Corridors of Death (4 page)

Milton ordered another round of drinks. ‘Funny terminology you lot use – long-stops and all that. My sergeant showed me one of the telephone messages he passed on this afternoon – “Hope to be back in office before close of play.” ’

Amiss laughed. ‘You can’t avoid it in the civil service. It’s an integral part of our language, possibly because it’s conveniently vague. “Close of play”, for instance, means some time between 5.30 and 7.00, depending on what time the recipient is likely to knock off. To put a specific time on it is rather frowned on. Gentlemen don’t leave at a regular time; only minions do that. We also talk about straight bats, opening bats, sticky wickets, bouncers and balls going wide.’

‘Are you all cricket fanatics?’

‘Oh, no. Probably very few of us are. It’s not even consciously figurative any more. There was an attempted revolt by soccer enthusiasts in my office some time ago – memos going round with half-time, full-time, off-side, own goals and so on, but they didn’t catch on. Officials have to cope with political change too often to be prepared to compromise on what they regard as really sacrosanct – language and customs.’

Milton considered this for a moment. ‘I know the score on that now,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave the gentlemen and get back to the players: where was Wells while Nixon’s balls were being driven to the boundary? Or is that too laboured?’

‘A bit. And anyway, Nixon was batting. I suppose you could say Wells was watching from the pavilion, having been shoved out of the team in a humiliating way. He had arrived that morning already bearing his share of personal troubles, also precipitated by Sir Nicholas, who, being always in touch with gossip about ministers’ private lives, had known very well that Wells was spending the weekend with his mistress on the pretext of a departmental conference.’

‘You go along with that sort of cover-up?’

‘Not directly. But we tell lies about ministerial whereabouts if we have to. We’re servants, remember. We may wear dark suits and talk with posh accents, but our job is to keep our masters happy. We draw the line at pimping for them, but we certainly would be expected to pass on any messages they gave us. Anyway, Sir Nicholas, knowing that, had the happy thought of ringing up Wells’s home, identifying himself and asking to speak to him. When Mrs Wells mentioned the conference, Sir Nicholas apparently denied all knowledge of it, expressed surprise, managed to arouse all her suspicions and rang off. According to his Private Secretary, the earful Wells got when he rang home just before this morning’s meeting would have left a lesser careerist in bits, but the thought of his triumph to come carried him through. Until, that is, he found himself put out of his seat at the conference table to make way for Nixon. He was condescendingly invited to stay and had a bird’s-eye view of Nixon’s collapse from a seat at the other side of the room. As an observer, he could do nothing at all to retrieve the situation. And remember that in this unjust world his reputation would have taken a dive purely by association with Nixon’s failure.’

‘Anything else is going to be an anti-climax after this,’ said Milton faintly. ‘But I suppose you’d better go on to the other motive and a half.’

5

‘The next best motive is Archibald Stafford’s.’

‘Is this going to be as complicated as the other two?’ asked Milton, miming coffee at the waiter across the room. ‘I’m beginning to hanker after something simple.’

‘Well, I can skip the technicalities if you like, and confine to the basic minimum my account of how Sir Nicholas set out to wreck Stafford’s career.’

‘Please do. It’s late already, and since I can’t tell anyone about our deal I’ve the job tomorrow of trying to extract from Nixon and Wells the information you’ve already given me. Bloody awkward, unless they believe in the god-like intuition of the super-sleuth. Not that I’m complaining, of course.’

‘I had some understanding of why he hated Nixon and Wells – contempt and ethical revulsion respectively – but why he should have had it in for poor old Stafford is still beyond me. They were at school together, they’ve had regular social contact ever since – lunches and so on – and I would have put them down as relatively close friends.’

‘Is Stafford a successful industrialist?’

‘It depends on what you call successful.’ And hastily, seeing Milton’s face contort at the prospect of equivocation so late in the evening, Amiss added: ‘That is, he’s risen to the top of a large and prosperous company, and if he isn’t pointed to as one of the country’s top ten management whizz-kids, he’s certainly well liked and respected by the Establishment. Over the years Sir Nicholas brought him on to all sorts of government advisory committees, and he was useful enough on them to be nominated to the great heights of IGGY with a knighthood an almost certain reward. Everything was going well for him until last year, when his company applied in the normal way for a large grant from this department for an expansion and modernization project.’

‘And presumably he expected to have Sir Nicholas’s backing?’

‘Certainly. Nothing wrong with that. The project would be examined objectively by staff seconded from outside the service, but it could only be a help to know that the Permanent Secretary considered the Executive Chairman to be a dynamic and able leader.’

‘Something went wrong?’

‘Yes. For Stafford, it couldn’t have gone much worse. It wasn’t until the other day, when the grant was offered, subject to a management shake-up, that I realized that Sir Nicholas must have been gunning for him all the time. A bit of digging confirmed it.’

‘What had he done? Dropped reservations about Stafford in the right ears?’

‘More than that, I think. As far as I can see he was instrumental in having an iconoclast, Barnes, chosen as project head. Barnes is an efficient enough chap, but obsessed with the virtues of scientific management and violently opposed to any kind of old-fashioned paternalism – however effective. It’s a bit of a joke really, the department employing someone like that when you consider that civil-service interest in management as either an art or a science is zilch. Barnes had a couple of conversations with Sir Nicholas about the case during which, I gather, Barnes was given to understand that much as it pained him to say it, Sir Nicholas thought old Stafford was a good chap but past it. So that was the conclusion Barnes went looking for and that inevitably was what he found. And poor old Stafford, who was well thought of in the department by anyone who had any dealings with him, had complete confidence in his old friend and kept referring Barnes to him as the official who knew most about his management philosophy. Sir Nicholas had indicated to his underlings that he was handling the departmental view on Stafford, so the case for him went by default. By the time Barnes had prepared his report – twenty-four hours before it went to the independent committee which adjudicates on the awarding of grants – it was too late for anybody to retrieve the situation. Plastics Conversion were promised six million pounds in government aid subject to their getting rid of Stafford and a few others.’

‘And Stafford isn’t so outstanding that he’s worth the loss of six million to the company?’

‘Certainly the shareholders wouldn’t think so.’

‘So all that was festering away in Stafford this morning. But he couldn’t have known Sir Nicholas was his enemy?’

‘No, not necessarily, but it would be interesting to find out if they had had a conversation since the knife went in. Given the manic mood he seems to have been in over the weekend, I wouldn’t put it past Sir Nicholas to have told him.’

‘Three down. Who had the weak motive?’

‘Richard Parkinson. I only call it weak because I can’t see why he would have murdered Sir Nicholas now rather than at any other time. He’s had reason enough to hate him for years, from all I gather.’

‘Don’t tell me. He’s been trying to ruin his career.’

‘Trying? He’s done it. Parkinson was a contemporary of Sir Nicholas’s at Oxford, although a scientist rather than a classicist. I think they both used to speak at the Union. When he joined the civil service ten years ago he was a successful industrial scientist who took a considerable drop in salary to come into the public sector.’

‘Why should he do a silly thing like that?’

‘Well, the rumour is that Sir Nicholas advised him to do so on the grounds that he was of such distinction that he would rise effortlessly to the top.’

‘And why didn’t he?’

‘Well, again I’m going on rumour. I’ve heard it said that when, a couple of years later, he found himself in a bit of a backwater, he was convinced by Sir Nicholas that he should transfer from the scientific to the administrative side of things, where his various talents would all receive recognition. There was an idea abroad in those days, among reformers, that the administrators needed to be shaken up by the introduction of people who really understood technology. Parkinson’s industrial experience made him look ideal for imbuing the paper-pushers with a consciousness of what the real world was all about.’

‘He didn’t succeed, then?’

‘He did well enough. From what I’ve heard he would have ended up at least a Deputy Secretary – that’s one from the top – given a break. He didn’t have any of the drawbacks that scientists often suffer from in the service, where literacy and articulacy tend to count for more than other qualities. Anyway, he found himself as an Assistant Secretary working directly to Sir Nicholas, who was then an Under Secretary. There he was, with an almost total lack of administrative experience, suffering perpetual embarrassment at the hands of his old pal, who criticized his handling of policy making, parliamentary questions, advice to ministers – everything he did, in short. Whatever he did was wrong.’

‘Hang on a minute. I’m getting hopelessly confused about all these secretaries. So far…’ he consulted his notebook, ‘I have a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State – Wells, a Permanent Secretary – the corpse, an Assistant Secretary – Parkinson, and now you’re dragging in Under and Deputy Secretaries. On top of all that, you’re a Private Secretary. None of you, I presume, does any of the mundane things one normally associates with secretaries, like shorthand and typing.’

Amiss laughed. ‘Perish the thought that we might do anything so useful. I’m sorry, I should have explained earlier. It’s easy to forget how much difficulty an outsider must have in grasping our antiquated ranking system. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll draw you a chart. You won’t see any real secretaries on it; they’re called Personal Secretaries and they won’t show up here.’

‘Right,’ he said a couple of minutes later. ‘Look at this. That’s our departmental structure roughly. You can see from the pecking-order that Parkinson is a long way down.’

‘Where do you fit in? You seem to be out on a limb.’

‘I shouldn’t be on the chart at all really. I’ve put myself there at the Permanent Secretary’s right hand to clarify things. I’m two ranks below Parkinson at the moment, more or less. If I’m a good boy I’ll be made a Principal soon and then I’ll be only one below him.’

Milton looked confused. ‘A Principal sounds much more important than an Assistant Secretary.’

‘Not when you know that the title is short for Principal Clerk – though of course it has nothing nowadays to do with clerical work. All these titles go back at least to the last century. Don’t try to understand why we use them – it’s easier just to accept.’

Milton ran his eye over the sketch and nodded his comprehension. ‘Thanks. I can see that Parkinson hasn’t done too well. Why didn’t he get out?’

‘He left it too late. He had got out of touch with scientific advances of all but the most general sort in his anxiety to learn about his new job.’

‘Dear God. Yours seems to be a very cruel world.’

‘No, not really. It’s often stuffy, often silly, it can be absurdly bureaucratic and it frequently wastes talent by attaching far too much importance to style rather than content. Still, it’s got a lot of intelligent, industrious and amusing people who would not be consciously unkind – just thoughtless. And thoughtlessly they left poor old Parkinson to his fate. More and more people got promoted over his head and Sir Nicholas rose to be Permanent Secretary. With his increase in power he was better placed than ever to shake his head when anyone suggested promoting Parkinson. I’ve heard him referring to Parkinson as a third-rate mind with a second-rate veneer.’

‘Did Parkinson know it was Sir Nicholas who was responsible for his condition?’

‘He can’t have known specifically, but he must have guessed a lot of it. He certainly must have smarted under some of the deft criticisms Sir Nicholas used to make of his work whenever he got the chance – often in memoranda circulated to half a dozen people. He never mentioned him by name, of course. Just made snide references – expressing concern that nothing had been done in this area or that, or surprise at the misjudgement displayed in a draft policy document. Sir Nicholas was very clever,’ Amiss sighed. ‘I bet
The Times
obituary says he had a first-rate mind.’

‘Well, time to draw stumps. I’m taking my third-rate mind home to bed before you tell me that Sir Nicholas was about to have the entire leadership of the TUC arraigned for treason. I don’t suppose even you can have a lot more to tell me tomorrow, but in line with our bargain, I’ll be here about the same time tomorrow night to fill you in on my day’s doings. Here, I’ll pay that. Least I can do.’