Your Royal Hostage

by Antonia Fraser

  The Quentin sisters settled down for a nice royal gossip until such time as Lydia Quentin had to leave again to keep her appointment at South Kensington station.

  About this time, in other parts of the city, various other forms of what might also be termed royal gossip were taking place. For example, it would probably be legitimate to term the remarks made by a man leaning over some emerging photographic prints, as royal gossip; even if the remarks themselves were too scabrous to be printed in any actual gossip column.

  As for Jemima Shore, sprawling on the white carpet of her Holland Park Mansions flat, with Midnight flumped down blackly beside her, she might be said at the very least to be studying royal gossip. All about her were notes, charts and newspaper cuttings, preparatory to her exclusive interview with the royal couple in the near future. When the telephone rang, she realized that it must be Rick Vancy making one of those checking calls from his car telephone which somehow seemed to her to do little more than establish Rick Vancy's ability to drive and digress (on topics of the day) at one and the same time.

  Jemima stretched out her hand without looking to where her own neat little telephone had been deposited on the carpet. In the course of the stretch, her hand encountered Midnight who moved out of the way with a small indignant cry.

  'Hi,' said Jemima. 'How's the traffic?' - hoping he would not tell her.

  There was a short silence. Then a voice - not Rick's - began speaking, and continued to do so at some length, carefully as from a prepared statement.

  At one point Jemima did interrupt: 'What?’ The voice continued to speak. Then: 'Who are you?'

  A little later she said: 'That's out of the question. Absolutely out of the question,' she repeated firmly, 'whoever you are. And whatever it is you say you've got.'

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Dangerous Connection

  'It may have been successful, Beagle,' Monkey was remarking in his (to Beagle) irritatingly lofty voice. 'But it was extremely dangerous.'

  Monkey's suit was the habitual pin-stripe; with the handkerchief in the breast pocket once more white, the first impression was of the respectable city gentleman Monkey presented to the outside world. But Monkey was palpably disturbed by recent events: how could Beagle so blithely ignore orders when orders, correctly given, correctly carried out, were to be the secret of their success? Because of the emotion of this moment, Monkey's simian quality, conveyed by his long curved hairless upper lip, the unduly splayed nostrils, was more in evidence than usual. Twirling his umbrella, Monkey today had, thought Lamb, the air of some heavy and slightly desolate primate.

  'Careful planning, my old Monk, careful planning,' replied Beagle easily. 'Careful planning eliminates danger. Chicken here took the photographs. No sweat, no problem. No difficulty. No laughs. No tears. Well, maybe just a few. But I assure you it was totally non-violent. The pistol was a fake or rather it was a true-blue pistol, but unloaded. As used in some lethal drawing-room tragedy. Supplied by Foxy. All by agreement as you might say. A gentleman's agreement.'

  'Shouldn't we say a lady's agreement, Beagle?' Chicken as usual sounded earnest; but all the same there was a new ease about her, even an air of happiness. Pussy in contrast looked heavier than usual (like Monkey) and her expression as she gazed downwards at her single plastic shopping-bag was sombre.

  'A lady's agreement, indeed, Chick. In more senses than one. So: no sweat, good photos, and now we use them.'

  'In fact,' continued Beagle, 'as you know, I've already set it up. Now don't panic, Monko - you agreed' — and as Monkey appeared to be about to speak - 'don't give me a lot of shit about orders, orders correctly carried out and all that shit. I really don't give a fuck for orders, never have, my orders being of course different -' Beagle smiled: but it was demonstrably not a smile intended to rob his words of offence. 'It just happened, right? Right and Innoright. There was I, photographing this lovely lady, clothes on, or most of them, and we get talking. Well, it was natural, wasn't it? We've got a lot in common, so we get friendly.' Beagle winked with meaning, a parody of a lewd wink perhaps, but a lewd wink none the less.

  In spite of herself, in spite of everything she had learned about self-esteem from the nice doctor. Lamb felt a violent lurch of jealousy, followed by the kind of spasm which just might turn to depression.

  She would not, could not let it do so. Quickly, Lamb cast up counter-images on her mental screen to blot out the pictures already forming there of Beagle and Mirabella Prey, Mirabella's black hair, how very black, how very thick it must be everywhere, even where concealed by the Daily Exclusive,

  Mirabella and Beagle Instead, Lamb concentrated on other images, in themselves far more horrific but which actually served as mantras to calm her down, restore her to her sense of purpose.

  The image of a pet cat called Snowdrop came first; the young white cat with a pink nose and occasional tabby patches which Lamb had loved as a child and which had vanished one day from a London street. Lamb imagined the cat with wires through her nose, and other wires applied strategically to parts of her body; Snowdrop's eyes gazed in silent terror and despair into Lamb's own, but in spite of her terror, Snowdrop had to remain mute because she no longer had a tongue or at any rate a tongue that she could use. Lamb thought of the work of saving Snowdrop and all the other cats who vanished mysteriously in cities, from such a fate. She was already calmer and did not need to pass on to her next image, culled years ago from an Animal Rights handout, which involved a beagle, a cigarette, more wires, and the connection between smoking and human lung cancer. (A beagle! How odd! That Lamb had never been able to forget the expression in that dog's eyes had surely been an omen.)

  Beagle was speaking again. 'So I find out for her where the Prince is staying, that's not difficult, Fleet Street being what it is, and get a message to him to come home quick which as a matter of fact is not all that difficult cither.' Lamb closed her eyes and the wraith of poor Snowdrop floated away into the recesses of her mind for when it was next needed.

  'It's easy, Monkey, so easy,' Beagle was saying. 'We're laughing. Just imagine them getting their knickers in a twist at Cumberland Palace. But there's nothing, bloody nothing, that they can do about it. 'Course no English paper will print them - you don't need to tell me that, I work for them, don't I? But abroad, that's quite another matter. 1 work for them too, don't I? And the date and all on the copy of the London Clueless. No way they can wriggle out of it.'

  'The date and the paper was my idea,' put in Chicken. 'I got it from the hostages, those American ones, or was it the Prime Minister of Italy? Both, I believe. They always photograph them with a daily paper to establish veracity. I fancy it was a professional touch.'

  'But the Underground Plan —' Monkey for once sounded irresolute.

  'This is a development of the Underground Plan, a stage along the way. Can't you see that?' In contrast to Monkey's gloom Beagle was increasingly cheerful. 'Just as we're no longer meeting in the Underground at this very moment, are we? Too dangerous at this stage. We've adjourned to my pad, as on previous occasions, have we not? And very nice too, I think you'll agree, if a little sparsely furnished. No prying landladies here.'

  Lamb looked around. Pussy was perched uncomfortably on a low curved white chair, her big knees held tightly together. That was because there were no other chairs visible, only the white cushions on the painted, shiny black floor. Monkey was standing, as was Beagle; some ridiculous prejudice had made Lamb avoid sitting on the bed - the familiar bed - when she first came in, leaving Chicken and Fox to sit on it together. The slightly built man and the precise woman, adjoining but not touching, had the air of puppet monarchs.

  The kingdom over which they ruled was literally an animal kingdom. Enormous blown-up photographs of animals covered the walls: animals without bodies, faces only, staring with huge bewildered eyes at the puny humans below them, faces of seals in particular (plenty of seals - Beagle might perhaps have chosen the code name Seal, given his preference for them). Th
ere was one mother seal, her coat slightly speckled in the photograph, who crouched protectively over her snow-white baby: that was Lamb's favourite. When Lamb first got to know Beagle, she had imagined rather vaguely that he was the sort of person who would turn out to live in a squat. Just as she had imagined him to be unemployed.

  'A squat!' he had repeated disdainfully. 'A squat brings you into contact with people - and I don't just mean the police. I have a perfectly good studio. And then I have this private place. As you can see, I'm for living privately with the animals.' He had gestured towards the nearest seal's face: with its neat muzzle and wide-apart eyes it looked pretty and rather plaintive, like an attractive girl; where the average photographer might have covered his wall with the faces of glamorous models, big eyed and long eyelashed, Beagle had his plaintive seals with long, appealing whiskers instead of eyelashes. Beagle's whole face changed and softened when he looked in their direction.

  But then Beagle, thought Lamb, even if he was a photographer, was not an average one. And the room where he lived, although situated near newly fashionable Covent Garden, was not an average room. In many ways it was an ideal rendezvous for the cell - once the Underground had become too dangerous for detailed plotting - because it was situated over a deserted shop apparently awaiting conversion. There was a side door and a narrow staircase, and another door at the back of the staircase, leading out to a tiny mews yard. On the edge of the shining new Covent Garden development, yet not part of it, the dingy property was like something shipwrecked from another time.

  'What about the owner of the shop?' Lamb had asked.

  'The owner is sympathetic to our cause,' was all that Beagle replied, leaving Lamb to wonder whether Beagle was not the owner of the shop. At least there was no inquisitive shopkeeper to monitor their arrivals and departures, the sort that Monkey feared. Was Beagle's flat suitable perhaps for the Lair? Was that the intention? But now Fox was speaking.

  'I wish one could have introduced an animal, say a dog, into the picture! Otherwise, it could seem a little, well, sensational....' Fox, who had the prints on his lap, sounded rather wistful; his voice trailed away as Beagle gave him a look of undisguised contempt.

  'Do you introduce a dog into your work,' he began and then broke off. 'Oh, what's the use? Let's discuss the statement. Right, Monko? Right, Chick?' Lamb thought with a little stab of pain that Beagle seemed to be assuming some kind of inner command, now that he and Chicken had carried out this successful form of raid; then she laughed at herself. She could hardly be jealous of Chicken, now that would be ridiculous. Lamb, like the others, concentrated on the statement that Prince Ferdinand and Princess Amy would be asked to make on television on the subject of innocent rights

  'Where's Tom?' asked Fox suddenly. He had been silent during most of the discussion but Beagle's brutal dismissal of the notion of an animal - possibly a dog — lending the photographs some kind of symbolic dignity had evidently riled him; or maybe the exchange had raised painful memories of Noel's rejection at the main Innoright meetings.

  There was silence. As a matter of fact Lamb had been wondering for some time why Tom's absence had not been explained; why Monkey for example had given the signal to abandon the earlier rendezvous before Victoria where Tom was due to join the train. There had been no explanation of that at the time, but then things had happened fast once she had glimpsed Monkey's bine handkerchief; Beagle, she remembered, had been in a state of exhilaration - but that was presumably explained by the successful photographic raid on Prince Ferdinand.

  'Where's Tom?' repeated Fox stubbornly. 'Monkey, I think you should tell us. You're the leader.'

  Monkey cleared his throat and raised one eyebrow. 'I regret to tell you all — Tom is dead.'

  'Dead!' exclaimed Fox, petulance abandoned. Lamb at the same time was experiencing a feeling of overwhelming relief: now she would no longer worry over Tom, lie awake at night worrying; above all she would no longer have to keep her fear of Tom from Beagle - his friend.

  'How dreadful! He was so young!' That was Chicken, as though talking of some former pupil.

  'What does age have to do with it?' Pussy sounded as if she was preparing to be difficult on some minor point: she did not appear to be particularly surprised or even distressed.

  'Well, wasn't it - a heart attack? Something like that?' Chicken again.

  'Was it?' Pussy was increasingly captious.

  'As a matter of fact it wasn't.' This was Beagle. 'As a matter of fact the police are treating Tom's death as murder. How about that, then?' He faced them, hands on his thin hips, smiling faintly. Like Pussy, he chose to express no regrets.

  Lamb realized that she was the only one who hadn't said anything.

  'How dreadful!' she exclaimed, echoing Chicken, whose sentiments, if banal, had been appropriate. She added piously: 'It's even more dreadful if he was murdered, of course.'

  'How do you know all this, Beagle?' - Fox, high complaining voice.

  'Can I tell them, Monkey?' Beagle was for once almost deferential. It occurred to Lamb that although Monkey knew that Tom was dead, he had not broken the news to them until pressed by Fox about Tom's whereabouts.

  Monkey nodded.

  'I was there,' announced Beagle. 'No, no, not literally there' -a shade of the old impatience returned. 'I wasn't there when he was killed. No one was there when he was killed - except the killer that is. But I was at the Press Conference. Or rather I came late for the Press Conference, last job took longer than expected, but I did get there. Part of my work, isn't it? Photographing Royals - Royals of all sorts and in all sorts of positions.'

  Beagle pointed his trainer shoe in the direction of Prince Ferdinand and Mirabella, still lying on the floor beneath the sad soulful gaze of the seals.

  'Tom was there too: he was a journalist. You didn't know that? Some of you knew that. He was a mate of mine, at least you all knew that. That's how we met, working together. That's how I knew he was a good bloke where animals were concerned. We cooked up something - but that's another story.'

  'He was killed there?’ Fox was still incredulous. 'At the Royal Press Conference, the one we saw on tv? But I watched that — '

  'Not there. In the hotel lounge outside. Somebody went and stabbed him, cool as you please. The lounge had been full of people, was currently empty because of the conference, empty save for Tom - Tom and his murderer.'

  'Go on,' said Monkey slowly. 'They've a right to hear the rest of the story.'

  'Afterwards the police questioned everyone - everyone at the conference, I suppose. Must have taken a bit of time. Not the Prince and Princess, I dare say. Everyone else. Anyway they questioned me, because we were mates, as I told you.'

  'Who, who killed him?' began Lamb rather tremulously.

  ' Why was he killed?' exclaimed Chicken at the same time much more strongly, making Lamb realize that her question could be construed as being nothing more than inane, whereas Chicken as usual was able to make an intelligent case for her intervention. 'When you know why, you know who, as they say in all the best detective stories.'

  'On that subject, Chick, you might feel like being in touch with the police,' remarked Beagle, staring at Chicken. 'If you're that interested. I'm sure they would be interested. To meet you.'

  Chicken stared back, but Lamb had the impression that she was just slightly ruffled. Fox burst in, breaking the moment of tension: 'I hope you won't dream of any such thing, Chicken. We don't want him connected to us now in any way. Now that he's safely dead.'

  'Safely dead,' observed Pussy. 'Now that's an odd way of putting it.' Nobody seemed to pay her any attention.

  'It could be dangerous, well, dangerous for the Plan,' pursued Fox. 'A dangerous connection.'

  'He is connected to us. He was connected to us when he was alive and he's connected to us now he's dead.' Beagle's smile had faded. He sounded quite savage.

  'What are" you trying to say?' demanded Fox.

  Beagle looked at Monkey. Monkey nodded o
nce more.

  'I am trying to say that Tom was a spy, a nark, an informer.' Beagle spoke with increasing passion. 'I'm glad he's dead in a manner of speaking because he would probably have ended by betraying the whole fucking Plan. In another way, I'm furious he's dead because it's brought all of us, and the Plan, into danger. From this, chaps, you may gather definitively that I did not kill him. In case you're getting any funny ideas.'

  Monkey lifted an eyebrow, preparatory to making one of his more sonorous statements. 'From what Beagle tells me, we may have to change the Underground Plan. Tom knew far too much -well, he knew a great deal, if not everything. We'll have to rethink.'

  'At least let's be positive!' cried Chicken encouragingly. 'The photographic coup, now that's going to help our cause a great deal. It'll be quite exciting watching the interview, won't it, and seeing them making the first really strong statement on behalf of the innocent that this Royal Family has ever made. I honestly don't count Prince Charles and the underprivileged, I mean a man who goes hunting..."