Death and the Princess (11 page)

The first thing that I saw was the top drawer of the desk on the left-hand side — it was left open, while all the others were neatly closed, as one would expect of Mr Brudenell. The scenario was obvious: Mr James Brudenell, sitting at his typewriter, takes a gun from the drawer and shoots himself on an impulse. That was what we were meant to think, and I may say I found it a thoroughly unlikely scenario. Brudenell as a possible suicide I could accept, but not on an impulse: I doubt whether he did anything without fussy preliminaries. He was the sort who would write a letter to the Coroner, and worry about the correct form of address.

The body had fallen clear of the typewriter, and I walked carefully over and looked at the sheet of paper still sticking out of the machine. It was headed typing paper, with the Whitehaven Mansions address at the top, and what was being written was a letter:

Dear John,

I must tell you, with great regret, that I can no
longer continue giving way to the monstrous financial demands you

There was no address for the recipient. Presumably, therefore, an intimate, if not a friend. I continued cautiously circling the room. On the far side of the desk the bullet had singed a track, finally lodging in the floor under the bookshelves. I stood considering the desk and shook my head, dissatisfied. It didn’t add up, I felt sure. Or rather, what it added up to was a strong smell of fish. Someone had been too clever by half.

‘They’re on their way,’ said Joplin, coming back into the flat.

‘Good,’ I shouted. ‘Come through, Garry. Have a look here. It’s obvious what the set-up is, as we’re meant to understand it. Brudenell is typing. Reply to a blackmail demand. He takes the gun from the drawer, and shoots himself. The bullet singes the edge of the desk, and lodges — over here, right? Into the floor. Now, before the other boys arrive, look around. Anything else you notice in this room that I haven’t spotted?’

As I said before, Joplin has marvellous, sharp little eyes. He stalked cautiously round the room, darting them about. He shook his head over the letter in the typewriter, noticed the bullet mark, and then finally came to rest by a good-sized side table in the opposite corner of the room. It was empty, and had a large easy chair beside it. I followed his eyes.

‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘Good lad.’

Most of the furniture in the room was covered by a light film of dust. I guessed that Brudenell employed a char a couple of days a week, and no doubt tut-tutted impotently at the inefficiency of her operations, and regretted the time when chars could be made to work their fingers to the bone for a pittance. This round table, however, had that film of dust only on the very edges: there was a large, square area in the centre that was
hardly dusty at all. We stood looking at it.

‘Now what,’ I pondered aloud, ‘was lying there, and lying there until recently? A newspaper? One doesn’t lay a newspaper down on a table to read it. A book? The area’s much too big — unless it was something like an atlas. An atlas . . .’

I suddenly remembered Bill Tredgold’s list of places, and wondered if by some chance or process of reasoning Brudenell had come by the same knowledge, or was conjecturing along the same lines. I would have gone to the bookshelves, but I wanted to leave the room to the fingerprint men, and there were other things to do first. As I was thinking, they all arrived — the technicians of death, and a posse of regular men from the Yard. McPhail, the Princess’s erstwhile and dour security man, had been put on the case, which was a sensible enough decision. Capable, if hardly exciting. He looked round the room as if it sunk him into a profound gloom, and then started getting on with the job in the careful, efficient way I knew so well.

I left him to it: I thought that the less the present protector of the Princess had to do with the investigation the better, at least as far as the newspapers were concerned. But I had a word with him before I went, and pointed out the dustless shape on the table. I wanted it measured and marked. Then Joplin and I hot-footed it back to the Palace.

I immediately asked to see the lady-in-waiting, and in that cold, bare antechamber told her (and incidentally and inevitably Miss Trimble as well) the essentials of the matter. Lady Dorothy blinked her concern, and gave little strangulated expressions of shock in the course of my narrative.

‘As far as we can see at the moment,’ I ended, ‘he committed suicide. But that is only a preliminary judgement, of course.’

‘How absolutely frightful,’ she drawled. ‘Quite appalling. I had no idea . . . Was he
ill,
or something?’

‘That we shall hope to find out,’ I said.

‘You’ll tell the Princess, of course,’ she said.

That I had rather hoped to get her to do, but she said it in so definitive a way that it almost seemed that some rigid point of etiquette might be involved (a Royal Personage shall always be informed by her Security Officer in the event of her Private Secretary putting a bullet in himself — that kind of thing). So I didn’t argue the toss, but meekly assented, and after a hushed telephone conversation I gathered the Princess would receive me. I was taken straight through to her sitting-room, and there she was, stretched out in those glorious jeans along her sofa, reading a glossy magazine and listening to Rod Stewart in loud stereo. She did not turn him down, but as soon as her lady-in-waiting withdrew she turned and smiled at me invitingly.

‘Your Royal Highness, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. When I got to his flat, I found Mr Brudenell dead.’

‘Good Lord,’ she said, gaping at me prettily. ‘How extraordinarily sudden!’

‘It seems he may have committed suicide.’

‘Oh
really!’
she said pettishly, as if mainly struck by the inconsiderateness of the action. ‘What an awful bore!’

To relieve Mr Brudenell’s shade of the burden of royal displeasure I perhaps foolishly added: ‘That’s how it looks at the moment. But I’m afraid we can’t rule out the possibility of foul play.’

‘Foul play? Do you mean murder?’

I nodded. ‘It is just a remote possibility.’

‘But how fascinating!’ And she gazed at me with a catlike smile on her face and repeated her earlier exclamation of delighted anticipation: ‘Frightfully exciting!’

CHAPTER 9

Scene of the Crime

The Princess realized almost at once the effect she had made on me with her reception of the news, and for some reason she thought it worth while to try to soften the impression.

‘Of course, it’s quite
awful,’
she said, swivelling round her splendid legs to get herself into a sitting position, and then gazing at me with a sincere and concerned expression on her face. ‘He was
terribly
loyal, you know? and quite sweet in his way. He’s given me an
awful
lot of good advice and all that, these last two or three years, I mean how to behave and all that, and how to pretend to be interested, which is really an
art,
I can tell you, and he knew all the tricks . . . Still, I mean, he wasn’t quite
human,
was he? Hardly a
man,
would you say? So prissy and correct, you sometimes felt he belonged in another century. More at home with Queen Anne, or somebody. I’m awfully
concerned,
naturally, but you can’t expect me to
care,
can you? Not
per
sonally, I mean.’

And on thinking it over, I didn’t suppose I could. Her first reaction had at least been natural and sincere, much more sincere than her assumed sincerity. It did seem rather a poor return for Mr Brudenell’s years of service. But it was typical of her that her thoughts were already turning to the future.

‘Actually, I shall probably regret him like hell in a week or two. I mean Aunty will probably inflict somebody much worse on me. The thing was, I could run rings around him, but heaven knows
who
they’ll send from the Palace now. Of course it would be lovely if it was someone
really
dishy,
but I’m quite sure it won’t be: nobody dishy would take a job like this, and if there was somebody, they wouldn’t give him to me. No, I bet it will be some
gaoler,
you know? Someone who won’t give me a
moment’s
freedom. Because they probably don’t trust me an
inch.’

I sincerely hoped she was right, but I only said: ‘So you don’t appoint your own Private Secretary?’

‘Oh
no.
Not on your life. Well, perhaps
officially
I do, but they have
ways.’

She made it sound terribly like the KGB, but I must say that in this case I saw the point of the Powers That Be. I (treacherously) decided to have a word with someone at the Palace, and suggest the qualities I thought desirable in Mr Brudenell’s successor: not a gaolor, exactly, but a damned good animal trainer. Cherishing this thought, I took a ceremonious leave.

‘You will keep me totally informed, won’t you?’ was the Princess’s parting shot. ‘Fancy being in on a murder!’

As I passed through Miss Trimble’s antechamber I had a word with her, telling her to inform whoever was at the moment in charge of the Household that I would need an office somewhere in the Princess’s quarters. Then, as usual, I was flunkied out.

Flunkied out, in fact, by little South Pole — the chilly, fair-haired youth who had interrupted my first talk with Mr James Brudenell. I remembered Joplin’s succinct summing up of what he imagined the situation between those two to be, and in the brown-wooded, lowering corridors I stopped and turned to him. His reluctance to talk flashed momentarily over his face, almost the first sign of emotion I had seen him emit.

‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose?’ I said.

A pause, the significance of which I could not determine. Respectful? A rebuke?

‘Mr Brudenell’s death? Yes, sir. Extremely tragic, sir.’

‘You knew Mr Brudenell well?’

‘Naturally, sir. He was a member of the Household. He was here every day.’

I could of course have pressed him further, but I decided to leave it at that for the moment.

‘I shall need to talk to members of the staff here,’ I said. ‘Do you go off duty in the evening?’

‘I personally, sir? No, I am on duty this evening. I shall sleep at the Palace . . . Excuse me, sir, but does this mean — ?’

‘Yes?’

‘Does this mean you’re not . . . satisfied?’

‘The case has to come before the Coroner, as I’m sure you realize. The police have to collect all the facts for the inquest. I don’t think you should read anything more into it than that.’

‘I see, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Quite respectful he was becoming. We resumed our stately egress from the Palace.

I spent the afternoon at the Yard, getting the details of the investigation as they were sent me by McPhail and his squad. They were the standard stuff of the first hours of an investigation. I also had a word with Buckingham Palace, made an appointment with one of the high-ups there, and suggested — greatly daring — that the Princess should be advised to lie very low as far as her private life was concerned for the next few days: it would do nobody any good if she were photographed at a disco on the day her Private Secretary died. The suggestion was received cordially enough, but I think they had thought of it already.

But what I mainly spent the time on that afternoon was delving into the background of James Brudenell. James Eliot Macpherson Brudenell, to be precise.

It was a sad little story, really. He had come of a fairly good family (which I suppose is like saying of a dog that
it’s nearly a pedigree). His father was an Old Harrovian, a sporty type and a high liver, without the income to support his tastes in style. He had acquired a wife and child before he had acquired the ability to hold down a job. He had departed for the Colonies in 1953, intending to bring out his family when he had established himself. But he had no sooner established himself than he had abandoned the intention of bringing out his family. He had been variously a mining executive, a farmer, a Rhodesian Front MP, and was currently in the service of the Emir of Onan (a state in which the Moslem proprieties were rigorously observed, and where a snifter and a bit of skirt must have been grievously hard to come by).

His wife and son, meanwhile, lived in a fairly miserable little semi-detached in Blackheath, on the irregular remittances received from husband and father. A wealthy relative, however, helped with the boy’s education, and he had attended a nearby preparatory school, and later been a day boy at St Paul’s. He was, by all accounts, a cosseted, well-wrapped-up, excessively mothered child. At school he was predictably miserable, having none of the qualities that made for popularity, nor even any that might have given him a small circle of chosen friends. After an undistinguished university career (a third in history from Oriel), he had got himself a job with the College of Heralds — concocting shields for Labour life peers and that sort of thing. After undertaking some special job in the library of Balmoral, cataloguing Queen Victoria’s laundry lists or something, he had gone on to the strength at Clarence House. Thence he had come, rather over two years before, to his present position.

Of private life he had had, apparently, none. He had lived with his mother until a legacy, and shortly afterwards her death, had released him from her increasingly querulous thrall and enabled him to
purchase a more eligible address. He seemed to have made little use of his new freedoms. In spite of Joplin’s conjecture, he had never been suspected of homosexual offences (but then the law had been changed when he was about twenty, so that, provided he made sure he didn’t fancy anyone under the magic age of twenty-one, there was no reason why he should be). In any case, if there had been anything of that kind on the records against him, he would certainly not have got his present job. On the other hand, I did wonder whether the Palace had decided that a decently repressed homosexual was just the type needed for a position in the Princess Helena’s household.

His tastes in the wider sense were unexceptionable. He enjoyed a first night at the theatre, on those now rare occasions when a good middle-brow play was to be presented. He sometimes went to the opera, but apparently more for social reasons than musical: he only went to Covent Garden, and one suspected his chief pleasure was in the little supper parties he arranged for after the performance. He was a member of the Monarchist League, and did amateur research work for Debrett and suchlike works. He inserted a memorial notice ever year in
The Times
for Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria (‘of pious and glorious memory’) between whom and his own family his genealogical ingenuity had discovered a connection. His club was the dullest in London, he had forsworn all political affiliations since Oxford, and he had no close friends as far as anybody knew. A sad, comic, ineffectual little life.