Dirty Tricks (25 page)

No, the only safe topic is gardening. Don’t ask why but there it is. You don’t need to know much about it, though a bluffer’s level acquaintance with the local flora won’t come amiss. But all that’s really required is to show interest and throw in the odd phrase like ‘My hydrangeas are very late this year’ or ‘Do you find tea roses take in this sandy soil?’ Not a big effort, then, and one I was quite prepared to make in the interests of cultivating a smooth and personable image. I’m happy to be able to report that it was most effective. One doesn’t expect conversation in England to flow, but this one oozed quite satisfactorily. Within a week Alison and I had been invited to sip sherry in North Oxford and drink gin in Abingdon. We were launched.

Everyone agreed that we were a delightful couple, perfectly attuned in some respects, piquantly complementary in others. If I had been less generous or astute I might have begrudged the time I had spent cultivating the likes of Karen and Dennis Parsons. But I was well aware that I was only regarded as a natural partner for Alison because I had money. Cash alone wouldn’t have made me acceptable, of course, but no charm, wit or patient attention to tedious monologues and appreciative laughter at stale jokes could ever have made up for the lack of it. As it was, the only obstacle to my complete conquest of Alison Kraemer appeared to be the implacable hostility of her daughter. Rebecca had taken against me with the passionate intensity of her age. I was yuck, I was gross, I was everything that was not awesome, radical, trif, wicked, lush and crucial. Alison in turn felt unable, so she claimed, to proceed further until her daughter’s opposition had been overcome. She just couldn’t, not while Rebecca felt the way she did, she just wouldn’t feel right. It never occurred to me to doubt that Alison would have come across if I’d pressed a bit harder, but that was just what I didn’t want to do. I’d done more than my share of pushing and shoving at fortune’s wheel recently. Now it was time to sit back patiently and let events take their course.

Karen’s death had made me a rich man, and after consultations with a financial expert recommended by Thomas I made a number of investments, the results of which astonished me. I’d had no idea until then that you could make more money doing absolutely nothing than you could in even the best-paid job. There was no point in my looking for work, not with the amount I was earning from the money I already had. Nevertheless I needed a cover. When people ask what you do, it’s simply not on, at least in the circles in which Alison and I revolved, to reply, ‘I sit at home in front of the TV while my brokers perform obscenely profitable operations with my accumulated capital.’ To provide myself with an acceptable occupation, I sank £30,000 in an investment which was, in a sense, to prove the most rewarding of all.

Following Clive’s conviction and sentence, the management of his business concerns had passed to his sister, a nurse who had no knowledge of or interest in EFL work. She therefore agreed to a buy-out proposal from a group of teachers at the school, who attempted to run the place as a co-operative. This lasted less than six months. What the teachers hadn’t realized was that the secret of the school’s success had not been their professional excellence but Clive’s unscrupulous and ruthless management, which they were neither willing nor able to emulate. That’s where I came in.

Buying a controlling interest in the OILC afforded me the greatest possible satisfaction. Besides giving me a colourable occupation – I appointed myself to the position of Director, while leaving the actual day-to-day running of the place to a salaried subordinate – it completed my revenge for the insults and injuries I had sustained in the past. Clive might have had my wife, but I had his school. I knew this would hurt him far more than Karen’s infidelity had hurt me. Everything he had lied and cheated and scrounged and gouged to create had been handed to me on a plate, as one more item in my varied and lucrative portfolio.

I soon turned the fortunes of the school around again by applying the methods I had learned the hard way from Clive himself. I offered the teachers a 25 per cent cut in wages and a one-year contract on the previous terms. Those who objected were dismissed. I then flew to Italy and tracked down Clive’s recruitment agent, who had switched to another school when the co-operative refused to pay his cut. In return for a percentage increase and a substantial cash incentive up front he agreed to forsake all others and cleave unto me. After that it was just a matter of finding an anal-obsessive martinet with a sadistic streak to act as administrator, while I swanned in from time to time and played at being busy. I remember my friend Carlos telling me that the difference between North and South Americans is that for the former power means being able to do whatever you want, while for the latter it means being able to prevent others doing what
they
want. At the time I was too much of a gringo to grasp the attractions of this kind of power, but as I lay back in Clive’s swivel chair, my feet up on Clive’s desk, admiring the view from Clive’s window, I finally understood. It is simply the most exquisite and luxurious sensation that life can afford, the ultimate peak experience.

And I had in fact peaked, although of course I didn’t see it that way. In the two years following my belated conversion to the doctrine of self-help and free enterprise my life had changed out of all recognition. There seemed no reason to suppose that the changes would stop there. On the contrary, I was full of plans and projects of every kind. Alison and I were ineluctably drawing closer together, and our complete union appeared to be just a matter of time. I dreamed of a large gothic revival mansion overlooking the Parks, where Alison would preside with effortless grace over the elaborate rituals of North Oxford social life. At other times I found myself attracted to the idea of a manor house in a Cotswold village, a gem of classic restraint and rustic charm where we would keep dogs and horses. Then there would be long lazy summers at the cottage in the Dordogne, and, once Rebecca was off our hands, impromptu trips to Venice and Vienna, to Mauritius and Morocco.

Nor were these mere idle fantasies. We had the money, we had the freedom, and even more important we had the taste and the style, the breadth of vision, the experience. But they were to count for nothing, and all because of a man named Hugh Starkey.

If a dramatist were to take the liberty of ascribing what Aristotle calls the catastrophe – an apt enough term in this case – to a totally extraneous character who pops up from nowhere towards the end of the last act, he would rightly be ridiculed. Life does it all the time, though. Forget anything I may have said about the reasons for my present circumstances. The disastrous turn which events were about to take was due not to anything I did or failed to do, but to a man I never even met.

In August 1988 a group of masked men ambushed a Securicor van in Wolverhampton, seriously injuring one of the guards. Following a tip-off from an informant, Hugh Starkey was picked up for questioning and later charged. Starkey was a minor-league villain from the Handsworth area of Birmingham with a long and uninspiring record of rubbishy offences like holding up petrol stations, extorting protection money from Asian and Chinese restaurateurs and breaking into bonded warehouses. While in police custody he signed a remarkably full and copious confession, naming the other members of the gang and citing a string of other unsolved crimes for which they were responsible. So forthcoming had he been, in fact, that it was widely assumed he had done a deal with the authorities in return for a reduced sentence. Much to everyone’s surprise, when the case came to court Starkey drew a baker’s dozen just like the men he had informed on.

About two years later, while Clive Phillips was awaiting trial for murder, our Hugh got a break. In the course of inquiries into a string of supermarket holdups, Greater Manchester police discovered incontrovertible evidence that on the day the Securicor van had been attacked Starkey had been on their patch, taking part in an abortive attempt to rob a Gateway supermarket in Salford. Security cameras mounted over the entrance had videoed him and two other men as they fled. This didn’t do much to improve Hugh Starkey’s image as an upstanding member of the community, but it was extremely embarrassing for the police force which had charged him with the Wolverhampton job. The Home Secretary ordered an inquiry, which discovered among other things that a number of passages had been inserted into Starkey’s confession after it had been signed. Disciplinary proceedings were brought against various senior officers, including a certain Chief Inspector Manningtree, who had transferred from the squad six months after Starkey’s arrest because his wife was ill and wanted to return to her native Wales. When the police in Rhayader discovered that they had a full-scale murder hunt on their hands, they asked headquarters to send up someone with the necessary experience to handle the case, and who better than a man who had served for five years in a big city Serious Crimes Squad?

When these facts came to light, Clive’s solicitor was engaged in the thankless task of preparing to lodge an appeal against his client’s conviction. In the absence of any new evidence or witnesses he knew this was a total waste of time. Clive stoutly maintained that he had signed a limited confession under duress, and that this had subsequently been doctored to include statements he had never made. Until now his solicitor had never believed this himself, let alone felt that there was the slightest chance of getting anyone else to do so. The Hugh Starkey scandal changed all that. Within weeks a lively media campaign was underway. The quality papers ran thoughtful, heart-searching articles expressing grave and widespread anxieties concerning the present system of policing, while the tabloids slammed and blasted their readers into a state of outraged moral indignation. From one end of the land to the other, the air was redolent with the stink of bent filth.

The first I knew of all this was during one of my occasional walkabouts at the school. Keep everyone on their toes was the idea. I knew it was no use trying to treat the staff as responsible adults. They wouldn’t be working for me if they were. In the teachers’ room I noticed an article pinned to the notice-board with three large felt-tipped exclamation marks beside it. It had been cut out of one of the local free papers. The headline read RESERVOIR VICTIM’S FIRST HUSBAND ALSO DIED MYSTERIOUSLY.

With the help of large photographs of Karen, Dennis, the house in Ramillies Drive, the Elan Valley and the Cherwell boathouse, the ‘exclusive’ article covered a two-page spread. ‘Our own reporter’ first summarized the events leading up to Clive’s conviction and then the ‘recent developments which have created demands for the case to be reopened’. But most of the article was devoted to what was termed ‘an astonishing oversight’ by the police, namely their failure to note the ‘disturbing parallels’ between the circumstances of Karen’s death and that of her first husband, ‘local Chartered Accountant and Rotary Club stalwart Dennis Parsons’.

Since these parallels amounted to no more than the banal coincidence that both Karen and Dennis had ended up in the water, one was initially left with the impression that the article was a feeble attempt to fake a sensational breakthrough where none existed. But the facts as printed were
so
scanty in relation to the claims being made that another solution eventually forced itself on this reader at least. The ‘disturbing parallel’ was not the one which the reporter described, but one which he could not mention for fear of legal action: my involvement in both deaths. My name was mentioned only once – in the caption beneath the photo of the house, where I was identified as the present owner of a property ‘marked by death’ – but my absence hovered over the whole article like a malign spirit.

I have no doubt whatever that this piece was ghost-written by ‘our own reporter’ to a scenario supplied by Clive through his solicitor. The rag in which it appeared was after all an advertising medium, for sale by the column, page or spread. Clive’s advertisement merely took a rather unusual form, that’s all. There was no follow-up in the legitimate press, and I forgot all about the incident until a few weeks later, when my answering machine recorded a call from a Chief Inspector Moss, or some such name.

It was a grey, gloomy day with a bitterly cold easterly wind which had brought the pavement out in grease spots. I had been out for a walk along the canal, and I got home feeling depressed and bewildered, full of disgust for myself and others. In this state of mind the message from the police seemed less alarming than it might otherwise have done. If I had been enjoying the fruits of my crimes more, I might have felt guiltier about them. As it was, I was so miserable that I might as well have been innocent. I called back and made an appointment to see Moss the following morning.

I left the BMW at a cash-and-flash car park and walked to St Aldate’s police station, where I was led upstairs to an interview room on the second floor. A paunchy, balding bloke in his mid-fifties sat doing a crossword puzzle. As I entered, he started whistling a phrase which I recognized with some surprise as the Fate motif from Wagner’s
Ring
cycle. On the desk in front of him lay a number of folders bulging with typed papers.

Moss stared at me for some time as though considering how best to proceed.

‘Several months ago, Clive Reginald Phillips was tried and convicted for the murder of your wife,’ he finally said. ‘Due to various irregularities in the investigative procedure which have recently come to light, that conviction has been ruled unsafe and is about to be set aside.’

I started gasping, as though I’d just run all the way from North Oxford.

‘This will entail various practical consequences,’ Moss went on gloomily. ‘One, of course, is that Phillips will be released from prison.’

‘But he murdered my wife!’

‘I wouldn’t go around saying things like that if I were you, sir. You could find yourself facing charges for criminal libel.’

‘It’s enough to make you despair of British justice!’ I cried, writhing about tormentedly in my chair.