A Scandal in Belgravia by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

11

The GREAT and the GOOD

On the train back to London, after one of those hotel breakfasts where you help yourself to a selection of near-cold victuals, I did some thinking. My first conclusion was that Andrew Forbes is still alive. If he were dead, why would his sister give the date of his death as 1988 when she had apparently visited him in 1989? Of course it was just possible that she had visited his widow and children, but I remembered her saying about the letters he wrote home: “He still—right up to the time he died—sent them to her.” To me that seemed an odd, if cleverly improvised, formulation. I believe the sentence started out as “He still sends them to her,” and was hurriedly modified.

There had been another place where she had pulled herself up. That was also when she was talking about letters from America. She had said that the police would be suspicious of them especially with his—and at that point she had changed tack and said something feeble about his being on the run. I felt sure that she had been going to say something like “especially with his name on it having the same initials”—or the same initials in reverse, or something of that sort. People who have to choose false names for themselves are notoriously prone to choosing ones which have some connection with the original ones, as if that original name were part of their personality which they can not bear entirely to obliterate. There had never been any suggestion that Andrew Forbes was a man of any imagination, and I guessed this was what he had done. Of course he didn’t have to put any name on the envelope, but aerogramme forms and most American airmail envelopes have a special place for the sender’s name and address, and an unsophisticated person might take it to be obligatory to write it. So he had sent the letters to friends down the road, and later to his married niece.

It seemed to me, now that I was getting a fuller view of the murder and its investigation, that the police had not made any great effort in this case. Oh—it was not surprising that by now the thing was as dead as a dodo: that would be normal, for all the police cant about never closing a file on an unsolved case. But at the time . . . It would surely have been a simple enough matter to get a look at the incoming mail of the Forbes family and their closest associates. I had a sense of the police, once they had decided the murderer was Andy Forbes and that he had left the country, washing their hands of the case. The interesting question was why? Was it a feeling that having to live abroad rather than wonderful old England was punishment enough for the poor begger? Was it a feeling that this was a quarrel between two queers, just what one

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