A Murder in Mayfair by Robert Barnard Read Free Book Online Page A

for them.’ Lord John has never given a hint of where he might be if he is still alive. The tabloids are always haring off on false scents of course, but there’s never been anything that the police thought worth a second glance.”
    â€œDid the police want to find him?”
    â€œWhat are you suggesting? The usual Masonic conspiracy notions? I never heard rumors of that, or even that Revill was one. I think it genuinely has been a case of ‘The police are baffled.’”
    I was racking my brains to remember the little I had ever heard about the case, which was before my time of political or any other kind of awareness.
    â€œWas there a suggestion that his rich friends had sheltered him and arranged for his escape from this country?”
    Margaret nodded.
    â€œSuggestions, but no evidence. And if they found him a safe haven he’s still had to live there for years, decades. And yet there’s been no solid evidence.”
    â€œWhat do you remember about the murder?”
    She shook her head, troubled.
    â€œVery little, beyond the bare facts, I’m afraid. I was out of the country on a trade mission to Eastern Europe with the then-Minister of Trade. My first trip abroad it was, though in a very junior capacity. Any news about it I learned from the BBCWorld Service, and it wasn’t the kind of thing they dealt with at any great length—not the sort of image of Britain they were interested in projecting. When I got home it was still hot news, but the papers assumed you knew the basic facts. . . . I think I tended to black the whole thing out.”
    â€œWhy?”
    She gave a self-deprecating grimace.
    â€œBecause I’d liked the man, I suppose. That’s what made it so terrifying. That a man you thought ‘a nice bloke’ could suddenly become a murderer, the most sought-after criminal in the country.”
    â€œWhen was this?”
    â€œThe first half of 1962. Before long the Profumo case swamped it as a political scandal. But talk has gone on.”
    â€œAnd to you he was just ‘a nice bloke’?”
    â€œYes. . . . Remember I was very young. He was good-looking, or moderately so, he was a minister, a Lord.” She was serious, absorbed. She had gone back forty years, and was wrestling with her feelings as an adolescent girl. “But to be honest I don’t think that really clouded my judgment.”
    Somehow I was sure it hadn’t. Like Miss Buss and Miss Beale, the young Margaret hadn’t felt Cupid’s darts. Then, as now, she looked, she considered, she judged.
    â€œWhat did? I wonder.”
    â€œCloud my judgment? I can only suppose inexperience.”
    â€œTell me what sort of person you thought he was.”
    â€œAh.” She was typically unwilling to be rushed. “Not altogether easy, that. On the surface, and on paper, a very conventional figure. He’d done all the usual things a man of his class does, or did at that time. He’d been in the Brigade of Guards, he’d been a deb’s delight, he’d married a wife from the landed gentry, and produced the necessary son—and a daughter, incidentally.”
    â€œWhy should a son matter? His was a courtesy title, surely, so it would die with him.”
    â€œSo it would. But his elder brother, the heir to the Marquis of Aylesbury, was . . . unlikely to marry.”
    â€œSo, on the surface, a typical upper-class scion without a rebellious bone in his body?”
    â€œThat’s right. And distantly related to Harold Macmillan, like a lot of the members of his government.”
    My eyebrows shot up.
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    â€œEither to him or to Lady Dorothy, his wife. It was said that, as Prime Minister, Macmillan liked to surround himself with people he knew. That was the polite way of putting it.”
    â€œWell before my time, all this. It seems like another age.”
    â€œNot so