Skeleton-in-Waiting (15 page)

“The blood of emperors,” she announced, equal speaking to equal.

She reached again for the toque, fell with it just beyond her grasp, and lay still.

Feet on the stairs, running. A man in motor-bike leathers sprang into the room and crouched, his stubby gun at the ready.
ZAP!
said the scarlet letters on his chest. He held the pose for an instant and rushed out of Louise's line of sight, towards the fight. Instantly his place was taken by another man, also in leathers, also striking for a moment that same coiled-spring posture before rushing on. Louise glimpsed yellow lettering across his shoulders as he turned. Another shot filled the room, bringing back the momentary deafness. Before it cleared her eye was caught by a movement at the bottom of her field of vision. Legs going past the windows, workmen again, two of them, in an awkward scrambling run. The one in front carried a battered blue metal tool-case. As they went past the second window her chair was lifted bodily and set up-right. Hands began to work at her gag.

“Where's HRH?”

(John's voice, gasping and mumbled.)

“Here. Looks OK.” (Close behind her.)

“Don't know about this one.” (Third voice.) “That one looks a goner. What happened?”

“She got a gun somewhere and shot him in the back.” (John.) “Gave me a chance to have a go at the other fucker.”

“There. You OK, ma'am?”

The gag slid free. Louise spat vomit.

“Davy!” she croaked. “Other room!”

She twisted her head to see John and one of the men rush out. The other man was kneeling, cutting her loose. She was aware of the movements and voices of more men beyond the door. Calls from the hallway—“Not here!” “Here!”

She was free, but almost fell as she rose.

“Hold it, ma'am. Steady.”

“No!”

She wrenched her arm free and ran to the lobby. It seemed full of police.

“Jesus!” called a voice. “Look at this!”

She pushed through. It was the room with the trunks in it, reeking of mothballs. The kitchen table was below the open window with a chair backed against it. Someone was already outside and John was on the table.

“That way!” she yelled. “Two of them! They've got him in a tool-case!”

John turned his head at her voice and did a thumbs-up sign. He scrambled through the window and another man climbed onto the table. She pushed through and shoved aside the man who was getting onto the chair.

“Wait! Hold it!” shouted someone.

“No!” she snapped. “I must!”

There was a moment's pause. (Later she realised that they must all have been waiting for one of the others to grab her, but none of them had the nerve.) In the half-second while she waited for the man to climb clear she glanced down. Almost straight below her, against the wall, was a tin trunk with its lid open. It was filled with a glittering white mass, like snow. Mothballs. Protruding from the snow, eyes staring up, was the face of a man. It was Alex Romanov. He was wearing some kind of reddy-black beret. The vision was sudden, hideous, intense enough to intrude for its instant into this other pounding nightmare Louise was in. She shook it away and climbed out into the open. Immediately her legs began running, dream-slow, that terrible inefficient female wallow, holding up the men behind her.

The others were at the corner. John rounded it and stopped. He pointed and yelled. The next man signalled violently to someone below. The man beyond was talking into an intercom.

“Gone down on the hoist!” John shouted. “Just the two of them. Boy's carrying a tool-case.”

“Look there!” said a voice from behind Louise.

She turned. The men behind her were running the other way now. She followed, gasping, reached the other corner. There was another man with an intercom, listening and passing on what he heard in a steady, detached voice.

“… builder's truck, going towards visitors' car-park …”

Louise looked out over the parapet at the lawns and drives that led to the main gate. There was no traffic on the bridge. Several police cars, blue lights blinking, blocked the gateway. The tall iron gates were being pushed shut. Two ambulances came wailing up and stopped behind the police cars. A dozen policemen were shepherding sightseers across the lawns towards the south-west corner of the Palace. A green truck shot into sight from the archway to the visitors' car-park. It clearly came from the building-works, and had a couple of scaffold-planks lashed down from the cab roof to the tailgate. Only its speed was out of context. The rear wheels slithered on the corner. The truck almost spun, but straightened and roared straight at the gates. Policemen leapt clear. It must have been doing well over thirty as it crashed into the iron-work, mounted a little way, slewed and stuck.

For a heartbeat no one did anything. The pain in Louise's throat told her she'd been screaming. The left-hand gate had lifted off its hinges under the impact and half fallen, with the nearside front wheel of the truck resting a little way up it. There was no movement from the cab, no sign. Men in combat gear emerged from behind the police cars, guns raised. A uniformed officer spoke through a loud hailer. Still nothing stirred by the truck. Covered by several guns a man approached it and tried the door-handle on the driver's side, but the door seemed to have jammed. Suddenly, as he wrenched, it opened and the head and shoulders of a man flopped out. The policeman caught the body deftly and dragged it clear, speaking over his shoulder as he did so. Another policeman approached the cab with his pistol raised. He spoke, but then stood back, still with the pistol poised to fire. Blue-trousered legs eased themselves off the seat as the passenger slid across and down. A boy, the policeman had said, surprisingly young to judge by his stature. He was wearing a blue denim cap. He had turned as he reached the ground to lift something from the cab, so Louise couldn't see his face, and then another half dozen police closed round and hid him completely.

“Better move back, ma'am,” said one of the men beside Louise. “Looks like they've spotted you down there.”

She glanced along the line of his gesture. The tourists were still being herded into the corner of the forecourt, but a number of them were taking their time, walking backwards with video cameras trained on the scene by the gate. Elsewhere in the gathering huddle Louise caught the familiar dark gleam of lenses trained on her. Automatically she moved out of shot to a point where she could still see between the crenellations what was happening round the truck.

One of the men there bent to pick something from the ground. His movement left a gap through which Louise could glimpse the prisoner for a moment. It wasn't a boy, it was a woman. Her cap had fallen off, letting her dark hair hang down. Louise still couldn't see her face as her head was bowed over the tool-case which she was now clutching with one arm against her chest. A man had gripped it by the handle and was trying to take it from her grasp. The first man rose, hiding her again, but in that couple of seconds Louise had recognised from the despairing and protective pose that the woman was Janine.

3

I
want to go home. I know I can't, but …”

“You've had a rougher time than you realise, darling.”

“I'm all right. I was all right the moment Davy woke up and started yelling for his supper.”

“They still don't know what he'd been given, or how much. They're expecting the lab reports around midnight.”

“He's all right. I could hear it in the way he yelled. I just know. He's going to be black and blue, though they'd done the best they could about padding the tool-case and drilling air-holes. Will you make sure they let us have it in the end? I want to be able to show him one day. I don't like the idea of him not knowing.”

“You're talking too much, darling. Take it easy.”

“I want to talk. I want to know. Those other men—dressed like motor-bike couriers—where did they come from? How did they get there so fast?”

“I gather they were part of your escort. You'd told Inspector Yale you wanted just John and another car for this kind of visit. She consulted her superiors and they decided to overrule you.”

“Without telling me?”

“I'm afraid she turns out to have been right this time.”

“Oh, hell … Where's my pad? Just make a note for me to thank her … Have they told you anything about Janine?”

“I haven't seen her. So far all they know, at least all they're letting on, is that she was kidnapped this morning on her way to visit that aunt in Clapham. It's assumed they followed her there. They needed her to look after Davy. Once they'd got him, of course, they could make her do anything they wanted.”

“I keep trying to think who knew I was going to see Aunt Bea today. I hadn't told anyone, practically—you, Father, Security, Aunt Bea—she'd have told Mrs Walsh, I suppose …”

“The idea at the moment seems to be that your attackers got themselves taken on at the building-works and used their access across the roofs to terrorise Mrs Walsh into cooperating with them.”

“No.”

“This would account for her sudden apparent change of heart about releasing your grandmother's papers, and also for the presence of poor Alex Romanov's body. He must have been there, attempting to negotiate with Mrs Walsh, when they first broke in, and they killed him to show her that they meant business.”

“Nobody terrorised Mrs Walsh. It wasn't possible.”

“Um.”

“And all those mothballs!”

“Take it easy, darling.”

“It's the worst thing, still. I don't know why. I keep seeing it when I close my eyes, over and over. Me up there on the table, waiting to get through the window, and then looking down and seeing him in the trunk with his head sticking out of this white stuff. Everything else I could understand—it was bad, frightful, but I understood it. That was just pure ghastly. Meaningless. Like tearing a scab off the world and seeing what's underneath is madness.”

“Try not to think about it.”

“I want to talk to Janine. With no one listening.”

“I'll see what can be done.”

JUNE 1988

1

T
he garden party was Soppy's first official public appearance since coming out of the clinic. Louise caught only occasional glimpses of her. The form for Garden Parties, assuming tolerable weather, was that the guests trooped through to the lawns and assembled, just over a thousand of them, and stood around for a while, half-listening to the band, chatting to chance-met friends, criticising the colour-clashes in the formal bedding—Mother, after years of careful diplomacy, had realised at last that the only choice she had was between sacking Mr Farren or going along with him—until the Family emerged, separated and began to move through the crowd. Piers, on the couple of occasions he'd come, had claimed to be fascinated by the dynamics of this process. The guests were a random mass, culled from the length and breadth of Britain for disparate reasons, social, charitable, political, inexplicable. They had no joint will but only, most of them, the individual hope of being presented to a member of the Family and exchanging a banal sentence or two. But they behaved as though it was a game with definite rules which they all almost at once understood and obeyed.

As Louise progressed across the grass a pathway opened before her, about a yard wide, lined by guests waiting for their chance of a greeting. The pathway stretched only a few paces ahead but it was always there, stopping when she stopped to talk and wriggling on another couple of yards as she moved on again. Sometimes, just as randomly, it forked and a decision had to be made, the unused path closing as soon as it became clear that she was going to take the other one. Louise's lady-in-waiting and equerry moved with her, usually a pace behind, but edging ahead when they had spotted one of the faces on their lists so that they could be ready to present the selected citizen to her. One trap was that everybody in the crowd knew who you were and looked at you with the natural gleam of recognition to which you instinctively felt urged to respond. According to Piers there was a specialised bit of brain which did nothing but remember faces; he said Louise's must be hyperdeveloped, but even so she was sometimes tricked by the response-instinct. Usually, though, she could rely on herself to pick out some anxious smiler, nod, give the brain a half-second to do its trick, and then say, “Hello, Matron. I'm so glad you could come because I've been longing to know how that baby got on, the little Asian girl you were fitting for a new foot.” It was a bit of an ego-trip, to be honest, the ability to do that after an eight-month gap and see the pleasure on the woman's face and feel the ripple of approval round her. The others could do it too—it was part of the job—but Louise seemed to have inherited Mother's natural knack whereas Albert, like Father, had had to train himself.

There were moments when two paths crossed. You would smile at Albert or whoever but then turn and talk to a guest while your attendants, with glances and minimal gestures, would organise separating paths to carry the royal wanderers apart. Like particles colliding in a cloud-chamber, Piers said. Louise glimpsed Soppy at two or three such encounters, looking perfectly stunning, everyone's dream princess, in a wide-brimmed black hat and bell-skirted electric-blue dress with a high collar. She was still bung full of drugs but looked the picture of health, smiling and pink, but not saying much to anyone beyond “hello”. She had a slight stammer these days, even alone, with people she knew well. Albert was extremely protective of her and insisted she was getting better.

After the wandering-through-crowd process you sat down to tea at your unofficially official table and chosen guests were brought to sit with you for a few minutes each. These might be anyone from people you yourself had asked to see to the unlucky daughters of skilled mums who'd managed to importune your equerry. Even meeting these last might not be pointless. For instance, at the previous Garden Party Louise had found a girl who had done a stint in the field with Wells for the Sahel and had learnt that the Director she had thought so unspeakable at that City luncheon was extremely popular with his staff. This afternoon she got a different sort of view from the underside—a student from Piers's university, reading Spanish but deep into student politics and full of good gossip to tell Piers.

As the sitting-down episode ended you did a quick check with your minders to see if anyone who mattered had been missed and then there was another half hour of crowd-wandering, different because the guests tended to have separated into clumps, and then Mr Slocombe would ring a handbell and bellow for everyone to be upstanding and the band would play “God Save the King”. The Family would re-form as a unit, move off to the doors of the Yellow Drawing-room, turn on the step, wave, wait for the muttered, understated cheer, barely audible against the burr of traffic up Buckingham Palace Road, and vanish into the temporary and partial privacy­ of the Blue Boudoir for a stiff drink. Ladies-in-waiting and equerries­ would arrive a few minutes later, peering at semi-decipherable­ notes they had scribbled about the various royal encounters. Father's idea was that it saved time in the long run if you sorted out anything quick and easy while it was still in the top drawer of memory.

Louise saw Albert massaging the knuckles of the hand Soppy had been holding, his eyes on the door. She raised her eyebrows into a query. He made a thumbs-up. When Soppy came in she stood at the door and checked where he was but then, with a visible mild effort, looked round the rest of the room and came across to Louise.

“No Piers?”

“Working. How are you? You look terrific.”

“Better, they keep telling me. Bloody drugs bung my guts up, so they give me a foul pink powder to open them out, but I'm never sure when. How's Davy d-doing?”

“Fine, only he's bolshie about crawling. He prefers to shove himself around on his bum.”

“Like a dog with worms. Going to have another one?”

“I thought I'd try and aim for August, when there's more room in the diaries. That's what I did last time, but of course I missed.”

“I want to, and my trick-cyclist says it might help. Kill or cure. Do you think it'd be f-fair on the brat? With a mum like me? Tell me the truth, darling. Nothing else is any use.”

It wasn't an easy question. Even before her breakdown Soppy had seemed an oddly brusque and casual mother. Both kids were rather quiet and cautious, though not to an extent you could call disturbed. According to Albert they had minded the sudden sacking of their nanny last autumn much more than Soppy's absence in hospital.

“I suppose it depends,” said Louise. “If you want it just to help you get well, then I don't think it is fair. If you want it so that it can be itself, for its own sake, then it is.”

“Won't find that out till I've had it. No, thanks.”

The last two words were spoken to a maid who'd come by with a tray of chipolatas.

“I don't believe it,” said Louise.

“Only at meals. Point is, I've got to show 'em I can. Show myself too. When I came out of the nut-house I got a lock put on the fridges and gave Mrs Alphege the key, but it was a bit like wearing a chastity belt, so I said don't bother. I allow myself third helpings on Sundays.”

“I saw you playing polo on the box.”

“Could have been worse. More hacks than spectators and I played like a dead haddock for the first couple of chukkas, but then I got my eye in and started hitting the odd ball. I'm getting on pretty well with Bertie these days, you know. I really need him. Him and no one else.”

“I noticed you looking a bit lovey-dovey.”

“Only I wish people wouldn't keep forgiving me the whole time.”

“There isn't much to forgive.”

“Wish I thought so. Don't go. Something I wanted to ask you.”

The various teams were coming in, but Soppy had gripped Louise by the wrist. Her fingers were like steel.

“It's about forgiving. That nurse of yours—Bert says you wanted to have her back.”

“Not really. Well, I mean, yes, part of me wanted to try and pretend that none of that had ever happened. She was so exactly my idea of what a nanny should be—only she wasn't. Another part of me was furious with her, and terrified about what might have happened. Now I'm just mainly sorry for her, and the mess she's in.”

“They going to put her in prison?”

“Well, she'll have to be tried. The trouble is that her best defence is going to be telling the court what really happened …”

“That's
what I want to know. I've got a sort of feeling for her. I mean we both landed everyone in the shit just about the same time. She wasn't off her trolley, like me though, was she?”

“No. She was just trying to be loyal in too many directions at once. It's like whoever-it-was said about Northern Ireland—there wasn't enough loyalty to go round. She'd grown up as an only. Her parents ran a corner-shop in Ormskirk, too busy to have much time for her. She used to play with a kid across the street, a boy called Ian. He was bright, got scholarships, finished up on some kind of exchange at Bremen University, fell in with one of those crazy anarchist cells and got hooked. He told Janine all about it—they used to meet up still whenever they got the chance, in fact they were just like brother and sister, only he didn't show up on her vetting. We don't know how he linked in with the Gorman lot—there aren't supposed to be that many connections between the Red Brigades and the Irish thugs. One theory is that he actually went and made the approach himself when Janine got her job. Anyway, he turned up in London and suggested a meeting on her day out, which was perfectly natural, but then he started being a bit too inquisitive about her job, which wasn't—before he'd always taken the line that we were an obscene farce. When she challenged him he told her that there were some political prisoners he wanted to help, and he was hoping she could tell him some kind of state secret he could use to bargain with. She said she wasn't interested, and changed the subject. He made her promise to say nothing about it, which she did. But the next time he rang she told him she'd worked out that the political prisoners he'd been talking about had been the Chester bombers and she was going to tell Security. He said that if she did that Gorman would have him killed for talking to her without their permission, and quite likely her too. He managed to frighten her enough to make her keep quiet a little longer.”

“He was ringing her at Quercy, through your exchange?”

“No. She had an aunt in Clapham she used to visit on her day off. She'd given him that number. Next time he called he managed to persuade her that if she helped him to discover some kind of family secret he could use it wouldn't only remove the threat to his life and hers, it would also mean the Family itself wouldn't be so much of a target. I'm not sure she really believed him—she says she did—they'd had a relationship of total trust so far, she thought—but I think she was just stringing him along and hoping that if she didn't do anything the whole problem would go away. There wasn't that much chance of her finding anything useful in any case. But just so as she could have the odd titbit to keep him happy with she'd started listening to Piers and me having our goodnight chats. We always do. It helps me go to sleep. We've got a fancy kind of baby-alarm—a friend of Piers invented it—it does all sorts of extra tricks you never really need. Anyway, that's how she learnt about Granny's letters, and Aunt Bea having all the papers at Hampton Court, and so on. Ian had managed to persuade her, she says, that he wasn't interested in violence either, and he pretended to get very excited about the papers, but of course all he really wanted to know was when was I going to visit Aunt Bea, and if possible when I'd be taking Davy with me. Then when you did your bolt things got urgent, both sides, but by then they'd got themselves jobs on the Hampton Court site, and sussed the flats out, and all they had to do was pick Janine up on her way to the Clapham aunt … I wish you'd seen the way she was holding Davy when she got out of the truck. She'd got a broken arm too. You'd know why I can't help wanting to have her back …”

“Poor kid. Poor stupid kid. People keep trying to tell me it wasn't my fault, coming apart like that. But Piers is wrong, you know. There was always a real me somewhere. I'm just as much to blame as your girl.”

“Nonsense. You weren't breaking any laws, for a start.”

“Doesn't make any difference. Love to old Piers, darling. Wish I'd have taken his line from the start.”

Soppy smiled like the happiest person in the world and turned away. They'd never have let her, thought Louise. Piers can, because he's a man, but princesses are there for the public to screw in their dreams. She watched Soppy sidle her way through the now crowded room towards Albert. Louise had done most of her sorting-out at the tea-table, so was finished before the others. Sir Savile noticed her standing alone and came over.

“You laid on a decent day for us this time, Sir Sam.”

“Thank you, ma'am. We endeavour to give satisfaction.”

“That sounds like the punch-line to one of Uncle Ted's stories.”

“It used to be what the bishop said to the actress. I have no idea who the participants might be these days. Ahem. Something a little unforeseen has occurred, in which I thought you might be interested. You remember that unpleasant business with the Dowager Princess's papers?”

“What do you mean remember?”

“We have received a letter from a woman, claiming to be Mrs Walsh's daughter.”

“She can't be. The daughter was Down's syndrome, or something of that kind.”

“The letter is from a professional scribe in Dushanbe.”

“Where's that?”

“Capital of Tadzhikstan, apparently. Southern USSR—right down beyond Tashkent.”

“Oh, yes, of course!”

Sir Savile raised an eyebrow and waited.