by David Field
‘What brings you back?’ Sergeant Parker enquired nervously. ‘Have you got more information about those stolen rifles? Or are you here to render further assistance in bringing our records up to scratch?’
‘Neither,’ Percy smiled. ‘I was just wondering if there’d been any circular regarding the processional route for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Only some stations in the West End seem to have got theirs.’
‘Typical!’ Parker muttered. ‘It’s always those posh buggers up west who get to know things first. Do you happen to know if the Queen will be coming this way, or will it all be confined to Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey?’
Percy frowned. ‘At the risk of depressing you further — and bear in mind that I haven’t been able to confirm this, which is why I was hoping that you could — it seems that there’ll be a church service of some sort on the steps of St Paul’s.’
‘That’ll be Whitechapel’s worry, won’t it?’ Parker said hopefully.
Percy shook his head in sad denial. ‘From what I could make out regarding their current manpower, I reckon they’ll be calling in men from all over the East End. Even if your blokes aren’t required at the Cathedral itself, you’re going to have folks tramping your streets on their way towards it.’
‘Can you get me more men? Isn’t that why you were down here in the first place — to assess manpower, and recommend any necessary increase?’
‘How many “specials” could you call in, if pushed?’ Percy asked.
Parker thought for a moment before replying. ‘About a dozen worth having, and a few more who’d come out for the money or the free food and drink, but won’t they want to be attending the celebrations with their own families?’
‘Good point,’ Percy conceded. ‘At any rate, we’ll have to give serious consideration to boosting your numbers somehow or other. Perhaps with troops from the Tower Barracks — who knows? But now I’m aware of the full extent of the problem, I can make suitable noises in appropriate places. Thanks for seeing me, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the bearer of happier tidings.’
‘We’re having a musical evening at the club this evening,’ Liam Brennan announced as he slid behind his desk in the office he was sharing with Jack. ‘You’re invited, and there are a couple of chaps I’d like you to meet. But before that, since it’s a bright sunny day out there, why don’t we go and take a stroll through Green Park and inspect the men on patrol? The boss said that you wanted to see how we do things up west.’
‘Yes, I’d be delighted,’ Jack replied despite himself, and less than half an hour later the police wagon deposited them at the north gate. As they walked down the main drive they passed several uniformed constables on fixed point duty, who gave every appearance of being alert, and saluted smartly as they saw their Sergeant strolling towards them with the plain clothed visitor. One of the constables appeared to be surrounded by chattering school children accompanied by a young lady who was presumably their teacher, and Jack smiled to himself at the sight of a London bobby trying to make himself understood in the most elementary French, while the teacher put him to shame with her superior English.
‘It’s down that way, missus — mamzell,’ the constable advised her as he pointed down the main path and received an entrancing smile of thanks from the pretty teacher.
‘Everything in order, Pascoe?’ Brennan enquired, and the constable nodded as he saluted.
‘Yes, Sarg. Jenkins an’ Bishop buckled a pervert down near the lavatories, but that’s bin all this mornin’, so far as I knows.’
‘Very good, carry on,’ Brennan instructed him in a manner no doubt well practised in his army days.
‘There seems to be no shortage of manpower, anyway,’ Jack observed as they walked on. He’d already seen more constables on duty directing foreign visitors through a pleasant park that he’d ever seen walking the dark streets of Whitechapel on a foggy night. Brennan seemed to read his thoughts as he pointed through the winter foliage towards the imposing facade of Buckingham Palace visible beyond the southern perimeter.
‘We’ll need every one of them when Her Majesty comes home for her big bash next June. There’ll be a twenty-one-gun salute from the Royal Horse Artillery towards Constitution Hill down there, and we’ll need to stop the sightseers from distracting the gunners, some of whom you’ll probably meet this evening. It’s normally formal dress for the musical evenings, by the way, but by tradition we allow visitors to wear mufti, so you’ll be OK as you are.’
As the clock on the steeple of a distant church chimed seven, Brennan stepped out of the police wagon with Jack immediately behind him. There was, as usual, no doorman as such, but the door that gave access to the billiard room immediately inside the premises was wide open, and two pairs of inquisitive eyes surveyed them carefully from over a table that contained only a pink and black ball lying at the opposite end from the white, indicating a close game of snooker nearing completion. Brennan waved back in silent acknowledgment as they made their way down the hallway and into the bar, where he ordered the same drinks as on their previous visit together.
This time it was easy to distinguish the army types from their police colleagues because they were all wearing their formal Mess outfits, the preponderance of red frockcoats broken only by the coloured flashes at shoulder and wrist that denoted the individual regiments, and the gold down the front of one dark blue dress jacket being worn by a tall man seated at a table with a somewhat haughty looking lady who was so plain that she must be his wife, Jack concluded.
The rest were in ‘black tie’ order, and Jack assumed that they were police officers, one of whom he recognised as the man who had been directing schoolchildren in Green Park. There were only three women present at this early hour of the evening, one of whom Jack recalled immediately when he caught sight of her luxuriant black hair as she leaned over the pianist’s shoulder pointing at something on his music stand.
Brennan beckoned to the tall, distinguished looking man with the gold braid all down the front of his dark blue jacket, who left the plain looking woman at his table after a brief aside and walked with a smile to where Jack and Brennan were leaning on the bar.
‘Jimmy,’ Brennan said, ‘allow me to introduce a potential new member, Jack Enright, Detective Sergeant at the Yard. Jack, meet Captain James Britton, Royal Horse Artillery. He’ll be in charge of part of the battery firing make-believe shells at Her Maj. on the morning of her drive to St Paul’s.’
‘Delighted to meet you,’ Captain Britton told Jack as he attempted to stop the circulation in his extended right hand. ‘Are you chappies going to stop the plebs from getting too close to our popguns on the big day?’
‘Something like that,’ Jack replied, ‘but I’m glad to hear that the shells won’t be real. I’m helping to assess the Queen’s overall security for the day.’
‘Two days,’ Brennan corrected him, ‘but I take it you were joking about the shells? If they were real, they could reduce Buck House to a pile of rubble in as little time as it took to fire them.’
‘Of course I was joking,’ Jack chuckled. ‘I came down here once before, during your “Trooping the Colour” ceremony, and my little daughter at the time was terrified when all those cannon went off. But from memory that was in Horse Guards Parade.’
‘To begin with it would have been,’ Britton agreed, ‘but if you were close to where we fired the guns, that would have been in Green Park.’
‘Where we were today,’ Brennan reminded him. It fell silent for a moment before Britton took up the conversation again.
‘So are you one of these proud subjects of Her Majesty who loyally turns out with his family to wave your cheap little Union Jack at the old lady?’
There was something about the scornful way in which the question was posed that alerted Jack to the fact that he was being tested, and his reply was suitably guarded.
‘We don’t really see enough of her for that, do we?’ he replied with a sight sneer. ‘And I�
�ll be damned if I’m going to holiday on the Isle of Wight, just to see where all the nation’s money’s being spent on ornamental gardens.’
Britton smiled back appreciatively, and the atmosphere grew noticeably more relaxed.
‘Nice to have met you, old chap,’ Britton beamed as he held out his hand for another crushing attack on Jack’s. ‘If you’ll excuse me, better see to it that the memsahib’s got enough alcohol to see her through yet another performance from “Lady Mary”. Nice chatting with you too, Liam.’
As Britton made his way back to his table, the pianist rattled a glissando from his keyboard in order to command attention, and the lady with the long dark hair took up a pose in the curve of the grand piano as a somewhat grizzled individual in full evening dress walked into the centre of the room.
‘That’s Sergeant Pultney from “F” Division,’ Brennan whispered in Jack’s ear. ‘He looks after all our musical activities, and he’s got a fine baritone voice when we let him show it off. Hopefully Mary will be singing my favourite, as per my request, before they launch into duets.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the master of ceremonies announced, ‘welcome to another of our musical evenings. We begin with our own Mary Carmody, who informs me that she’s had a special request for one of her own favourite songs from her home country. Ladies and gentlemen, Mary Carmody.’
The polite spattering of applause faded as the pianist rolled through the introduction, then paused for dramatic effect as the lady closed her eyes, opened her mouth and let the opening line glide out as if propelled by a light breeze.
‘Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.’
Jack was no judge of music but took his cue from the reaction of the audience, the vast majority of whom appeared spellbound as the light contralto notes rolled effortlessly round the room. A swift glance at Liam Brennan revealed tears at the corners of his eyes as the song came to its sad ending of ‘And I will sleep in peace until you come to me’, and the applause burst out with enthusiasm at a level much louder and more heartfelt than its predecessor. Mary bowed her thanks, wiped a tear from her own eye, then launched into several other maudlin ballads before thanking her audience, taking a final bow, then moving to a table at which she joined a group of recently arrived men whose red jackets and white belts denoted them as officers of the Grenadier Guards.
Then it was the turn of the master of ceremonies to regale the assembled company with a selection of light classics from the currently popular operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was noticeable that the ones that drew the loudest applause were those that appeared to mock either the monarchy or the forces of law and order. A particular favourite proved to be a song entitled ‘A Policeman’s Lot’, and even Jack was forced to snigger at some of the innuendo regarding timid constables who were hesitant to perform their constabulary duties. The evening ended with the baritone sergeant being joined in front of the piano by Mary Carmody for a trio of duets on a patriotic theme, concluding with a lusty rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’ that drew the entire company into its repeated final chorus.
It was well after eleven before Jack crept silently through the front door of the Hackney house in which he was lodging, to find all the lights out in the front hall, but a note pinned to the kitchen door to advise him that there was a pan of soup on the stove and fresh bread in the bread bin. Silently he thanked Aunt Beattie for her kindly concern and ate his supper while his head was still ringing with the final chorus of ‘Rule Britannia’. He was sure that the members of the Home Front Club sang it in some sort of sarcastic parody of the loyalty they were sworn to display when in their daily uniform, but which they could deride and belittle in their off-duty hours.
‘We may as well travel into work together,’ Jack suggested as he joined Percy at the breakfast table the following morning. Percy looked up from his kippers and nodded.
‘However, I plan to be in the East End for most of the day, assessing how we can possibly even begin to guarantee the Queen’s security at St Paul’s. The damned idiot who dreamed up that particular folly obviously had no experience of life on the streets of the East End. Add to that a bunch of anarchists only too eager to assassinate the old bat, and we don’t stand a rat’s chance in a kennel.’
‘It may well have been “the old bat” herself who asked for whatever it is you’re complaining about, Percy Enright, and don’t let me hear you referring to our Queen in such terms again,’ Beattie said tersely as she all but slammed the jam pot down on the table next to the toast rack. ‘And don’t get jam on the tablecloth — it’s clean on this morning.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Jack asked.
‘No idea, during the day. But how did you go in the anarchist playpen yesterday evening?’
‘Interesting, if somewhat depressing. From various things said in conversation, they obviously have no love for the Queen and the existing political set-up, yet they’re all men sworn to defend both. There’s a distinct Irish flavour about the place, and they’re probably being used by Fenians; the really scary thing is that they’ll be the ones the Queen will look to for her protection on the big day, and they’ll obviously be armed. At least, the soldiers will, and with enough corrupt police officers in strategic positions along the ceremonial route they could easily hide an assassin in their ranks.’
‘Do they suspect you, do you think?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Far from it. Just the opposite, in fact — I think they’re testing me out for membership. Which is all very well, in one sense, but I have two serious problems. The first is that I can’t, with any continuing credibility, hang around Bow Street like a bad smell, doing a job that could have been completed by now, even working at half speed. The other is that those traitorous bastards in that club make my skin crawl, and it’s all I can do keep my hands off their throats.’
‘You’re just going to have to grin and bear it, Jack,’ Percy advised him as he loaded jam onto his third slice of toast. ‘It’s the best possible lead we could have into what those anarchists are planning. As for your daily work, Bow Street isn’t the only police station that’s going to be heavily involved at the western end of the festivities. There’s Mayfair and Soho in “C” Division, and Kensington in “F” Division, for a start. We also need to look at the possibility of drafting men across from one station to another, like for example Marylebone and Hampstead. You could do us all a valuable service by visiting all of these stations in turn, assessing how many men they’ll need on the day to patrol their own patch, given the predicted increase in pedestrian movement down to Westminster, then seeing how many, realistically, could be drafted across to the East End for the St Paul’s service.’
‘That’s a huge task!’ Jack objected.
‘And you’ve got slightly over six months,’ Percy told him. ‘Unless Melville can come up with a better plan when I meet with him on Tuesday, then a “master plan” of available manpower across the whole of the affected parts of the Met will be the key to holding the lid down on two hectic days next June.’
‘Can I still have tomorrow off?’
Percy smiled reassuringly. ‘Of course you can. But make the best of it, because it may be your last free working day for some time. If you can clear your desk in Bow Street today, all to the good, but make sure that you keep in touch with Sergeant Brennan even when you’re on a tour of other police stations. We need you inside that club, sniffing out what’s being planned. I’ll make my excuses to Inspector Markwell and leave him believing that all my focus will now be on the East End.’
Thursday went according to plan for them both, and by supper time they were able to congratulate each other on having begun to expose what was undoubtedly some sort of plan to disrupt the Diamond Jubilee, possibly by assassinating the Queen. Based on what Jack had observed for himself, the main impetus for this seemed to be an Irish one, but Percy reminded him that while the Fenian Brotherhood might well have been recruited to do the dirty work, the dark forces behind the
plot might come from anywhere. Even within the nation there were plenty of subversive resentful groups who viewed with bitter contempt the large chasm between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, whereas nations such as Russia and Germany also had a longer-term interest in throwing England into chaos.
These thoughts occupied Jack’s mind so fully that he almost forgot to get off the Southend-bound train from Fenchurch Street when it rattled and huffed its way into Barking on Friday morning. At the last moment he jumped from the carriage with his portmanteau and walked through the barrier into the roadway that led to the crossroads. Instead of continuing across into Bunting Lane, he turned right down Church Lane, and within minutes he was being embraced by his mother and invited to stay for dinner. After what was almost certainly a larger meal than was medically advisable for Constance, who was clearly using Jack’s presence as an excuse to cock a snook at Dr. Browning, they sat drinking tea in the sitting room. Constance looked slightly uncomfortable as she opened up a line of conversation that for once was not inspired by goings on in the Ladies’ Guild.
‘I don’t suppose you’re allowed to tell me what you’re involved in with your uncle down there in London?’ she asked. ‘Knowing Percy, it won’t be anything safe and cosy, but the sooner you’re back here in Barking, the better.’
‘And how’s your health, Mother?’
‘Don’t try to change the subject. You’re neglecting Esther and the children. Particularly Esther.’
‘So she reminded me when I came home last week,’ Jack smiled ruefully. ‘I hope I fare better this afternoon.’
Constance’s eyes dropped down to the tea cup in her hand. ‘There’s something I feel obliged to tell you, Jackson. I feel so disloyal doing so, and believe me I’ve been grappling with my conscience all week, knowing that I’d have a moment at some time or other to talk to you in private this weekend, but…’
