I called Andy Gold from a phone box but I couldn’t get hold of him and there was no one else I could think of who would be willing to run a vehicle registration check for me. I wasn’t too concerned; I was pretty sure I could find out who the man in the Jag was on my own. I hung up and dialled the daytime number Sir Peter Morgan had given me.
Sir Peter wasn’t at the Treasury, he was at Westminster today. I called the number I was given and reached his secretary and eventually convinced her that her boss would want to talk to me. I then arranged to see Sir Peter in his office in thirty-five minutes. He suggested a later time but I impressed upon him the need to see him soon, and he agreed. I hung up and then walked round to the entrance gate the Jag had driven through.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, in broad Texan to the uniformed man on the gate. ‘Could you help me?’
‘If I can, sir,’ the man replied. He had been sitting in his booth reading the Sun but he stood up and approached the window.
‘I was just having an argument with my wife,’ I explained. ‘Shirley-Anne. You see I could have sworn I just saw the Prime Minister drive in here, in a blue-coloured Jaguar car, but she says it wasn’t him.’
‘And I’m afraid she’d be right, sir,’ the guard said. ‘Although Mr Lloyd might make it one day. No, the Prime Minister has a driver in any case.’
‘So you’re sure it wasn’t John Major?’
‘That was Graham Lloyd, sir, right Party, wrong man. And anyway, sir, John Major hasn’t been PM for …’
‘Was that who that was? Damn!’ I leant forward. ‘Do me a favour,’ I said, taking a quick look back over my shoulder. ‘Don’t tell that to Shirley-Anne.’
I could feel the hangover now. It was catching me like a favourite in a steeplechase making its way through the field. I fed six twenty-pence pieces into the meter which was guarding my car and looked around for somewhere to get a quick bite to eat. I found a coffee bar and drank one of those Californian multi-vit drinks that really did make me feel a bit better – for the moment. I ate a samosa and then had one of those little Portuguese custard tart things with an espresso. London, a hundred different countries packed into one traffic jam. As I ate I wondered what the hell was going on in the life of Charlotte Morgan. I had mixed feelings about having caught her out; I was glad the case had started to move but it didn’t make me happy to have my grubby suspicions confirmed. I didn’t like to think of her having anything to do with her husband’s death.
And then I had another thought. Sir Peter. Was I being made a fool of? I was soon to find out. I looked at a copy of the Telegraph which somebody had left behind, and read that Boris Yeltsin had had another heart attack and that a man with an unpronounceable name who I had never heard of before was in charge of the country. This worried me. A country with a lot of nuclear weapons should be run by someone you’ve heard of. I paid for my lunch and decided to leave the Telegraph where I’d found it. I didn’t want to give Sir Peter the wrong idea.
‘You’re resigning?’ the MP said, his mouth opening a little to demonstrate his surprise. We were sitting in his office, him in his discreet power chair backed by a panorama of the Thames and St Thomas’s Hospital, and me opposite, my left foot sitting on my right knee. ‘But you’ve only being working for two or three days!’
Sir Peter was shocked, and annoyed with me. But that was OK.
‘I like knowing what I’m doing,’ I told him. ‘I don’t like playing to someone else’s agenda. I got enough of that on the force.’ I settled back into the chair but didn’t get too comfortable.
‘I don’t know what you mean!’ Sir Peter’s fingers spread wide apart and his head moved forward towards me, leaving his shoulders where they were.
‘Fine,’ I said. And I got up to go.
‘Please,’ Sir Peter stood up with me, ‘won’t you at least tell me what this is about?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want to tell you because you didn’t hire me for that, and if you had told me that is what you wanted me to do I would never have agreed to work for you. That sort of thing isn’t my line. Does that make any sense?’
‘No,’ Sir Peter protested.
‘Fine,’ I said again. ‘But I don’t believe you.’
This time I made it to the office door but Sir Peter took my arm before I got it open.
‘All right,’ he said, his voice now void of any false hurt.
‘All right. I know what you’re talking about but, please, let me explain.’
I sighed.
‘Please,’ Sir Peter said.
‘I didn’t hire you to snoop on my political enemies.’ We were back at the desk. ‘Anyway, Graham’s one of us. Not that that means a damn thing these days.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘Because I wasn’t sure about it. I thought I was just being paranoid, but that if you came up with anything, well, so be it. ‘I’m amazed it only took this long.’
‘It was a fluke,’ I said. ‘How did you find out about it?’
‘Well,’ Sir Peter said, ‘I introduced them. At one of those diplomatic things Ministers have to go to and hate, but which their friends and family adore. Edward was away on long haul and I ran into Charlotte in one of those ghastly restaurants in Notting Hill and asked her if she wanted to come along to the Portuguese embassy with my wife and myself.’
‘And she met him there?’
‘Yes. It was about eight months ago. They hit it off but I didn’t think anything of it. Who wouldn’t hit it off with Charlotte? She’s a beautiful woman and she works in PR. Hitting it off with people is her job.’
‘So why did you suspect they were seeing each other?’
‘Coincidence, I suppose. Teddy and I met for lunch one day, about six weeks before he was killed. He told me that he and Charlotte were having problems. He didn’t seem to think they were too serious, but he did say that she seemed quite off with him. I said that every marriage must be like that at some point.’
‘I’m sure they are.’
‘Yes. Anyway, it just happened that in a cab on the way back to the Treasury I saw Graham and Charlotte together on the Mall and Edward’s words struck me. Oh, they weren’t doing anything, they were just walking along. They could have run into each other and remembered meeting before, or Charlotte could have got Graham’s number and phoned him on a work basis. But there was something about them. It was nothing blatant but it was something. Graham Lloyd is married, you know?’
‘I had assumed that he was.’
‘I have become adept at reading body language over the years. I’ve had to. It helped, of course, that Charlotte and Graham didn’t know that anyone was watching them – not that they were doing anything to give themselves away. I just had the feeling.’
‘So when your brother was murdered, why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘For the same reason I didn’t tell you, only more so. I wasn’t sure he was having an affair with Charlotte. I didn’t want them bothering him if I was only imagining it. Even if I was sure it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, and if the papers had got hold of it – Christ! I couldn’t tell them and I didn’t want to tell you. I wanted to see if you came up with it yourself.’
I sighed. I really love chasing around finding out things that my clients could have told me before I even started.
‘There seems to be a lot of things you can’t tell me. Can I be certain that’s the lot?’
‘Yes,’ he said, relieved. ‘And I’m sorry, I really am.’
‘So. Are you going to tell the police about it now?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to.’
‘Which won’t hurt your corner at all,’ I said. ‘Will it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Him being a pro-European, and you being as sceptical about Europe as Ian Paisley is about a united Ireland…’
‘Now look here!’ Sir Peter stood up. ‘If you think for one minute that where the murder of my brother is concerned I would attempt to gain any sort of political advantage, then you couldn’t be more wrong. How dare you?’
‘Just to see what you’d say,’ I admitted. ‘You can see how I might think it. Get me to catch Lloyd in the act, maybe get some pictures off me which get leaked to the Mail. They’re on your side, aren’t they, on Europe?’
Sir Peter tried hard to suppress his outrage at my suggestion.
‘If that was the case I could just have told the police of my suspicions first off, couldn’t I? They would have revealed the truth just as you did, and I wouldn’t have had to leak it to the papers, the police would have done it for me themselves. No?’
He had a point. Also, his anger did seem genuine. All in all I was inclined to believe that he wasn’t using me in his bid to keep the jewel of Britain firmly entrenched behind her silver sea, away from nasty foreign hands. I decided not to tell him about the film I had though.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I apologize for doubting your motives. But if you had told me of your suspicions we wouldn’t have had to have this conversation. Now, do you want to go to the police with this?’
‘Yes. I think. Isn’t that what you think?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Like you said, the police are sure that your brother’s murder was part of a series of gay killings. For them, this will just confirm the pattern. Of course she was getting it somewhere else, she wasn’t getting it at home, was she? But they will make trouble – just to do it – and somebody will almost certainly use his desk phone to call one of the tabloids and make himself a few quid. Nothing would be gained by that.’
‘It disgusts me, you know, that police officers do that kind of thing.’
‘You should have got Mr Howard to pay them more then.’
‘It would happen anyway.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘it probably would. I don’t think telling the police would do much good in terms of finding out who killed your brother. Even if it was his wife and her lover.’
‘So, what, we just leave it?’
‘I’ll see what I can come up with,’ I said. ‘If I do find anything more concrete, then we’ll give it to the police. In the meantime, we can spare a few blushes.’
Sir Peter seemed relieved, either at retaining the services of yours truly or avoiding further conversations with the police. I asked him if he liked his sister-in-law and he said that yes, actually, he did. He said he would find it very difficult to believe that Charlotte had anything to do with Edward’s death.
I handed Sir Peter a copy of the picture, knowing that Andy Gold had already shown it to him, and that he hadn’t been able to tell him anything. Sir Peter gazed at the picture ruefully and then put it down on his desk, with a look which said that finding the man in it wouldn’t actually do much for him. He wanted the man caught but it wouldn’t make him happier. He sucked on his teeth, picked the photograph up again, and slid it into a drawer.
I stood up and shook Sir Peter’s hand. As he walked me across his office I had a thought and I stopped at the door.
’What’s Graham Lloyd like, by the way?’ I asked.
Sir Peter stood holding the door handle and he looked me straight in the eye. His expression was measured and still, that very strange mixture of the deadly serious, and a wry smile, which I have only ever seen on upper-class Englishmen.
’Oh, Graham’s a bastard,’ Sir Peter said.
On the way back to my car I remembered that I wanted to speak to the barman at the airport so I stopped at a phone box. I called the number and a harassed woman told me that Alex hadn’t come in today and no she didn’t know when he would be there because he hadn’t phoned her to tell her he wasn’t coming, which was most unlike him and was that all because she had a bar full of customers? I smiled at the thought of the assistant manager with her polished nails cranking out cappuccinos and swearing under her breath at her errant subordinate. Thank you, I told her, that’s all. It wasn’t really that important. I hung up and walked around the corner to my car, beating a traffic warden to it by seconds.
Charlotte Morgan hadn’t gone back to work that day. She might have nipped out after I’d seen her because she was no longer in her dressing gown when I got to the flat on Leinster Mews that she had either rented or was borrowing and she opened the door to me. As well as the clothes I had seen her in earlier she wore a look of not very pleasant surprise.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
“To talk a little more,’ I replied quietly.
‘How did you get my address?’ she demanded, one hand going to her hip.
‘I followed you here.’
‘What?’
‘Earlier. I followed you here.’
I let Charlotte Morgan think about that for a second. Then I held up a roll of film. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘are you going to let me in or should I just take this straight round to my friend Giles at the News of the World?’
She looked at me with horror, and at the small plastic case in my hand. I could almost see the pieces falling together in her mind and I tapped my feet until they were all in place. After a second or two Charlotte Morgan bit her bottom lip, took a step backward and opened the door.
It was a very nice place. Far too polished and expensively cluttered for my taste but then I’m the sort of person who never could see the point of buying over-priced generic articles from the Conran Shop that you don’t exactly need. Charlotte Morgan, quite obviously, could see the point of that.
She was sat stiffly on the edge of a small Chesterfield while I had turned a high-backed French dining chair around and was straddling that facing her. She looked defensive, tense like a cornered cat. I looked at her and a rush of contempt filled me as I saw Lloyd again, kissing her the way he had. I calmed it down with the knowledge that I didn’t have all the facts yet. I handed her the role of film which she took hesitantly, surprised to be given it.
‘I’m not a sleaze hunter,’ I told her. ‘I want to find out who killed your husband. I’m not going to tell anyone about the affair that you’re having unless I think that it reflects upon that. The only way I can assess that is if you tell me about it. All about it. If you refuse then I’ll assume you’re hiding something and I’ll go to the police. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ she said eventually.
‘And if I go to the police, which believe me I should, then the newspapers are sure to get on to it. So. Once again, did you enjoy a happy sex life with your husband?’
She paused for a second until I let out a sigh of irritation.
‘No,’ she said, looking down at her lap.
‘And you didn’t tell anyone this because you didn’t want people looking into your private life?’
‘I suppose. We hadn’t made love for some time but I couldn’t see how that fact was in any way relevant to my husband’s murder.’
‘All right. Why weren’t you and your husband making love?’
She looked up again. ‘Because I didn’t want to. It wasn’t really a big thing for me. I still loved Edward. I think that I realized that it had never really been a sex thing for me. Edward was just such a lovely person so I said yes when he asked me to marry him.’
‘When did you realize this?’
‘Oh,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘When… when I met…’
‘When you met Graham Lloyd.’
Mrs Morgan’s mouth opened in surprise.
‘Did you tell Edward about him?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I mean, I was going to. Graham and I were both going to. He was going to tell his wife and we were going to divorce and get married. If you know what I mean. We still are.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. But it’s difficult now. Graham, he doesn’t need this kind of publicity, Christ knows what people might think. And Edward, he hasn’t been dead long, I mean, it wouldn’t be right, I…’
Mrs Morgan stopped speaking and began to cry. She put her head in her hands very neatly and cried quietly for a long time. She cried like she was doing something, a chore perhaps, which she had to get over before she could talk to me again. I watched her crying, the top of her head moving ever so slightly, and the animosity between us seemed to dissolve into the air. I felt sorry for her. When she stopped it was very suddenly and she sat up straight like she had before, and smiled a smile which said I’m drowning but I don’t much care, and I’ll do what I can before I disappear. I returned her smile and looked her in the eye.
’How did he take it? Edward? This lack of desire for him?’
‘I don’t really know,’ she replied, thinking about it and pushing aside the remnants of a tear. ‘He never said anything. Everything else between us seemed so normal. It seemed normal for me to be with Edward and living and sleeping next to him, but making love to another man. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to be with him, but my sex was somewhere else. This didn’t seem too strange because it had never really been there with him.’
I nodded.
‘But did he try to have sex with you?’
’A few times. He held me in that way, you know? In bed? But I didn’t respond and he never pressed me.’
‘Did he have a strong sex drive? For you?’
‘I don’t know. I kept thinking about that when everyone asked me if I thought he was gay. He certainly wanted to make love to me often enough but it was never like…’ Charlotte took a breath. ‘It was never like fucking. Not just that. It was more of a way to be together and communicate our affection.’ She turned to the side, thinking of something, and I thought she was going to cry again.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I still loved him. All that I ever had. But I didn’t tell him, and I didn’t show him, because the way that I had shown him before suddenly meant something different to me. I didn’t want to fuck him. I never had and I couldn’t. I wanted to find some other way to show him but it was too late then, it was too late because he was… He probably died thinking I didn’t love him.’
Mrs Morgan looked down at her lap, where her rust-coloured fingernails were picking at the gold ring on her left hand. Her voice became small and hopeless.
‘That’s all I can think about,’ she said. ‘That’s the only thing I can think about, that and what it must have been like for Teddy. When…’
Mrs Morgan tried very hard to stop them but her words broke up into sobs again. She pressed her fists into her face and her elbows into her sides to stop her grief shaking its way out of her. The sound she made wasn’t loud, but the pain coming out of her seared the air like something tearing apart along a seam which didn’t exist. I had never seen anyone cry from such a central place as Charlotte Morgan was crying. I saw my hand move up from my knee towards her, and I watched it hover for a second above the Alice band which held her hair in place.
I drew it back towards me and let it rest on the top of the chair.
I watched Charlotte Morgan crying for a long time, and I knew that I had a lot of questions that I should ask her. About Graham Lloyd. And jealousy. And her finances. And about what Edward would have done had she told him. And had she actually told him already. I knew that I should wait until she had finished her crying and ask her these things. That is what Andy Gold would have done and he would have been right to. This woman had lied to the police, she was a recently bereaved widow who, it transpired, had a secret lover. Andy would have waited and that is what I would have done too, if I was still bound by an oath which said I had to be dispassionate and clinical while exercising my duties in the pay of the public and in the public’s interest.
Instead I stood up, set the chair gently aside and walked through the kitchen, and then out on to the street, with the sound of Charlotte Morgan’s bewildered grief following me like a lost bird. I turned and closed the door quietly.