Corridors of Death (23 page)

Nixon seemed to hesitate as he flicked quickly through his notes. He looked over at the civil servants. Surely he must have the answer to that, Milton thought. It was inconceivable that the officials responsible would have neglected to provide the answer to such an obvious follow-up question. Milton scrutinized the occupants of the enclosure and saw Parkinson scribbling on a piece of paper. Nixon began to answer the question in measured tones. He was playing for time, Milton assumed, by giving annual statistics of unemployment, but he clearly didn’t have the six-monthly figures, or if he did he couldn’t find them. Presumably, if there was some particular significance in the six-monthly figures he wouldn’t get off with that. Parkinson must be busy supplementing the information.

Milton looked again at the Box to see how Parkinson would get the note to his minister. He could hardly leap over the partition which marked his separateness from the Members. There must be a minion to do that. He saw a tail-coated attendant approach him and hover as he waited for the note to be proffered. Parkinson didn’t seem to be coming up with the goods. He had stopped writing and was leaning back in his seat clutching his stomach. Nixon was stringing out his answer with a flood of statistics about cost per job, redeployment successes and the government’s record in job creation during its term of office. Milton wasn’t listening. He was growing increasingly concerned about the kerfuffle in the Box. Parkinson had slipped off his seat and Sanders and Amiss were bent over him. The sweat was standing out on Milton’s brow. He leaped from his seat and rushed out of the gallery to find someone to take him through the labyrinth of corridors to the back of the Box. He was praying as he ran down the stairs. He didn’t know if it was for Parkinson or himself.

36

By the time Milton reached them, Sanders, Amiss and a couple of attendants had carried Parkinson into the corridor. They were standing by helplessly. The carpet was spattered with vomit and the stains of uncontrollable diarrhoea. Cries of agony issued from the convulsed face below them. The horror of it had set their faces in rigid lines of sympathetic pain. As two men in uniform ran up with a stretcher and a medical kit, Milton led the two civil servants away. They would have trouble enough in banishing the image of this from their minds without seeing any more.

He was badly shaken himself, but he was lucky in having work to do. He made the necessary arrangements for officers to follow Parkinson to hospital and be ready to pass on to Milton’s temporary headquarters at the House any news on how he was progressing, or of anything he might say.

He was quickly found a room and he called in Sanders and Amiss to question them on Parkinson’s sudden illness. It was as he had feared. Parkinson had complained of indigestion and dehydration, had been perspiring heavily, and had shown signs of intensified symptoms as he sat in the Box. The convulsions had started when he fell to the floor. Sanders had tried earlier to persuade him to leave the House and go home or get medical treatment, but Parkinson had insisted that he would be all right. Milton felt sick when he realized that the poor fellow was probably trying to prove himself in front of his new Permanent Secretary.

He chafed with impatience while he went through the motions of interviewing the others who had been sitting in the Officials’ Box. They all told the same story. He gave himself a moment alone to ring the hospital. Maybe there was still a chance that this would prove to be simply a bad case of food poisoning. There wasn’t. The doctor to whom he spoke was in no doubt. Parkinson was suffering from acute arsenic poisoning. Milton’s worst suspicions were confirmed.

He made some more telephone calls to set enquiries in train, and then recalled Sanders and Amiss. He needed to know Parkinson’s movements. They might be able to add something to the evidence others were now getting from his secretary and staff. All they knew, they said unhappily, was that Parkinson had had a working lunch with Nixon at about 1.30. There had been so much for Sanders and Nixon to talk about in relation to Wells’s sacking that the Secretary of State hadn’t been able to keep his late-morning appointment with Parkinson. It had been Nixon’s idea that they should lunch together and go over the brief on the glass-recycling plant. All the civil servants had had ten minutes or so together with Nixon just before Question Time to clear up any problems that might have occurred to him.

Milton sat silently contemplating the obvious inference that Nixon had had an excellent opportunity to poison Parkinson. He sent a patiently waiting sergeant to question the canteen staff. He was about to dismiss Sanders and Amiss for the time being and call in Nixon, who had finished in the Chamber and was standing by to keep their appointment, when he caught sight of Amiss gesticulating at him from behind Sanders’s back. Of course, he had wanted to see him about something. The message from Ann seemed to have come a long, long time ago. He called out as they were leaving the room.

‘Excuse me, Mr Amiss, but something has come up about Sir Nicholas which you should be able to answer. Would you mind staying for a moment?’

Milton’s mind wasn’t on what Amiss was saying. All he could think of was what the next news from the hospital would be. Surely they had got Parkinson in time? He couldn’t be dying. Hadn’t he suffered enough in his life not to deserve an appalling death like this? But then so had Gladys. This murderer probably didn’t know or care about the kind of people he killed. He must be a savage. Gladys’s death was mercifully quick, at least. Only a fiend would kill with arsenic.

He looked up dully at Amiss, who seemed to be talking about a missing appointments diary. It wasn’t like Robert to witter on like this when there was something so much more urgent going on. His telephone rang.

‘It’s Pike, sir. I’ve had a couple of people at work checking alibis and Jenkins, Nigel Clark and Stafford are in the clear. They couldn’t have seen Parkinson today. I can’t get hold of Lady Clark and I’m still double-checking on Wells’s movements.’

Milton closed his eyes and thought. Amiss hadn’t started talking again. Shaw was out as well. That left two people who might have murdered Parkinson, unless of course someone had found a way of getting the poison to him indirectly or at an earlier date. Why? Why? Why? What could Parkinson possibly have known that would have made him a danger now? He was no Gladys, too confused to make sense of anything he had seen or heard. He was a trained scientist, for God’s sake. But maybe he had been keeping quiet for a reason? Was it conceivable that that open relaxed man had been indulging in blackmail? If so, of whom? Wells? Fruitless. Wells didn’t have either money or power. Nixon? He had some indirect power over Parkinson’s career, and a little money. Lady Clark? She had money.

Pike rang again. ‘Lady Clark and Mr Wells are in the clear also, sir, as far as today is concerned.’

He looked up at Amiss. ‘I’m sorry, Robert. I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to see Nixon. He’s not going to be able to explain his way out of this one, if I’m any judge. Apart from anything else, we’ve discovered that Sir Nicholas knew he was mixed up with a call-girl.’

‘You’ve got to listen to me first, Jim.’

The phone rang again. This time it was from the hospital. Milton listened for a moment and hung up. ‘Parkinson’s dead, Robert.’

‘But he can’t be,’ cried Amiss. ‘I was sure he was the murderer.’

37

Amiss’s argument was that the key to Gladys’s murder lay in resolving the question of who had had an early Monday morning appointment with Sir Nicholas. Although Milton felt it was rather academic now, he had pulled himself together and accepted that, since Amiss wasn’t a fool, he should do him the courtesy of listening. There was no harm in letting Nixon sweat for a few minutes longer. He followed and approved of the line of reasoning that had led Amiss to that conclusion.

Amiss had been able to check on Wells and Nixon easily. There was no problem in consulting their diaries and having a brief tangential chat with their staff. Nixon had unquestionably arrived back in London on the shuttle half an hour before the IGGY meeting. Wells had met his Private Secretary more than an hour before IGGY to go obsessively over the brief with him. Parkinson had been more of a problem. His secretary was extremely unapproachable and guarded her secrets jealously. Amiss couldn’t think of any way of finding out about Parkinson’s early-morning movements without looking suspiciously nosey. He had had a brainwave which he was now embarrassed about. He excused himself in advance by a sheepish admission that he had let his enthusiasm run away with him.

‘What did you do?’

‘I rang up his secretary – I knew he was out of the room – imitated your voice, gave your name, and said I was doing a routine check of the early-morning movements of everyone concerned in the case.’

Milton pulled himself back from the brink of rage. This was his ally, after all, whose enthusiasm had up until now been of incomparable value to the enquiry.

‘And she said…?’

‘That while there was nothing in his diary for Monday morning other than the IGGY meeting, he had been in unusually early. His coat was on the rack when she got in at 8.45. She didn’t know where he’d been, but he had come back a few minutes later.’

‘You’re not trying to tell me that on the basis of this you concluded that he was a murderer?’

‘Of course not. It wasn’t enough in itself. But it tied in with something that Sanders consulted me about this morning which gave Parkinson a real and urgent motive for murdering Sir Nicholas.’

‘Yes?’

‘He was in line for the Under Secretaryship of a new division which needed a scientist-cum-administrator. Sanders wanted to know what I thought of him. He said he’d just been talking to the Personnel people about it and they were waiting for a recommendation from the Permanent Secretary. Sanders was well-disposed. Thought Parkinson hadn’t had a fair deal from Sir Nicholas.’

‘Would Parkinson have known he was in the running?’

‘Not in the normal course of events. But Sanders said Sir Nicholas had known about it last Friday. Isn’t it highly possible that he made an appointment with Parkinson for Monday morning to tell him he wouldn’t recommend him?’

Milton tried to cast his mind back a few hours. Yes. Had he heard about this then he would have followed it up with alacrity. The big thing in Parkinson’s favour all along had been his lack of an urgent motive. Knowing Sir Nicholas there was every reason to believe that he would have wanted to raise Parkinson’s hopes over the weekend only to dash them on Monday morning. But that, as he told Amiss, was now entirely and eternally hypothetical, since both principals in the supposed conversations were unable to confirm it.

‘Could he have committed suicide? Or intended just to make himself ill in order to draw suspicion away from himself?’

‘You’ve had a taste of what arsenic poisoning does to someone, Robert. Do you really think it’s likely anyone would commit suicide that way? And he was a scientist, don’t forget. He wouldn’t have given himself a fatal dose if he wanted to make himself ill. He’d have calculated it carefully. No. I’m afraid that while your theory would have seemed plausible this morning, it’s not a runner now. Apart from anything else, can you explain why he should have committed suicide?’

‘No,’ said Amiss unhappily. ‘But just for the sake of it, will you have someone check through his things here and in the office for a suicide note?’

‘All right, Robert. I’ll do that now. Will you tell Nixon I’ll want him in a couple of minutes?’

The Assistant Commissioner burst through the door as Milton finished his call. It took a few minutes to bring him up-to-date about Nixon’s possible new motive, the elimination of Alfred Shaw and the fact that, with the exception of Nixon, none of the suspects had had any contact with Parkinson that day.

‘And you haven’t arrested him yet?’ he asked incredulously.

‘I’m not one hundred per cent certain, sir. I was just going to question him again.’

‘If you had questioned him earlier today Parkinson might be alive now. What possible reason can you have for holding back? Don’t you realize that we’re already likely to be accused of incompetence? We don’t want a charge of giving special treatment to a government minister levelled against us as well.’

‘There are three things worrying me, sir. First, why should Nixon have wanted to kill Parkinson? I can’t think of a motive which will hold water. Second, why would he have been so incredibly stupid as to poison him over lunch and make himself the Number One suspect?…’

‘Blackmail and bravado,’ said the A.C. crisply. ‘What’s the third?’

Milton tip-toed on egg-shells in putting forward Amiss’s theory as if it were a long-shot of his own. He had difficulty in looking the A.C. in the eye as he mentioned having made a phone call to Parkinson’s secretary. He concluded by mentioning he had organized a hunt for a suicide note.

‘Rubbish,’ said the A.C. ‘You’ve been letting your imagination work overtime. Parkinson’s been murdered by the same person who showed himself ready to take massive risks with his earlier killings. Let’s get the bastard in and break him.’

Before you go back to the Yard and break me
, thought Milton. He went out to find Nixon.

38

Nixon could do nothing except sit there and deny everything. No, Sir Nicholas hadn’t said anything to him about Sally. He might have intended to, but Nixon had avoided him after the meeting. No, he hadn’t murdered him. No, he hadn’t murdered Gladys. No, he hadn’t been blackmailed by Parkinson. Nor had Parkinson told him he knew anything about the earlier murders. No, he hadn’t poisoned Parkinson. All he had done was buy him lunch out of the kindness of his heart.

Milton remained silent throughout the questioning. The A.C. had begun politely enough, but his patience was wearing thin by the end of half an hour of asking the same questions and getting the same answers. When the interim pathology report came through with the news that Parkinson had died from a dose of arsenic large enough to kill a horse, taken along with his lunch, the A.C. began to shout.