Barbara Vine - The Birthday Present

If you scrutinized this as Iris and I did, you could see that the link between Ivor and all this was that he had taken up with Juliet Case after her ex-boyfriend Lloyd Freeman was dead and that he had paid an allowance (a sort of disability pension) to the driver of a crash car in which Lloyd Freeman had been a passenger. Did the media even know what they were looking for?

They kept it up through the Wednesday, mostly with repetition and a plethora of photographs. Ivor went into the department by day and into the House of Commons to vote. In the past he'd always walked to work and back, but that had become impossible. Thanks to the photographs, people recognized him; cameramen followed him, anxious for more shots to use next day, leaving enough of their number behind to catch Juliet if she dared emerge. Braving them was a frightening thing, because they crowded Juliet, thrusting their cameras into her face. Her being so beautiful and eminently photogenic didn't help. I suppose she hadn't been much of an actress or hadn't had the right agent, because surely if she had she would have somehow found her way to Hollywood. Perhaps she was just so nice and, oddly, so modest. Every photograph of her which appeared made her look perfect. There was no awkwardness in any of them, no lines of strain or moue of anger. In a single one she seemed distressed and had tears on her face and in that she looked only like the Tragic Muse.

But why did they persist? Why did they keep the story going? Nothing new came out and two days went by. Iris said she thought that perhaps they were working on someone, persuading someone to say more, to confirm what they knew but dared not divulge without confirmation.

ON THE FRIDAY afternoon Ivor drove himself and Juliet to Ramburgh. It was a brave thing to do, first pushing through the reporters and photographers to get to the car. He told me afterward that getting Juliet through was the hardest part.

He thought for a while, then, “No,” he said, “the hardest fucking part was not giving that Sun guy a sock on the jaw. Lovely expression that, don't you think? Does anyone say it anymore?”

I said it was a very good thing he hadn't and felt like a prig. Braver, though, was facing his constituents in Morning-ford and this he did on Saturday. He held his surgery as usual. Someone asked him why he was paying a pension to a man whose injuries happened through his own careless driving. It wasn't the sort of question constituents should ask when they came to their MP for help, but Ivor answered it or, rather, he said that no charge had ever been brought against Dermot Lynch, so it was impossible to say if his driving had been careless or not. By that time he had seen Saturday's newspapers, or one of them, the relevant one.

It had a scoop. On its front page was an interview with a woman who called herself a friend of Hebe Furnal's but who wished to remain anonymous.

I say he had seen the newspaper but he hadn't read the story in the sense of perusing it. The paper, which was regularly delivered to Ramburgh House, where my mother-in-law was, of course, living, was The Times, but the one which had scooped the rest Ivor picked up after he'd parked his car in the Market Square of Morningford. He saw the headline, the picture of Hebe, and he read the first line of one of the paragraphs in her account of things. Then his agent came down the steps to greet him and he had to run the gauntlet of the people waiting to see him.

Presumably, Gerry Furnal had refused to speak to them and so had his wife, Pandora. When I saw the paper and read the story, I found myself hoping against hope (in soppy-father mode) that Hebe's son, Justin, was too young to understand any of it and that no one would ever tell him of it.

Ivor went back to Ramburgh House. He had no local engagement that evening and none on the Sunday. Going home to London on the Sunday morning was an option and he decided to take it. By then he had read the anonymous woman's interview with a journalist twice while sitting in his car, parked in a farm gateway on a quiet stretch of lane. Much of what she said was untrue or, at best, half true. She talked of Hebe's promiscuity, her spending of her hardworking husband's money on “other men.” Hebe had neglected her child, she said, in order to meet her lover “two or three times a week” and had often not returned home until “the small hours.” He had given her a pearl necklace worth seven thousand pounds, which she had told her husband came from the British Home Stores. Ivor's name wasn't mentioned—the anonymous woman didn't know it—only that Hebe's lover was “an important man in government,” which, at that time, he was not. Ivor read the interview a third time. When he came once more to the bit about how he was supposed to have met Hebe so often he said aloud, “I should have been so lucky.”

It was a fine sunny day, warm for October. He could see the fields, not yet plowed, white with chamomile flowers where the barley had been. I'm not saying this to add color to my narrative. This is the way he described things as he sat there reading and rereading that paper.

He didn't show it to Juliet or his mother. He was an English gentleman, enough of the old school in spite of his outré sexual carryings-on, to feel it right to keep unpleasant things from women if he could. Of course they must know it and know it soon, but not yet, not on this glorious day. He ate his lunch, not drinking too much till the evening. He and Juliet went for a walk, through the grounds of Ramburgh House, across the fields to the river and back by the lanes and the village. I know it well; Iris and I have done it many times.

Sometime that evening, in preparation for his departure next day, he must have gone into the room next to the boot room at the back of the house and fetched what he needed to take back to London with him in the morning.

WHILE IVOR WAS sitting in his car on the way back from Morningford, Sheila Atherton, Jane's mother, was in her daughter's flat, where she found Jane's diary under the floorboards. I know it was at the precise time, or at any rate on the precise morning, because she told Juliet the date and the time of her discovery when she sent her a copy. She had been walking about the one-room flat when she noticed how a floorboard creaked as she crossed a certain point. Jane's flat wasn't carpeted but scattered with rugs. She moved one of these rugs, lifted a loose floorboard and found the diary, sheets of A4 paper clipped together.

If they ever knew about it, the press must have longed to get hold of the diary. They never did. Sheila Atherton handed it to the police, though not apparently for quite some time. After all, they had Jane's murderer in custody, which must have been the result of what she told them Jane told her about him and his attack on her. Why did she send the copy she made of the diary not to Ivor, but to Juliet? Malice? Revenge? I don't know. You will have seen by now Jane's hatred of Ivor and contempt for him and also the light it sheds on so many dark corners and imponderables. It was because she sent it to Juliet that I have been able to include it, or parts of it, in this account, having first secured Mrs. Atherton's permission as holder of the copyright.

What happened to Hebe's clothes? Those presumably sexy, lap-dancer's, embarrassing clothes that poor Jane put on to see how she might entice the window cleaner. Was she wearing them when Sean Lynch made his way in? Perhaps her mother found them in the suitcase in the cupboard and threw them away out of shame.

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Menhellion had cleverly never mentioned Sean Lynch, yet his name seemed to underlie every line. It was all there too, in an experienced journalist's synopsis. We left it to Ivor to get in touch with us, or we did so until the Sunday evening and we had heard nothing. At about seven he phoned us and, hastily getting hold of a babysitter, paying her double time, I drove us to Westminster.