A Murder in Mayfair (5 page)

The next morning I got a postcard in my mail. It read:

NOT WHO YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE, ARE YOU?

At least now I could discount the idea that somebody thought I was getting too big for my boots.

S
pring wore on into summer—a chilly, unfriendly one it was, in June and July. The infatuation of the country with its new government should have been wearing off, but to everyone's surprise, including our own, it wasn't. Polls put our approval rating at an impossible high. Could a honeymoon last forever? Reason told us it could not, but, basking in what seemed like universal affection, reason's voice was often ignored. We were like children who imagine that they will live forever.

As the session wound down toward the summer recess, I was asked to dinner by the formidable Margaret Stevens, the permanent secretary at the Ministry, and the person whom, quite wrongly, I regarded as my boss.

“Nothing formal,” she said. “I'm asking Chris Cunningham and his wife as well. You don't have a partner, do you?”

“Not at the moment,” I said. Margaret and I were getting on rather well by now, more relaxed and appreciative in each other's company, so I added: “I asked one of my constituents recently if he had a partner, and he said: ‘My brother George—you know that, Mr. Pinnock. We're plumbers.' And when I said that I meant did he live with anyone he said, ‘Mind your own fucking business, Mr. Pinnock.'”

She laughed.

“Well, so long as you're happy to come on your own. When you're Prime Minister you'll have to ask your sister or someone like that to act as the Downing Street hostess.”

I shook my head, smiling.

“No sister. No relatives of any kind or of either sex. Didn't Mr. Heath do without a hostess when he was Prime Minister?”

“Perhaps that was Mr. Heath's problem,” she said tartly.

So Margaret and I were now on the sort of terms where comment of a personal nature could be made on politicians of the past. Nevertheless I was careful over dinner about what I said, and I saw no evidence that she was on similar terms with Chris Cunningham—but his wife's presence may have made Margaret more careful than she otherwise would have been. Chris's wife, Mary, was heavily pregnant with what the pair called their Party Conference baby, and soon after dinner they had to leave rather precipitately. It certainly wasn't anything they ate. Margaret was a good cook of a very traditional kind. There were no exotic dishes or ingredients, and the results made clear that she would have no truck even with the crunchy vegetables nonsense.

“You'll stay, won't you?” she said, as Chris and Mary retreated to the lift and out to the official car. “It'll make them feel worse if they hear they brought the whole evening to an end.”

“I'd like to,” I said, coming back into the beige and blue living room of her Earl's Court flat. “I bet Chris and his wife would have planned things differently if they'd known he would get a ministerial post.”

“If they planned at all,” she said lightly. “Sex and politics—the two great imponderables.”

She sat down and began pouring the coffee, which had been sitting stewing during the minor panic of Mary's bad turn.

“I think I handle the political hazards more confidently than the sexual ones,” I said, keeping the tone of the conversation light.

“But then you've been in the political thick of things for a long time, haven't you?”

“Oh yes—I've been ‘politically active' since my teens,” I said, leaving well to one side the question of my sexual activity. “First locally, then nationally. But of course government is another matter.”

“Naturally. More exacting, and more dangerous. But you've proceeded very cautiously, I think.”

“Oh, I make mistakes. Making little jokes about my predecessors to civil servants, for example. Second nature to me, that kind of joke.”

“Oh, everyone with a sense of humor makes that kind of mistake. It's very minor. But you do see the problem, don't you?”

“I think so.”

“We've all served lots of masters and mistresses, we who work in the Civil Service. Some we've liked, some we've loathed. The liking or loathing has little or nothing to do with their performance as ministers. You can have a minister who's totally incompetent, a one-man disaster area, someone who drives you to distraction professionally, yet personally you may be very fond of him. I've even been fond of one who was . . . let's say corrupt. So as far as recent ministers are concerned, it's on the whole best to keep off the subject.”

“Point taken. But you go way back, of course, so a little idle banter about figures of the past is not out of order?”

“Oh yes, I go way, way back,” she said cheerfully. “Isn't it awful? I've been married to the Civil Service. And even before I went up to university I'd been a typist-cum-dogsbody in a government department. What a life! most people would think.
Some would say hardly a life at all. Yet something in me right from the start said: ‘This is what you want to do.' You could say that was me recognizing my own mediocrity.”

“No one who knew you would think that,” I said, gallantly but truthfully.

“I'm not so sure. But I admit that there have been times when I have looked at the minister or the Secretary of State I've been working for and I've said to myself: ‘I've got a damned sight better brain than you have, you pillock.' No names, no pack drill.”

“You've worked for practically everyone who's been anything in politics,” I said guilelessly.

“Oh no, that's an exaggeration,” she said, in that downright, factual way of hers I found endearing. “But lots.”

I had, I must admit, been leading this conversation in a certain direction.

“On my first day at the Ministry you came into my office, you saw me at ray desk, and you were startled.”

She looked embarrassed.

“Did you really see that? You are a deep one! I could have sworn you hadn't noticed.”

“Why?”

“Why was I startled?” Her elderly face, framed by gray, undyed, and little-cared-for hair, became rapt in thought. “Something in you,” she said at last, “your looks—not your face but your stance, your way of sitting at your desk—reminded me of someone.”

“Who?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, it went as soon as it came. As you say I've had an infinite number of men set over me in my time.”

“I expect if you went back over your career in your mind you could pinpoint who it was.”

I said it easily, but she shot me a glance.

“Who said it was one of the ministers I've served that you reminded me of?” she asked.

“I'd have thought it quite likely. I was sitting there at my new desk, the new boy, but I reminded you of someone in the past, sitting at that or a similar desk, and you started.”

She nodded, reluctantly.

“Yes, I suppose it's quite likely.”

“I'd be interested who it was.”

“Good heavens, it could be anyone.”

“Going through them would be good preparation for writing your memoirs.”

“That's something civil servants never do.”

“Never?”

“Not usually, except in private and for posterity. It's mainly the more self-important ones who do that. This is getting a bit like a parlor game. . . . Though I said it could be anyone, I think we can be a bit more selective than that, because it must have been one of the
memorable
ministers you reminded me of. That rules out sixty or seventy percent of them—the ones who sort of coalesce in my mind into an undifferentiated lump.” She paused, swallowed, then began. “Well, I started in 1962, and that was in what was then the Commonwealth Office . . .”

And so she started through the thirty-five years of her career in Whitehall and her bosses: names that had gone on to distinguished political careers, names that had meant something at the time but had fallen by the wayside through election defeat or sheer ennui, names that were just names.

“Now,” Margaret said, getting to the seventies, “we can rule out the women—”

“Why?” I asked. “I've no objection to reminding you of a woman.”

She shot me another quick glance.

“Well, I don't think it's likely, but if you insist. Much of the time in the seventies it was either Margaret Thatcher or Shirley Williams. That was in my first spell at the Department of Education.”

“What were they like?”

“About as far apart as you could get in ideology, behavior, treatment of people, likes and dislikes. Funnily enough, what they actually
did
was strangely similar.”

“The power of the Civil Service machine winning out over political standpoints?”

“I don't think so. Force of events, a case of the prevailing orthodoxies swamping the personal ideologies. . . . Anyway, you certainly don't remind me of either of them.”

And so she went on, covering her transfer to one of the big economic ministries, then back to the Department of Education in the late eighties.

“Ken Clarke, John Patten, emphatic
no
in both cases, Gillian Shepherd the same . . .” She pulled her hand through her wiry gray hair. “No, I'm sorry, Colin. I've failed you entirely.”

“No point in going over the less remarkable people?”

“No, there's not. As I say, you reminded me—momentarily, be it said—of someone who for one reason or another is etched on my consciousness. Unremarkable ministers are not.”

I stood up regretfully.

“Sorry I involved you in a fruitless trip down Memory Lane, Margaret.”

“I've quite enjoyed it as a memory-retrieval exercise.”

“It was certainly a lesson to me on how short political reputations can be.” I was just about to give her the conventional thanks and assurances that I'd had a lovely evening when an idea struck me. “You said you worked as a typist in Whitehall even before you went up to university.”

“Yes.”

Her brow furrowed again, and I struck in with: “What about the people you worked for then?”

Suddenly she sat down on the sofa.

“Oh.”

“You've remembered something?”

But I knew she had, and I sat down again, too. This was going to repay some going into.

“You won't like this,” Margaret said after a moment, probably one spent wondering if she could avoid saying anything, and deciding she couldn't. “This is actually more serious than you've been pretending, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“You're—I don't want to pry—in some way trying to find out who you are.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sure this has nothing to do with who you are, but—”

“Margaret, I'm not looking for a cozy ending,” I said. She swallowed.

“It was Lord John Revill.”

I blinked. That was someone I had heard of.

“The man who—what?—murdered his children's nanny?”

“Murdered his wife, and was sleeping with his children's nanny.”

“You worked for him?”

“As a typist. He had a very junior post at the Home Office. . . . You could say he was the most disturbing man I ever worked for . . . in retrospect.”

“Why in retrospect?”

“Because at the time he had seemed so ordinary, so conventional, so
nice.”

 • • • 

Without asking, she poured me more black coffee, and I drank down half a cup without sugar. Watching me do this decided her to pour me another glass of brandy, and a stiff one.

“The man who disappeared,” I said at last.

“Without trace,” she said. “The most successful vanishing act in criminal history. Usually they surface in the heart of South America, or in some African state riddled with disease and corruption. Even the Nazi war criminals eventually seem to be traced to places like that, and with half your mind you say, ‘Well, that's
some
punishment for them.' Lord John has never given a hint of where he might be if he is still alive. The tabloids are always haring off on false scents of course, but there's never been anything that the police thought worth a second glance.”

“Did the police
want
to find him?”

“What are you suggesting? The usual Masonic conspiracy notions? I never heard rumors of that, or even that Revill was one. I think it genuinely has been a case of ‘The police are baffled.'”

I was racking my brains to remember the little I had ever heard about the case, which was before my time of political or any other kind of awareness.

“Was there a suggestion that his rich friends had sheltered him and arranged for his escape from this country?”

Margaret nodded.

“Suggestions, but no evidence. And if they found him a safe haven he's still had to
live
there for years, decades. And yet there's been no solid evidence.”

“What do you remember about the murder?”

She shook her head, troubled.

“Very little, beyond the bare facts, I'm afraid. I was out of the country on a trade mission to Eastern Europe with the then-Minister of Trade. My first trip abroad it was, though in a very junior capacity. Any news about it I learned from the BBC
World Service, and it wasn't the kind of thing they dealt with at any great length—not the sort of image of Britain they were interested in projecting. When I got home it was still hot news, but the papers assumed you knew the basic facts. . . . I think I tended to black the whole thing out.”

“Why?”

She gave a self-deprecating grimace.

“Because I'd liked the man, I suppose. That's what made it so terrifying. That a man you thought ‘a nice bloke' could suddenly become a murderer, the most sought-after criminal in the country.”