A Scandal in Belgravia by Robert Barnard Page B

the reason he came to London. They certainly weren’t able to point to any regular girlfriend while he lived in Nottingham, or anyone he’d brought home since. Remember that the working-class reaction to homosexuality is a gut one: they are less liberal than the middle class even, and certainly less so than the upper classes.”
    I thought hard for a while.
    â€œRight, well I think I’ve got a much better picture of the murder. What about afterwards? Did the police get any further leads on Andrew Forbes?”
    â€œLeads? I don’t know if you’d call them that. Rumours, really. The sort of thing you get in all missing-and-wanted cases. Is there anywhere in the world, I wonder, where Lord Lucan hasn’t been spotted? The best authenticated were that he was working as a barman in Las Palmas in the spring of 1957, and as an electrician in Barcelona in 1958. Remember this was at the height of the Franco era.”
    â€œI know: no extradition.”
    â€œThat’s right. And a police force better at intimidation than investigation. There was a request to the Barcelona police to investigate the last report, but by the time they got around to it he had got hold of a false passport and flown.”
    â€œWhere to?”
    â€œAmerica, they thought.”
    â€œThe States? Canada? Dear old South America, haven for all the world’s undesirables, and fit punishment for them too, from all I’ve heard?”
    â€œThe word from the Barcelona police was that it was the States. I don’t know how much trust I’d put in that.”
    â€œAnd there the trail ends, I suppose.”
    â€œPretty much so. I gather from the case notes, though, that there was a reporter interested at the time.”
    That made me sit up.
    â€œReally? That does surprise me. The lady who does research for the memoirs hasn’t turned up anything of substance from the newspapers yet.”
    â€œI don’t suppose she will. Terry Pardick was a crime reporter for the Daily Mail. What they’d have done if it had been a child of one of the Labour Party notables, say Hugh Gaitskell or Jim Callaghan, I don’t know, but as it was the son of a Tory cabinet minister they weren’t interested unless it was absolutely hard.”
    â€œSo presumably he never got that far?”
    â€œPresumably not. I knew him some years later. He was a nasty little muckraker, was Terry Pardick—a terrier with a nose for rotting meat.”
    â€œI don’t recall having heard the name. He was no Chapman Pincher, obviously.”
    â€œDefinitely not, if only because he couldn’t distinguish the truth from rumour.”
    â€œA Private Eye man before his time.”
    â€œSomething of the sort. He may well have got no further than the fact that Timothy Wycliffe was a homosexual. Certainlythe Mail didn’t print that, or anything else. Whether he got anything into any other rag I don’t know—even then there were rags that would print any dirt provided it was dirt. All the police knew was that he was following them around, getting on to the ring of his boyfriends and so on.”
    â€œI’ll tell Elspeth Honeybourne to look at the seamy end of Fleet Street, but I rather imagine she’s doing that anyway. This Pardick is dead, is he?”
    Sutcliffe pulled at his ear, and looked very like a beagle who has been distracted from an interesting scent.
    â€œI’m assuming so. I haven’t heard his name for years.”
    â€œI made that assumption about Tim’s father, but I was wrong. Look, John, I’m very grateful. All this has really put me in the picture. I don’t like to ask this, but are you willing to do a little more?”
    Sutcliffe smiled.
    â€œI thought you’d never ask. Yes, I am. A little light work—isn’t that what the experts always recommend for us superannuated professionals?”
    I thought hard.
    â€œNow, I’m off to Derbyshire