A Royal Pain (32 page)

“And just how do you propose to find out who might have hired a trained killer?”

I put down my teacup. “I have absolutely no idea, Granddad. Frankly I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have to give it a try, don’t I? I really don’t want to start a new world war.”

Granddad put down his teacup and burst out laughing. “Oh, that’s a good one, that is. You—starting a new world war because a young bloke gets himself stabbed?”

“Look how the last one started! With one silly archduke being assassinated in a little unimportant country. People seem to think an incident involving Hanni and the communists might be enough to unsettle things in Europe. I don’t see how, personally, but . . .” My voice trailed off.

“You worry too much, love,” Granddad said. “You take yourself too seriously. You’re young. You should be enjoying yourself, not feeling responsible for other people.”

“I can’t help it. I was brought up with duty rammed down my throat.”

He nodded. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

“And I wondered if you might come back to Rannoch House with me. Just for a day or so. I don’t like the thought of being alone there.”

“Of course I will, my love. As long as you don’t expect me to dress up in that ridiculous butler’s outfit. But I don’t think you’ll get Mrs. Huggins to join us this time. Had enough of that kitchen of yours, she has. Said it gave her the willies working underground like a mole.”

“I quite understand. Of course she needn’t come. It’s just me. I’ve left my new maid at Dippings and Hanni’s staying there until things are decided for her.”

“So you and I best get working then.” He picked up the beans. “But first we need a good lunch. I was going to do lamb chops and new potatoes, with beans from my garden. How does that sound?”

I smiled at him. “Perfect.”

Chapter 32

After lunch we caught the train up to the Smoke, as my grandfather called it. Then we went our separate ways, he to Scotland Yard and I out to the western suburbs this time and to the address I had found for Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, Sidney’s parents.

The Robertses lived in a humble semidetached house in Slough. Its red brick façade was coated with the grime of endless coal fires and its pocket handkerchief-sized front garden sported one brave little rosebush. On the journey there, I had thought out how I should approach Sidney’s parents. I knocked and the door was opened by a thin little woman in a flowery pinny.

“Yes?” she said, eyes darting suspiciously.

“Mrs. Roberts, I’m here about your son,” I said.

“You’re not another of those reporters, are you?” She went to close the door again.

“No, I was a friend of his from Cambridge” (all right, so it was a small lie, but detectives are allowed a certain degree of subterfuge, aren’t they?) “and I wanted just to pay my respects and tell you how very sorry I was.”

I saw the wariness soften and crinkle into pure grief. “You’re welcome to come inside, miss,” she said. “What did you say your name was?”

I hadn’t, of course. “It’s Maggie,” I said, reverting to my maid’s name as I had done once before. Maggie MacDonald”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss MacDonald.” She held out her hand. “The hubby’s in the back parlor. He’d like to meet one of our Sidney’s friends.”

She led me down a dark hallway into a little room with the obligatory three-piece suite and piano, its top littered with Goss china pieces, little souvenirs from past day trips to Brighton or Margate. A man had been sitting in one of the armchairs, reading the paper. He jumped to his feet as I was ushered in. He was painfully thin and balding, wearing braces over his shirt. His face looked completely haggard.

“We’ve got a visitor, Father,” Mrs. Roberts said. “This young lady used to know our Sidney at the university and she’s come to pay her respects. Isn’t that kind of her?”

“Much appreciated,” he said and immediately I felt rotten about deceiving them. “Take a seat, please. And how about a cup of tea, Mother?”

“Oh no, please. I don’t want to put you to any bother,” I said.

“No bother, I’m sure.” She scuttled out into the kitchen, leaving me to face Mr. Roberts.

“So you knew our Sidney at the university, did you?”

“Yes, but I lost touch with him when we graduated, so you can imagine what a shock it was to read about him in the newspaper. I couldn’t believe it was the same Sidney Roberts that I had known. I just had to come to London and find out for myself what had happened.”

“It happened, all right,” he said. “Our bright, wonderful boy, his life snuffed out just like that. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? I went through the whole Battle of the Somme and I came out without a scratch, but I tell you this, miss, I’d willingly have sacrificed my life in a second in exchange for his. He had so much to live for, so much promise.”

Mrs. Roberts had come back in with a teapot under a crocheted cozy and three cups on a tray. Obviously this was one of those households where there is always tea ready. “Here we are then,” she said with forced brightness. “Do you take milk and sugar?”

“Just milk, please,” I said. She poured me a cup and the cup rattled against the saucer as she passed it to me with an unsteady hand.

“I was telling her how I wished I could have traded my life for his,” Mr. Roberts said.

“Don’t get yourself worked up again, Father,” Mrs. Roberts said. “This has really been hard on him, miss. First losing his job and now this. I don’t know how much more we can take.”

I looked longingly at the door, fervently wishing that I hadn’t come. I also wished I could help them with money, although I rather suspected that they wouldn’t take it.

“I understand that Sidney still lived at home?” I asked.

“That’s right. He came back to us after the university,” Mr. Roberts said. “We were worried that he’d get a job far away and his mother was delighted when he said he’d be stopping in London, weren’t you, old dear?”

She nodded, but put her hand to her mouth.

“The newspaper said that Sidney was killed in the docklands area of London? What was he doing there?”

Mr. Roberts glanced at his wife. “He worked in a bookshop. All that education and he ended up working behind a counter like any of the other young men from around here. I’ll tell you, miss. We had such high hopes for our Sidney. He was such a bright boy, see. We scrimped and saved to send him to the grammar school and then he goes and gets a scholarship to Cambridge as well. He had the world at his feet, our Sidney did.”

His voice cracked and he looked away from me.

“We thought he’d go into the law,” his wife continued for him. “He had always talked about becoming a solicitor so we expected him to become articled to a good firm when he came down from the university. But no. He announces to us that he wants nothing to do with the bourgeois establishment, whatever that is.”

“It seems he got in with a funny lot at his college,” Mr. Roberts said confidentially. “You probably knew about them, if you was one of his friends there.”

“The apostles? The secret society? Is that who you mean?”

“That would be the ones. You’ve heard of them then?”

“I did hear something about them. And I know that Sidney was—well, rather idealistic about things.”

“Idealistic? Ruddy stupid, if you’ll pardon the language, miss,” Mr. Roberts said. “All this talk about power for the people and down with the ruling classes and everyone should govern themselves. It can never happen, I told him. The ruling classes are born to rule. They know how to do it. You take a person like you or me and you put us up there to run a country and we’d make a ruddy mess of it.”

Mrs. Roberts hadn’t taken her eyes off her husband’s face. Now she looked at me as if willing me to understand. “His father tried to make him see sense, but it was no use. He started writing for that
Daily Worker
newspaper and hanging around with those communists.”

“Bunch of layabouts the lot of them. Don’t even shave properly,” Mr. Roberts intervened.

“No good can come of this, we told him. When you want to get a proper job, this will come back to haunt you.”

“His mother wanted to humor him to start with,” Mr. Roberts said. “You know how mothers are, and he was her only boy, of course.” He paused and cleared his throat. “She thought he’d grow out of it. Young people often do go to extremes, don’t they? But then they find a nice girl, settle down and see sense. Only—only he never got a chance to grow out of it, did he?”

“Do you have any idea at all who might have done this awful thing?” I asked.

They stared at me blankly. “We think it had to be a mistake. The person who stabbed him mistook him for someone else. It was dark in that place, so we hear. Maybe the killer stabbed our poor Sidney by mistake. I can’t think of any other explanation for it.”

“Had anyone threatened him?” I asked.

Again they stared blankly. “We never heard he was in any kind of trouble,” Mr. Roberts said. “Of course he would go to them communist rallies and sometimes there was a bit of a scuffle there. His mother didn’t want him to go. But apart from that, we’ve no idea. It couldn’t have been anybody trying to rob the till, because he was upstairs when they stabbed him.”

“Have the police given you any idea at all of what they might suspect?” I asked.

“If they have any ideas, they certainly haven’t shared them with us,” Mr. Roberts said bitterly. “Asked a lot of stupid questions about whether Sidney was connected to any criminal activity. They thought it was done by a professional because of the way he was stabbed, I gather.”

Mrs. Roberts shifted forward to the edge of her chair. “But we told them he’d always been a good boy. Never done a thing to make us ashamed of him. And if he was up to anything shady, we’d have known, wouldn’t we, Father?”

“Was Sidney worried about anything recently?” I asked.

They glanced at each other.

“Funny you should say that, miss. I think something was upsetting him. He had a nightmare and we heard him moaning in his sleep and he said, ‘No, it’s wrong. You can’t do it.’ In the morning we asked him about it but he’d completelyforgotten. So maybe he was in some kind of trouble and hadn’t told us. They do have gangs working in that part of London, wouldn’t you say? Perhaps they wanted to pressure our Sidney to take part in a robbery or something and he’d refused. He would refuse, you know. Very upright, was our Sidney.”

“Or we wondered whether he’d overheard something not meant for his ears, and he was killed because he wanted to go to the police.”

“That sounds possible,” I agreed, wondering why it had never occurred to me before. “What about Sidney’s current friends? I know who his friends were at university. Did he keep up with the old crowd?”

“Not very much,” his mother said. “There was that young man with the silly name. Sounded like a mushroom.”

“Edward Fotheringay, pronounced ‘Fungy’?” I asked her.

She smiled. “That’s the one. He came to the house a couple of times and picked up Sidney in his little sports car. ‘I thought you said you was against the upper classes,’ we said to him. His dad liked to tease him from time to time. But he said that this Edward was all right and cared about the masses too. Apart from that, he didn’t bring anybody home. No girlfriend, as far as I could see. He didn’t go out much, apart from those communist meetings. He always was rather serious, wasn’t he, Father?”

“No girlfriend he ever told us about anyway,” Mr. Roberts said. He was looking at me strangely, with his head cocked to one side, like a bird, and it suddenly came to me that he thought I might be Sidney’s girlfriend. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, miss, but you seem very concerned about him. More than the average acquaintance from university would be.”

I gave what I hoped was a nervous laugh. “It’s true. We were close friends once. That’s why I was so angry to hear about this. I want to get to the bottom of it. I want his killer to be brought to justice.”

“We’re very grateful for any help, miss.” The Robertses exchanged a look.

I decided to plunge ahead. “I was wondering . . . Sidney wasn’t drinking or smoking too much recently, was he?”

“He’d take the odd pint and the odd cigarette, but no more than the average person, not as much actually, because our Sidney was always careful with his money, as you probably remember. He left quite a bit in his savings account, didn’t he, Father?”

My ears pricked up—so quiet, well-behaved Sidney had been squirreling away quite a bit of money, had he?

“He did. Over fifty pounds,” Mr. Roberts said proudly.

So much for the theory that Sidney was selling drugs. Fifty pounds wouldn’t have begun to cover one of Gussie’s parties.

I finished my tea and took my leave of the Robertses.

I was feeling tired and depressed by the time I arrived at Rannoch House and was relieved to find my grandfather already in residence and yet another cup of tea on the stove. This one, however, was most welcome.