Political Suicide Read online

  “I see. So you think that that was why his career never really . . . took off?”

  “I’m sure of it. He never got his priorities right—never worked out even what they were. I used to say to him, either you go all out for office, high office—because otherwise all this Westminster stuff is sheer drudgery, and damned dull to boot—or else you go after money. Let’s face it, James wasn’t born to money: he set up this small printing and duplicating business when he was quite young, with some money he was left. It was very efficient, used very modern methods and so on, and it positively spawned other little businesses all over the country. But James lost interest. Sold out. You’ve got to be single-minded if you want to make a lot of money.”

  “Instead he went into politics?”

  “Exactly. And he always kept very busy, even as a back-bencher. But he was much too wet—politically wet, I mean—to get anywhere much. And there doesn’t seem to be any point unless you do, not in my book.”

  “Perhaps not,” murmured Sutcliffe. “Was there any political problem in the last few weeks that seemed to be bothering him?”

  “Well—” she seemed uncertain—“nothing special that I can recall. Constituency problems, naturally. He was depressed by the rising unemployment in Bootham. Have you been to Bootham, ever? No, well it’s not the sort of place one goes to, deliberately. Between you and me, a frightful hole. He found the problems of the unemployed families terribly depressing, though one does sometimes feel, doesn’t one, that some of them have almost brought it on themselves, and if you can’t do anything about it, there’s not much point in bringing all their problems home. But there—that was James.”

  “So you didn’t live in the constituency?”

  “Good Lord, no. Well, we have a cottage. In a little village called Moreton. Very much outside: still in the constituency, but not in Bootham. Bootham East is the better part of town, naturally, but even so there wasn’t anywhere where I’d care to live, even for the odd weekend. We used the cottage when we went up on constituency business—James for his fortnightly surgery, me to open something or other. I’ll get rid of it now, of course. Though, really—house prices in Yorkshire are rock bottom.”

  “Tell me: Thursday night, when he didn’t come home—weren’t you worried?”

  “Well, I didn’t know. I can see I shall have to enlighten you, Superintendent, as to how politicians’ wives live, what they have to put up with.”

  “You mean the hours—all-night sittings, and so on?”

  “Exactly. And when they don’t sit late, all the manœuvrings and conspirings, and the constituency business, and Christ knows what. We—we have a guest bedroom here, of course, and we have an agreement that if James comes in—came in—after I’d gone to bed, then he slept there. So really, when I didn’t see him all day, I wasn’t in the least surprised, because that was very much business as usual. I went to bed at—oh, about half past eleven, I suppose, and never gave a second thought to James’s not being home.”

  “And when you found out in the morning that he hadn’t slept in the spare bed?”

  “Well, actually, I didn’t. I mean, I came down to get the children’s breakfast—I do that once or twice a week, because we’ve got a Danish au pair, and she gives them the oddest things on rye bread, so I do try to make sure they have something sensible now and again. And I was just sitting down to my own when your sergeant came.”

  “And then you went up and found the bed hadn’t been slept in, I suppose.”

  “Naturally, of course it hadn’t. I understand the body had probably been in the water some hours.”

  “That’s what we think. I’ll be getting the results of the post mortem later today. So you can’t think of any special reason—?”

  But they were interrupted by the entrance of two wide-eyed children, very neat and clean, and an enormous flaxen-haired girl who looked as if she was about to play Brynhild in some open-air Scandinavian pageant play. Sutcliffe knew all too well the sort of questions intelligent five- and six-year-olds ask when they have just lost a parent. Muttering that he would get in touch, and that he hoped Penelope Partridge would contact him if she thought of anything relevant, he made a discreet exit. Walking from the front door to his car, he thought what a very unsatisfactory interview this had been, without being able quite to pin down in his own mind the reasons for his dissatisfaction. But one thing was certain: Mrs Partridge had not been able to put on even a pantomime of sorrow or regret.

  • • •

  The press-cuttings on James Partridge which Sutcliffe found waiting for him in a folder on his desk at New Scotland Yard confirmed the picture that his wife had painted so pitilessly—that of a man whose career had never quite got off the ground. Early on in his stint as a junior minister a newspaper had called him “the thinking man’s Tory,” and the label had stuck, possibly because there was so little competition. The occasion for the label had been a thoughtful speech on the nature of conservatism which could, by a generous stretching of the term, have been called philosophical. He had made one or two more such speeches, and it was perhaps to give him more time to think his conservative thoughts that the Prime Minister had dropped him from the government after the election. He had apparently accepted his dismissal without bitterness, had only joined one revolt against the government since, and seemed determined to be a conscientious back-bencher and a good constituency MP. He had appeared three years before in the “New Boys” column in the scandal sheet Private Eye, but they had found little dirt to fling at him. He had busied himself in recent months with a Private Member’s Bill which one of the papers had dubbed “The Animals’ Charter.”

  Sutcliffe digested all this, and then he got on the phone to Conservative Central Office. The girl on the switchboard said that of course it was a Saturday, and there was only the tiniest skeleton staff there, just to deal with any emergency that came up, and naturally the Chairman wasn’t there, but he could come and talk to Terry if he wanted to. Who was Terry? Well, Terry was sort of deputy-under-constituency-organizer—she’d forgotten his exact title, but he was a sort of liaison man. Sutcliffe said he’d come and talk to Terry.

  Terry, it turned out, was just out of university, well-groomed but amiable, with a shapely haircut of medium length that failed to hide the fact that he was wet behind the ears. Yes, actually he had known Jim Partridge, not just since he took up this job, but—well, his father was in the House, actually (“On the government side?” asked Sutcliffe innocently), and he’d got to know a lot of the members, well—ever since he was a kid, actually. And then he’d had a bit to do with Partridge more recently, actually over this Animals’ Charter as the papers were calling it, so really you could say that he’d known him quite well. Actually.

  “And what sort of man was he?”

  “Quiet, conscientious, a bit of a plodder. The sort Ted Heath used to like. Give him a job, and you knew he’d do it, and well, though he might take quite a lot of time over it. A good enough speaker, slightly dull—but actually this isn’t the golden age of political oratory, is it? They used to call Michael Foot one of the great speakers, so the standard must be low. If you were really prepared to listen, Jim’s speeches were worth the effort.”

  “You never heard of any personal problems?”

  “No. But I wasn’t on those terms. I’m frightfully junior here, actually. We came into contact over this animals bill, and that was giving him problems enough, heaven knows.”

  “You think that might have been the reason—?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. Jim was a professional politician, and he’d probably learned to take that sort of thing in his stride.”

  “What sort of thing, exactly? What were the problems that the bill was giving him?”

  “Well, you might say it was a bill designed in one way or another to offend the maximum number of people. Actually, if you want to know, it was my job to try and warn him off. There was nothing in it for us—as a party, I mean—and there were pit
falls every inch of the way. It was a very comprehensive bill, designed to protect domestic and wild animals against all sorts of cruelty and exploitation. If you want to know who it offended, I could just name, for starters: the hunting and shooting lobby; research scientists; farmers—particularly the intensive kind; furriers; the cosmetics industry—well, you name it, they disliked it, except for the ecology lobby.”

  “It seems odd I haven’t heard more about it.”

  “It’s still in its early stages. But all the specialist journals of these various pressure groups got whiff of it long ago, and they were beginning to alert their people and emit squawks of outrage. I tell you, as far as his career was concerned, it was political suicide . . . Oh, I say, rather an unfortunate phrase, actually, eh?”

  “But surely there was nothing much there to offend the electors of Bootham?”

  “I don’t know about that: dearer food, steep increase in dog licences . . . But I wasn’t thinking of that, I meant only that he could say goodbye to any thought of getting high office.”

  “Since he’d been dropped, there wasn’t much thought of that anyway, was there?”

  “Well, I suppose, looking around at all the people who have been dropped, no—not very much. They tend to stay dropped. Most of them start giving more and more of their time to the City—directorships in big companies, and so on. Jim took up animals. Really, it was awfully un-Conservative.”

  “Conservation isn’t a Conservative thing, then?”

  “Hardly. Game conservation, of course, but that’s in order to shoot them afterwards.”

  “Can we come back to the unpopularity of this bill? You implied there’d been squawks in the Chicken Farmers’ Gazette, or whatever. Had the opposition taken any other form? Threats?”

  “That sounds awfully melodramatic. If an MP gets a threat, he generally takes it up with the Speaker as a matter of privilege. But anyone in the public eye receives an amount of hate-mail, you know. Almost all from nuts, and usually pretty mad and full of violence. I’d have thought the pro-animal lobby usually had a fair number of those people in their ranks: there’s nothing more violent than the Annual General Meeting of the RSPCA. I think that if Jim received any mail of this sort it was less the manic type, more from the sort of people who felt their livelihood was being threatened.”

  “You don’t know of any specific threats?”

  “No. Jim talked generally about ‘pretty nasty letters,’ but he didn’t give any details. You’d have to go along and ask Arthur Tidmarsh—he might know more.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The Labour MP who was sponsoring the bill with him. It was a sort of cross-bench effort—probably more support on their side than on ours, if the truth be known, though the Leadership was wary there too: dearer food isn’t popular with anyone except battery hens. If there were any threats—that was what you had in mind?—”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’d guess he would know more about it than I would, since perforce they’d got pretty close . . . I say, this was a suicide, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s for the jury at the inquest to decide,” said Sutcliffe, in classic phrase.

  “No, but I say, I mean—the inquest will decide pretty much as you tell them to, won’t it?” The schoolboy face had gone quite red with consternation. “This business is causing embarrassment all round, you know. I can tell you, we weren’t pleased you had to rule out accident. The PM was pretty shirty, because suicide doesn’t make the best impression, does it? I mean ‘the Almighty hath fixed his canon against self-slaughter,’ or however it goes.”

  “Is it God, or the Prime Minister you’re more worried about?” asked Sutcliffe, and murmuring his thanks for assistance he escaped out into Smith Square.

  Arthur Tidmarsh proved gratifyingly easy to contact. He was MP for a South London constituency, and lived on the spot in a semi whose living-room was given over entirely to his constituency work: piles of letters, reports, forms and applications, blue books and newspapers. Arthur Tidmarsh seemed at home in the room—more so, in fact, than with his resentful-looking wife and family.

  “He was a good bloke in his way,” he said, settling Sutcliffe down in an armchair and taking a seat himself at his desk. “Stiffish, reserved, but once you got to know him, tremendously fair. And conscientious to a fault.”

  “You did get to know him?”

  “Oh yes. On a business level, a political level.”

  “But he didn’t, for instance, tell you anything about problems in his private life?”

  “Oh no—never anything like that. Not even when we were having a drink together in the bar. We never got within miles of the personal. Was he having problems?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “All politicians have problems with their private lives: they either have too little of it, or too much. Some dance on the tightrope all their lives—like Lloyd George—and never fall off; and others ruin their career the first time they step off the strait and narrow. It’s all bloody unfair, but I suppose you just have to have a flair for it.”

  “A flair for adultery? It’s an idea. Would you say Jim Partridge had it?”

  “Well, frankly, no. Jim was more like one of us than a Tory, in some ways. If he’d had an affair, he’d have agonized about it in his conscience. All a Tory cares about is not getting caught.”

  “About this bill—you’re having a bit of hate-mail, I gather.”

  “Some. It’s early days yet. As far as I’m concerned, it wouldn’t be worth it if we weren’t.” He grinned with what was meant to be engaging candour, though Sutcliffe recognized it as a “we’re all crooks underneath” smile, such as he had received from innumerable hardened cases. “I’m in it for the publicity as much as anything.”

  “Was there anything particularly vicious in any of the letters?”

  “Not that I recall. Fairly standard stuff, in point of fact. ‘You care more about animals than humans’—that kind of thing. Odd argument that, isn’t it? They’re not alternatives at all, but people keep wheeling it out. I’d be less worried about the nuts—because not one in ten thousand is actually going to do anything about it—than about the people with special interests: the intensive farmers, the cosmetics industry, the mink farmers: they’d be the ones most likely to act. Though I can’t see them doing so in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  Again there was that grin, intended to express engaging honesty. Probably Tidmarsh had built his career on that grin.

  “Because it hadn’t a chance. Can you imagine a House with a large Tory majority passing a bill that restricts fox-hunting, abolishes stag-hunting, controls game shooting, sets up standards for factory farming more stringent than anywhere else in the world has—and so on, and so on. The only possible way it could get on the statute book would be for us to drop or water down the provisions, one after another, and get left at the end with a totally toothless bill. It’s what will happen, now he’s gone. If I don’t decide to drop it altogether. Partridge was a good manager—he’d have been very good in the Whips’ Office. I don’t fancy all the drudgery now he’s gone.”

  “Going back a moment, do you remember if there was any one of these letters from the various special interest groups that particularly upset him?”

  “Well, of course, if he worried about any, he’d worry about ones from his own constituency. We all would. After all, we have to go back and ask the buggers for their votes every four or five years. Jim had one pretty unpleasant one from a battery farmer in his constituency—abusive, said he could whistle for his vote in the future.”

  “A farmer? In his constituency?”

  “That’s right. It takes in a bit of rural land to the east of the town. Otherwise I doubt Bootham would ever have had a Tory MP at all . . . That’s the only one I can remember affecting him. And I don’t think it was the threat, such as it was. He said he’d seen that farm, seen those hens . . . And you know, we all get that sort of le
tter from time to time. We get our own little formulas for writing back. No doubt Jim had his, and I expect he forgot it in a day or two.”

  “It certainly doesn’t seem much of a motive for suicide.”

  “No. Beyond the fact that Jim was decidedly a worrier, in his quiet, ingrowing way. And of course, to use a cliché, things can pile up. I see it all the time in my constituency work: you’re unemployed, your wife has left you, but it’s the big electricity bill through the letter-box that’s the last straw.”

  “Maybe,” said Sutcliffe, getting up to take his leave. “But that’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to put to an inquest jury.”

  Driving back to New Scotland Yard, Sutcliffe tried to sort out the various uneasinesses he had felt during his day of interviews. In the end, he whittled them down to two questions: if Jim Partridge was currently worried over his Animal Protection Bill, why had it never once been mentioned by Penelope Partridge? And hadn’t she accepted rather too readily his failure to return on Thursday night? Sutcliffe hadn’t a very detailed knowledge of House of Commons procedures, but he had a vague notion that by Thursday things at the Palace of Westminster were often beginning to wind down, so that members could if possible have a long weekend with their families, or go off to their constituency. As soon as he got back to his office he got on the phone to Arthur Tidmarsh.