Deadly Sin (6 page)

“Her Majesty is wearing an ivory …” begins the commentator, and Bliss fades him out in momentary panic as he realizes that he never ordered anyone to specifically check the repaved area under the Queen's feet. Seconds stretch to eternity as Bliss waits for a blast, and then he takes a breath as she is escorted to the steps by Commander Fox.

“Prince Philip is resplendent in his field marshall's ceremonial uniform,” says the BBC reporter, seemingly as surprised as everyone else as the Duke of Edinburgh alights from the royal limousine.

“I thought this was supposed to be informal …” mumbles Bliss as he frantically flicks through the orders of the day.

“Maybe he's losing his marbles,” suggests Sergeant Williams with little concern.

Bliss has found the page, stabs at the words
civilian dress
, and fumes, “His bloody aide-de-camp should've picked up on this.”

“You know how stubborn the old bugger can be,” responds Williams. “He's making a statement. What does it matter?”

“Because, Sergeant, protocol is protocol,” explains Bliss fiercely. “Not every Arab goes around singing ‘Rule Britannia' and wants to be reminded that our army's been crapping on their doorstep since the Middle Ages.”

“Nothing we can do about it now,” shrugs Williams as the Duke returns Commander Fox's salute before following his wife up the steps towards the reception party.

“Hurry up … hurry up,” encourages Bliss in a tense whisper. This was the only bit he objected to during the initial briefings. “Why not have the official greetings inside — out of danger?” he asked. But the Queen's equerry was adamant.

“Everyone must see the respect accorded by each side. You must appreciate, Chief Inspector, that this visit has great historical significance.”

Historically significant or not, a touch of comedy is creeping in a few steps behind the Queen, where Prince Philip appears to have gotten into a fight with his ceremonial sword.

“What's his bloody lordship up to?” sniggers Williams in Bliss's ear as Prince Philip struggles with his scabbard.

“No idea, Sergeant,” says Bliss. “First he shows up dressed like a —”

“Do you know,” cuts in Williams. “He once saw the Nigerian president in his Muslim robes and said, ‘God, man. You look ready for bed!'”

“Really.”

All eyes and cameras switch to the aging Duke of Edinburgh as the protection officer steps in and takes hold of Philip's sword arm.

Williams smirks, saying, “Unhand me, you varlet,” in a Shakespearean tone as Philip angrily waves off his guardian and, with a sharp tug, draws his sword.

“What the hell is he doing now?” mutters Bliss.

The midday sun flashes off the brilliantly burnished weapon, and the imams shrink back in unison as Philip lunges towards the lineup. The Queen finally catches on and spins with a confused look.

“What on earth are you doing?” she mouths and takes a step towards her husband as he raises the sword. “Philip!”

“Oh my God,” breathes Bliss as the sword begins its descent, then the Queen's protection officer takes a flying leap. The blade slashes downward as the aging woman falls
under the weight of her bodyguard, but the tip slices into a bony calf.

“Jeezus,” spits Williams as the Duke's man grabs the weapon and the Queen tumbles backwards down the marble steps in the embrace of her saviour.

Commander Fox is on the radio in a flash. “Get an ambulance, Chief Inspector.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And a bottle of Aspirins.”

“For the Queen?” queries Bliss.

“No, you fool. For me.”

D
eny, deny, deny. Everyone from the Prime Minister down is singing from the same page.

The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, OM, and a Scrabble bag of other official abbreviations, did not attempt to run his wife through with his ceremonial sword. He simply stumbled while trying to free his scabbard.

“Free it from what?” is the question on everyone's lips. It wasn't as though he could have gotten it caught in his fly. But the only other possibility is that he made a deliberate thrust at the Queen, and that is an option no one is prepared to consider — other than Internet bloggers, tabloid journalists, the foreign press, and a very large chunk of the populace who viewed it live on the BBC.

“You do realize that attempting to harm the monarch is high treason,” the assistant commissioner says to Bliss at a hurriedly arranged debrief while they wait for other
senior officers to be rounded up. “I've got a feeling it still carries the death penalty.”

Don't blame me
, thinks Bliss, suggesting, “Maybe he's going a little senile, sir. Apparently his mother went completely dotty in her old age.”

“Wake up, man,” spits the A.C. “He's been round the bloody twist for years. Remember when he asked that blind woman if she knew where he could get an eating dog for an anorexic ‘cos he wanted one for Princess Diana.”

Bliss doesn't bite. “How is the Queen, sir?” he asks coolly as Commander Fox and several of the field officers arrive from the scene of the skirmish.

“Not amused,” laughs Fox on his way in. “One stab wound, some bumps, some scrapes, and a very sore bum. She'd probably have carried on, but the medics aren't taking chances — they're going to keep her in for a few days' observation.”

“And the Duke?”

“Heatstroke can be a terrible thing, especially in the elderly, Chief Inspector,” says Fox, putting on a deadpan face as he pulls up a chair and starts building an alibi for Prince Philip. “Surely you've been reading the papers. There's been all kinds of weird goings-on.”

So that's the official tack
, thinks Bliss, as the A.C. nods approvingly. “Heatstroke, Commander. Yes. That would explain it nicely. His Highness, realizing he was about to faint, pulled out his sword and stumbled as he was overcome.”

“Why did he pull out his sword, sir?” digs Bliss, then wishes he hadn't as Fox takes his head off.

“Don't be a fool, man. If we don't come up with a cast-iron defence some lefty pinko on the front bench is going to demand a trial. And where would that leave us?”

“Right,” says Bliss, resisting the temptation to say,
With a very strong case of attempted murder, assault occasioning grievous bodily harm, and, possibly, high treason.

“Now,” carries on the A.C. as the door finally closes behind the smokers and the eternally tardy. “I've ordered sandwiches and cold drinks to be sent in. Take off your ties, get your minds in gear, and don't make any plans for this weekend.”

Bliss checks his watch.

“Going somewhere, Chief Inspector?” demands the A.C. in a tone that tells Bliss that his five o'clock flight to Nice will be leaving with at least one empty seat.

“No, sir.”

“Damn right you're not. If we get this wrong the Queen won't be the only one with a sore arse for the next month.”

“Right, sir,” says Bliss, and he sits back as a couple dozen senior officers play footsie with the facts. The weather takes most of the heat, followed by a handful of civilians — Prince Philip's equerry, his aide-de-camp, and his wardrobe mistress — who all should have made sure he was wearing appropriate clothing. The Met's own men, the royalty protection officers, and the Queen's detective could be in the firing line for not alerting anyone to Philip's breach of etiquette, but Bliss's peers are working on that as he tunes them out.

Why didn't his own P.O. stop him? Why the slow reaction from the Queen's P.O.? Why didn't anyone see it coming? These are the questions the cadre of white-shirted officers are readying to deflect as Bliss closes his eyes and finds himself in Cannes with his arm around Daisy.

It is late afternoon on the Côte d'Azur. A million urban northerners clog the Mediterranean shores, seeking respite from the oppressive heat, as Bliss dreams of strolling with his fiancée under the shady palms and oleanders of Cannes' beachside gardens and of watching the evening's fireworks display from the Promenade de la Croisette. The promenade, the wide seafront boulevard that follows the gentle sweep of the bay, is lined with the world's glitziest hotels and is so familiar to Bliss that he can
picture every one of the opulent façades facing the golden beaches and multi-hued blue waters.

Daisy's hometown, and Cannes' dowdy neighbour, St-Juan-sur-Mer, was Bliss's domicile for a year while he laboriously wrote the manuscript that now sits, unread, on several publishers' slush piles. So he knows the Croisette's restaurants, the bars and glaceries that can stretch a visitor's plastic to the limit in a single bite. He has felt the deeply cushioned comfort of the Carlton and the Miramar, and he is well aware of the ritzy, air-conditioned clubs and casinos filled with Middle Eastern men who have thrown off their white robes in favour of silk suits as they play away from home in a Mecca of immorality, where easy women, hard drinks, and gaming chips come and go with a flick of a finger.

“Chief Inspector!” calls Commander Fox from outside, but Bliss has left the bustle of the waterfront in Cannes and is blithely floating across the serene cerulean bay to the infamous island of St. Marguerite, one-time home of the Man in the Iron Mask — the subject of his historical novel.

“Mr. Bliss!”

The ancient stone fortress that incarcerated the masked prisoner in isolation for eleven years guards the island from atop its rocky outcrop and looms above Bliss as his mind spins him back to the seventeenth century.

“Dave! Dave!” whispers the man on his right, but Bliss is walking the dusty parade ground where Louis XIV's feared Legionnaires once marched, towards the impenetrable cell block where the famous inmate was housed. Then he takes a sharp elbow in the ribs.

“Sorry, sir. It must be the heat,” he says, giving his head a shake.

“The Home Secretary wants a report on his desk yesterday,” says Fox above the guffaws of Bliss's colleagues. “You claim to be a writer — so write.”

“I do fiction, sir.”

“Precisely. And it'd better sound bloody convincing.”

Blame is still being shunted around the table as Bliss takes a pen out of his briefcase, and he can't help smiling at the fact that officers who have collectively spent over five hundred years trying to nail violent offenders are now twisting their brains to let one off the hook.

The weather is still the most favourable suspect, but a close second is the suggestion that Prince Philip simply stumbled and fell after pulling out his sword to give it to his equerry, feeling it inappropriate to enter a mosque armed.

“Well, which do you want?” asks Bliss with his pen poised, and he can't help thinking it might be amusing to simply stroll out to the press corps who are baying at the gate and say, “Okay. The gig's up. The old fool caught us on the hop.”

“Heatstroke,” decides Commander Fox firmly, but the assistant commissioner sees a mine in the road.

“Hang on a minute, Roger. What if he suddenly pops his head out of the palace and says, ‘I did it — the miserable old bat was getting on my nerves'?”

A superintendent from the Public Order Unit wonders aloud how the Queen will parse the incident in her annual Christmas address, and as the laughter subsides, a mimic pinches the bridge of his nose and takes on the Queen, saying, “In August of this year, my husband tried to put the wind up me …”

It is nearly seven o'clock by the time the meeting breaks up. Heatstroke wins the day, and Bliss's circumspectly worded report wins general approbation, although, as he walks home in the evening sunshine, he can't help but reflect that the penalty for attempting to pervert the course of justice is life imprisonment.

Daphne Lovelace is on the phone the moment he walks in the door.

“I thought you were going to see Daisy.”

“So did I,” he replies sourly, but his sex life is on neither his nor Daphne's agenda.

“I saw it on television,” she carries on, without need of elucidation. “I couldn't believe my eyes.”

“Heatstroke …” starts Bliss, but Daphne has more faith in her eyes than that.

“David, I may be getting on a bit —”

“It was just a slip of the sword,” he cuts in quickly. “Anyway, what possible reason could he have?”

“Henry VIII made a habit of it.”

“True. But Philip's not exactly short of male heirs. Anyway, Henry didn't get his own hands bloody. He had enough sense to use the official executioner.”

“I could do with one of those,” snorts Daphne, although, under questioning, she admits that all is quiet on the western front. “I think they're away for the weekend,” she adds, before returning to the errant Prince Philip. “They did say it was the heat on the news.”

“Then that must be right,” says Bliss, and a few minutes later he gets the same information from Daisy.

“I'm really sorry,” he says after explaining the situation. She understands, she claims, but since the death of her grandmother the distance between them has grown. Spring was scented by millions of Provençal orange blossoms for the couple as he put the final touches to his historical novel, but now the tender fruits are withering in the summer's relentless sun.

“Just a few days — maybe a week,” he says with his fingers crossed.

“But you will miss all zhe fireworks.”

“I know,” he replies.

“Perhaps zhen I should come back …” starts Daisy, but she trails off as her mother calls. “I am sorry, Daavid,” she says, “but I zhink she needs zhe toilette.”

Bliss feels her slipping. “I'll call in the morning. I love
you.” he says hurriedly, but she has gone. “Damn. Damn. Damn,” he is still swearing as the phone buzzes again.

“Fox,” barks the commander. “My office at eight tomorrow morning.”