Читать книгу A Scandalous Man - Gavin Esler - Страница 12

HARRY BURNETT’S STORY

It was now dark, but something drew Harry Burnett back to the study of his father’s Hampstead apartment. Perhaps it was the memory of the defiant girl looking up from the bench on the heath below. He checked the bench again but this time it was empty. He returned to the kitchen, fetched water from the tap in a crystal pitcher and poured a couple of fingers of Glen Moray into a whisky tumbler. He splashed a drop of water on top.

‘Just a wee splash to open the nose,’ he said in a mock Scottish accent. ‘As faither would say.’

He stared at the picture of his father with Leila Rajar again, then switched on the television. His father’s suicide attempt was the last headline on a specially extended edition of the Ten O’Clock News. The top story was, of course, the beginning of the General Election campaign with polling day set for 5^th May 2005.

‘5 – 5 – 5,’ Harry said. ‘Very auspicious. Probably. In China, or somewhere.’

Historic, the journalists said, repeatedly. They loved adjectives, Harry thought, so everybody knew what to think. The news presenter – historic, historic – explained that the parties were preparing to launch their campaigns for this – historic – battle of historic ideas. He tried to make it sound exciting, which was a bit of a stretch since everyone knew that Blair would win. The Tories were in the same mess they had been since the Lady left office. That was the great thing about the Conservatives, Harry thought. They hated each other more than they hated anyone else. To a Tory, Labour was just the Opposition. The real Enemy was always on their own side. It was half an hour into the extended bulletin and two whiskies later before they got to his father, a political footnote to the main news of the day.

‘Now to a story – and a man – the Conservatives would rather forget. Robin Burnett. He’s credited with being one of the great brains behind Thatcherism in the late seventies and eighties, and he has been found close to death in mysterious circumstances at his home in Gloucestershire. Empty pill bottles and a knife were discovered by his side, and it is known that his wrists were cut. Police sources are saying that it may have been a suicide attempt, but foul play has not been ruled out. Here’s our political correspondent, Sheena Hayworth.’

Harry let the whisky trickle over his tongue. The report that followed looked and sounded like his father’s obituary.

It began with the tribute from the American Vice President David Hickox and the commentary noting that Robin Burnett had ‘helped put the word Special back into the Special Relationship with the United States.’ There followed more familiar TV clips from the past, threaded together with interviews with his father’s contemporaries.

‘Robin Burnett was talented,’ Jack Heriot, the former Prime Minister and Cabinet contemporary of Burnett was saying. Heriot was now a puffy-faced elder-statesman in a grey pinstripe suit. ‘No doubt about it. Brilliant, even. Mrs Thatcher certainly thought so. Driven. Charismatic. But he had a fatal flaw.’

‘Which was?’

The puffy face broke into a grin.

‘He always wanted to be the centre of attention. If Robin Burnett were invited to a wedding, he wanted to be the bride. If it was a funeral, he wanted to be the corpse. What happened to Robin was a classical tragedy. His fatal flaw was pride. Arrogance. He thought he could get away with it. And he very nearly did.’

The voice-over continued.

‘That barbed tribute from one of his contemporaries. But when we asked the current Conservative leader Michael Howard to give his reaction today, it was not forthcoming.’

There were pictures of Howard smiling vacantly in a crowd of Tory supporters in some south of England market town, ignoring shouted questions.

‘What do you think of Robin Burnett’s apparent suicide attempt, Mr Howard?’

Grin, grin. Shake, shake.

‘Are you worried it reminds voters how the party lost its way under Mrs Thatcher?’

Grin, grin. Shake, shake.

‘About the Sleaze Factor?’

The Art of Political Zen. For Michael Howard, if he pretended it wasn’t really happening, then it wasn’t really happening. But it was happening. More voice-over.

‘A Conservative party spokeswoman said Michael Howard was too busy focusing on the current election campaign to be bothered by what she called “a figure from the distant past.” The spokeswoman then read out a single-line tribute.’

The TV report cut to a picture of a young Tory woman in a blue suit reading in a dull voice from a piece of paper. She must have been about Harry’s age, too young to remember who his father really was.

‘Our sympathies go out to the Burnett family at this difficult time. We intend to respect their right to privacy.’

That was it. She folded the paper and walked away. The voice-over picked up again.

‘Twenty words – just twenty words in tribute to one of the intellectual fathers of the modern Conservative party. All this shows that Burnett’s mixed legacy is not forgotten, though some wish that it were. The Conservatives are desperate to distance themselves from everything the Burnett scandal symbolized. Political amnesia – you might say – is today’s ailment of choice.’

The report then cut to old footage of Harry’s father brushing back luxuriant black hair with his left hand, grinning broadly as if at a great joke and pounding the rostrum at a party rally. Harry noted the date. It was less than a month before he was born. A strap across the pictures said April 1979. His father was speaking.

‘Our mission is to get government off the backs of the British people.’ The deep baritone was resonant with conviction, almost as if he were in the room. It made Harry shiver. On the TV screen his father pointed at the audience, as if at each person individually. It was a clever trick.

‘To the people of Britain I say this. We intend to turn you loose – you – and you – and you – each and every one of you – to do what you can do for yourselves and for your families and for your country. Our mission is to take the dead hand of government out of your pockets, out of your wallets, off your backs – to lift the burden of the state from the British people and to set the people free!’

The audience took up the refrain.

‘Set the people free! Set the British people free!’

Harry sipped the whisky. He knew what was coming, and he felt for the TV remote control. There were more shots of Robin Burnett, this time canvassing in his Gloucestershire constituency. He was thin and angular, handsome in a way, with a glow of certainty about himself and his message. The commentator was saying something about Burnett’s personal closeness to Mrs Thatcher, to the Americans, his charisma, his intellectual background as an economist.

‘Some tipped Robin Burnett as a future Prime Minister. But that all fell apart in the late eighties in a scandal which seemed to symbolize the rottenness and arrogance at the core of …’

A newspaper picture of a young woman appeared. She was wearing a striped bikini and high heels.

‘… a woman called Carla Carter who …’

The woman’s backside was stuck out towards the camera, and she looked over her shoulder while her tongue licked her red lips. Her hair was big and wavy. Harry hit the off button. He did not need to hear any more. Ever. He drained the whisky and decided to try another.

‘And why not?’ he said aloud to his father’s image in the photograph with Leila Rajar. ‘Funny, isn’t it? If they had got a sniff of you and the delicious Leila, that would have perked up the obituary, yes? That would have given them a very different kind of scandal. I wonder how much I’d get for this picture now, eh?’

The alcohol was doing its work. His hand felt for the Macallan.

‘And while we are on the subject of totty, should we invite the delish Leila to your funeral? Or your hospital bed? Does she even know you are close to death? Maybe someone should tell her? Maybe it should be me?’

Harry picked up the whisky glass and began to mooch around the rooms one more time. He was drawn back to the study. On the desk under the window facing the heath there was a silver grey Sony Vaio laptop computer connected to a laser printer and to a broadband router. Harry switched on the printer but it required a password. He switched it off again. He had never considered his father might be surrounded by so many modern gadgets, but then he supposed that he hadn’t really considered his father much at all. The bookshelves bore a number of biographies and political books, many of them by former colleagues, some with friendly inscriptions.

‘To Robin. In memory of better days. Nigel.’

‘To Robin, the man who made it all possible! Best wishes, Margaret.’

‘To Robin. The man who got out at the right time!!! Pity the rest of us!!! Norman.’

‘The Bastards!!! Don’t let them grind you down!!! Best, always, J. H.’

Harry found a ready-made pizza in the freezer and stuck it in the oven. He tried to imagine his father eating a frozen pizza, but that was impossible. A lot of what he was seeing simply did not add up. While he waited for the pizza to cook he freshened up the whisky and searched through his father’s DVD collection. Old Bogart movies. Brief Encounter. Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction. Blue Velvet, the complete edition of Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive. The Player.

‘Tarantino and David Lynch? Robert Altman? Jesus. Pizza? Plus Leila Rajar? Who knew, eh, dad? Who knew?’

Harry ate the pizza, more confused about his father than ever before. He lay back on the sofa in the main room, determined to get raging drunk. He turned the volume down on the television and fell asleep where he lay. It was a deep, undisturbed, whisky sleep.

When Harry woke, it was with a start. It was hours later, his tongue was furred and his mouth tasted of sour alcohol. The middle of the night. Harry tried to check his watch but his eyes were sleepy.

Something about the room felt strange, like a chill. He shivered. He sensed someone watching him and shook himself awake. Then he caught sight of a blur. It was a woman. A young woman with a small rucksack and spiky brown hair. Harry shook himself again as the woman broke into a run and burst through the room towards the front door. She was carrying the Sony Vaio laptop from the study under her arm plus papers and files and the silver-framed photograph of his father with Leila Rajar. Harry sat upright, startled, and then leaped after her. The young woman ran as Harry stumbled. It was as if he were trapped in a pot of thick oil, unable to move, while she ran from the room like a faun leaving behind a whiff of her scent, a perfume without a name, flicked open the front door and was gone. Harry broke into a run, then paused to make sure he had the front door key so he would not lock himself out. He swore at his slowness as he burst into the hallway and raced down the blue carpet, following the tease of her scent. He ran towards the elevators, but they were silent. Nothing moved. The emergency stairs, he decided. She must have used the emergency stairs. But where were they? Where was the fire escape? Where was the sign?

He ran to the other end of the hall, his bare feet pounding on the trampoline of a carpet. The fire escape was marked and he pulled at the door. He could make out the sound of footsteps below and ran after them, the balls of his bare feet thumping on the concrete of the fire stairs. He hit the jade coloured floor of the main entrance hall as the front door clicked shut. The young woman was running down the hill towards the heath. The faun had escaped into the woodland. Gone. Barefoot in the dark Harry had no chance of catching her. He stood panting in the hallway and checked his watch. It was three o’clock in the morning.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed under his breath. He wondered why he had not heard the girl breaking in, but then immediately understood. She had used keys. She had crept past him, and had almost managed to leave without rousing him. She knew exactly where she was going. She had been there before. Harry pressed the elevator button and returned to the apartment. He checked the front door. As he had guessed, there was no sign of forced entry. He went from room to room trying to decide what had gone missing. His own wallet was lying undisturbed on the table. But the computer was definitely gone. And the photograph of his father with Leila. Some papers. Nothing else, he decided. He thought about calling the police immediately, then he hesitated. Finally he decided to leave it until daybreak. The girl was long gone. There was nothing the police could do for him, except give him a long, sleepless night. After a while he wondered whether he had dreamed about the burglary, whether it had really happened.

He rubbed his face in his hands and then tried to decide whether the real dream was the love he had seen in his father’s eyes for someone called Leila Rajar, in a photograph which had now disappeared, and which, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, had never existed.

The two Metropolitan Police detectives finally arrived at the Hampstead apartment at eleven in the morning, an hour late, or a day late, depending on how you calculated it. Sidney Pearl told them to go up to the flat, and he then called Harry to warn him they were on their way.

‘The traffic,’ one of the detectives apologized, as he shook Harry’s hand and stepped through the door of the apartment. ‘Plus the election. And we had a terror alert. And then a couple of shootings in south London. Busy day yesterday, all in all.’

The detective was a few years older than Harry, in his early thirties, white, fleshy, rubicund. He introduced himself as Detective Constable Steven Harpenden.

‘Even this morning, took us an hour to get five miles from Scotland Yard. We were going to blue light it, but thought we’d sit through it. Nothing works in London except the traffic lights.’

‘And us,’ his colleague interrupted. ‘We work, yes?’

Harry looked at the second detective. He was around 40, black, skin the colour of milky coffee, slim, in a well cut brown suit.

‘Detective Sergeant Donald Sylvester,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘We talked on the telephone yesterday. I’m so very sorry we’re a day late.’

‘Not a problem,’ Harry said. ‘I was here anyway. I just thought what with it being an attempted murder inquiry, you’d be here last night.’

DS Sylvester eyed him closely.

‘Who told you it’s an attempted murder inquiry?’

‘I just thought …’

‘Most likely attempted suicide,’ Harpenden interrupted. ‘That’s what we’re hearing from Gloucester. No signs of breaking and entry. No signs of a struggle. No evidence to the contrary. But we’re keeping an open mind, know what I mean?’

Harry said nothing. The whisky and the early wake-up call from the spiky-haired girl had got to him. He wasn’t sure exactly when it was that he decided not to trust the detectives. It was simply a matter of instinct. He would tell them as little as possible. A line of Seamus Heaney poetry kept buzzing in Harry’s head.

‘Whatever you say,’ Heaney wrote, ‘say nothing.’

He was not going to mention the girl, the laptop or the photograph with Leila Rajar. Say nothing.

‘Shall we – um – get on, then, Mr Burnett?’ Detective Sergeant Sylvester said, still looking him over as if he sensed that Harry was about to lie to him.

‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘Maybe just answer a few questions and let us poke around a bit?’

‘Of course,’ Harry repeated. ‘But I don’t understand what we’re all doing here exactly.’ Harry turned to Donald Sylvester. ‘I mean, if it’s not attempted murder, then is there a crime? And if there’s no crime, why is there an investigation?’

‘Well, we – um,’ Sylvester hesitated. ‘Like Steve said, we don’t think there’s a crime, but we have to tick all the boxes.’

Harry smiled.

‘So you’re not going to charge my father with wasting police time if he lives?’

‘Just a precaution really, sir,’ Sylvester began to explain. ‘Bearing in mind your father’s – um – high visibility. We need to be seen to cover the ground. Your father attracted … a lot of attention … some of it – um – undesirable.’

‘But you really don’t think that someone tried to …’

His voice trailed away as he gestured round the apartment with his hand.

‘Did you know of anyone with a grudge against your father?’

‘No.’

‘Did you know of anyone who would want to harm your father?’

‘No.’

‘Did you know of any threats to your father of any kind?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know of any reason why he would kill himself?’

Harry shook his head.

‘And do you think he is capable of committing suicide?’

‘I have no idea what he might be capable of,’ Harry said. ‘He was a stranger to me, as I told you on the phone. Was there a suicide note?’

Sylvester looked back at him.

‘No. Or at least, no one has found one. Did you find anything here?’

‘No.’

The detective was just over six feet tall but Harry was even taller. They stared at each other.

‘What are the police in Gloucestershire saying?’

‘Things point to a – um – self-induced drugs overdose and self-inflicted wrist wounds,’ Sylvester said flatly. ‘The cuts were at the correct angle for self-harm. Was your father left or right handed?’

That caused Harry to pause.

‘Right handed,’ he replied. ‘I think.’

Sylvester nodded.

‘You don’t sound so sure.’

‘I haven’t seen him in years.’

Detective Sergeant Sylvester couldn’t read the emotions in Harry’s eyes, but he knew what he was not seeing. Grief.

‘Are you in the politics business yourself then, Mr Burnett?’ Harpenden wondered.

‘Politics? No,’ Harry protested and then grinned. ‘Well, not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘I work as a volunteer for my constituency Labour party in Fulham, if you consider that the politics business. We have a local joke: Are you a member of an organized political party? No, mate. I’m Labour, me.’

Sylvester smiled, surprised.

‘So you’re not – um – Conservative like your …?’

He did not have to complete the sentence. And Harry did not have to reply. He wondered whether the detective’s occasional stammer gave him a second to think.

‘I am the opposite of my father in many things,’ Harry responded eventually. ‘I am pleased to say.’

‘But it’s not your job, politics?’ Harpenden repeated, as if asking the same question in different ways might produce a different answer.

‘No,’ Harry said firmly. ‘Just a hobby. On the grounds that if I don’t help elect the people I want to run the country, some other person will. By profession I’m a translator.’

‘An – um – interpreter?’

‘No, well, I do a little interpreting but mostly I’m a self-employed translator.’

‘It’s all languages, isn’t it?’ Harpenden said.

‘Yes, but an interpreter lives for the moment, switching between languages. A translator works with books or documents. That’s my line. They are different skills.’

‘You speak lots of languages?’

‘Some better than others. French and German. Also Czech, which is what pays the bills right now. And I’m learning Arabic in evening classes.’

‘Very handy, sir. Could – um – come in useful. Given the way the world is going we might all be speaking Arabic before long.’

Harry shook his head.

‘Nobody cares about French and German any more. It’s Chinese, Arabic and Farsi – Persian – that’s what people need.’

The detectives began to move from room to room, businesslike, picking up things, opening drawers. Harry followed.

‘You are welcome to do this – but what exactly are you looking for?’

‘We’ll know it when we see it,’ Sylvester explained lamely. ‘Maybe something, maybe nothing. Anything – um – out of the ordinary.’

Like a picture of my father with an American TV newsreader, stolen by a woman in the night? Harry thought. He played a couple of chords on the piano.

‘What would be “out of the ordinary” in this kind of situation?’

Detective Sergeant Sylvester ignored the question.

‘Please don’t touch things for now. Make me happy.’

Harry stepped back from the piano.

‘Of course. Except I stayed here overnight so I must have touched a lot of things already. Sorry.’

‘He – um – live here mostly, then, your father? Or down in the West country?’

‘Tetbury,’ Harry responded. ‘Not here. It doesn’t look much like anyone lives here, does it? Too clean. But there’s no point in asking me. Like I said, I never saw him. And I didn’t even know this place existed until yesterday. I haven’t really seen him since … not since it happened. You know, the scandal.’

The detectives looked at him. Sylvester nodded.

‘Yes,’ he sympathized. ‘The scandal. I saw the TV last night. And your mother?’

‘She … died a few years ago. She killed herself, though in her case it was with help from Mr Smirnoff. A bottle of vodka a day by the end. Cirrhosis.’

Sylvester said, ‘I’m very sorry.’

The apartment suddenly felt oppressive.

‘Did you blame your … um … father for what happened to your mother?’

‘Of course. It was his fault.’

‘And for what happened to you?’

‘Yes,’ Harry replied coolly. ‘He behaved like a complete shit. Although in front of the children he would say that as “S-H-one-T”, as if we couldn’t spell.’

‘Did you hate your father?’ Sylvester said suddenly.

‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘He’s not dead yet. Did you hate him?’

‘I didn’t try to kill him. And I didn’t hate him either. Not any more. He was irrelevant to me. A stranger. He was not in my thoughts and not in my life.’

Harpenden suddenly said, ‘Where were you two nights ago between the hours of six p.m. and midnight?’

Harry thought for a moment.

‘I was at my Arabic class in west Acton until approximately ten o’clock and then I went to the pub with two other students. And then I came home, around midnight.’

‘Alone?’

‘Sadly, yes.’

‘But you have witnesses in this Arabic class?’

‘Of course. I haven’t been out of London in weeks, and I have never been to my father’s cottage in Tetbury. I couldn’t even find it.’

The atmosphere suddenly changed. The two detectives started to move around again, picking things up and looking at them.

‘Still, it’s a nice gaff all right,’ Harpenden said brightly, looking at the bookshelves. ‘Good taste, your father.’

Beyond the political biographies in the study, the bookshelves in the main room were full of expensive picture books, Ansel Adams and Andrew Wyeth, celebrations of Rembrandt, Goya and Matisse, books on Islamic art, Persian culture, and several on the Moors in Spain.

‘In most things, yes,’ Harry replied.

‘Most things?’ Sylvester wondered.

‘Not in women,’ Harry responded.

‘Ah,’ Harpenden responded, perking up. ‘I believe there is a technical term for having bad taste in women, Mr Burnett. It is called “being a man”. What was it exactly with your father that went so wrong, sir?’

Harry took a deep breath. He recited the history of the scandal as if ordering a list of vegetables from the greengrocer.

‘When I was eight years old, a woman sold her story to the News of the World saying that she and my father were lovers. She was half his age and a lingerie model, so there were plenty of pictures of her in her knickers for the papers to print. It ruined my father’s reputation. And his marriage. Oh, yes, and his political career. And – what else? His family. And his life. And probably a few other things too, but I can’t remember it all. He became a pariah. Went off to Gloucestershire and spent most of the last twenty years growing organic vegetables and fruit which made him a small income, or so I believe …’

Harry’s voice trailed off.

‘Not a great – um – move then, sir, all in all,’ Sylvester said with a wan smile. ‘The lingerie model.’

‘No, not really,’ Harry agreed.

‘He should have just denied it,’ Harpenden suggested cheerfully.

‘He did.’

‘Oh.’

‘Then they published pictures of them together. Tapes. Video tapes. The woman … well, you get the picture.’

‘Oh,’ Harpenden volunteered. ‘Bummer.’

Sylvester said, ‘And you and he …?’

Harry bristled.

‘I really find it difficult to talk about this.’

‘No, no,’ Sylvester apologized. ‘You don’t have to …’

‘I am not used to talking about it,’ Harry said. ‘I tell people my parents are dead, which stops the questions. And they are dead. Both of them. I have not seen nor talked to my father since he walked out. Or was thrown out by my mother.’

‘Didn’t you want to? See him, I mean?’

‘No. He wanted to see me, and tried from time to time.’

‘Recently?’

Harry shrugged.

‘He sent me a card a week or so ago saying we should meet, but I didn’t reply. One of his parables was that when he was fourteen years old he thought his own father was the stupidest man in the world, but by the time he got to twenty-one, he was amazed how much the old boy had picked up in just seven years. He tried to tell me that maybe it would be the same with him and me, but I got to twenty-one and he was nothing to me at all. He died years ago, when he walked out. Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.’

Sylvester looked at him.

‘William Butler Yeats,’ Harry explained. ‘I’m helping with a new Czech translation of Yeats, and also I’m translating Milan Kundera short stories into English. Very difficult, actually, Kundera.’

Harpenden and Sylvester nodded as if they were interested, then moved away again. Harry followed the detectives as they nosed about the unfamiliar rooms. There were several paintings in the sitting room, Victorian scenes of Venice, the Rialto, the Bridge of Sighs.

‘I never knew my father either,’ Sylvester said suddenly, shuffling through an address book by the telephone. Harry was surprised.

‘You didn’t?’

‘No. He went back to Grenada before I was born. My mother said that she did know him, and that was enough for both of us.’

‘Families, eh?’ Harpenden laughed.

‘Of course, you’ll inherit this place,’ Detective Sergeant Sylvester said, ‘in the event that your father dies.’

‘Presumably, yes,’ Harry shrugged. ‘Me and my sister. Though if you are suggesting I tried to kill him for it, then, well, firstly I didn’t, and secondly I didn’t even know this place existed, but I am happy to keep repeating what I have just told you again and again until we all get very, very bored.’

He glared at Sylvester defiantly.

‘I don’t think that will be – um – necessary,’ Detective Sergeant Sylvester replied. ‘But thank you for your patience.’

Ten minutes later the detectives said they were done.

‘Nothing of interest as far as I can see. If we need to come back, we’ll – um – let you know.’

‘Any objections to me staying here?’

‘None, Mr Burnett. It’s yours to do what you wish as far as we’re concerned. I hope your father pulls through.’

‘Thanks. Before you go, can I ask you something?’

Sylvester grimaced a little but tried to look happy.

‘Of course.’

‘If it really was a suicide attempt, why do you keep asking me all these questions?’

Sylvester shrugged.

‘Nothing personal, sir. Strictly business. But this is political, right? Number Ten’s taking an interest, so is the American embassy. It means I can tell my gaffer we went through all the hoops.’

Harry stared at him. Harpenden broke the silence.

‘Y’know, they were saying on the radio that he could have been prime minister.’

‘Yes, they do say that.’ Harry smiled grimly. ‘Maybe we are all lucky that he wasn’t.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ Harpenden said again. ‘There are worse things than what your father did. I mean, a lingerie model? What man wouldn’t be tempted? Nobody died, did they? At least he never sent us into Iraq with no hope of getting out.’

‘You could be right,’ Harry agreed awkwardly.

‘Thanks for your time, Mr Burnett.’

‘Thank you.’

‘If you think of anything …’

‘Yes of course.’

‘You have our numbers.’

‘Yes. And you have mine.’

The detectives left. Harry shut the door and leaned against it. There were worse things than what his father had done, he repeated. A lingerie model. What man wouldn’t be tempted? Nobody died. He looked back into the apartment and at the big mirror in the pitch pine frame that he remembered from his childhood home in Pimlico. And as he looked at it, he stepped back into the place he had once called home.