, that was the extent of the hard evidence. There was not a word on paper. When, a little later, Briers told Humphrey the history as the detectives knew it, Humphrey said that old O’Brien must have known all the rules of security. With his career in machine politics, it would have been strange if he hadn’t. On what they now knew, the police were able to construct various kinds of scenario. The one which survived was the simplest. They had to assume that O’Brien and Lady Ashbrook were acting with unqualified trust in each other. (The very best security, said Humphrey, if you had chosen the right person.) She had made over the major part of her capital to him – a tiny amount by O’Brien’s standards, no doubt, one Yard estimate being £50,000–£60,000. In England, it was still less than wiseacres would have expected; but it was not totally unbelievable, as after death her estate had seemed.

It was then arranged that O’Brien should get money to her in England at appropriate intervals. O’Brien was doing nothing illegal, or even improper. An American citizen could acquire any amount of English currency and give it away in England. It was conceivable that the dividends on the securities were allowed to accumulate, and not declared on either side of the Atlantic. That was not resolved. Those who knew O’Brien thought it more likely that he paid the tax himself, and even supplemented the fund. He could well have afforded to, and he liked doing good turns in secret.

Lady Ashbrook was, of course, evading income tax. Not on a big scale, but as much as she could arrange. What may have given her more satisfaction, she was also evading death duties. It seemed unrealistic that people should care so bitterly about what happened to their money after they died. Perhaps it was another defiance of mortality.

In the scenario, all was as simple as arrangements could be. O’Brien brought packets of notes in person, or else sent them in a small parcel. The simpler, the safer. That was another rule for secret operations. Lady Ashbrook duly received about £3000 a year – this was the police guess, but it might have been out by a sizeable factor. This was partly from the income on capital, partly through slices of the capital itself, which was to be allowed to decline.

No one but the two of them could know, but transactions seemed to have worked smoothly enough – so long as they were both healthy and mobile.

Briers, who hadn’t been involved at first hand, nothing like so closely as with Loseby and Susan, made one intervention himself. It was a curious one. He asked for an interview with Tom Thirkill, just after the ministerial post had been announced. Briers wanted another opinion, from someone who was supposed to know everything about financial sharp practice; but his real reason was that he might pick up a scrap of news about Susan, where he was still searching.

There he drew a complete blank. Thirkill received him with the overwhelming heartiness of a politician on the rise. Boisterous jokes, one suspicious professional to another, Thirkill suggesting that the police might not be planning to run him in this time. The Ashbrook murder, the police would get into trouble if they didn’t charge someone soon. ‘The Press are after you, Frank. We all know what that is like. They’ll be cutting my throat if I don’t pull something out of the bag. Don’t you worry, this government is going to stagger on.’ Actually, Thirkill, among the blague and the bluffness, Christian names and all, sounded less persecuted than he had been, and this was the bugle-call of his own kind of defiant confidence. But he had nothing to say about the murder, or about his daughter and her marriage.