Ten Lords A-Leaping (15 page)

‘I know it was a rough night, Robert, but what kept you up so late? You sound close to death yourself, if you’ll excuse my saying so.’

‘I admit it wasn’t the best of ideas to go back with Jack to Myles Cavendish’s after the hoo-haa had died down, but I always remember too late that whisky exacerbates shock rather than moderating it. Hold on a minute. I’m freezing.’ Amiss darted back to his bedroom, pulled on a dressing gown, grabbed a rug from the bed and put it round him before he picked up the phone again. ‘OK. What do you want to know?’

‘Mostly I wanted to know how you are.’

‘Incredulous. Shattered. Horrified. What you’d expect. But thanks for asking.’

‘Also, I thought you’d like to know Jim and I are on this case.’

‘What? Why? Surely it’s got to do with the anti-terrorist lot rather than the Murder Squad?’

‘It’s all hands on deck. The Anti-terrorist Squad are overwhelmed. Between being run down after the Northern Ireland ceasefire and having a scare blow up on the Islamic Fundamentalist front last week, they’re so short-handed they’ve agreed enthusiastically to having Jim, me and anyone else he can spare come on board.’

‘Well, thank God for that.’

‘Of course, it will all be done under their auspices and they’ll get the credit, but at least we get part of the action. And we can maintain a low profile and stay out of the way of the press, thank heaven.’

‘Well, bugger the internal politics of the Met, Ellis. This is terrifying stuff.’

‘So I gather. Is it OK if we come round to see you in half an hour or so to get some colour?’

‘If you bring breakfast.’

‘Done.’

By the time he answered the door to Pooley – well laden with carrier bags – and their friend Detective Chief Superintendent James Milton, Amiss was showered, dressed, halfway through his first cup of coffee and almost clear-headed. Milton put an arm half around his shoulders in the awkward manner of a sympathetic middle-aged man from a macho culture.

‘Poor old Robert.’

‘Thanks, Jim, but I’m all right.’

‘At least it wasn’t gory.’

‘What a Pollyanna you are.’

‘Come on. Let’s go into the kitchen and tell us all about it while Ellis plays Mum.’

They sat at the kitchen table while Pooley competently dispensed orange juice, coffee, croissants, butter and jam. Amiss drank all his orange juice in one go and held out his glass for more. ‘So what happened to all those poor old sods?’

‘Mechanical failure.’

‘Don’t tell me. Someone jammed their pacemakers.’

Milton put down his coffee and gazed at Amiss in astonishment. ‘How did you work that out? I thought you were scientifically illiterate. We’ve only had that confirmed this morning.’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Myles Cavendish, DSO, MC, ex-SAS and presently some kind of hush-hush consultant on terrorism and intimate friend of the Baroness Troutbeck worked it out double quick. His reasoning was based on the impossibility of eight people dying simultaneously of natural causes, the peaceful nature of their deaths and the fact that nerve gas was a non-starter as the bodies were mostly well separated. When he asked about their health, Jack knew four of them had bad hearts and – in response to his prompting – remembered two definitely had pacemakers. Myles wasn’t sure how it had been done but he was sure it was possible. He proffered some theories, but I’d had so much whisky by then that I’m damned if I can remember them. What did the pathologist say?’

‘That he’d performed four postmortems and all had stopped pacemakers. And since then we’ve been told the other four had pacemakers too. It looks pretty open and shut. The anti-terrorist boys are getting down to the how. I’m concentrating on the why and the who.’

‘And the which.’

‘Sorry, Ellis. I don’t quite follow that. I’m feeling a bit dim this morning.’ Amiss took another draught of coffee.

‘Well, we don’t know if the intention was to murder one, some or all of them.’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. It’s a bit hard to imagine somebody with a grudge particularly directed against people with pacemakers unless, of course, there’s a Pacemakers Liberation Front. I guess the most likely scenario is that the Animal Avengers were having a second crack at Reggie Poulteney and the other poor bastards just happened to cop it along with him.’

‘Second crack?’ Milton was puzzled.

‘Of course, that wasn’t on your territory. Pour me out some more coffee, Ellis, and I’ll try to give you a coherent story.’

‘So what’s your hunch? Do you think these Avengers might be behind everything?’

‘How would I know?’ said Milton. ‘My instinct would be that it’s too much of a leap from behaving like a lot of yahoos and writing childish letters to committing mass murder. But of course if they were responsible for the letter bombs they might be capable of anything.’

‘But you don’t know if they are.’

‘Too true. Paul Jarrett, my pal on the anti-terrorist side, tells me there are at least a couple of dozen animal activist groups, maybe half of which are in the thick of civil disobedience and around half a dozen of whom he thinks are capable of serious violence. His money was on the Animal Liberation Army. He’d never heard of the Animal Avengers till their threatening letter to the peers.’

‘I still think the murderer is more likely to have been after an individual,’ said Pooley. ‘Just like in Agatha Christie’s
ABC Murders
. Maybe Poulteney’s daughter-in-law hired a hitman.’

‘You can’t seriously think that. I’m no defender of Vanessa Bovington-Petty, and I could just about imagine her having the guts to try to murder Daddy-in-law in an indirect way which couldn’t be traced back to her, but I’m damned if I could seriously see a disaffected Sloane being behind wholesale murder. It’s much too far-fetched. What do you think, Jim?’

‘Life isn’t like Agatha Christie.’ Milton sighed. ‘Or not any more, anyway. We live in a world where terrorists have launched devastating attacks on the City of London, the New York Trade Centre, the Tokyo underground and Oklahoma City, just to pick four at random.’

‘The IRA, Islamic Fundamentalists, Doomsday cultists and anti-government fanatics,’ said Pooley. ‘I suppose since foreigners always thought the English were mad about animals it would be appropriate if it is their defenders who make our contribution to terrorism.’

‘Dammit, as Jack frequently points out, we’re animals too.’ Amiss sipped his coffee gloomily. ‘I know it’s a failure of imagination, but I find it difficult to understand how people who call themselves defenders of the rights of some can be so cavalier with the rights of others.’

‘Mad people find causes that enable them to cloak their madness with virtue,’ said Milton. ‘Now, enough of all this philosophizing. Ellis and I have to get back to the Yard to catch up and plan our course of action. What are you going to do?’

‘See what the newspapers have made of it and meet Jack for lunch. You can leave messages there for her and they’ll get to me.’

‘Robert.’ Milton looked serious.

‘I know. Be careful.’

‘I mean it. If these really are pro-animal terrorists, you’re right up there in the line of fire beside your pal Troutbeck.’

‘Well, there isn’t much chance of persuading her to take care. Myles read her the riot act last night and she kept explaining she’d be fine. Trouble is, she thinks she’s invincible.’

‘Well, you’re not.’

‘I’ll watch out. I promise. Besides, I should be safe enough today. Jack rang earlier to say that she thought the Lords might be a bit depressing, so she’d told Beesley to take us to the Cavalry Club. I should think the inhabitants of that place would see off any troublemakers in short order.’

Chapter 16

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Amiss’s relationship with his Indian newsagent was warm and mutually supportive. He wrote references when Sanjeev Patel applied for citizenship or needed a permit to sell alcohol; in turn, Patel kept Amiss’s spare keys and took in his parcels, and they enjoyed chatting over the day’s news.

‘This dreadful business in the House of Lords is really most extraordinary,’ he said, as Amiss leafed through the tabloids, which were in a state of ecstatic hysteria. ‘Do you think it’s something in the heating or air-conditioning that kills eight people out of several hundred? Picks off the weakest, perhaps. Like legionnaire’s disease.’

‘Interesting notion, Sanjeev. But according to the papers they all seem to have died at about the same time.’

‘What I don’t understand…’ Patel pulled out a paper at random. ‘Look here. It says the police think they died at about nine o’clock but nobody noticed them until more than an hour later. How could that be?’

‘I suppose they thought they were asleep.’

‘There’s a difference, Robert, in being asleep and being dead. Mark my words, there’s something very sinister going on. If your neighbour looks suspiciously quiet beside you, you investigate.’

Amiss shook his head. ‘Sanjeev, I fear you don’t understand the British upper classes. If anything untoward happens beside you the etiquette is to pretend not to notice.’

‘What? Even if you fear something serious has happened?’

‘Let me tell you two stories. Several years ago an enormous lump fell out of the House of Lords ceiling on to a seat in the chamber and just missed one of the lords. Now what would be the reaction if that happened in Delhi in the Lok Sabha?’

‘All hell would break loose.’ Patel laughed. ‘I expect we would have a stampede.’

‘Well, in the Lords everyone sat in his place and pretended not to notice. And don’t you remember that a couple of years ago some lesbians abseiled down from the gallery in the Lords and everyone ignored them. So you see why I have no difficulty in understanding what could have happened last night. To investigate your neighbour’s condition, unless he directly asks you for help, would be seen as impolite and intrusive.’

Patel shook his head. ‘Intrusive is not a word we understand much in our culture, and that is bad, for we are much too inquisitive and meddling. But from what you tell me, your aversion to it is worse, for it may be lethal.’ And sighing at the irrationality of man, he left Amiss to peruse the papers while he attended to another customer.

‘Are you the chap in charge?’

‘One of them.’

I’ve told them over and over that I’ll only talk to the c-in-c.’

Milton assumed his most soothing tone. ‘I am a detective chief superintendent on the Murder Squad, Lord Beesley. There is no one more senior here at present who understands as much about last night’s atrocity at the Lords.’

‘That’s not what I want to talk about. Well, only in a way.’

Milton summoned up all his patience and shifted the phone to his other ear. ‘I’m here to listen to whatever you have to talk about, sir. Just fire away.’

Beesley sounded dubious. ‘It’s about Reggie Poulteney. You know someone tried to kill him before.’

‘By damaging his saddle. Indeed, yes, sir.’

Beesley was cheered by this evidence of intelligence. ‘Oh, good. Now this is very delicate. I don’t want it talked about.’

‘Why don’t you just tell me, sir, and then we can discuss what to do with your information. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, the most important consideration is to bring to justice whoever killed or tried to kill Lord Poulteney.’

‘Well, I know. But we don’t want any scandal unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

‘No, sir. And there won’t be an unnecessary scandal. Trust me.’

Amazingly, that request worked. ‘It’s Hawkins, you see. He rang me up and told me what he’d seen the night before Reggie took his toss.’

There was a silence. ‘And what was that, sir?’

‘He saw Vanessa Bovington-Petty… do you know who that is?’

‘Lord Poulteney’s daughter-in-law. And who is Hawkins?’

‘Poor Reggie’s head groom. Well, he saw Vanessa coming out of the tack room in the middle of the night. Didn’t tell anyone but now he’s worried in case she tried to kill Reggie then and had something to do with last night. Asked my advice and I told him I’d have a word with someone and then he must make a clean breast of it.’

‘Excellent advice, sir. Now if you tell me what you know, you can then ask Mr Hawkins to ring me as soon as he can do so discreetly. And you can reassure him that I will go to all reasonable lengths to conceal his identity.’

‘Lady Poulteney is on her way up.’

‘Thanks, Jane. Ask Sergeant Pooley if he’ll come in now, please.’

Pooley entered, notebook in hand, looking expectant.

‘Ellis, I forgot to ask you if you’d ever met this woman. I mean, you haven’t come across her at society weddings or hunt balls or Henley or wherever your sort of person hangs out, have you?’ He was pleased to note that Pooley was toughening. A year ago he would have blushed, but now he smiled and said, ‘No, sir, not even at Ascot.’

‘Good, then you can stay.’

‘Before she comes in, sir. Have you heard about her and the Rutland police?’

Milton looked puzzled. ‘All I’ve seen are the not very helpful interview notes faxed to me this morning. Why?’

‘Gossip from a friend there is that she was very respectfully treated by Inspector Hill, who’s notorious as a pushover for the gentry. Apparently there was a hideously embarrassing moment when, after she left the drawing room after the interview, her fluting voice was heard saying to someone: “What a sweet deferential little man!” ’

‘Good. With luck she’ll still have a false sense of security.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Send her in, Jane.’

As Vanessa swept into the room, Milton stood up.

‘How nice to see you, Superintendent. Oh sorry, have I mucked that up? Aren’t you a chief or something?’ Her manner reminded Milton irresistibly of the attempts of some of his superiors to be gracious to junior staff at the Christmas party.

‘Please sit down, Lady Poulteney. And superintendent will do fine. This is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Pooley.’

‘Not one of the Worcestershire…? No, sorry. Of course you wouldn’t be.’

She sat down, oblivious to Pooley’s look of relief and Milton’s twitch of the lower lip. ‘Thank you for coming to see me, Lady Poulteney. And may I first offer my condolences on the loss of your father-in-law.’