Death and the Princess (7 page)

He was obviously annoyed at being interrupted in his purposes again, and he put on a rather sickening smile.

‘Security? Really, is it necessary? I don’t think any of my constituents wants to assassinate me.’

He was gesturing towards them in a sycophantic way when I said: ‘It was the security of the Princess Helena that I wanted to talk about, sir.’

He froze. He looked like an Archbishop of Canterbury who has just been accused of owning half shares in a pædophiliac brothel. After a full second, and a swallow, he shook himself and ushered me over to a corner.

‘Really,’
he said, settling himself down on to a bench with his bag and papers. ‘Did you have to do that?’

‘I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?’

‘Well, you might have realized that . . .’ He found it impossible, or too embarrassing, to explain. ‘Oh, never
mind. I suppose one can’t expect too much sensitivity from the fuzz.’

‘Quite,’ I said. ‘We’re not paid for our quivering sensibility. I take it that you mean your constituents would be shocked by your associating with the royal family?’

‘Most of them would be tickled pink. But those particular ones . . . Well, I might not be able to convince them that to me she’s just — just a — ’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, get on with it, man. What is this all about?’

I launched myself confidently into the sea of untruth.

‘The fact is, sir, we’ve reason to believe that there may be a threat to the Princess’s life — in fact, from the IRA.’ (Thank God for the IRA! What would we do without it? Have to go back to the old-fashioned anarchists, I suppose.) ‘This being the case, we’re naturally checking up on all the Princess’s . . . contacts, so I should want to talk to you in any case, since we gather you’ve been seeing something of each other. What worries us about you, sir, is that
together
you would make such a doubly inviting target.’

I obviously wasn’t convincing him. His face slid into a sneer of disbelief.

‘Oh, come on, now, Inspector, or whatever you are. I’m pretty well known to be on the left of the party. I’ve no particular interest in Ireland, but it’s us those boys get on best with. We speak up for them from time to time. It’s the Conservatives these chaps would want to get at, particularly now they’re in power.’

‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘the Princess is not associating with any Conservatives at the moment. She is associating with you. And as far as we can see, you could be a brace of sitting birds.’

He sat there, complacent, impatient, not open to conviction. ‘This sounds like a lot of police bullshit to me,
if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ve always said that the police create more crime than they solve.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ I said, suave, very suave. ‘I’ve heard people say that politicians create more problems than they solve. We all have our critics. Tell me, sir, where have you and the Princess been accustomed to meet?’

‘Oh, we met at a film première. Charity do. I don’t hold much with charities — most of them are just excuses for bourgeois do-gooding — but I do sit on a Parliamentary Commission on the British film industry. I think we’re meant to find out if it still exists. That’s why I was there.’

‘I see. But that wasn’t quite my question. I asked you where you had been accustomed to meet.’

He floundered visibly. ‘Well . . . we’ve met at parties, that kind of thing . . . been to the theatre, though frankly that’s a bit too public for me . . . met in my flat.’

‘Ah yes, that would be at — ?’

‘I live in Dolphin Square.’

‘Yes, I know that. But according to our information the flat you took the Princess to was in — ’

‘So you’ve been following us?’ He flung open his arms in an angry gesture. ‘I’ve half a mind to ask a question of the Home Secretary about that.’

‘I doubt whether, on thinking it over, you will want to, sir.’

He was not dim. That thought had struck him even as he said it. He gave in with bad grace.

‘Oh, all right then. The fact is, some of us here have a place — a sort of
pied-
à
-terre
— where we can go to, to — you know. My wife lives in the constituency, but she’s taken to coming up to London unexpectedly. She caught me once, and — well, I don’t have to spell it out to you, I suppose. So there’s this little flat down river — it used to be Price-Feverel’s, before he married — and we club together
to pay the rent, and . . .’

Well, well, I thought. Price-Feverel was a Conservative, a Junior Treasury Minister, one of the rigid monetarist types the PM seemed to get on best with. An inter-party knocking shop, then! Well, well, as I said. Good to see that some things transcend party barriers.

‘There’s really no cause for embarrassment, sir,’ I said, reapplying the suavity. ‘That sort of thing is no concern of mine, so long as you keep within the law. It’s only a question of knowing where the Princess might be if she is with you. Of course, one would like to be sure that the IRA knows nothing about this flat.’

‘Oh, come on, Inspector, you don’t really think they trail us when we slip out for a quick naughty, do you?’

‘That is exactly what I do think, sir. They might very well enjoy catching you with, so to speak, your trousers down. They are probably not without a sense of humour.’

‘I’d say that is exactly what they are without, and I’m sure I know them better than you, Inspector. I had something to do with them while I was at Oxford.’

Of course. He was in student politics at the time when young left-wingers would express solidarity with anyone provided they threw bombs. But I refrained from following him up the garden path after my own red herring. I did not think the IRA had anything to do with this.

‘What I came to ask you, sir, was this,’ I said. ‘You can see that if there is a threat of any kind to the Princess, it presents the police with special problems.’

‘I’m not really very interested in the police’s problems.’

‘But perhaps you might be a mite interested in the young lady’s safety?’ He pursed his lips. It wasn’t quite on to say he didn’t give a bugger. ‘It’s particularly difficult because we’re anxious not to let the Princess know we’re especially worried. What I’d like you to do is this: if you’re going out with the Princess, could you phone this number
and leave a message telling me where you both are? Just “Bayle, 35 Cheyne Walk”, that kind of thing.’

I handed him a card with a Scotland Yard number on it, but he took it only with reluctance, and stuffed it in with his papers.

‘Really, I don’t know . . . This does seem like an intolerable invasion of privacy.’

‘Even though the Princess’s life may be at stake?’ I asked. And as he seemed so little concerned, I added: ‘And yours too.’

‘Oh, very well.’ He looked at his watch, scowled, and began stuffing his papers into his briefcase. ‘You’ve made me late for the boilermakers. But I’ll co-operate as far as I can.’

A paper fluttered to the floor and I picked it up for him. It was an old election address. It had a picture of Harry Bayle, his wife, and two little boys. The wife was sensible-looking rather than glamorous — a down-to-earth, busy, right-thinking body, a typical Labour Party wife.

‘Nice picture,’ I said, handing it back to him.

CHAPTER 6

Country Pleasures

I’d got the idea that the next day was to hold another factory visit for the Princess. When I had started on the case I had gone through the Court Circulars and ‘Social Engagements’ columns of the papers, constructing the Princess’s round of activities for the last few and the next few months. But there must have been a change of plan, because when I rang Joplin that evening I found that next day was to be the first of two days of engagements in the
Midlands. The opportunity was too good to be missed. I told Joplin that both of us would be going with her, but that I would be sloping off for a time to Knightley. I had a date with the dead Bill Tredgold.

Well, we took the Royal train up to Birmingham — attended to the platform at Euston Station by all manner of station-masters and things, top-hatted and togged up to the nines, and all the more conspicuous when compared to the slovenliness and grime of all the other functionaries in sight. All the bowing and scraping was enough to make a cat laugh, but the Princess took it all in her stride — her demeanour commonsensical (didn’t everyone who went by train get this sort of treatment?) and a shade demure. I sat on the train with her and Lady Muck, in what was not so much a compartment as a large, rather plush room. Joplin patrolled the corridors, and seemed to consider himself well out of it. The Princess Helena and I talked about the day’s engagements, read the papers, commented on the news. The Princess read the
Daily Grub
for preference, which rather shocked me. In spite of that, though, I was beginning to revise my opinion about her intelligence. She might not have an idea in her head, not an idea of the abstract kind, but she did have a useful practical streak, a knowledge of where to draw the line, an ability to deal with people, and get them to do what she wanted. She coped admirably, for example, with Lady Dorothy Lowndes-Gore. She sat, upright and cool, in the corner of the apartment on wheels, reading one of those glossies that assumes its readers run a couple of Rolls and have more Georgian silver than they know what to do with. The Princess, in the midst of our chat, kept throwing remarks in her direction, and paid solemn attention to her drawled, inhibited replies. I could see she wished her a hundred miles away, so we could have a cosy chat about the fracas in the Wellington Club, but not by a whisker
did she give any sign of this.

The only time Lady Dorothy made any independent remark, it was addressed to me: ‘You’re one of the Northumberland Trethowans, aren’t you?’

‘I was,’ I said.

She looked at me for a moment, as if my answer smacked of Jacobinism. Then she said: ‘I met your cousin Peter once,’ and dropped her head down once more into her glossy. I rather got the impression that much of her conversation was of this kind, that she acted as a Waugh-like ancestral voice, charting the ramifications of the Great Families, and lamenting their downfall.

The engagement for the morning was of the Princess Helena’s traditional type: we all visited an old people’s home that was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. You can imagine what it was like: product of the Depression, its aim was obviously to produce just that in anybody who had anything to do with it today. There was a smell of new paint, obviously for the visit, but through doors one caught glimpses of peeling walls, sagging ceilings and arthritic sofas in the rooms the Princess was not to be taken into. The staff seemed to be recruited from the female relatives of Methodist missionaries, and the old people themselves gave every appearance of waiting impatiently for the last feeble spark to be extinguished.

In this sort of environment the Princess flowered, like an outrageous orchid in a herbaceous border. She smiled, she flashed those splendid eyes, she bent solicitously over and chatted, and she made the staff feel they were a cross between Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry, fit only for translation to a heavenly home, or for CBEs at the very least. I began to appreciate her, not as a person, but as a
performer:
on duty she was a non-stop, never-flag
show.
At length we all tottered into the dining-room for drinks and lunch. The old people, we gathered, would be partaking of a ‘light lunch’ (cabbage-stalks and potato
peelings, most probably) elsewhere in the building.

The array of local worthies we were lumbered with was a mixed bunch. There were lots of the sort of red-faced, paunchy businessmen we’d met at the Wellington, whose rubicund, heavy-lidded aspect told of business lunches, and wage negotiations into the early hours. Then there were the Midlands gentry, consciously giving the event tone. They self-consciously left the Princess to the commercial interest — rather implying that
they
could talk to her any day of the week. I was given a drink to hold (I suspect on the direction of the lady-in-waiting, who had decided that I could not be treated like any old policeman), and I tried to mingle while not letting my guard down. I found myself talking — my eye on the Princess all the time — to someone who seemed to be a nob of some kind.

The conversation turned out to be an elegant variation on the lady-in-waiting’s family obsession: we played the ‘I suppose you know’ game.

‘I hear you’re one of the Northumberland Trethowans. Everyone survive that nasty business last year?’

‘Everyone except my father,’ I said. ‘Mostly they thrived on it.’

‘Harpenden’s close to the Yorkshire border, isn’t it? I suppose you know the Witteringhams?’

‘I think I may have — ’

‘And the Northumberland Fortescues. Not the Derbyshire lot, but the younger branch. Now, they wouldn’t be all that far from you, would they?’

‘No, about twenty — ’

‘I say,’ he interrupted, with a sort of nervous intensity that covered the rudeness, ‘wasn’t your mother one of the Cumberland Godriches? You know, I think we must be related. I say, Dot — wasn’t my Aunt Margaret second cousin or something to the Cumberland Godriches?’

‘Yes, through her maternal grandmother,’ drawled Lady Dorothy.

I was surprised to hear Lady Dorothy addressed as Dot, but not surprised to hear she had everyone’s family tree at the tips of her well-manicured fingers. The conversation pissed me off no end, but after a bit I got him on to horses and dogs, which I suspected were the only other things he knew anything about, and eventually we sat down to lunch. Lunch was one of those predictable disasters which occur when cooking staff used to making boiled fish and cottage pie try to do something a little special. After it, farewells were said, little speeches made, and the Princess was driven off to the home of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, where she was staying overnight. Later in the day she was to attend Beckett at the Birmingham Rep, but seniority goes for nothing if you can’t hand that sort of job over to the lower ranks, so I delivered the Princess, like a gorgeous parcel, into the safe-keeping of Joplin, commandeered a car from the Birmingham CID (who had been informed of my mission and had promised all co-operation) and about four o’clock hit the road for Knightley.