The Birthday Present (33 page)

“Well, I hope to God he hasn't.”

“People do love him, don't they? Dermot did in his way. The way Ivor talks about him, I'd say Sandy Caxton loved him too. I do. I do love him so much.” She looked at me and this time there was no smile, diffident or otherwise. The beautiful mouth trembled and she began to cry.

Iris had just come in with the coffee. She put the tray down, went to Juliet and threw her arms round her. “Don't cry, darling, please don't. It'll be all right. It'll blow over. You'll see.”

“I don't see how it can.”

I was thinking, though I didn't say it aloud, that even if it blew over at the present time, when Sean came up for trial—nine months, ten, perhaps a year away—the man's motive must come out and there could be no other motive, it appeared, but saving Ivor from Jane Atherton's malice or greed. Or desperation or need, if I am to be fair.

“He'll be home by seven,” Juliet said. “He's bound to know by then.” Neither of us had asked, it would have been too much of an intrusion, but it was as if we had. “It sounds silly but it was love at first sight for me. The first time I saw him I thought, I want to marry that man. Well, not the first time, that was at a party, but the second. Whatever happens I'll never leave him. If he wants to get rid of me he'll have to throw me out.”

“He won't do that,” I said, though I was by no means sure he wouldn't. “Get him to give us a ring when he comes in.” We kissed her and Iris hugged her, holding her tightly for a moment. We had our answer to the question we'd so often asked. Why? What was in it for her? Not for unspoken blackmail, not for a gourmet meal ticket, but love, just love.

“I was wrong,” Iris said when she'd gone, “about her being unfaithful, wasn't I?”

I
VOR DIDN'T PHONE
us that evening, though he knew. He'd seen the relevant newspaper in the plane on the return flight and there were a few lines in the evening paper, rather cunning subtle lines. They said only that Dermot Lynch, driver of “a kidnap car” in which the intended victim had been Kelly Mason, having been in a “protracted coma” for a long time, had made a partial recovery. (As if kidnap, crash, and recovery were all recent history.) Juliet told us about it next morning. She called us after Ivor had gone in to the department. They had both also read the follow-up story in the right-wing daily newspaper Ivor had delivered.

This was just an account of Sean Lynch's arrest and his appearance in the magistrates' court, where he had pleaded not guilty to the charge of willful murder. There had been, of course, nothing about what led the police to him and no details about him except that he was thirty-three years old (the heavenly number) and lived in Paddington, west London. But at the foot of this brief account of the proceedings, there appeared once again the two lines about Dermot, his involvement in a suspected kidnap attempt, his long period of unconsciousness, and his “limited recovery.” Not a word about any relationship between the two men, nothing to show they had an address in common.

“How is Ivor taking it?”

“All right. Not bad. He's tough, you know, Rob. He keeps saying, ‘There's no mention of me. They haven't made the connection and with luck they won't.' He's got a statement to deliver to the House this afternoon and he'll do it. He won't only do it, he'll do it as if he hadn't got a care in the world.”

But I think he was already making preparations for the action he meant to take. If things got worse, that is, if the connection was made between himself and what three newspapers had called “the kidnap car” and therefore between him and Sean Lynch. I don't mean he was resigned to his name coming into this; not at all, that mustn't be thought of. He hoped with all his strength that the media would stop there. What would happen when Sean came up for trial was a long way off; all sorts of things could happen between now and then. He had to think of the immediate future, the next few days in fact. He told us all this when the four of us met in the evening of the day after he came back from Culdrose.

He was an optimist, he always was, but a fatalist too, and I could hear it in his voice and, if it doesn't sound too melodramatic, see it in his eyes. It was a kind of foretaste of despair. Things which he had thought—had hoped—had passed away, buried themselves, had only been waiting before they were resurrected. Iris, who is the literary one of us, said it reminded her of a line from
Lear:
“The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.” Well, Ivor had had his pleasant vices all right, but he really thought by now that he had got away from the wrath of the gods.

“If nothing more has happened by the end of the weekend,” he said across the dinner table, “I've probably got away with it again. It's a funny thing,” he went on, “but when I
read that bit in the paper on the flight home last night I had that ghastly feeling of some thing falling out of me. As one does. Like being in a lift when it comes to a stop too fast. And then this morning I read it again and I was used to it. I could take it. It didn't seem so bad. And tonight's
Standard—
well, there it is again, with a quote from that guy Mason and a photograph of the car after it crashed, and all I thought was, what was I making such a fuss about on the plane last night? You get used to things. I suppose you can get used to anything.”

“Oh, darling.” Juliet took his hand in both of hers. “Nothing more will happen. You won't have to get used to it. I'm sure it's over.”

He wasn't sure and I doubt if she was either. When we say we're sure, we mean we doubt but we're hopeful. A look of grimness, of dark resolution, had come into his face and, with hindsight of course, I think, as I've said before, that he was making up his mind then what he would do. We said good night early. They went back to Westminster and we to our Barnet-Hertfordshire borders, where all three children had, for reasons best known to themselves, been giving my mother a hard time.

I don't know what Ivor and Juliet talked about that night, though it's hard to imagine it could have been anything very different from what we'd discussed over dinner. Iris and I lay awake a long time, trying to guess what the media's next move would be. Both of us thought that, having talked to Damian Mason, they would be naturally led to Gerry Furnal; much hung on what Furnal might disclose to them. Would he say anything? He never had, but that was before the pearls and his discovery that the wife he revered had had a lover. It really depended on whether Furnal wanted to expose himself as a cuckold (to use Ivor's word) and whether in
fact he'd be audacious enough to make accusations against a Minister of the Crown. Iris was positive he would. I was more doubtful. He of all the people involved in this business must know the most.

“If he'll stand up to my brother in a crowded room at a party and practically chuck his present in his face,” Iris said, “he'll have nerve enough for anything. He may want revenge. He may want more satisfaction than he got from giving back the pearls. And what's a Minister of the Crown these days? It's not the eighteenth century.”

Neither of us foresaw the direction from which discovery would come and I'm sure Ivor and Juliet didn't. Philomena Lynch perhaps or Gerry Furnal's wife, some witness to the pearls incident, or Jane Atherton's mother—we thought of all those. The pathway which led one astute investigative journalist to Ivor never crossed our imaginations. We didn't know all the people; we didn't know the host of minor characters on the perimeter. It couldn't have crossed Ivor's mind either as he lay sleepless at Juliet's side through the long watches of the night.

N
othing happened for a while, not for several days. The first story about Dermot Lynch had appeared on the Thursday morning, the day Ivor went to Culdrose, and we had all dined together on the Friday evening. Saturday's papers were empty of all references to Jane Atherton's murder or to Sean Lynch, and so were Sunday's—those Sunday papers, the cradles of scandal. For Ivor, waiting and dreading and hoping, it must have been rather like the days after the crash, when he waited and hoped Dermot would never regain consciousness. Worse now, though. Accumulations had happened since then. He had advanced up the ladder, he had inherited money, bought a glamorous house, acquired a beautiful fianceé, made numerous successful speeches, even come to the edge of (I repeat again my wife's quotation) “the fierce light that beats upon the high shore of the world.” It would be immeasurably worse for him now. But nothing happened. Not yet.

•   •   •

T
HE JOURNALIST WHO
brought things to light was a man called David Menhellion. Iris says it's a Cornish name. In the first piece he wrote, he remarked on the fact that Juliet Case, thirty-five, fianceé of Ivor Tesham, MP for Morning-ford and a Minister of State at the Department of Defence, had once been the “live-in girlfriend” of actor Lloyd Freeman, killed in an accident to the “vehicle in which he was ‘allegedly' attempting to abduct Kelly Mason and demand a ransom from her husband, multimillionaire Damian Mason.” You can't libel the dead, of course, so Menhellion was in the clear there. Dermot was mentioned only as the driver of the kidnap car. But all this was known already. When she first became engaged to him, Juliet had herself said in an interview that she had once been married to Aaron Hunter and later had a relationship with Lloyd Freeman. She and Ivor had met through a mutual friend, the actress Nicola Ross. Very little comment had ever been made on this disclosure, but Menhellion made as much of it as he could. Had Mr. Tesham perhaps known Lloyd Freeman himself? If he had, hadn't he some questions to answer? It would be unusual, to say the least, ought to be impossible, for a member of the government to have a friendship with a kidnapper and one who was very likely also the author of demands for money with menaces made to Mr. Mason.

When I'd read this through twice I thought that on the whole it was pretty thin. It was scandal-sheet stuff. A rational reader would soon see that Ivor might well have known Lloyd Freeman as an actor only and have first encountered him in Juliet's company. Nor did it much worry Ivor.

“All that's already in the public domain,” was the way he put it, in the politician-speak he used when he was disturbed.

Next day, though, none of us could remain unconcerned. Menhellion's story, a lead in a tabloid, looked at first like a simple follow-up of the previous day's delving into Juliet's past. There was nothing new in the first three paragraphs. Then he asked his first rhetorical question: what was Ivor Tesham, Minister of State at the Defence Department, doing while his present-day fianceé was sharing her Queen's Park “apartment” with her live-in lover Lloyd Freeman? Involved, Menhellion said, in a “steamy” love affair with none other than Hebe Furnal, twenty-seven. Hebe had died in the kidnap car crash along with Lloyd Freeman.

I spoke to Ivor on the phone ten minutes after I read that. He was calm but very quiet.

“We've already had them phoning,” he said.

“What, journalists?”

“Someone called. I mean, not the American ‘called,' came to the door. I slammed the door on him.”

“Will you go in?”

“To the department? Yes, of course. I must. Look, can Juliet come up to you? I don't want to leave her alone here. They're bound to come. That's for sure. I could get her out the back way before I have to go.”

I had an appointment. I was due to pay another visit to that client in Blomfield Road, Maida Vale. The last time I'd been there was when I saw Ivor and Juliet heading for Warwick Avenue tube station after they'd been to see the Lynches in William Cross Court. They should never have gone near the place but I wouldn't allow myself, even
to
myself, to say I told you so.

Juliet spent the day with Iris and the children and was still there when I got home. She'd spoken to Ivor several times on the phone, but the last time she'd tried he was in the House of Commons with his mobile switched off. I'd
brought the evening paper in with me and, as we'd all expected, they were carrying a portrait photograph of Hebe and the windblown one of her with Justin, both of them alongside Juliet in extravagant eighteenth-century comedy clothes. She looked about twenty.

I asked her where they got that from.

“I had a part in
The School for Scandal.
Apt, isn't it? I'd guess Aaron gave it to them.”

“Would he do that? I thought you and he were on good terms.”

“He hates this government. It's not Ivor in particular. He'd do the same if it was anyone in the government. It's all part of this antisleaze campaign of his.”

There had been nothing about Juliet's marriage to Hunter in the morning papers but there was by the evening. Apparently with enthusiasm, he had given them an interview as well as the photograph. Yes, he knew Ivor Tesham, he'd met him on several occasions. Lloyd Freeman too. He wasn't prepared to say (he said) that he and Juliet had been divorced on Freeman's account, there were many factors that led to their breakup, but Freeman had certainly “appeared on the scene” very soon after their decree became absolute. He had moved in with her at her home in Queen's Park. Whether they were still together when the kidnap attempt was made in May 1990, he wouldn't care to say.

A double-page spread, sprinkled with photographs, was devoted to a biography of Hebe. As is usually the way with beautiful women, she had often had her picture taken. There was a wedding photograph, Hebe in clouds of white clinging to Gerry Furnal's arm. There was a postnatal photograph, Hebe in bed with her baby in her arms, and another of her in a black dress with pearls.

“The
pearls, I suppose,” Iris said. “Surely Gerry Furnal
didn't give them those pictures. Surely he wouldn't, not her husband.”

“Come to that, who gave them the story? Who told them all that stuff?”

I drove Juliet home at about six. I was crawling slowly along through Westminster when we saw the crowd ahead of us. It was their spilling over into Marsham Street that was causing the traffic holdup. We passed Ivor's house, necessarily slowly, and Juliet turned her head to look at them, the press pack, the media with movie cameras, the photographers. The house faced directly onto the street, with short pillars linked by a chain rather than a front garden separating it from the roadway. The reporters were inside the chain, pressed against the front wall and downstairs windows. They left only half the roadway accessible to traffic and one of them was sitting on top of a van illicitly standing on the yellow line.