Publish and Be Murdered (11 page)

Parry’s credentials as a promising member of a famous English department required him to hide his true instincts by dressing up the traditional in obfuscatory cant and making it seem original in a world of post-structuralists, postmodernists and post-revisionists. He was, in Amiss’s view, striving to be the first post-fogey – a position that allowed him to dress, think and share the prejudices of fogeys while maintaining a position of ineffable academic and intellectual superiority.

The baroness was watching enraptured. Amiss quickly saw why.

‘So you’re devoting your life to books,’ said the fuchsia woman to Parry. ‘I think that’s great. I think that’s really great. I think books are wonderful. I love books. Books are my companions, books are my friends. Friends are good too, friends are great. And when your books are your friends, you’ve always got friends. Don’t you agree with me, Wilf?’

‘Yes,’ he stammered.

Amiss – who had never seen Wilfred Parry at a loss for the word that would illustrate his cleverness – chortled inwardly.

‘Now have you got any poems about friendship that are your particular favourites?’

‘Nothing comes to mind,’ he said defensively.

‘Come on, come on,’ she said. ‘A bloke like you must have lots at your fingertips. Who’s your favourite poet?’

Parry froze. ‘Er, er. Perhaps William Empson.’

‘Who? Never heard of him. That’s the trouble with you intellectuals. You’re not interested in the common people. In what ordinary people relate to. What’s this bastard ever written about friendship?’

‘Er, I don’t know.’ Wilfred, who could see that a small crowd had gathered, was beginning to look desperate. ‘Not the sort of thing he writes about really.’

‘Name me someone else you like who does.’

Amiss was almost beginning to feel sorry for Parry, who looked as if he had gone beyond the stage of being able to think about anything.

‘What about Tennyson?’ she barked.

‘I suppose there is an argument

‘What do you mean an argument? Wasn’t “In Memoriam” the best poem about friendship ever written?’ She jabbed him in the chest.

‘Er, yes. I know what you mean.’

‘Do you? And here’s another poet for you. What do you think of the lines: “Alas, the friendship that begins in spring / Is often gone before the summer’s out.”? Come on. Whatdaya think of them?’

An expression of mingled embarrassment and fear crossed Parry’s face.

‘Er…’

‘You didn’t like them? But they mean a lot to me. My mother wrote them. But you’re looking down your nose at them, aren’t you?’

‘No, no. They were fine. Very moving.’

Fuchsia burst out laughing and slapped him on the back. ‘You know what you are? You’re full of bullshit. Those lines are crap. You know they’re crap. I know they’re crap. Why don’t you just come straight out with it the way we do in Oz? What a bunch of sissies you pommies are!’ And pausing only to look at him and emit a loud snigger, she turned on her four-inch heels and went to find another victim.

Pale and perspiring, Parry caught Amiss’s eye, and giving him a sickly smile, tottered away.

‘Who is that splendid creature?’ demanded the baroness.

‘No idea.’

‘Find out.’

‘I’m not your errand boy, Jack.’

‘Yes, you are. And I need to know. I smell money and at St Martha’s we can always do with plenty more of that. If she’s as rich as she looks I’ll ask her down.’

‘Sharon McGregor,’ said Lambie Crump.

‘Who?’

‘A visitor from the Antipodes. Her manners have the exuberance of those colonies.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Amiss, observing the lady patting on the head a famous ex-editor of a national institution and asking him how he filled his days now that he was past it.

‘My, my,’ said the baroness when Amiss reported the news. ‘Serious money, indeed: I’d better mount a charm offensive. What are you doing for dinner after this?’

‘Going out with Papworth.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No. It’s an annual event sacrosanct to editorial and Monday meeting attendees.’

‘Monday, then. Seven o’clock, Lords lobby and we’ll go on somewhere.’ Without waiting to hear his answer, she took off and cut a merciless swathe through the crowd, pushing human obstacles to left and right. Interrupting the conversation without a by-your-leave she whispered in Sharon McGregor’s ear and was rewarded with a large beam and a slap on the back. Without a backward glance, they headed towards the fire escape, leaving the elderly sage gazing after them pop-eyed and incredulous.

As befitted a host, Amiss hastened to his side and introduced himself. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said the sage as his eyes swivelled to peer over Amiss’s shoulder. Within five seconds, with a, ‘Must be off, I’m afraid,’ he had walked away to talk to someone more important.

11

«
^
»

As Clement Webber came to the end of an ill-tempered diatribe about cushy prisons, Amiss cut in.

‘Where’s Henry?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Lambie Crump.

‘Nor have I,’ said Amiss. Dwight Winterton and Wilfred Parry shook their heads, Amaryllis Vercoe and Clement Webber looked blank, Bill and Marcia continued their private argument and Phoebe Somerfield studied the menu.

‘We can’t start without Henry, can we?’ asked Papworth. ‘I don’t think he’s missed one of these dinners in thirty years.’

‘Might he not have gone home?’ suggested a bored Parry.

‘Henry gone home, when there is conviviality at hand?’ interjected Winterton. ‘Impossible.’

‘Could he have forgotten where we were going?’ asked Amiss.

‘Hardly,’ said Papworth. ‘We’ve been here every year for the past five years.’

‘It’s just that he can be a little forgetful when he’s been drinking,’ said Amiss hesitantly.

‘Not that forgetful,’ said Lambie Crump sourly. ‘He always knows where the next drink is to be found. He has probably taken a better offer.’

‘I suppose,’ offered Amiss, ‘it’s just conceivable that he might have nodded off in Percy Square.’

‘Passed out, you mean?’ said Lambie Crump. ‘Better leave him.’

Amiss rose. ‘I’ll ring his office just in case.’ He was back in three minutes to report an unanswered telephone.

Lambie Crump shrugged.

‘We’d better start without him,’ said Papworth.

‘Do,’ said Amiss. ‘But just to relieve my mind I’ll pop back to the office. It’ll only take ten minutes. It’d be a shame for Henry to miss this because he’d fallen asleep.’

‘He’ll be a bore,’ said Lambie Crump.

‘Never mind that,’ said Papworth. ‘Thanks, Robert.’

The extent of the mess in the dining room momentarily took Amiss aback, but then he remembered that part of his cost-cutting deal with Lady Amanda had been that her staff would be removed at nine o’clock to help with another function so the clearing-up would be left until early morning.

Seeing no Potbury, he ran downstairs to check his office. Just in case Potbury had been too drunk to find it, Amiss looked into all the other rooms. As he closed Ricketts’s door he remembered their first encounter and headed back upstairs to the playroom. There was Potbury, slumped amid a sea of glasses, with his head in a silver punch bowl.

Frantically, Amiss pulled his head out of the liquid, laid him on the floor on his face and thumped him on the back. Some liquid came up, but Potbury stayed supine and made no sound. When eventually Amiss rolled him over on his front he was left in no doubt that Henry Potbury had died as he had lived – drowned in alcohol. His face was bloated and purple and his eyes were staring.

Having tried and failed to feel Potbury’s pulse, Amiss realized there was nothing left to do except ring for an ambulance, the police and Lord Papworth.

The press loved Henry Potbury’s death. Never tiring of writing about their own kind, journalists were thrilled to have the excuse of sudden death to promote Potbury beyond the confines of the obituary page and on to the front pages. Even the tabloids splashed it, for it was on a poor day for news and since the death of Princess Diana their staple fodder was no longer available to fill empty spaces. Their coverage was unkind: Potbury was self-evidently a nob writing for a nob’s journal, so they went as close as they dared to making his death sound funny, with various puns about Potbury, pot and potty.

It was another twenty-four hours before the broadsheets could really go to town on Potbury as a great columnist of his time and produce acres of reminiscences from every old and middle-aged British columnist about wonderful days in El Vino’s and memorable toots abroad. It was quite clear that the press in general – perhaps with the exception of Potbury’s friends – were hoping that he had been murdered or at the very least had committed suicide so that the story could run and run.

The autopsy was inconclusive. And after a few cursory enquiries, the police inspector in charge rang Amiss to tell him that foul play was not suspected.

‘It’s definite, Willie. They’re treating it as an accident. Apparently he was drunk enough to have slid in there and simply drowned.’

Lambie Crump passed his hand over his forehead in one of his more affected
fin-de-siècle
gestures. ‘What a relief! What a huge relief! It would really have been intolerable to have those… those… buffoons trampling all over the psyche of
The Wrangler
. Now perhaps we can return to some semblance of normality. It is a major achievement that the journal came out this week: the strain has been so intense.’

Amiss forebore to mention that there was precious little thanks due to Lambie Crump himself that the journal had appeared at all: most credit was due to Dwight Winterton and Phoebe Somerfield. Lambie Crump’s only contribution had been an admittedly elegant but ultimately shallow appreciation of Henry.

Winterton, however, was disappointed. ‘How dreary,’ he drawled. ‘A murder investigation would have been rather fun, don’t you think? It would really have put the wind up New Willie and there’s nowhere I’d prefer the wind than up Willie. Besides, they seem to have been rather indolent in deciding so quickly on an accident. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know, Dwight. There was no obvious motive – none of the normal ones anyway. Nobody wanted his job, he’d almost no money, and presumably sex wasn’t an angle.’

‘I don’t know about that, Robert. I quite want his job as Willie’s deputy. Though of course I won’t get it, so there wouldn’t have been a lot of point in knocking off Henry.’

‘Still, you’ll have a higher profile.’

‘True. But I would need a little more reason to kill someone I rather liked. Have you thought about sexual jealousy as a motive?’

‘Sexual jealousy?’

‘Yes. There’s the matter of Henry and Marcia to be considered.’

‘Henry and Marcia?’

‘Robert, are you going to stop repeating everything I say. Yes. Henry and Marcia.’

‘They were having an affair?’

‘Indeed they were. I caught them in a clinch in his room. He was a bit embarrassed and asked me to keep my mouth shut. Which I did until now.’

Amiss shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have thought Henry could do the necessary. However, there’s no doubt that sex is a department that is always full of surprises. The most unlikely people are at it, at the most unlikely ages, in the most unlikely condition

‘And in the most unlikely manner.’

‘True. Yet Henry and Marcia as an item is a trifle hard to come to terms with.’

The truth of Winterton’s story was confirmed by the surprisingly youthful and good-looking Mrs Henry Potbury. Over a drink with Amiss, who had come to talk about practicalities, she burst into outraged denunciation of her husband and his infidelities – particularly with those she persisted in calling his ‘
Wrangler
totties’. ‘Henry was an unspeakable old lush,’ she said. ‘But at least he was my old lush. I could tolerate his drunkenness. I could tolerate him coming home frequently in an absolute stupor, falling into bed and snoring all night. I could stand the fact that he made a public exhibition of himself on many occasions and I had to drag him out of parties and make him ring up the next day to grovel.’

She laughed ruefully. ‘Sometimes he involved me in scenes that would make most wives unable to show their faces in public for months, but I had got to a stage when I was beyond embarrassment. What I found very hard to bear was the combination of drunkenness and rampant philandering. It’s one thing to be a philanderer if you know how to cover it up. One of my tenets is that the least a philanderer owes his wife is discretion, but clever as Henry was, he was no exception to the rule that drunkenness and discretion do not go together, so I had no option but to know about several of his inamoratas, and that I resented. Which is why I’m keeping the funeral private and am not contemplating a memorial service for a few months: I might get angry if I saw any of them.’

‘I understand.’

‘The hardest – or to be precise – the second hardest to bear was Marcia. Not that I have anything against her personally, but she should have had more sense. Thou shouldst not philander with a colleague, especially when you know his wife, more especially when you know he’s a drunk and above all when you know that he makes a habit of this sort of thing. What’s more, it is particularly stupid when someone as jealous as Ben is liable to find out.’

‘Ben?’

‘Surely you know about Marcia and Ben?’

‘What?’

‘They’ve been living together for about thirty years, and when it comes to jealousy, from what I’ve heard, Ben makes Othello look like a proponent of open marriage.’

‘I don’t know why I didn’t know that, but I didn’t.’ Amiss rubbed his eyes. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me that Lambie Crump and Josiah Ricketts are lovers.’

‘No. But Henry and Amaryllis were.’

This caused Amiss to sit bolt upright. That’s too much. ‘You’re having me on.’

‘That’s no way to talk to a widow,’ said Amelia Potbury – to Amiss’s relief breaking into laughter. ‘I assure you when you’re married to somebody like Henry you don’t need to make up stories.’