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Mordred and his driver went to a service station while, seven miles further up the road, Talbot was flagged down by traffic officers, arrested and taken back to Salisbury to be charged. Mordred ate a vegetable slice in Mike’s Kitchen Garden while Kevin sat in the taxi with a flask of coffee and a beef tongue sandwich. Like all motorway cafés, the outside was cold, noisy and windswept with the passing of cars, and the inside was anonymous and somehow dominated by the toilets. Afterwards, they went to find the police station.
When Mordred walked in, the officer at reception – a young WPC with a bob - was expecting him. “Mr Talbot’s in a cell right now, sir,” she said. “Would you like to wait till he sobers up, or do you want to deal with him right away?”
“As soon as possible, please,” Mordred said, putting his card back in his pocket. “I’ll speak to him alone at this stage, keep it as informal as possible. Do you have an interview room available?”
“It’s all arranged, sir. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”
“That’s very kind, but no thank you.”
She introduced him briefly to some of the other officers – a matter of etiquette - then took him straight to the room where Talbot was waiting, seated at a table. She closed the door as she left and Mordred sat down. Talbot looked at the floor. His eyes bulged manically.
“You’re a university lecturer, I understand,” Mordred began. “This probably isn’t going to look good for you. 120 miles per hour, eh? What were you trying to prove?”
Talbot shrugged. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, avoided eye contact and said nothing.
“However, I’m not here to talk about that,” Mordred went on. “I’m here to talk about Frances Holland. The woman whose funeral you just attended,” he added, to prevent a quibble. “I know you two were having a relationship.”
Talbot seemed to wake up from a dream in which he’d decided to be uncooperative. “Er, what?”
“Are you denying it?”
“Wha – how? Who are you?”
“A friend of hers.”
“Here, in the police station?
“DI Jonas Eagleton. When I say I’m her friend, I don’t mean I knew her personally. I mean, I’m on her side. And I’m not sure you are.”
“How dare you? She and I were always friends. Always. I’ve known her since she was at university.”
“Is that when you started sleeping with her?”
Talbot deep breathed for a few moments, then relaxed as if a weight had been taken from him. He spent a few seconds swallowing his indignation, then sat up. “For what it’s worth, it wasn’t a crime in those days,” he said meekly.
“Granted. It isn’t now.”
Another long pause, then: “It wasn’t even considered unethical. We were in love. Correction: I loved her. She didn’t love me.” He grinned acrimoniously. “Obviously, I was younger and better looking in those days. What was your name again?”
“Eagleton.”
“Do you – suspect anything?”
“About what?” Mordred asked.
“You tell me.”
This didn’t come out as a declaration of defiance. It came out as ‘You go first’. Tell me what you know, and maybe we can help each other. How to respond?
“I’m not convinced she committed suicide,” Mordred hazarded.
“Me neither. In fact, I’d stake my life on it.”
“Except I don’t have a theory. I’d be glad of any assistance in that department, which is why I’m here.”
“I’m being blackmailed.”
No point in trying to conceal his surprise. “Blackmailed? By who?”
“I don’t know. They say if I ... Yes, I do have a theory. I guess it must be close to the truth. But I’m not allowed to say anything.”
“Did you sleep with Frances Holland recently?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘recently’. Once. A mistake. Old times sake. She was unhappy, and we’d been drinking - ”
“And someone filmed it.”
“So they say. I haven’t seen it, but I can’t afford the risk. Emily would leave me. My wife.”
“In my experience, if someone hasn’t shown you the goods, that’s because they haven’t got them. In this case, they never filmed it to begin with. They just heard about it somehow. Think about it. Copies are easy enough to make. You’d want to make at least one, for insurance’s sake. Where exactly did you have sex?”
“In the toilets at East Chisley Conservative Club. Look, I know that sounds implausible. Mad, even. But Frances was mad. When she was on a low, she was in complete stasis, but when she was on a high, she threw caution completely to the wind. Like she was two different people.”
“Presumably, you chose the toilet cubicle at random. It wasn’t pre-planned?”
“No. No, of course not. She didn’t plan – anything when she was in that mood. And any plans you had, she deliberately trampled them.”
“Okay, think about it then. Think about the logistics of setting up a camera to record something like that.”
“It could have been an opportunist. Everyone films everything on their mobiles nowadays.”
“So – what are you saying? This is the Conservative Club, let’s remember that. Someone comes into the toilet, presumably because they need to, and they hear a couple having sex in a cubicle. They don’t think, ‘This is disgraceful. I must tell the club chairman’ or ‘I really need to urinate. I hope they don’t hear me and think I’m a peeping tom’. No, they get out their phones and film it. Like it’s a secondary school.”
“I see your point, but there were lots of Young Conservatives in that night. Everyone knows they’re not quite right in the head.”
“I’m sure they’d have put it on Youtube by now. They wouldn’t have handed it over to some anonymous gang of blackmailers. No, what happened is that someone probably did hear you that night, and word did get out, and that’s how the blackmailers heard. You’re in the clear, if you ask me. When the chips are down, it’s your word against theirs. And they won’t dare throw into question the reputation of a fine, upstanding politician like Frances Holland, as they’d have to, like it or not. Even less so, now she’s dead. It would backfire on them pretty much big time. They’re bluffing.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay, I’ve done enough talking now. Now I need to know your theory. You said you’d stake your life on the notion that Frances Holland didn’t commit suicide.”
“That’s right, she didn’t.”
“So ...?”
“Planchart killed her. Charles Planchart, the MP. Her Parliamentary colleague.”
He nodded in an attempt to conceal his disappointment. “I have to say, on the face of it, that’s highly implausible. He was in London the entire time she was in Scotland.”
“Look, yes, I know it sounds barking. I’m just going to tell you what I think I know now, okay? I don’t actually know it in the technical sense. I can’t provide hard evidence. But I ‘know’ it like you know ... I don’t know ... that I was telling the truth about me and Frances at the Chisley Conservative Club just then.”
“Just tell me what you strongly suspect then.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Well, for a kick off, Frances wasn’t at all what most people thought she was. In most people’s view, including that of her constituents, and the cabinet, and the party, she was Little Ms Dependable, supremely rational, a bit of a cold fish, bluestocking, young fogey, spinster, what have you. All those things.
“But in reality she wasn’t like that at all; the mental illness saw to that. She wore a mask. She kept it in place with great difficulty, and most of the time, she was petrified it would slip. But not all the time. Sometimes, when she was in one of her euphoric periods, she would behave recklessly: sex with strangers, inappropriate practical jokes, theft, even – on one occasion - arson ... So I’ve heard. It rings true.
“I knew her at college. I was one of the lecturers on her course. We had a fling, I suppose you’d call it. I didn’t realise she was seeing Bill Ashbaugh at the same time, who also went on to become an MP. Labour. You may have heard of him.”
“I’ve already spoken to him.”
“In hindsight, her thing with Bill was probably much more serious than her thing with me. Must have been. She was all set to marry him, apparently, political differences notwithstanding – although they weren’t that different in those days – but he ... Well, I can’t say. It’s just what I heard. Let’s just say that when I heard he’d been fiddling his expenses the other year, I wasn’t surprised.”
“Financial misconduct. That’s what split them. At university.”
“Combined with a strong dose of two-timing. Poignant: she was cheating on me, and he was doing exactly the same to her. The odd thing is, had it not been for their love affair and the car-crash way it ended, I really think they’d have ended up in the same ideological place. Pink or pastel blue, one or the other. What happened instead was that their mutual repulsion had an impact on their outlook. She became dark blue, he became deep red.
“Except he didn’t. Just like her, he put a mask on. The difference is, his mask was there to conceal his moral bankruptcy. Whereas, ironically perhaps, she retained her idealism. You may have heard her called a ‘conviction politician’. That’s true. For all her impetuousness, in public she only championed causes she believed in.
“And in the end, that’s what did for her. Have you ever come across a satirical magazine called Private Eye?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Basically, it’s a mixture of satire, cartoons and serious behind-the-scenes journalism, most of the latter in a font so small you can barely read it. It focuses on corruption in the British establishment. I mean the whole caboodle: the newspapers, the local councils, the City, the health service, agriculture, and, of course, the mother of all cesspits: Parliament. HP Sauce, it’s called, and there’s usually an entire page of it, sometimes two.
“Now just about everything that appears in Private Eye is way ahead of Reuters and the like. It’s mostly what you’d call ‘breaking news’, although it rarely creates a scandal: thanks to the fact that there’s a disgraceful level of apathy amongst the public. The point is, though, to work something like that, you need sources. Spies, more than journalists. People who care about the public good enough to risk their necks disseminating information the establishment would rather you never knew about.
“Step forward Frances Holland. She began with the intention of exposing Bill Ashbaugh, but once she’d done that, she got a taste for what I’d call the spying life. Everyone can see the attraction. Look at the following Spooks had. Look at The Night Manager. Divest yourself of your identity; become this secret person filching hidden files and popping them into the hands of your controllers, shedding light on darkness. The irresistible glamour of becoming no one.
“Pretty soon, she wasn’t just spying on her political opponents; she was spying on everyone. And because of who she was, how occasionally self-destructive and unrestrained she could become, she was spying on The Get Out Clause too. I counted four separate articles on Planchart and his cronies this year. Of course, they’ve dried up now.”
“Can I ask how you knew she was doing all this?”
“Back a bit. When I heard that she was part of TGOC, I hastily claimed funding for a book that would allow me to shadow her for ‘research’ purposes. Part of me was still enamoured of her, you see. Anyway, she got me in, and used me to bounce ideas off. Pretty soon that extended to sex in a toilet cubicle and desperate revelations concerning things I didn’t necessarily want to know about. She was fully aware I didn’t like the fact that she’d turned out all Mrs Thatcher – us full-time academics tend to be a fairly left-leaning lot – so she thought she’d mitigate it by letting me see her human side. As in, telling me what she was doing for Private Eye, among other things.”
“I assume you’re going to say Planchart found out.”
“She overextended herself. I didn’t discover what it was she eventually found out and tried to give to Private Eye – she said it would blow my mind if I knew. But I also know she was becoming paranoid about my book by this time. In a stupid, completely unrealistic way. Like it was going to be some definitive kiss-and-tell, disclosing everything I’d undergone with TGOC in every last detail, and thus wrecking her career. Bit by bit, she stopped trusting me. I last saw her precisely two weeks before she disappeared. She asked me to stop shadowing TGOC and stop writing my book. I said I could do the former. I couldn’t do the latter. She became utterly uncontrollable. I had a black eye for nearly a week.”
“I assume you didn’t go to the police.”
“Absolutely not.”
“This ‘mind-blowing revelation’ she had. How did she tell you about it?”
“Phone. It was the last conversation we ever had.” He smiled sourly. “Not counting the two-word text.”
“This conversation. Before or after the black eye?”
“Just after. And she told me Planchart had found out.”
“How did he do that? Do you know?”
“She took the information, whatever it was, to Private Eye, but apparently it was such a grandiose claim, and there was so little evidence to substantiate it, that they couldn’t put it into print. They have a good team of lawyers over at Carlisle Street, but they’re not omnipotent. However, it was a serious enough for them to want to pass on to the police, just to cover themselves. And someone in the Met went straight to Planchart. He had an informer, in other words.”
“Surely, the police would have wanted to interview him anyway?”
“You’re a policeman yourself, DI Eagleton. You’re investigating Frances Holland’s death. And yet you’ve no idea what I’m talking about. Have you?”
It was a good point. True, he wasn’t who Talbot thought he was, but if the police knew about it, then as a member of MI7, he’d have been told. “No,” he said.
“So there we are. It must have been taken to the police – if Private Eye say that’s what they did, then that’s what they did – but someone in the police saw it, sat on it and had a quiet word in Planchart’s ear. ‘Someone’: I’m guessing, another freemason.”
“Planchart’s a freemason?”
“They all are. Tossers.”
It was beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory. Still, not wholly implausible. “How did Planchart kill her then?”
“This is speculation now,” Talbot continued, “but it fits with what I know about him. Once he found out from the police that Information X – we might as well call it that – had reached the police, he knew there was only a limited number of people who could have passed it on. It was someone in his immediate circle. He then trawled through six months’ worth of Private Eyes, and realised that revelations were being made about people and organisations connected to various people, but all with only one common denominator. Frances Holland. He confronted her, then he threatened to expose her.”
“How would such ‘exposure’ work?” Mordred asked. “Given what you said a moment ago: that no one in the country cares about what Private Eye thinks and says?”
“The public, by and large, don’t. The politicians and the press, they do: very much so. No one likes having their peccadilloes held up to ridicule in print.”
“So Planchart would have ‘exposed’ her in a more limited sense than the usual – to her colleagues.”
“That’s all he needed to do. She’d have been finished. And I don’t mean just her Westminster career. Powerful people would make sure there was no cosy job in industry waiting for her at the end. No boardroom consultancy, no advisory post, no well-paid column in a national newspaper. They’re a vengeful lot, on the whole.”
“I still don’t understand how he’s supposed to have killed her.”
“Back to my story. He’s blackmailing her now. He pretends to be her friend. Listen, I have a cottage in Scotland. Two weeks. Best leave now, lie low for a while. I’ll try and smooth things over while you’re away, but I can’t promise anything. So off she goes, defeated and alone and facing a dark future. Once she gets there, there’s no car, probably limited wireless, no one she knows, and to cap it all no anti-depressants. Planchart made sure they went missing somewhere between King’s Cross and Skye.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t for certain. But, like I said earlier, I received a two-word text message from her, the day after she disappeared. That was the last I heard of her.”
“What did it say?”
“No Citalopram. Plus an emoticon. A sad face. It’s still on my phone, if you don’t believe me. Which was confiscated when I arrived here.”
“And how did you respond?”
“Best check my phone for the details. I haven’t deleted anything. A combination of ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Let me help’, and variations on those themes.”
Mordred tried to take stock. So maybe Planchart had sent her to Skye. That would at least mean he’d been lying throughout the period of her disappearance. And maybe she’d had something big and incriminating but unverifiable on him. And maybe he’d arranged for her antidepressants to vanish as soon as she’d left London. Perhaps he’d even foreseen where that would lead. Any one of those things currently looked hard to establish. Together, they were an Everest.
At least in so far as pinning Frances Holland’s death on him was concerned. But the bigger issue was probably what did she uncover, and why was it momentous enough to merit her extermination?
“I’m surprised no one’s looked into who booked that Skye cottage,” Talbot said. “Dig deep enough, I’m pretty sure you’d discover it was Planchart.”
“And the reason you didn’t go to the police with any of this,” Mordred said, “was because you were being blackmailed. I assume you’ve met the blackmailers at some point?”
“They phoned me at work.”
“Pretty amateurish.”
“If I’d gone to the police, I’d have had to confess to having had sex with Frances. And given how leaky the police were first time round ...”
“Just one more question.” Mordred reached into his inside pocket and put a picture of Pierre Durand talking to Frances Holland on the table. “Do you know this man?”
“I saw him a few times, but I don’t know him by name. I don’t think I ever spoke to him. Who is he?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. You don’t know anyone you could ask?”
“My association with Frances means all my bridges with TGOC are now well and truly burned, I’m afraid.”
Mordred stood up. “Understood. Don’t worry, nothing will get out this time round. I’ll need your phone, I’m afraid, and a guarantee that you’ll cooperate if we need to ask further questions. You’re not in a position to ask for anything in return. You were driving dangerously under the influence of alcohol and innocent people could easily have been killed. However, given the circumstances, and your invaluable assistance with a major inquiry, I’ll do everything in my power to see you’re released with a caution. We’ll take you home. You can pick up your car from here tomorrow morning. Never again, though.”
Talbot got to his feet and accepted the handshake. “Agreed. Th – Thank you.”
