A Royal Pain

by Rhys Bowen

  “His name was Sidney Roberts. I don’t know if he’s exactly a friend of Gussie. They were at Cambridge together. We also met him at the communist rally in the park, when you stepped in to rescue us.”

  “You say his name was . . . ? So that means that he . . .” Darcy looked at me inquiringly.

  “Yes. He’s the man lying dead upstairs in the bookshop. Somebody stabbed him.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Darcy muttered and almost went to cross himself. “And you and the princess found him?”

  “Hanni did. She stumbled over the knife lying on the floor.”

  “You look as if you could do with a cup of tea too,” Darcy said. “You’re as white as a sheet.”

  I nooded. “It was awful, Darcy. All that blood and I touched the knife and . . .” I swallowed back a sob.

  His arms came around me. “It’s all right,” he murmured, stroking my hair as if I were a little child. “You’re safe now.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth and closeness of him, his chin against my hair, the roughness of his jacket on my cheek. I didn’t want him to let go of me ever.

  “Come on. We’d better get you that tea.” He took my arm and led me to the tearoom. Hanni’s eyes lit up when she saw him.

  “It is Darcy! How did you find us here? You always come at the right moment to rescue us.”

  “That’s me. Darcy O’Mara, guardian angel in disguise.”

  In the distance came the sound of a police whistle being blown and a constable came running down the alley. Mr. Solomon appeared from the office across the way, together with several interested clerks. When the constable heard that the murderer might well still be in the bookshop he was not too keen to go inside. He stood at the doorway of the tea shop with Mr. Solomon while Darcy took me to get a cup of tea. We didn’t have to wait long. The incessant jangling bell of a police motorcar could be heard, echoing between high buildings. The noise caused several windows to open and brought more people into the alleyway.

  The alleyway was just wide enough to accommodate a police motor. It came to a halt. Two plainclothes officers and two uniformed bobbies got out, pushing their way through the growing crowd. I returned to the door of the tea shop.

  “Stand back, now. Go back to your business,” one of the officers shouted. He saw the bobby standing guard at the doorway. “What have we got here then?”

  “They say a man’s been murdered and the murderer might still be in the building,” the bobby said. “I didn’t like to go in alone, sir, so I guarded the doorway to make sure he couldn’t get out.”

  “Quite right,” the plainclothes officer said. In spite of the warm day he was wearing the traditional fawn mack and trilby hat, pulled down low on his forehead. His face and mustache were fawn to match the raincoat. He had jowls that gave him a sad bulldog look. Worse still, I now recognized him. None other than Inspector Harry Sugg of Scotland Yard. He spotted me at the same moment and reacted similarly.

  “Not you again. Don’t tell me you’ve got something to do with this.”

  “Princess Hannelore was the one who found the body.” I gestured an introduction to the princess inside the tea shop.

  “Why on my shift?” he complained. His voice tended to whine at the best of times. “I’m not normally in this part of town. I just happened to be over this way, so they sent me. Are you making a hobby of finding dead bodies?”

  “I don’t actually enjoy the experience, Inspector,” I said. “In fact I feel as if I might be sick at any moment. Someone was getting me a cup of tea.”

  “All right,” Sugg agreed. “Drink your tea, but don’t go anywhere. I’ll have questions to ask you, and the princess.” Hanni looked up at him, wide eyed, from the table at which she was sitting.

  “Don’t let any of them go anywhere, Collins,” Sugg barked. “Stay out here and keep an eye on them. Foreman, James. Come with me.”

  They pushed past everyone and went into the bookshop. A little later they emerged again. “No sign of anyone in there,” Sugg said as he came back into the tearoom. “Which of you is the bookshop owner?”

  “I am.” Mr. Solomon came forward.

  “There didn’t seem to be any other exits except for the front door.”

  “That is correct,” Mr. Solomon said.

  “You were the one who phoned the police?”

  “I was indeed.”

  “And do you know the identity of the murder victim?”

  “Of course I do. He is my assistant. His name is Sidney Roberts. As nice and respectable a young man as you could find. I don’t understand how anybody got into my shop to kill him or why they’d do so.”

  Inspector Sugg turned to look at Hanni and me. “So this young lady found the body? Your full name is...”

  “This is Her Royal Highness Princess Maria Theresa Hannelore of Bavaria,” I said, adopting my most regal tones to make it very clear. “She is a guest of the king and queen. I am chaperoning her around London.”

  “And what’s a visiting princess doing in a place like this, I’d like to know?”

  “We met a young man at—the British Museum.” I had been about to say “at a party” but I thought it wiser not to remind the police of the occasion of another dead body. “He told the princess about the bookshop where he worked. She accepted his invitation to be shown some rare old books.”

  Harry Sugg stared hard at me as if trying to gauge whether this sounded plausible or not.

  “Does Her Highness speak English?” he asked.

  “A little,” I said before she could answer.

  “So tell me, Yer Highness, how you found the body.”

  Hanni glanced at me for reassurance. “Lady Georgiana and I, we go to visit Sidney.” I noticed she had picked up on my words and was speaking as if finding the right words in English was extremely hard for her. “We enter the book-shop. Nobody is there. We look. I find staircase. I go up the stairs in front of Georgie. It is very dark up there. I kick something with my foot. It is long and silver. I pick it up and it is sticky. I see it is horrible knife. And then I see the body lying there.” She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob.

  “And what did you do then?”

  “Lady Georgiana and Mr. Solomon come immediately after me. Mr. Solomon sees that Sidney is dead and we go to call the police.”

  “How long do you think he had been dead, sir?” Inspector Sugg asked Mr. Solomon.

  “Not long at all,” Mr. Solomon said. “He was still warm. The bloodstain was still spreading. That’s why we suspected the murderer might still be on the premises.”

  “So who else had been in the shop recently?”

  “Nobody. Just myself and Mr. Roberts. A very slow morning. I left Mr. Roberts in charge and I went across the street to hand-deliver a book that had just come in. When I came back, these two young ladies were in the shop.”

  “Were you gone long?”

  “Only a moment.”

  “And did you pass anybody in the alleyway?”

  “The alleyway was deserted.”

  “Interesting.” The inspector turned his attention back to Hanni and me. “Did you ladies pass anybody as you walked down the alleyway?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Wait. There was a beggar sitting at the entrance to the alley, and then there were those two men sitting at the window of the tearoom. They haven’t moved.”

  “Beggar, Foreman. Go and check on him and who he’s seen,” Sugg barked. “And James. Ask those geezers in the tea shop.”

  The crowd was steadily growing. Darcy handed me a teacup and I drank gratefully.

  “If you don’t mind my suggesting, Inspector,” Darcy said, “but might it not be wise for me to escort these two young ladies home before the gentlemen of the press get here? This lady is a visiting foreign princess, after all. We don’t want to cause an international incident, do we?”

  I heard the whisper run through the crowd. Foreign princess. Some of them ran off to fetch their friends. Obviously this was
going to be more interesting than the usual back-alley murder.

  “And who might you be?” Sugg demanded, apparently not the least concerned about causing an international incident.

  “O’Mara is the name,” Darcy said with a certain swagger. “I am a friend of the young ladies.”

  “And I suppose you’re also a prince or a duke?”

  “Not at all. My father is Lord Kilhenny, Irish peer, if that’s what you want to know, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “So were you here with the young ladies when they discovered the body?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I’ve only just arrived here myself.”

  “And what made you happen to be in the same, disreputable part of town? Pure coincidence?”

  “Not at all,” Darcy said again. “I called on Lady Georgiana and her butler told me where she had gone. He expressed concern, so I did the only decent thing and went to keep an eye on them.”

  “And exactly why did he express concern?” Sugg was still attacking like a bulldog, shaking and not letting go.

  “Isn’t that obvious, Inspector? Would you want your innocent daughters wandering through this part of London? These girls have been raised in seclusion. They have little experience of the seedier side of life in the big city.”

  Sugg stared at him, one eyebrow raised and a half smirk on his lips, then he said, “So you arrived on the scene exactly when?”

  “Just before yourself. As I came around the corner into the alley, I met Lady Georgiana, running to find a police constable. She was extremely distressed. I brought her back to have a cup of tea. And now, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to take her home. And the princess, naturally.”

  I was conscious of the growing crowd, swarming around us, staring with unabashed curiosity. It would only be moments before the first pressmen arrived. “You know where I live, Inspector,” I said. “Her Highness is staying with me. If you have more questions for us, we’d be happy to answer them.”

  Harry Sugg looked from me to Hanni to Darcy and then back again. I think he was trying to decide whether he’d lose face by allowing us to go.

  “If these ladies’ faces appear on the front page of the newspapers in connection with an East End murder, the king and queen would not be pleased—you can see that, can’t you?” Darcy said. “Added to which, they are both clearly suffering from shock.”

  “I’m not happy about this,” Harry Sugg said. “Not at all happy, I can tell you. I know you young things and what you do for thrills. Stealing policemen’s helmets, for one thing, and what goes on at your parties. Don’t think I don’t know about your thrills. Oh, I know right enough.” His eyes didn’t leave my face as he spoke, then he took a step closer to me so that I was conscious of that fawn mustache dancing up and down in front of my face. “Two bodies in one week. That’s a little more than coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “The other death was a horrible accident,” I said. “I was there on the balcony when it happened. Nobody was near him. He fell. An awful accident.”

  “If you say so, my lady. I just find it strange, that’s all. In the police force we are trained not to believe in coincidences. If something looks suspicious, it usually is. And if there’s some kind of connection, trust me, I’m going to sniff it out.”

  “I assure you there is no connection between us and the murdered man, Inspector,” I said coldly. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like you to take us home, Darcy, please.”

  Nobody stopped us as we walked out of the tea shop and forced our way through the crowd to Wapping High Street.

  Chapter 19

  Nobody spoke much as we sat on the tube back to Hyde Park Corner. I had thought of getting a taxicab, but we couldn’t find one in that part of the city and in the end it seemed simpler to take the underground. Even Hanni was unnaturally subdued and didn’t attempt to flirt with Darcy once. Darcy escorted us all the way back from the station to Rannoch House.

  “You’ll be okay now, will you?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Thank you for coming to look for us. If you hadn’t been there, we’d probably have been off to prison in a Black Maria by now.”

  “Nonsense. You know how to stick up for yourself pretty well, I’d say.”

  “I’m very grateful. It is most kind of you to be concerned about us.” I held out my hand. I’ve found that in moments of great duress, I revert to upbringing and become exceedingly proper.

  A look of amusement flashed across Darcy’s face. “You’re dismissing the peasants, are you?”

  “I’m sorry, but under the circumstances...”

  Darcy took my hand and squeezed it. “I understand. Go and have a stiff drink. You’ll feel better. You’ll feel even better knowing that it’s Binky’s brandy you’re drinking.”

  At that I managed a smile. As I went to withdraw my hand from his, his fingers closed around mine. “Georgie,” he said. He opened his mouth to say more, but Hanni stepped between us. “I also thank you for saving us,” she said, and wrapped her arms around his neck, depositing a big kiss on his cheek. I was so shocked I just stood there. Darcy extricated himself, giving me a half-embarrassed smile, and went on his way. I steered Hanni up the front steps.

  “What will happen now?” Hanni asked. “I think that man did not believe us that we found poor Sidney dead.”

  “They certainly can’t believe that one of us killed him. What possible motive could we have?” I asked, but even as I said it I saw that there might be motives that the police could unearth. I hadn’t forgotten the cocaine at Gussie’s party. And I had found Hanni sitting at the table in the kitchen with the cocaine users. What if Sidney were somehow involved with that? If he ran a cocaine ring, or he had not paid his drug debts—I had read that these people were ruthless. Maybe it was not for nothing that he worked in the East End of London, so close to the river. Perhaps the respectable bookshop was merely a front for less respectable activities. Perhaps this inquiry would open a whole can of worms. I felt quite sick as we went into the house.

  My grandfather was waiting anxiously for us. I sent Hanni up to her room to lie down before lunch and then I went down to the kitchen, where he was polishing silver, and told him exactly what had happened. He listened with a concerned frown on his face.

  “That’s nasty, that is. Very nasty. Someone is killed at a party, then a few days later the princess meets someone she had met at that very party again, at the British Museum of all places, and he invites her to a bookstore in a shady part of London and you stumble upon him dead? It all sounds like too much of a coincidence to me.”

  “That’s what the policeman in charge said. But it was a coincidence, Granddad. That’s the awful thing. I know the first death was an accident. And why on earth would one of us want to kill poor Sidney Roberts? We both spoke with him at the party and he seemed a harmless, earnest kind of chap. Rather sweet, actually. Hanni must certainly have thought so. She seemed rather smitten with him. But we’d only met him on those two occasions. We knew nothing about him, really.”

  “If I was you, ducks, I’d get on the old blow piece to the palace right away. Let Her Majesty know what has happened and let her decide what to do with the princess.” He put down the silver teapot he had been polishing. “I told you that one wanted watching, didn’t I? Never did feel quite easy about her.”

  “Oh, but, Granddad, Hanni had nothing to do with this. She wanted to meet Sidney again because she is a little boy-mad, given her years in the convent. And he was very nice looking. And I think she was intrigued that he was a communist. But that’s all.”

  “I’m not saying she stabbed the poor bloke or nothing. It was just a hunch I had about her. I’ve seen the type before. Where she goes, trouble follows. You’ll be well rid of her, ducks.”

  “Oh, dear. I have to say that I agree with you. I’ll go and telephone the palace right away.”

  “Have your lunch first.” Granddad put an arm around my shoulders. “You look as if you’v
e seen a ghost, you do. Nasty shock, I expect.”

  “Yes, it was. It was utterly horrible. And then the police and everything . . .” I didn’t mean to cry but suddenly I could feel tears trickling down my cheeks.

  “There, there. Don’t cry, my love,” Granddad said, and he enveloped me in a big bear hug. I stood there with my head on his shoulder, feeling the comforting firmness of his arms around me and realizing at the same time how strange this was. I believe it must have been the first time in my life that a relative actually hugged me and comforted me. Oh, to be sure, Nanny had hugged me when I had fallen down as a small child, but my parents had never been there. So this is what it is like for ordinary people, I thought. They care about each other. They comfort each other. I resolved there and then that I would be an ordinary mother to my children and hug them hard and often.

  “I’m so glad you are here,” I said.

  “Me too, my love,” he murmured, stroking my hair as if I were a little child. “Me too.” Then he released me. “You’d better go and keep an eye on Her Highness before she gets into any more trouble.”

  “Oh, dear, yes, I suppose I had.” I turned back to the stairs.

  “Your cook’s made one of her famous pork pies,” Granddad called after me. “Known for her pork pies, ’ettie is.”

  I met Hanni coming down the stairs as I emerged through the baize door.

  “Is lunch ready? I’m starving,” she said, and in truth she looked as if she had just woken from a good night’s sleep. She had changed out of the dress with blood on it and looked fresh and innocent. I stood looking at her for a moment, weighing in my mind what my grandfather had said. Was she indeed one of those people who seem to invite trouble, or had the last week been an unlucky one for both of us?

  “It’s almost ready,” I said. “I see you’ve changed your clothes.”

  “I fear that dress will have to be thrown away,” she said. “Irmgardt is working on it, but I do not think she will be able to remove the blood from the skirt.”

  “I should go up and wash and change,” I said. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”