The Birthday Present (6 page)

Because it was all over the papers, he had to tell me that it was on his instructions that Dermot and Lloyd handcuffed Hebe, roped her ankles, and tied a scarf round her mouth. He showed no embarrassment in telling me but spoke of it as if this was normal behavior. I didn't comment but I thought how extraordinary some people's tastes are, that this man, my own wife's brother, would get pleasure and no doubt excitement from something that would leave me cold.

By the time he was looking at himself in the glass, he went on, the two of them would have been on the Watford Way, a
busy road at most times of the day, but residential too. The houses were set well back from the main highway and separated from it by their own front gardens, a service road, and a strip of grass with trees. Dermot, who was driving, would have pulled off the main highway onto this service road, where he could have remained parked while Hebe was trussed up. Ivor was taking it for granted she wouldn't have struggled much because, although she wasn't told what to expect, she knew to expect something that would ultimately be for her pleasure.

While this was going on, Ivor was waiting in our house. He never knew and probably no one apart from Dermot and Lloyd ever knew whether Hebe had been on time or late. There was one witness to the mock abduction. She was a woman called June Hemsley and she lived in one of the houses on the Watford Way behind the strip of grass, the service road, and her own front garden. She had been standing in the window of her front room, watching for her son to return home from his violin lesson. He was due at seven and Mrs. Hemsley had been standing in the window since that time. She told the police she had been there “for ten minutes” (which means very little, it's what people say when they mean a short time) when she saw two men in balaclavas get out of a car, which had been parked in the service road, say something to a girl who had been walking southwards and bundle her into the car. The girl didn't struggle much and the car didn't immediately move away but it had done so when Mrs. Hemsley's son arrived after about five minutes. That worry off her mind, she debated with herself whether she should phone the police. She looked out of the window again but the car had gone and she hadn't taken its number. Still, she did phone the police at seven thirty-five.

This was the time when Ivor began to be restive. There
was a phone in the car—
he
had a mobile, thick and heavy as a brick, and other people did, but to nothing like the extent they have now—and Dermot and Lloyd had our phone number and had been instructed to call him if there were problems. Ivor went out into the mews and looked up and down it, the way people do in these situations, though it doesn't bring the expected one any sooner. He grew afraid that the phone would ring while he was outside, so he went back indoors and as he came into the living room the phone did ring. It wasn't Dermot or Lloyd but one of our friends calling to tell us she couldn't come to a dinner party we were having. By then it was ten to eight.

Even if the traffic was very heavy, it was stretching things a bit to take fifty or even forty-five minutes, if Hebe had been late, from the Watford Way to the middle of Hampstead. Something had gone wrong. She hadn't come. Gerry Furnal had been late home or detained at work or the child had been suddenly ill. But if she hadn't come why hadn't Lloyd or Dermot phoned? At no time did Ivor suspect what had happened. He wasn't worried. He was angry. His anger grew and grew and at five to eight he poured himself a stiff gin with a drop of tonic. He wasn't going to touch the champagne just in case, by some miracle, she still turned up.

Was it possible Dermot and Lloyd had reneged on him, just hadn't gone to the pick-up place? He knew they had seen each other at least once after his encounter with them in the pub in Victoria. He had suggested that the two of them meet after a few days to arrange things, the renting of the car and the purchase of handcuffs, gag, and balaclavas, and had seen them exchange phone numbers. Maybe they had simply decided to pocket the first two hundred and fifty pounds he had given each of them and do nothing. There was little he could do about it if they had.

He might have phoned the car but he didn't know the number. Besides, he was angry, not worried. He waited there till eight-thirty, thought of going home but stayed on till nine. Then he changed back into his own clothes and left, taking the two envelopes with him but forgetting all about the champagne. At home he listened to no news bulletins, nor did he turn on the television. If he had he might have seen horrific pictures of the crash come up on the screen, though there was nothing that night about a kidnapping.

T
HE STORY IRIS
and I read in the paper quoted the police as saying there had been a kidnap attempt and the victim was Hebe Furnal, 27, of West Hendon. Newspapers don't give precise addresses and often they don't give exact locations where events or accidents happen. They didn't in this case. They alluded vaguely to “a Hendon junction” and a “roads intersection in north London” and to this day I don't know exactly where the accident happened, though later on I did find out more details. The car had been “in collision with” a forty-ton lorry the paper described, American-fashion, as a “truck.” Hebe Furnal had been bound and gagged. The two men were wearing jackets with hoods. Lloyd Freeman was dead and Dermot Lynch, the driver of the car, was in hospital in a serious condition with brain damage and multiple injuries. The driver of the lorry, high up in his cab, I suppose, was unharmed.

There followed some biographical details about Hebe, substantially accurate except that her son was referred to as Jason, but no speculation as yet as to why anyone would kidnap her. That came later. Reporters must have been to Gerry Furnal's house to get the photograph they had used of
Hebe. It was a nice photograph, not a studio portrait but a shot of her on a beach playing with her little boy.

I hadn't finished reading it before Iris was on the phone to Ivor. The phone rang half a dozen times and then it went on to message. She didn't leave a message—what could she have said? We kept trying to get hold of Ivor throughout the morning and at midday Iris said, “I think we ought to go back.”

We went back and, without bothering about lunch, drove straight to Old Pye Street. Iris had just stopped breastfeeding Nadine, so we'd parked in a lay-by on the A12 to give her a bottle and some tinned stuff and she had slept contentedly ever since. (I know this should be about Ivor, not me, and that I say too much about my daughter. I shall watch it in future but can't promise anything.) So to Ivor. He was in. Yes, the phone had rung and rung, but he hadn't answered it because he was sure it was Hebe with excuses for why she hadn't turned up and he was still too angry to speak to her. At lunchtime he had gone out to buy a paper and he'd bought the one we had seen.

Ivor's flat was very elegant, full of good early Victorian furniture and quite valuable paintings. He had a private income—a great-aunt had left him a house to sell and a considerable sum of money when she died ten years before—and he had indulged himself. A compulsively tidy man (anal, said Iris, but fondly), he was in the habit of having a place for everything and he put everything back in its place. There wasn't even a cup or a glass about.

Iris threw her arms round him and held him close. “I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,” she kept saying.

I asked him when he knew.

“Not till about an hour ago. I don't bother much with bloody scandal sheets at the weekends, get too much of
them all week. I read it in the paper shop. Christ, I had to go outside and sit down on a wall.”

It was then that he told us. It took a long time, but I think telling us did him good. Halfway through he wanted a drink, said he'd had a brandy when he got back to the flat after buying the paper, but Iris stopped him having another. She fetched him a glass of water and made him drink half of it. When he got to the end, to his coming back here and going to bed, still furiously angry, he looked up and said, “God, poor little Hebe.”

Those weren't quite the only words I ever heard him utter which might be construed as expressing grief but they almost were. I asked him what he had done. Presumably, he had told the police.

He looked at me and there was a strange expression on his face. Secretive, certainly. Covert? Incredulous that I should have asked? Perhaps all those things.

“Well, no,” he said. “I haven't.” His voice rose, was suddenly indignant, almost angry with me. “How can I? For God's sake, how can you fucking ask?”

Iris had been kneeling down by Nadine's car seat. She had wiped Nadine's mouth with a tissue and given her a quick kiss on the forehead. She got up.

“Ivor,” she said, “I'm not hearing this.”

“What aren't you hearing?” His face was very set and his voice was sharp.

“You must tell them. How can you, you say. How
can't
you? Everyone thinks she was really abducted, the police, her husband—her
husband,
Ivor—do you ever think of him? You have to tell them it was you, you set it up.”

“Look,” he said, calming down, “of course I've thought of the police. If it had been the accident only and nothing about their taking the pretend kidnap seriously, I'd have gone
straight to them. I'd have told them and never mind the consequences. There's no doubt about that, I wouldn't have hesitated.”

“What do you mean, consequences?” Iris said.

“Gerry Furnal, for starters, and a snide little paragraph in the
Mirror
for another.”

I asked him what was different now.

“It wouldn't be a snide little paragraph,” Ivor said. “It would be a front-page scandal story. MP stages kidnap of charity chief's wife. Besides, it's too late.” There was a clock on the mantelpiece and a watch on his wrist but still he asked me, “What time is it?”

“Just gone four.”

“This has been news since—when? Last night probably. First thing this morning. All over the papers. On TV, I expect, only I haven't watched any. They're going to ask me, the first thing they're going to ask me is why I've only just told them. I can't tell them, Rob. It's too late.”

We stayed with him. Well, I did. Iris went out and bought a loaf and some smoked salmon and made sandwiches for us. Ivor ate nothing. We turned on the early-evening news and of course it was the lead story, with more pictures of the crash and photographs of Hebe and a lot more about a kidnap attempt going wrong. They put Gerry Furnal on, a shattered man in tears, the tears actually streaming down his face, who said he didn't know why anyone would kidnap Hebe as they must have known he had no money for a ransom. There was speculation about someone they called a “mastermind” behind the abduction. When he heard that bit, Ivor put his head in his hands and muttered, “Turn the fucking thing off.”

A good deal later we took Nadine home. Iris was very tired but still we talked a lot that evening about Ivor's decision not to go to the police. I suppose neither of us could
understand it. Iris said that if only he'd gone to them as soon as he'd read that newspaper at lunchtime everything wouldn't exactly have been all right, but a lot better than it was turning out to be. That news story we had seen on the TV would have been very different and there was a good chance his name wouldn't have been mentioned. Without the abduction element it wasn't much more than an ordinary road crash, the kind of thing that happened all too often and does even more now.

“You don't think some journalist would have found out he was behind it?” I said.

“Possibly, but even if someone had and had printed it, the only blame which could be attached to him was—well, having an affair with a married woman. He'd have had to give the newspaper an interview saying he deeply regretted what he'd done. The death of one of those men was a tragedy, et cetera, et cetera, he was broken-hearted over Hebe Furnal's death—he's not though, is he?—and he was very sorry for the whole business. The main thing would have been to establish that there was no abduction. It was a game, a setup, and a private matter. If he'd done that, don't you think it would have blown over in a couple of days?”

“It would have damaged his political career.”

“Not much, though. Not for long. His chief whip would be cross—I think. Would he, though? Men laugh about that sort of thing. I mean, it's no laughing matter now because two people are dead, but it would have been. Still, I don't think Ivor would have been blamed much. Gerry Furnal seems a meek sort of man, awfully wretched, poor thing. Those tears were dreadful, weren't they? He wouldn't want to fight Ivor. The worst he'd do is fix up a meeting with him and make a big scene. Couldn't Ivor have weathered all that?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I've never seen him so afraid. He was a different man.”

N
O ONE EVER
attempted to blackmail Ivor. Yet almost from the first he was blackmail material. Of the few people who knew about the birthday present, not one of them knew it all. Each of them knew some of it, from one aspect or another, but they could all have asked him for money, a large sum of money or a guaranteed income to keep silent, but none of them did. I'm sure this wasn't because of their loyalty to him or fondness for him which held them back, but it may have been fear. Or even a kind of diffidence. I wonder how many people there are who would try demanding money with menaces, as the legal definition has it, but for their reluctance to appear quite so base and low in their victim's eyes. Perhaps I'm being naïve. The fact remains that Ivor was an MP, a respectable man, a rich man on his way to getting richer, who had set in motion a train of reprehensible events that he very much wanted to keep secret. Still, an independent observer might have said that none of it was really his fault. Not at the beginning, at any rate.

W
e always think first of saving our own skin. I did when Gerry phoned. I was having a lie-in. Not that I had been out the night before. As usual. I'm tired at the end of the week and on Fridays I'm usually in bed by ten. Like an elderly person, as Mummy used to tell me before Callum came on the scene and she was scolding me for not finding a husband or even a boyfriend. I still like to lie in bed on Saturdays a bit later than my usual seven a.m. rising time. The phone rang at eight-thirty and I thought it was Mummy, trying to catch me because I hadn't answered when she called the night before. I was still in bed. I reached for the receiver, picked it up and heard a man say, “Jane? It's Gerry.” I didn't recognize his voice. It sounded like someone had tried to strangle him. “You won't be surprised it's me. I should have called you before, I'm sorry.”