A Scandal in Belgravia by Robert Barnard Page A

taken the night ferry to Dieppe on the second of November, the night after the murder. His landlady let our chaps into his flat, and there they found prints everywhere which matched the ones from Craven Court Mews.”
    â€œHad Forbes given up his flat?”
    â€œNo, he hadn’t. He’d just said to his landlady that he’d be away for a few nights. He’d taken a case full of clothes, toilet things, and that’s about all.”
    â€œDid the police get to know much about him? All that I know is that he was an unemployed electrician.”
    â€œEven that’s misleading—technically true, but misleading. Makes him sound like a down-and-out or a male prostitute who couldn’t give his real job. It wasn’t like that at all. Forbes had had a good job with the BBC for two and a half years. Commercial television had started up the previous year, and he had a job lined up with them, at better pay. When the BBC heard this they sacked him. They were very snooty about ITVin those days. So Forbes had money in the bank, a small but nice flat, good prospects.”
    â€œNot quite the picture I had of him.”
    â€œNo. Background: respectable working class in Nottingham. I’ve got the address of his parents—here, I’ll leave it with you, though I doubt it will be of much use. Curriculum vitae: good reports from his Secondary Modern school, though he certainly wasn’t the academic type; apprenticeship at fifteen, job at the end of it, then moved to London and the job at the BBC in 1954.”
    â€œDid the landlady know him at all?”
    â€œOh yes—she lived on the ground floor, and Forbes had the flat at the top. Chatted to him a lot, gave him cups of tea. Liked him very much, said he was quiet, kept the flat clean, never any trouble beyond once or twice returning home drunk.”
    â€œBoyfriends?”
    â€œNo. In fact she was convinced he had a girlfriend. But you’ve got to remember, Peter, when we are talking about. As far as the landlady was concerned they would be friends, not boyfriends. ‘Coming out’ at that date could have meant being put inside. The landlady said he had a few friends, chaps of his own kind from work, and some of them she recognised, but no one specially close, she said. He kept in touch with his family, rang them once a week, went home for holidays and the odd weekend. Liked pop music and football, supported Arsenal, went to the occasional dance. And that was about it: the typical young man of the fifties.”
    â€œThat’s the picture of an unlikely murderer. Did that strike the police too?”
    A slightly cynical smile wafted across Sutcliffe’s lips.
    â€œAre you sure you’re not on to one of these ‘miscarriage of justice’ kicks, sir?”
    â€œNot at all—I’m just interested in the pressures that made this particular young man into a murderer.”
    â€œAs far as that goes you could say that to the police there isno such thing as an unlikely murderer: depends on the person, depends on the pressures. I think the police at that time took it as some kind of lovers’ tiff.”
    â€œSome tiff.”
    â€œQuarrel. Again, remember the times: there was a tendency among the investigating policemen to regard homosexuals as by definition excitable and unstable.”
    I followed this up.
    â€œThen again, a lover’s tiff. I can’t see that it was established that they were particularly close.”
    Sutcliffe nodded.
    â€œCertainly the impression I got was that the other two men were much closer to him: both of them had spent periods of ten days or more in the flat in the months before the murder. So far as I can tell from the notes, Andy Forbes seems to have been more in the nature of an occasional lay—ugly word, sorry.”
    â€œWhat about his family?”
    â€œDenied indignantly that he was a homosexual. What you’d expect, really. Probably that was