A Murder in Mayfair (31 page)

Meanwhile I had been thrown, straight after my mother's arrest, into the political fray. The issue of the cuts in benefits to
single mothers, after simmering for weeks, boiled over into a vote in the Commons. It was a defining issue, and I don't blame the MPs who thought it was too soon to forsake their own party and their own longed-for government. But I resigned my position in the Department of Education and later the same day voted against them. The vote was not just a single vote, it was part of threats to cut benefits for the disabled, it was the courting of sleazy businessmen, it was the abolition of student grants for tuition, it was the awfulness of Prime Minister's Question Time—all cheap point-scoring and ducking the issues—it was the feeling that everything was being labeled “New” but nothing had changed. It was, in short, general discontent and disillusion.

I resigned on December 10, in the early afternoon, and it made the later editions of the evening papers. By the next morning the papers were crowing over the fact that almost all the new women MPs in our party voted to cut the benefits. I was relegated to a short paragraph. There resteth my political career.

As soon as I resigned the Downing Street Misinformation Machine started spreading it around that I would have lost my place in the next reshuffle anyway, and that I had been distracted by family matters and had for that reason performed indifferently as a minister. I cherished a letter from Margaret Stevens, expressing sorrow at my going, and including the words “Politics do make me sick sometimes.” It was unlike her to be so candid, but I suppose the approaching date of her retirement loosened her tongue.

“There's life after being in government,” I said to Susan a week or two later, when I was settling into being just an ordinary MP again.

“There's life after politics,” Susan replied.

And that was a question that was bubbling around in some
deep recess of my mind. I'd been approached soon after my resignation to work for Opportunities for the Disabled, an educational charity—work on a voluntary, part-time basis, using what clout I still had as an MP. But I hadn't been there long before the director resigned, and I soon found they were interested in me as a replacement. I thought long and hard, as the cliché goes in political life, and I decided that I wasn't willing to do two jobs and do both inadequately. It occurred to me that I would probably do more real, practical good for the disabled through running the charity efficiently than I had done in seven months as a minister preparing for initiatives that might never get off the ground and might do precious little good if they did. I finally decided to accept the job and informed the Milton constituency that I would be standing down as their MP. I think their regret was genuine, but I resisted all their efforts to change my mind. I would always be a Milton man, would always cherish my links even after my father slipped out of life, but for the moment I was obliged to live and work in London. There was work to be done, and it was work worth doing.

When I proposed to Susan, which she thought very quaint, I made the proposal a double one. I asked her to marry me and raise a family with me. I felt we should be clear from the beginning that we both wanted both things. She accepted under the two heads. Margaret Stevens would have approved of our foresight and precision.

It was on our honeymoon in Italy that, one day, sitting at a table in a pavement restaurant in the main piazza in Sienna, Susan looked at me and said:

“Recalled to life.”

She didn't need to explain. That was exactly what it felt like.

A
LSO FROM
R
OBERT
B
ARNARD

The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

No Place of Safety

The Habit of Widowhood

The Bad Samaritan

The Masters of the House

A Hovering of Vultures

A Fatal Attachment

A Scandal in Belgravia

A City of Strangers

Death of a Salesperson

Death and the Chaste Apprentice

At Death's Door

The Skeleton in the Grass

The Cherry Blossom Corpse

Bodies

Political Suicide

Fête Fatale

Out of the Blackout

Corpse in a Gilded Cage

School for Murder

The Case of the Missing Bronte

A Little Local Murder

Death and the Princess

Death by Sheer Torture

Death in a Cold Climate

Death of a Perfect Mother

Death of a Literary Widow

Death of a Mystery Writer

Blood Brotherhood

Death on the High C's

Death of an Old Goat

SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Robert Barnard

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner Edition 2000

First published in Great Britain, as
Touched by the Dead,
by Collins Crime.

S
CRIBNER
and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnard, Robert.

[Touched by the dead]

A murder in Mayfair/Robert Barnard

p. cm.

First published in Great Britain as: Touched by the dead.

1. Title.

PR6052.A665 T+

823'.914—dc21

99-046962

ISBN 0-684-86445-2
ISBN 981-4767-3716-4 (eBook)