Chapter Two: In the Pink
We came to the country for the headlines.
In our local paper in London, the prostitute who threw herself out of the window of a burning building, torched by her pimp, only made the third page. Here in rural Hertfordshire, the cover story the week we moved was, ‘Llama Escapes from Petting Zoo.’ My husband’s favourite was a confrontation between a senior citizen and the bin men over too many bottles in her recycling box. But the headline today in Great Marston’s Weekly Recorder came as a bit of a shock – or at least it did to my mother-in-law Vivian, who had swept up the paper on her way in to breakfast.
“My God. It’s Pinky!” she shrieked, unfolding the paper in front of her.
“What the hell’s Pinky?” Guy enquired, in his lovely, drawly voice, made even more drawly after a night on the single malt (and the odd fag, I’ll wager).
“We used to call him Pinky,” Vivian answered, in sepulchral tones.
“Not good news, then?” I supplied cheerily, from my post at the kitchen sink, washing up the breakfast things. Vivian may live in her own ‘grannex’, but she likes to sit majestically at the head of our worn and scratched oak table in the kitchen for most meals and, indeed, for many cups of tea during the course of the day. I have become inured to it, in the manner of a reluctant owner adopting a determined cat. The downside to living in two million quids’ worth of Georgian rectory is dealing with the former chatelaine. When Vivian suggested we take on the rectory and she would retire gracefully to a converted barn in the extensive grounds, it seemed like a dream ticket to the countryside. With a baby on the way in a one-bedroom flat in the east end, we’d seized it with both hands. Every now and then, we felt like shoving it back, but the return to Murder Mile kind of put us off.
“Isn’t he that disgraced minister bloke?” Guy hauled his corduroyed behind over to his mother’s side of the table and began reading over her shoulder.
“Colourful local MP, Montague Durdin, was found hanged in his £1.2 million, five-bedroom farmhouse last night at eight p.m. Police were called to the property in Little Marston after reports of a disturbance and found Mr Durdin, sixty-eight, hanging from – “
“Stop! I can’t bear it! Poor, poor, Pinky!” Vivian wailed.
“I didn’t know you knew him that well,” I said, rather surprised by Vivian’s reaction. I pinged off my trusty Marigolds (the house lacked a dishwasher and we hadn’t got round to installing one in this first phase of the renovations; let’s face it, we hadn’t got the cash) and turned towards her, beginning to feel concerned. Viv starred in the local pantomime most years and most days, she starred in some production of her own. However, those were real tears sliding down her flawlessly made-up face.
“I thought he was just an old acquaintance of Dad’s,” Guy agreed, “He usually pops in to open the summer fete if he’s around.”
“We used to be good friends, many years ago, before I met your father. And now he’s been killed!”
“Well it says here he hung himself with his wife’s scarf,” Guy pointed out.
“He wasn’t the type to kill himself!” cried Vivian, “It must have been murder!”
“What do the Old Bill say?” I asked Guy, drying my hands and scooping Rory up from his wooden high chair, where he was patiently wrestling with a tough bit of crumpet and ignoring the emotional meltdown taking place above his head.
“’The possibility of suspicious circumstances has not been ruled out’”, he read aloud.
“I told you!” Vivian closed the newspaper with an emphatic waft.
“Hang about,” Guy swept it off the table and carried on reading, “Why did you call him Pinky?”
“Drink, darling, I need a drink,” Vivian was grasping the edge of the table like a sea-sickness sufferer and groping her way along to the sideboard.
“Hair of the dog, darling?” I murmured. Guy had crawled in during the early hours of the morning, looking a bit peaky after a night spent reliving old digs (or whatever it is archaeologists talk about when they get together) at a pub in Cambridge.
“We called him Pinky,” Vivian announced, pouring herself a large brandy, “Because he was the most fearful commie at university.”
“Monty Durdin, pillar of the Conservative party, a communist?” I was astounded. Rory grabbed a hank of my hair and pulled for some attention, so I yowled loudly.
“It’s not that unbelievable,” Guy said, “What did Churchill say? If you’re not a socialist at twenty you have no heart and if you’re not a conservative at forty, you’ve got no brain’, or something like that.”
“Well I’m not a conservative and I’m not far off forty,” I huffed. I swear Vivian narrowed her eyes at me at this, although she must know. For heaven’s sakes, my father’s a retired shop steward, and, to her lingering disapproval, I speak fluent Estuary. I do, of course, make many a disparaging aside about wealth and privilege whilst enjoying not a lot of the former, but a great deal of the latter. But hey, I have my issues, and it’s not my fault I fell in love with a gorgeous hippy-looking archaeologist on a Greek beach who turned out to be super-posh.
“Monty changed, of course he did. He grew up, like the rest of us. But he was a passionate man, and he was so committed to the cause at the time. He even went to Russia, I remember, just after he was sent down.”
“What, he was chucked out?” Guy asked.
“I started seeing your father in the Michaelmas term and that was it,” Vivian turned a little misty-eyed at whatever memories she was reliving. Then again, it could have been the cooking brandy taking effect.
“You went out with Durdin?” I asked incredulously. Monty Durdin, former Chancellor, Big Tory Beast and also, apparently, university drop-out and my mother-in-law’s ex. The mental images thrown up almost required that I hit the booze as well, in order to block them out.
“Well, we had a sort of thing,” Vivian shook herself like a wet dog, as if to throw off unwelcome thoughts. “Oh, it’s so terrible! I can’t believe it.”
“Bloody hell, is that why Dad wouldn’t have him in the house? I thought it was to do with the exchange rate mechanism!” gasped Guy.
“Listen, kid,” I whispered into Rory’s ear, “Go play with your trike on the patio and I’ll be with you in five,” I liberated my squirming child through the side door and turned to take in more of the unusual breakfast scene.
“Muriel’s going to be here soon,” I announced, “Shouldn’t we-?”
“Clean up?” supplied Guy.
I moved the brandy bottle out of Vivian’s reach, nodding at him and mouthing ‘Do something!’
“Look, mum, I’ve got to get to work and, apparently, Muriel’s coming in today to clean. Jo’s here,” he looked to me for confirmation. Of course I was. Where else would I be with a child, a stricken mother-in-law, a high-maintenance cleaning lady and a band of builders to support?
“But you were out all night!” exclaimed Vivian.
“Self-inflicted damage, stiff upper lip, it’s only a couple of departmental meetings to snooze through and I’ll knock off early,” Guy rattled off, sounding much like his grandfather during the Battle of Britain, I imagine. I cast a glimpse outside to check on Rory who was shouting “Pow! Pow!” at the crows. Another chip off the old block.
“I’ll be around,” I said sympathetically, “Perhaps we can have another cup of tea and then you can go back to the barn for a lie down.”
“I haven’t got time for a lie down!” Vivian retorted, necking the last of her pick-me-up, “I need to ring Barbara and see what anyone’s doing for poor Juliet.” Guy raised an interrogative eyebrow.
“Monty’s wife. They used her scarf, the barbarians!”
“Hang about, mum, we don’t know what’s happened. There’ll be police crawling all over the place, the last thing she’ll need is people turning up today, especially now it’s in the papers. Just leave it for a day or two.”
Vivian looked mutinous before agreeing to go ‘home’ to the back garden and take a paracetomol for her headache.
Rather unwisely, I switched on the radio and we caught the last few minutes of an interview with Durdin himself, recorded only two days earlier.
“Why should we believe you, Minister?” the interviewer was saying. “With respect” (which meant of course, with no respect whatsoever), “You haven’t exactly been squeaky clean yourself. The scandal has touched you as well as the Home Office.”
“I hardly call a few cigars a scandal,” scoffed Monty. And with that, it would seem, he’d hung himself.

Chapter 1: Beating the Tom Tom

“Get Barker at the Tribune for me now!” bellowed Scott Newchurch, hunched over his pc in Central Office, “Durdin’s history!”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” a senior aide stooped to deliver her verdict, “He was a big beast and some big beasts simply refuse to be made extinct.”
“It’s not the cigars, Shireen, you bloody idiot. It’s the rest of the stuff he had stashed in the cupboard with all the other skeletons. Look,” he handed her a sheet of paper.
“It’s a photocopy of an invoice,” she murmured, scanning quickly.
“Eighty-five grand,” Scott said tonelessly.
Shireen sat down heavily next to him, “I see what you mean. But how?” She was unable to formulate any of the many questions crowding her mind, edged out by the rapidly coalescing scenes of mayhem and disaster for the party.
“Unfortunately, Durdin had form. Forty years of it. It’s like finding a mass grave, we’re still pulling the bodies out.”
Shireen’s eyes flickered with distaste at Scott’s overstated analogy; one of the many. She suspected that the extreme terminology favoured by the men at Central Office correlated inversely with the dangers they faced in their comfortable desk jobs. Responsible they may have been, indirectly, for sending other young men to their deaths in aimless foreign wars, but they themselves confronted no machines more life-threatening than a malfunctioning photocopier in the course of their day. So of course they compensated with overuse of muscular, militaristic language.
“I told Dick. He went ballistic,” Scott answered her next question before she asked it.
“Don’t let him hear you call him that,” she said automatically. Richard Clarke, the leader (and generally acknowledged saviour of the party) liked to present himself as an amiable kind of guy, but he was distinctly lacking in a sense of humour when it came to deploying the diminutive of his Christian name. Unfortunately, the Red Tops revelled in it and it was this form of disrespect rather than any other that wounded him deeply and spoiled the enjoyment of his public life. Richard Clarke was more in favour of dignity, respect and general obeisance than he cared to let on.
“Come on,” Scott got to his feet, shovelling papers into his laptop bag, “I need you to help with damage limitation.” He picked up his Blackberry and pressed his large, stubby fingers over the tiny keypad.
“Are you summoning back-up?” Shireen asked, playing a mental game of Bullshit Bingo.
“There could be some collateral fall-out,” Scott replied with no trace of irony, “I’m going to need cover. You’re coming with me.”
“Right, I’ll round up the troops,” she said, covering up a smirk with her silk scarf.
“Bingo!” she added, under her breath.