Publish and Be Murdered (21 page)

‘It was only Troutbeck,’ said Marcia, ‘would make anyone want to pick up a copy of the bloody thing the way it was getting.’

‘Look at this,’ said Ben and produced a letter in crabbed handwriting. ‘This is from a geezer who writes to us every week if there’s any errors. He’s fanatical about standards on
The Wrangler
. It came last Monday.’

He passed it to Milton, who, for Tewkesbury’s benefit, read out the entire document. ‘ “Ha-ha. Fucked up on the Finns, didn’t you?” ’

Marcia pouted. Ben looked triumphant.

‘ “ ‘Focussed’ for ‘focused’. How often do I have to tell you?” ’

Ben interrupted. ‘I wish the bugger wasn’t anonymous. For years I’ve been wanting to have that out with him. He’s no more right than we are.’

Milton continued. ‘ “OK otherwise, so nine out of ten. PS. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this now
The Wrangler
’s gone to hell. Someone should fire your editor.” ’

Tewkesbury was shaking his head. ‘This person is obviously deranged.’

‘Why?’ asked Ben. ‘Because he thought Lambie Crump should be sacked?’

‘Of course not. Because he writes anonymous letters like this.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Marcia.

‘It’s the action of a fanatic.’

‘Naw, it isn’t,’ said Ben. ‘He’s just a pedant with time on his hands.’

‘It’s the sort of thing Ben would do in retirement,’ said Marcia. ‘Only he’d be ruder.’

‘But why should he stay anonymous?’ asked Tewkesbury. ‘It’s hardly the action of an honest man.’

‘Maybe he’s simply not sociable,’ said Marcia. ‘Doesn’t want to answer letters or argue.’

‘Just wants the satisfaction of keeping us up to the mark,’ added Ben. ‘Seems quite reasonable to me.’

‘Well, not to me,’ said Tewkesbury. ‘I find it very suspicious.’

Ben eyed him with distaste. ‘You’re just one of these gits thinks anyone different from himself is mad. So you think this guy is mad enough to have knocked off Lambie Crump because of declining standards.’

‘It’s a hypothesis,’ said Tewkesbury huffily.

‘A bloody stupid one, if you ask me.’

‘And me.’

‘The guy’s as sane as I am.’

‘For what that’s worth,’ said Marcia.

‘A bleeding sight saner than you, mate. At least I can tell my Finns from my Swedes.’

Milton stood up. ‘Many thanks to you both. We appreciate your help.’

He led his discomfited sergeant away.

19

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‘Can I pick your brains,’ asked Milton, ‘or is this a bad time?’

‘No, it’s fine. Rachel’s at an official dinner, I’ve just finished a disgusting take-away, I’m delighted to have an excuse not to tackle the essay Wilfred Parry gave me this evening and I had a particularly crazy encounter before I left that I’m longing to tell someone about.’

‘What happened?’

‘After everyone except me had left, Miss Mercatroid – a.k.a. Fatima – decided to remove the portraits from the reception area. Apparently her imam has been cutting up pretty rough on the issue of representational art.’

‘But those portraits look as if they weigh a ton.’

‘They do. Which is why when I found her she was lying spreadeagled under a sombre picture of the third Marquis of Salisbury, who has not been improved by the encounter.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do, except remove his lordship and run for the first-aid kit? After she had sorted herself out and recovered her breath we had a little chat.’

‘And?’

‘I felt it was time for the young master to become stern-faced. I waxed eloquent about our heritage, not to speak of the likely cost of repairing M’Lord Salisbury, and explained what I required to forget about this incident. Faced with the news that she had to choose between me and the imam on this and one or two other matters, she chose me. Or rather, she chose her job: I think she grasped the point that the imam does not actually need to be told about her workplace in all its gory detail. So the bonus was that she agreed to keep her hands off our portraits and sculptures, stop disconcerting visitors by praying to Mecca in the reception area and shut up about pork and alcohol.’

‘My goodness, you never have a dull moment.’

‘And what about you. What’s bothering you?’

‘I just can’t understand how Lambie Crump could have been getting plastered so often during the last few months and making those phone calls, yet nobody’s ever reported seeing him drunk. Second, I can’t understand why he would have been so foolish as to make – apparently sober – those disastrous begging phone calls to Number Ten.’

‘I can’t help with the first, except that the calls I experienced and heard about were lateish in the evening, and it’s perfectly possible that Willie sometimes got sozzled on his own after coming home from a social event.

‘As to the second? Well, when I was in the civil service I found it to be commonplace for businessmen, in particular, to go virtually on their knees to influential officials looking for knighthoods – let alone peerages. Admittedly they usually claimed they were doing this because their wives wanted to be Lady Thingummy and such honours meant nothing to them – an excuse Willie didn’t have – but still, beg they did.

‘I expect his line was the other popular one, viz, that he was seized with a desire to serve his country by working selflessly for it in the House of Lords. And it may be that he realized that if you don’t tout for honours, you often get overlooked. Yet I would have expected that Willie would have gone about things in a more sophisticated manner, by dropping a word discreetly in a friendly ear and having its owner make the case in the right quarters.’

‘I think I’ll call on Downing Street tomorrow,’ said Milton. ‘And just to punish Tewkesbury, I shan’t take him.’

‘That’s very harsh, Jim, isn’t it? The equivalent of refusing to take Miss Mercatroid – sorry, Fatima – with you to Mecca.’

‘I’m not just dim,’ said Milton. ‘I’m cruel too.’

He called into Amiss’s office mid-morning. ‘Curiouser and curiouser. The recipients of the calls all remembered them clearly, which says a lot, since they’re so incredibly busy and take dozens of phone calls every day. They all give a similar account and none of them thinks Lambie Crump was pissed, though they’re not ruling out the possibility that he had had a few. But there seems certainly to have been none of the slurring you and other
Wrangler
people reported. The general theme in all calls was the same: the huge contribution he could make in the Lords as a working peer, which he considered so important that he would give up
The Wrangler
.’

‘Which seems odd in itself, since it suits the government to have
The Wrangler
on side and their only chance of that was under Willie. Unless they calculated he might turn against them if he hadn’t got his peerage?’

‘Yes, but by then they’d have had another year of favourable coverage out of him. Maybe he could have been played along for some time until the journal’s course had been so far changed that it would have been hard for a new editor to do a volte-face.’ Milton looked at his notes.

‘Two of them mentioned how irritating he was.’

‘Willie was always irritating.’

‘Yes, but if you’re ringing such a PC stronghold of swinging modernity as New Labour’s Number Ten is, would you really not censor some of your affectations of language?’

‘Like what?’

‘ “I could pop into a taximeter cabriolet immediately and call on you for ten minutes”, was one example.’

‘He always said “taximeter cabriolet”, like he said “wireless” and “gramophone”.’

‘To the Prime Minister’s press secretary? When he’s praising the administration’s passion for modernizing?’

‘I’ve never known if he actually used language like that consciously or unconsciously, but I take your point. Hardly helpful.’

‘He told the PM’s chief of staff that they badly needed new talent in the Lords, which these days was altogether too full of ghastly women wearing vulgar attire and sporting gaudy baubles. And he told his private secretary that since it might help to counter the view that the PM had surrounded himself by bully boys, the acquisition of a gentleman might be no bad idea.’

‘Oh, Jim, this is preposterous. You’d think he was trying to wreck his chances.’

‘Precisely. That’s exactly what he did. The Number Ten view of him changed dramatically as a result.’

‘Good God,’ said Amiss. ‘Of course, that’s it.’

‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking.’

‘Yes. And I bet we agree on the likely culprit.’

It took Tewkesbury the best part of a morning to track down a Harvard don who knew Dwight Winterton well. ‘Great guy,’ he said. ‘Mad as a coot, but a first-rate mind, great company and a brilliant mimic’

‘Many thanks,’ said Tewkesbury. ‘That’s all I needed to know.’

‘What’s the problem?’ asked the don in a tone of alarm. ‘Is he in trouble?’

‘No, no,’ said Tewkesbury. ‘Goodbye.’ He put the phone down. ‘He’s a brilliant mimic, sir.’

Milton, who had been leafing through interview reports in increasing frustration, looked up. ‘Says who?’

‘His Harvard history tutor.’

‘Did you cover your tracks?’

‘How do you mean, sir.’

‘Like telling him you were just checking up that you had the right Winterton.’

‘Eh?’

‘Oh, never mind. Just fetch me Winterton, wherever he is, before he gets a tip-off.’

Tewkesbury spent most of the afternoon vainly searching for Winterton, who had gone to lunch with a civil service mole and then disappeared to read in the London Library.

When he finally sloped back to the office, Miss Mercatroid, as instructed, sent him straight to Milton.

‘What can have been going on in my absence, Mr Milton?’ he asked, as he sat down. ‘Why am I in such urgent demand? No more cadavers, I trust, just when we were settling down?’

‘Mr Winterton,’ said Milton, ‘you are, I hear, a formidable mimic.’

Winterton looked him straight in the eyes. There was a long pause and then he grinned. ‘I suppose, Mr Milton, this is where you would like me to start guiltily, blush to the roots of my hair, clutch at wherever it is my heart is supposed to be located and cry, “Who told you that?”, thus making it clear that I’ve been keeping it a secret that, yes, I have a certain facility in that department. So instead I shall confound your expectation and instead say, “It’s a fair cop, guv.” I impersonated Lambie Crump in several phone calls to my colleagues. I thought you’d eventually twig that since there was no other evidence he ever got pissed, he was unlikely to be making nuisance phone calls.’

‘May I ask why you did this?’

‘Malice and fun, Mr Milton. It relieved my feelings of rage to have him appear to behave like an uncouth, drunken prat, and there was the amusing bonus of listening to my colleagues coping with their deranged editor.’

‘And how did they?’

‘Let’s see. Robert, of course, was diplomatic, Wilfred was obsequious, Henry expostulated and argued angrily – especially when he was drunk himself, Ricketts – ’

‘You didn’t call Ricketts,’ interrupted Milton, despite himself.

‘I did, but I thought better of it three sentences in. Couldn’t cope with the whimpers and wails of, “Oh, no, Mr Lambie Crump, sir. What are you saying? I don’t understand.” I stopped in mid-rant, launched into sober Crumpspeak and explained that I was just perpetrating a small jest by pretending to be inebriated.’

Winterton adopted a high-pitched falsetto. ‘ “Oh, Mr Lambie Crump, sir. Thank you, sir. I’m sorry, sir, that I was taken in for a moment and became a little upset. But it was a very good joke, sir. I know that you ladies and gentlemen always like your little jokes.” And the poor old sod followed with a forced “ha-ha”, that would have melted the steeliest of hearts.’

‘Who else did you call?’

The usual suspects. There was a wonderful row with Clement Webber, which I wish I’d taped. Amaryllis was a bit of a disappointment, being pissed herself that night and only half listening. Ben and Marcia were a particular hoot, because they were on two different extensions and plunged into a row between themselves over the pseudo-Crump’s assertion that there had been more errors in March than in April.’

‘Was that it?’

Winterton thought. ‘Apart from Lord Papworth, who was courteous, there was Milady Troutbeck.’ He laughed.

‘How did she deal with it?’

‘Swiftly. “Bugger off, Willie,” she said, and put the phone down.’

‘No one guessed?’

‘No, because I had sneakily never mimicked anyone to any of my colleagues. I thought that in a new job it was wise, perhaps, to keep this card up my sleeve in case I needed it. And I was glad I had. Willie was driving me mad, and getting at him this way got a lot of the venom out of my system, while damaging the bastard at the same time by enhancing his reputation for selfishness and double-dealing.’

‘Hardly responsible behaviour, though.’

‘Indeed, Mr Milton. Hardly responsible. I thank you for the moral guidance.’ He burst into a convincing imitation of Tony Blair. ‘Responsibility, maturity, compassion, vision, giving. Ask not what you can have but what you can give.’ He reverted to his own voice. ‘All missing during those calls, I’m ashamed to say.’

Milton’s lip twitched. Tewkesbury looked disapproving and Winterton broke into a broad grin.

‘So much for your colleagues, Mr Winterton. Now, did you make calls to anyone outside
The Wrangler
?’

Winterton looked appraisingly at Milton. ‘Do you already know, I wonder. I’d better tell you the lot, hadn’t I? Otherwise you’ll find out about them anyway and think I’m underhand and that would never do. And besides, it doesn’t matter now.

‘I did two impersonations of Lambie Crump. For his colleagues, who knew him very well, it was always Drunk Willie, because the slurrings covered up any slight failings in my impersonation. With acquaintances and strangers of course I could do a sober Crump. What I decided to do was from sheer spite to try to scupper his chances of a peerage by making unhelpful calls to Number Ten, Downing Street. And I enjoyed every minute. It was great fun to wind up those PC know-alls.’