Rogue's Gallery (17 page)

And she left the room and the house with a merry wave of her hand. The two men hurried after her and Samantha followed
them
, and we passed all four a few minutes along Caves Pathway, arguing and jesticulating. Mum didn't
honour them with so much as a glance. She and I were usually together on these walks because we are the slowest. This year we were in front, and well in front too.

‘Are they coming?' Mum asked after a bit. I looked round.

‘Yes, but quite slowly. They're still arguing.'

‘They would be, wouldn't they? When is it any different on these reunion days? I could murder Bernard.'

‘Well, we've come to the right place,' I said, but seriously, not waggish at all. ‘Sheer drop at several points. Hardly a soul around.'

‘True,' said my mother, also treating the question seriously. ‘But murder is too good for him. I should leave him alive, to moulder in his horrible skin, with his horrible self and his awful little talent.'

‘I think murder would be better.'

At this point in his writing Morgan laid down his pen. Had he overdone it in directing suspicion on himself? It was a common ploy in crime fiction he had read. Probably it mirrored reality – policemen are really thick and do get it wrong, in all probability. If a reader took it too seriously he had only to read on to change his opinion.

He took up his pen again.

‘You're probably right,' said my mother. ‘But do you think I'm the murdering type?'

‘You're the Agatha Christie type: least likely suspect.'

‘I'm not sure the police would take that line. I don't get the impression they read Christie.'

‘It's about half an hour to Trevelyan's Cave. Sheer
drop from there. Half the suicides' bodies are never recovered.'

‘Little monster. Have you been planning this? How did you know that?'

‘The
South Devon Chronicle.
'

‘Shame on them … I was telling the truth when I said I could murder him … Taking up with that whore, twelve years after he ditched her for me.'

‘I thought she ditched him for Uncle Tim, and you got him instead.'

‘No … Well, have it your own way if you like … To go back to her, have regular … meetings in gungy hotel rooms—'

‘Sex. It's called sex, Mum.'

‘I know, cheeky. Or I remember … Well, that's the end, murder or no murder – and I think I can restrain myself from slortering him.'

I was afraid that was true. But when we got to Trevelyan Cave I was relieved that she went into the dirty little hole and sat down among the rocks. I stood outside where I had a spectacular view of the deadly rocks on Westcot cove, and also of the path, winding its vert-something-or-other way up to the Cave. I was looking for a little party of four, but I soon saw I was mistaken: the party had broken up, with Deirdre, Tim and Samantha probably going back to the village and then back to their Manor home which one day may be mine. There was one solitary trousered figure trailing his way up to us. All he needed was a napsack on his back and he'd be one of your typical boring-as-hell walkers.

‘Here comes Dad,' I said. Mum elbowed her way to the front of the cave and I took over the shadows. ‘He's going to beg you to take him back,' I said, in case he did.

‘He's got a nerve,' muttered my mother. But he didn't do anything of the sort.

‘I'm not stopping,' he panted, in the misstatement of the century. ‘I just wanted to say goodbye. You always knew Deirdre was the one, didn't you? You always knew I was imagining her when we were … you know. It makes me sound a jerk, I know.'

‘Not just sound,' said Mum.

‘All right, all right. But I'm going to win her back. I'm going to go to her. Tim knows he's lost her, and I'm not sure he'll care all that much. He's told me he always loved you, Morgan – Oh, like a father, you know. I told him to keep his hands off you because we don't want his bloody Brideshead—'

I shot out of the cave, and the sentence was only completed with an ‘AAAAHHH'. When I was capable of taking my eyes away from the prospect at the bottom of the cliffs Lois was looking around – up, down, and towards the edge – with a gaze of total bewilderment on her face. I felt almost sorry for her.

‘Congratulations, Mum. You did it.'

‘But I didn't. I mean I can't remember that I …
Did
I? Morgan, DID I? Oh my God, I must have. What are we going to do?'

‘Go home. Tell people Bernard's been called away.'

My mother put her hand to her face.

‘Australia! He was thinking of going to Australia. He's
writing some material for Dame Edna.'

‘
Was
writing,' I said. ‘Of course the body might be found.'

‘But nothing to connect him to us. It would be much more likely that he committed suicide, or just missed his footing. There's been no one on the path to say that he ever got as high as Trevelyan Cave.'

‘And no one to say we were here. Come on, Mum: let's get back home. I think Dad's going to like Australia so much he's going to be there for a very long time.'

Morgan stopped writing. He wondered whether it was totally clear what he wanted the reader to think. Well – not totally clear: this was a literary exercise, but one which could result in his being parentless and ripe for adoption. For a literary exercise it was surely a lot more exciting than most.

When Morgan was called into Miss Trim's office he knew exactly what he was going to say. The end of his father had been to a degree ‘impovised', as he called it, but the broad outlines had been with him (as a fantasy hardening to a project) for some time. He could cope with the likes of Miss Trim.

‘I must say, Morgan, that your essay bewildered me, even shocked me.'

‘Oh? Why was that Miss Trim?'

‘I expected it to be a factual, that means truthful, account of what you did on the last day of your holiday.'

‘You didn't say that, Miss Trim. And I expect you know that my father is an imaginative writer.'

‘Well, your father wasn't—'

‘He makes it up. I find it runs in the family. I get to a certain point and then my imagination takes over.'

‘Ah!' It was a sigh of relief. ‘So you made a little play out of your day, so to speak?'

‘A little story, Miss Trim. A play would be all dialogue and stage directions. I hope you enjoyed the story.'

‘Oh, I did,' said Miss Trim untruthfully. ‘But of course it made me uneasy, since all the others were truthful accounts of their day.'

‘They're not a very imaginative lot, 6A.'

‘Tell me, Morgan, why did you decide to write a story in which your father got … well, killed?'

Morgan shrugged.

‘Well, it's just one sort of story, isn't it? They call it a Whodunnit. You don't know till towards the end who did it. My father's never had much time for me. Oh, he's there if I need him, but he hopes and prays I don't need him too much. Same with my mother. He cares more about the characters in his piffling plays. He'll pack a few things and take off at the drop of a hat. You wouldn't know this, Miss Trim, because he never comes to parents' days or anything like that. Doesn't care.'

‘Oh, I'm sure he does. Some people find emotional things very difficult. Well, I think that was all. You've cleared up things nicely. I think I'd better ring your mother in case she hears rumours – gossip from your classmates or their parents.'

‘They wouldn't know fact from fiction,' said Morgan contemptuously. He got up and walked towards the
door. ‘Thank you for being so understanding, Miss Trim.'

As he opened the door he saw her hand straying towards the telephone. His face was suffused by an expression of sublime self-congratulation. He stood outside the door, his ear close to it.

‘Mrs Fairclough? Oh, it's Edith Trim, from Westward School. I've just been talking to Morgan, always a pleasure. Sophisticated without being, well, snooty with it. He's written this essay about the last days of the school holidays, and he turned it into a really promising little story – he must be reading Agatha Christie and writers like that … Oh, he is! I guessed well. Now, there's a murder of course, and it's quite intriguing and exciting, but I just wanted to tell you, in case rumours come back to you that he is writing gruesome stories which gave kids sleepless nights and all that. Parents tell all sorts of silly tales about any child who makes up stories. It's really not that sort of story at all … I hope you can make it to the next parents' evening, Mrs Fairclough. We could have a good talk. And do try to bring your husband. I know Morgan would appreciate his being there. Oh … Oh … Oh, Australia. I see. Well, I'm sorry. We'll hope to see him next term.'

Morgan heard the receiver being put down. He started walking along the corridor, the smug expression still suffusing his face. This was going to be one of those subgenre stories, in this case one of those in which the wrong suspect is fitted up for a murder he, or in fact she, didn't do. And it was going to be one in which
the murderer is the one telling the story. Morgan was enormously pleased with himself for thinking of that. It was exceptionally clever, and something he was quite sure would never occur to a pedestrian mind like Agatha Christie's.

It must be rare for the first thought of a newly appointed government minister to be: Now is the time to kill my wife. Don't get me wrong – I'm sure many of my colleagues would like to, with that dull, insistent sort of wishing which will never actually impel them to action, and which is characteristic of second-rate minds. My thought was not ‘If only I could' but ‘Now I can'. It had my typical decisiveness and lack of sentiment, as well as that ability to get to the heart of a question and come up with a solution which I am sure was the reason the prime minister decided to promote me.

I was brought into the government in the autumn reshuffle, and my second thought was: Christmas is coming. Ideal.

I should explain that the post I was given was one of the junior positions in the Home Office. I doubt whether the thought would have occurred to me if it had been in Trade and Industry, or Environment. The Home Office,
you see, has a great deal to do with Northern Ireland, and everything to do with the imprisonment of IRA terrorists. Its ministers, therefore, are natural targets. Indeed, two days after I took up my post, I had a visit by arrangement from a high-ranking Scotland Yard terrorist officer who lectured me on personal security; elementary precautions I and my family could take, and little indications that might give me the idea that something was wrong.

Including, naturally, suspect packages.

He actually brought along a mock-up suspect package, showed me all the signs that should arouse my suspicions, and then proceeded to take it apart and show me the sort of explosive device that would be concealed inside. It was a real education.

I tried not to show too much interest. Indeed, I hope I gave the impression of a man who is trying to give due attention to an important matter, but who has actually a mountain of things he ought to be doing. In fact my mind was ticking away as inexorably as a real explosive device. A suspect package among her Christmas parcels – a sort of
bombe surprise.
How wonderful if it could have gone off while she was singing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Jesus' with the children. But of course that was out of the question. I had no particular desire to harm my children. Merely to render them motherless.

There are many reasons why the old custom of wife murder has not fallen into disuse in this age of easy – indeed practically obligatory – divorce. One is to get custody of the children. Another is money. Another is personal satisfaction that no divorce can give. My situation is peculiar. Normally
even an MP can move out of the family home, make mutterings about ‘irretrievable breakdown,' and in two shakes of a duck's tail be shacking up with his secretary, or Miss Bournemouth 1989, or whomever he has had his eye on. Not the MP for the constituency of Dundee Kirkside. My constituents, though Conservative almost to a man and woman, are tight-lipped, censorious, pleasure-hating accountants and small shopkeepers, people for whom John Knox did not go nearly far enough. Liquor never passes their lips, dance never animates their lower limbs – their very sperm is deep-frozen.

Divorce, for the MP for Dundee Kirkside, was a non-starter.

Equally, living for the rest of my life with Annabelle was simply not to be contemplated. If I had not known this before, I certainly knew it at a Downing Street dinner shortly after my appointment. As ill luck would have it, Annabelle was seated near to the prime minister, while I was someway down on the other side of the table. But of course I am all too attuned to her voice, and I heard her say, ‘Whenever I see my two little ones tucked up in their little bed, I always seem to see the baby Jesus there making a third!'

The prime minister's face was a picture. So, I imagine, was mine.

Not that Annabelle's style of conversation, apparently derived from Victorian commonplace books designed to be given as Sunday school prizes, hadn't been useful to me in the past. I'd be the first to admit that in private. For instance, being only half-Scottish (and on my mother's side at that)
and having been educated at Lancing, I was not an obvious candidate for a Scottish constituency. Thank God we Tories still interview the wives as part of the selection procedure! I don't say anyone was melted by Annabelle's liquid caramel smile, but they were enraptured by her expressed conviction that we (we in the Conservative party) are on this earth to do the Lord's bidding, that she prayed every night that her husband would do the Lord Jesus's work, that we were the party of the family, and the Christian family at that – and a lot more balls along these lines. I got the nomination, and we celebrated by going down on our knees beside the twin beds in our hideous Dundee hotel room. It was the least I could do. Luckily the curriculum vitae which I submitted to the selection committee had merely stated that we had been married in 1985 and our first child born in 1986 – months not given. Being the party of the family didn't mean they approved of women who were in the family way when they went to the altar.

That happened, of course, before Annabelle got religion from a poisonous American woman evangelist at a dreadful rally in Earls Court that she had gone along to under the impression that it was
Aida
with elephants.

‘I'm so longing for Christmas to come this year,' burbled Annabelle, her eyes all fizzing sparklers. ‘Just us and our two babies celebrating the coming of Jesus.'

I looked at her with love in my eyes and Semtex in my heart.

‘It will be lovely. But, do you know, I sometimes regret the Christmases of my childhood. Over in Belgium the real celebration was Christmas Eve.'

My family retreated to Ostend, in the manner pioneered by bankrupt Victorians, when I was five. This was as a consequence of a disagreement my father had with the Inland Revenue which was not sorted out for many years. I have no idea whether the Belgians do in fact celebrate Christmas Eve. It was bad enough living with the clog-hoppers, without mixing with them. But I do know that many Continental countries do, and Annabelle has no knowledge of habits and customs outside Pinner.

‘How odd,' she said in reply. ‘Before the baby Jesus was actually born. I'm not sure I'd like that.'

‘Don't be so parochial,' I said. ‘God isn't just English. He's got the whole world in his hands, remember.'

That set Annabelle off singing for the rest of the evening in her clear, bright Julie Andrews voice that can shatter glass ornaments if she goes too high.

I, meanwhile, was not neglecting the practical side. I never do – it's part of my strength. I've always been pretty smart at do-it-yourself, and to explain my evening hours in the garage I told Annabelle that I was preparing a little surprise for Gavin and Janet at Christmas. Which wasn't so far from the truth. I had already made an incognito visit (luckily for me I am still so junior that my face is not known, which will not be the case for long) to Tottenham Court Road, where I picked up one of the devices the inspector had so kindly demonstrated to me. Fortunately I had a very dodgy contact in the underworld (I had used him when I worked for Conservative Central Office, for a small job of ballot-rigging), and from him I got the modest quantity of explosive necessary to send Annabelle into the arms of the Lord Jesus.

All was going beautifully to plan.

While all this was coming to fruition, I was naturally fulfilling – very energetically fulfilling – my obligations and duties at the Home Office. I was also making routine preparations for Christmas, or getting other people to do them for me. I paid particular attention to getting the right presents for Annabelle. I meant her to die happy – or, if she insisted on leaving my presents till later, I intended to make much, in a thoroughly maudlin way, of what pleasures I had had in store for her to the Special Branch officers who would investigate her death. I bought a diamond pendant from Cartier's; I had one of the bookish secretaries from the Home Office scouring the secondhand bookshops of Highgate and Hampstead for a copy of
The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature,
which she had expressed a desire for – everything, right down to the Thornton's chocolates that she loved. Thoughtful presents, though I say so myself. The presents of a model husband.

The children's presents I could safely leave to her. She loved shopping for them, and she was usually out when I rang home in the weeks leading up to Christmas, on some spree or other of that kind. I got one of the secretaries to ring Harrods, and by the eighteenth a large Christmas tree was in place in the living room. Annabelle, the children, and the Norwegian au pair decorated it the same day. They were just finishing it when I arrived back from Whitehall.

‘Do you celebrate Christmas Eve or Christmas Day in Norway?' I asked Margrethe.

‘Christmas Eve,' she said promptly. ‘That is when the Christmas gnome brings all the presents.'

I smiled at her more benevolently than usual and suppressed any comment about the Christmas gnome. Really, was it a Christian country or a European Disneyland?

‘You know, I think we'll do that this year,' I said to Annabelle later than evening. ‘Celebrate
our
Christmas on Christmas Eve, after the babies have gone to bed. Then we can give all our time and attention to them on Christmas Day itself. Their day, entirely and completely.'

‘Perhaps you're right,' said Annabelle, smiling her melting-fudge smile. ‘When you come to think about it, Christmas Day should be just for the little ones, shouldn't it?'

Soon the packages began to pile up under the tree. Presents from grandparents, aunties, presents from constituents, especially from businessmen and property developers anxious to keep on the right side of me. Most of them were for Gavin and Janet, of course, but Annabelle and I soon had a respectable number. I began to separate the piles – the children's on one side of the tree, ours on the other.

On December the twenty-first I put the suspect package into the pile – a brown padded envelope, with a stamp and a fake postmark. It nestled shyly under bigger and gaudier packages.

Christmas is a very uninteresting time in politics. Nothing important gets announced (unless it is something dodgy we are hoping to slip past the public with little publicity), and so many of the MPs slope off home early that there is very little of the cut and thrust of political infighting which is what I excel at. Even in the department things slackened
off. I was able to get home on two or three afternoons in the lead-up period. I found Annabelle out shopping and the kids in the charge of Margrethe. Margrethe proved very unresponsive to my suggestions of how we should spend the afternoon. Really, Norwegians are not all they're cracked up to be.

Once she had got the idea of a special dinner for us on Christmas Eve, Annabelle chattered on about what it should be. The damned kids insisted on turkey on The Day, of course, though I can think of about twenty meats I would find more interesting. We finally decided on a cold meal – light, but with a few touches of luxury. Margrethe was flying back to Bergen on the twenty-third, but she did some of the preparations before she went. We really get quite a lot of work out of Margrethe. I made one or two suggestions – not that I expected to eat anything much, but in order that it should look right to the investigating officers. I would have been a superb stage director. Annabelle said she could get some of the things at the delicatessen around the corner, and she would get the rest at Harrods. She also said it was going to be an absolutely smashing evening.

The day dawned. The children (‘the babies,' as Annabelle calls them, though they are no longer that, thank God) were of course wild with pre-Christmas excitement, so I escaped to the office for most of the day. There was, after all, nothing left to do. Soon after I got home I suggested it was time for the kids to go to bed, and as they were confidently expecting a visit from Santa Claus, they didn't make too many objections. Then I began setting the scene. I put the drinks on the phone table at the far end by the door.
I intended to be over there when Annabelle opened the package. I toyed with the idea of being rather closer, to get the odd cut and scar from the debris, but I rejected the idea. Annabelle began bringing on the cold collation with a series of appreciative shrieks – ‘Doesn't this look
scrumptious
?' and the like. The room was beautifully warm from the central heating, and I rejected Annabelle's suggestion that I light the fire. In fact, I was feeling distinctly sweaty, and I would have taken off my jacket and tie, except that I hate that sort of slovenliness. Round about seven-thirty, I said:

‘I think it's about time for a drink.'

‘Oh, goody!' said Annabelle. Getting God had not quenched her taste for dry martinis. I got her a large one with plenty of ice. Then I got for myself a gin and tonic that was mostly tonic and ice. Keep cool, George, keep cool!

‘Now!' I said, and we looked at each other and smiled. We had agreed to open presents when we had our first drinks.

First of all we opened our own to each other. Annabelle oohed over the Cartier pendant (‘You
shouldn't
have, Georgie boy! What must it have cost?') I tried to look pleased with a very expensive shaving kit.

‘I really thought you should start shaving
properly
, Georgie. Electric razors are frightfully
infra
, and people are starting to comment on your midnight shadow. Look what harm that did to Richard Nixon.'

I regarded my midnight shadow as part of my saturnine and macho image. Nobody ever found Richard Nixon macho.

‘I promise, my darling,' I said.

Then she opened her
Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature.

‘Oh, wonderful! How
thoughtful
you are, Georgie-Porgy. People say that reading this is an entirely new experience!' She opened it and read: ‘“There were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”'