A Murder in Mayfair (10 page)

“There was a fair bit of TV coverage when I won the by-election in '93.”

“Not that interested in politics these days. Sometimes don't see the news on television for days at a time or a newspaper either.” He looked at me. “But I'm more interested in how
you
got on to
me.
I'm a person of the utmost obscurity.”

“Except for your parentage,” I ventured. His expression told me he had expected this, and was almost relieved it had come out into the open.

“Except for that,” he said, nodding. “Of course people around here know who I am. I can't pretend they don't talk about it, because I suspect they do. That's just human nature. But not to me. They don't talk about it to me. So it isn't a factor of any importance in my life.”

“What about when you stood for Wellingborough Council?”

He grimaced.

“My childish peccadillo. Why on earth did I bother? If people knew about my father they made nothing of it during the election, and it never got into the local paper. It's a very old scandal now.”

“That's true. People had to jog my memory as to what actually happened,” I conceded.

“People?” He raised his eyebrow. “You haven't told me how you got on to me. Somehow I assume it's recent, otherwise you would have tried to make contact before.”

“It's recent. The day I got my job at the Education Department I had a postcard pushed through my door. It said: ‘Who do you think you are?' I may have been wrong, but I read it, took it as a challenge. I've had another one since that suggests I was right. And the permanent secretary at the Department had once worked for your father. She saw the resemblance—not in the face, but in the stance, the shape, intangibles like that. Sitting at my desk I reminded her of your father sitting at his desk.”

“Neither of us is much like my father facially. But we are very like my grandfather.”

“I know. I looked up obituaries for him a few days ago.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“You
have
been doing your homework. What's it all about?”

I settled into my chair. Something I hadn't expected was happening: I was beginning to feel comfortable in his company.

“In the first instance it's about satisfying my curiosity. I had always assumed that the parents I knew were my natural parents. Suddenly it seemed they weren't.”

“So they'd never told you that you were adopted? That's unusual these days. . . . And in the second instance?”

I was silent for a moment, thinking how to put this. Most people were pretty unimpressed by my feelings that, for reasons unknown, someone had me in their frame.

“There were the postcards for a start. Someone wants me to get wise about my origins. Why? How can that matter to anyone but myself? Then something distinctly odd happened the other day. Someone slipped something into my bag at Marks & Spencer, so that I was accused of shoplifting.”

If he was skeptical he hid it well.

“Ah. . . . Of course that could have been just any crank wanting to discredit a member of the new government in a minor way.”

“Yes, it could. And the fact that it was of all things a package of sticky toffee pudding would suggest that. And also the fact that at this stage the whole thing doesn't seem terribly serious.”

“But you cling to the idea that one brain is behind all this, and it could get serious later on?”

“Yes, I do. That said, I should add that I've reported these things to the Palace of Westminster police, who have aeons of experience of what people get up to in relation to politicians, and they're not terribly impressed.”

“You reported it as a sort of insurance?”

“Exactly,” I said, impressed by his understanding. His face was thoughtful and also sympathetic.

“All this is interesting, but we're rather skirting round the major issue, aren't we?” he said.

“And what do you see that as?”

“‘Who do you think you are?'”

I sat back, thinking not so much about the question as about him. I was in no doubt that I liked what I saw—even if what I saw was a version of me, so it seemed like vanity. This version of me, in his early forties, was by the look of him a serious farmer, a man of the soil, even if on the managerial level. He was strong, capable, he would be willing to get his hands dirty—in fact he frequently did so by the look of them: they were chapped, lined with soil, and hard. I also thought he was honest: there was a warmth about him, an interest in me and my predicament, that was very congenial to me. It struck me suddenly that I was rather lonely, and that this man was my brother. I had to pay him the compliment of being honest back.

“I could be your father's son by the nanny,” I said.

He nodded without surprise or consternation. He had considered this already.

“Yes. Of course you could be my father's son by any number of women, but I have never had the impression that he was a promiscuous man. And she was pregnant at the time of the murder.”

“How do you know that?”

“My sister is two years older than me. It was one of the things we whispered about in the days, weeks, after the murder, in bed at the Grange. Then at school it was spoken of. My grandparents chose an exceptionally good and concerned school for me—it's something I will always be grateful to them for. They also had my name changed, adopted us officially—eased our passage in every way they could. Still, schoolboys will be schoolboys. One or two little shits made sure I knew that they knew
who I was: that my father was a murderer, and that he'd been having it off with the nanny, and that she was going to have his child.”

“I suppose by then she'd had it—
me.”

“You're making assumptions. Yes, I suppose she had, though. I never heard anything concrete about her after the day of the murder. She was a taboo subject at the Grange.”

“But the taboos must have broken down when you and your sister were alone.”

“That's true. We did talk about Nanny, as I said, but she hadn't been there long, we didn't particularly like her, and of course we were more interested in our mother and what had happened to her.”

“You knew she was dead?”

“Oh yes, we knew that. That was the reason given for taking us from London to the Grange.”

“But not that she was murdered.”

“That idea got through to us very gradually.”

“How?”

“Probably by overhearing the servants talking, or my grandparents when they thought they were alone.”

“And the fact that it was your father who had done it?”

“The two ideas made their way simultaneously into our minds. People talking about one thing inevitably talked about the other.”

“You say you were more interested in your mother than the nanny, which is only natural. You must have been fond of her.”

He pondered, not wanting to make a snap answer, perhaps because he was talking to a virtual stranger, perhaps because he didn't lightly embark on any act of disloyalty.

“I think not. Of course one had the conventional notions of a mother and what one ought to feel toward her—those had been dinned into us by earlier nannies. But I don't think we
really
felt
them. And I don't think we had any reason to. She was . . . a distant figure. Emotionally reserved—no,
cold
is the right word. She kissed us now and then, but as if that was one of the things one was expected to do. She never held us. No, I don't think we felt a great deal for her.”

“That must have left the nanny to supply her place, then.”

He shook his head vigorously.

“Oh no. Not just Lucy—the two before her didn't try to be stand-in mothers either. They were massive elderly dragons, rather quick to use the hairbrush, but at the wrong end. They were very traditional nanny figures. The upper class entrust their children to extraordinary types: first a nanny, then public school teachers. They tried a different type with Lucy, but one always thought she was interested in other things than us.”

“This must have left a big gap in your lives,” I said. I hazarded a guess: “Did your father supply the missing affection?”

“Yes.”
It was said with great love and enthusiasm. “It was our father who was at the center of our lives. He wasn't always there, of course—not by any means, since he had his political career, as MP and as minister. Still, one always felt that that was a bit of a hobby, that he was at best a dabbler in matters of state. He
was
there a lot for us—in the house, taking us to the park, to circuses, and pantomimes. Oh, Mother would sometimes come along, but it was father who
took
us.”

“I see.”

“He was loving, involved, interested, charming, and funny.”

There was a break in his voice as he went through the catalog.

“And suddenly you lost him.”

“Yes. . . . I don't like talking about that. And it couldn't be relevant to the question of who you are.”

“Maybe not. Unless just possibly after he disappeared he resumed the connection with Lucy Mariotti.”

“I doubt that, though of course I
know
nothing. I do know
she was in Britain for some time after the murder. Caroline heard people say the police wouldn't let her leave, had confiscated her passport.”

“Do you think he lived for some time after the murder?”

He shook his head, disclaiming knowledge again.

“I just don't know. I was too young to follow things at the time, and I've preferred to leave him in peace since I've been an adult.” I was covertly watching his face. It was blank, almost ingenuous. I think he knew I was watching him. “They want me to have him declared dead.”

I pricked up my ears.

“Oh? Who does? Your family?”

“No, no. It's never discussed in the family. But the Conservative leader in the House of Lords does, for one.”

“But why?” In a second, though, I had worked it out. “Of course. You are by rights the Marquis of Aylesbury.”

“If my father is dead,” he said firmly. “The last Marquis, his brother, died four years ago.”

“Yes, I've just been reading his obituaries, such as they were. He was not the marrying type, they all said or implied. I'd gathered that already.”

Matthew laughed.

“The archetypal sad gay.”

“Not a distinguished holder of the title, I guessed from what I read.”

“Far from it. Almost invisible. He had a life of sorts, I suppose. A sex life with vigorous Australian and South African visitors whom he paid or boarded. Intellectually his one interest was early Victorian genre painters. He had enough money to live as he wanted, but not enough to do anything good with it, or splash it effectively on anything.”

“You weren't close, I take it?”

“Barely knew him. He threw a party on my twenty-first—the
sort of occasion he wished he didn't have to hold and I wished I didn't have to go to. I suspected he was trying to discover my sexual orientation, and that of my friends. He was, by and large, disappointed. But I shouldn't slang off at him. He left me the house in Upper Brook Street, which was a family one, and a lot of bad pictures. I sold the house sight unseen, but I was silly enough to look at the pictures. Anyway, they fetched a tidy sum: I could stop working tomorrow, or work for myself, but I'm happy as I am.”

“Happier than you would be as a working peer?”

“Good heavens, yes! To be fair I don't think anyone is suggesting I be that. They'd just like my vote against your lot's plans to reform the House of Lords, and also against things like the ban on hunting. I'm afraid I don't give a damn about hunting either way, though I'd rather die than turn out myself—I don't fancy poncing around in a red coat with a collection of prats who most of them work in the City or in Canary Wharf or places like that.”

“So I take it you're not ready to become Marquis of Aylesbury?”

“No. I went up a week or two ago to talk to the Tory leader in the House of Lords. I told him it wasn't on.”

“Because you don't want to be Marquis? Or for some other reason?”

He left a pause before he replied.

“Because I don't want to be the one who has my father declared dead.” He leaned forward and looked at me. “Think of it. At the time of the murder my father was thirty-five. Now, if he's alive, he'll be about seventy. That's no age. Who am I, of all people, his son, to assume that he's dead?”

“What do you really think?”

“I tell you I don't know. Any number of people have asked, but I always say the same: I don't know. I suppose I hope he's dead, because he can't have had much of a life. But then, what if he's
in a Greek monastery or something, happy and at peace? I don't know, and I see no reason to take action. The Marquises of Aylesbury have been pretty undistinguished figures for generations, apart from my grandfather, who held something or other at the coronation of George VI and became ambassador to Russia when Khrushchev was in power. The country as a whole can jog along quite happily without a Marquis of Aylesbury. The estate went long ago, and most of the family wealth with it. Good riddance. Anyway, I'm not even sure I'm a Tory anymore. And before you start trying to sign me up for your mob I should say I genuinely don't think I'm
any
thing politically.”

“I'm not in this as a recruitment officer for the Labor Party,” I said.

“That brings us back to the question: What
are
you in it for?”

“To find out whether I am the son of your father and Lucy Mariotti,” I said promptly. “And to find out how I came to be brought up by my mother and father—by Claud and Elizabeth Pinnock.”

“You haven't got a quixotic subagenda to prove that my father wasn't a murderer?”