Death and the Princess

by Robert Barnard

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Royal Summons

  Chapter 2: The Loyal Subject

  Chapter 3: Flunkeydom

  Chapter 4: Young Blades

  Chapter 5: House Visiting

  Chapter 6: Country Pleasures

  Chapter 7: Family and Friends

  Chapter 8: By His Own Hand?

  Chapter 9: Scene of the Crime

  Chapter 10: Young Woodley

  Chapter 11: High Places

  Chapter 12: Acting Styles

  Chapter 13: State Visit

  Chapter 14: Lions’ Den

  Chapter 15: Two Pieces in the Puzzle

  Chapter 16: Henry Shorthouse Tucker

  Chapter 17: The Figure in the Frieze

  Chapter 18: Endings

  About Robert Barnard

  CHAPTER 1

  Royal Summons

  The story of my intimate association with Royalty begins on a January day in 198 — .

  Does that sound like a passage from the ghastly memoirs of some Edwardian gaiety girl, long past gaiety or anything else except mendacity? Well, my association with royalty wasn’t like that at all. You might say, I suppose, that the Princess brought a touch of glamour into my humdrum life. You might even say I brought a whiff of excitement into her humdrum life. But both these formulations are a bit too positive, compared with what actually happened.

  Anyway, on the day in question I was lingering over a last cup of breakfast tea with Jan, my wife, and Daniel, my small son. They were shortly to return to Newcastle, where my wife is studying Arabic (for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me). I had nothing particular bothering me in the way of cases: about the only thing I was engaged on at the time was a leakage of classified information about welfare payments from a social security office. Cases do not come more tedious than that. Nevertheless, it was at that breakfast table that my life was invaded by royalty — though admittedly by minuscule royalty. The invasion signalled itself in the form of a ringing phone.

  ‘Perry Trethowan,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Perry,’ said the gravelly voice of my superior, Joe Grierley, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘I’ve got one already,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be finding a Mole in the Shoreditch Social Security Office. Feeding classified information about benefits to the New Statesman.’

  ‘Forget it. You’re going up in the world, Perry. I picked you specially, because you’re couth.’

  ‘I am not couth,’ I protested. ‘And I do not like cases that involve noble families.’ (The last upper-crust family I’d been criminally involved with had been my own.)

  ‘Noble families? Who said anything about noble families? We can do better than that. You are going to be personal bodyguard to the Princess Helena. No less.’

  ‘No less?’ I burst out. ‘No more? might be a better question. What sort of a job is that for a man of my seniority?’ I’d just been made Superintendent, and didn’t at all fancy spending hours and hours attending charity matinées, royal tours of ball-bearing factories, and Girl Guide jamborees. ‘Surely you can find someone else?’ I pleaded. ‘Couthness can’t be in that short supply.’

  ‘Couthness is as rare as muffins,’ said Joe. ‘And as you will realize when you think about it, I wouldn’t have put you down for this without a reason. I’m putting you on with Joplin, who can do most of the charity matinée stuff. You are to have general responsibility for security. I’ll see you this afternoon, and put you into the picture about the whys and wherefores.’

  I was slightly mollified. The thought of sitting in limousines making well-bred conversation about the weather had caused me to jump the gun a bit. I said with a sigh of acquiescence: ‘OK then, if I must. How do I address her, by the way?’

  ‘Your Royal Highness first off, and then Ma’am,’ said Joe. ‘Pronounced Marm. I know all about it. I once did the same for Princess Anne.’

  ‘Really? What was she like?’

  ‘Screaming blue murder most of the time, and wetting her nappies. It was a while ago.’

  ‘Well, at least mine is out of that stage,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, yours is out of that stage. If we could keep her in a playpen all day, things would be a lot easier. I’ll send Joplin and a car round to your flat at ten — right?’

  ‘I suppose so. Plain clothes?’

  ‘Uniform. And make damn sure it’s impeccable.’

  So there were me and Jan spending the time until ten o’clock brushing hair and dandruff off my uniform and cleaning shoes to the sort of spit-and-polish brightness I remembered from my army days. At least that’s the sort of work you can talk over, and we spent the time dredging up all we knew about the Princess Helena.

  ‘She’s absolutely gorgeous,’ said Jan, with more than a suggestion of impending suspicion in her eye.

  And the fact is, gorgeous she was, and this was what everybody knew about her. She had started doing the odd royal chore about three years before, when she was barely out of her ’teens. The press had been enraptured, scenting limitless fodder, and the young lady had become patron of this, honorary president of that, until very soon she was taken on to the royal strength, with a nice little sum on the Civil List and apartments in Kensington Palace, which one gathers is the regular doss-house for minor royals.

  Her connection with the Royal Family was not particularly close. She was the daughter of the Princess Charlotte, who was the daughter of — well, I forget who, but I think it went back to George V, or Edward VII or someone. Princess Charlotte had been mildly notorious in her time: a royal high-liver about whom risqué stories were told at cocktail parties, songs were sung at hunt balls. Not that there was ever anything much said publicly. Luckily her heyday had been in the post-war years and the ’fifties, when, if you remember, anyone who said anything faintly critical of the Queen was run through with middle-class umbrellas in public places, and burned in effigy by Bishops in their Cathedral Closes. So there was never much in the newspapers and tattle-sheets, but — as I say — the whisper did get around. Jokes. Her name didn’t help . . .

  Well, Charlotte had married a German princeling with a name as long as your arm some time in the late ’fifties, had produced the undoubtedly gorgeous little Helena, and had then divorced in a blaze of publicity. By now, it was the ’sixties, the age of Private Eye, and royalty was no longer wrapped in jewellers’ cotton-wool, or stuck up for worship on a side-altar. Long before the decade ended she had driven her sports car over a cliff in Sardinia, taking with her a highly unsuitable escort and an amount of alcohol and drugs unusual even for Italy. A lot of dolce vite ended roughly the same way at that time.

  So my little lady was brought up very quietly in the country by other exceedingly obscure offshoots of royalty. I suspect they may have been scared of something hereditary coming out in her: they sent her to a ridiculously decorous girls’ school, the sort which seems to aim to turn out dowagers. Still, it seemed from what one read that they had not quite managed to snuff out that hereditary spark.

  ‘I wish I wasn’t going back to Newcastle at the end of the week,’ said Jan.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Not absolutely altogether,’ she said.

  ‘Come off it. Princesses don’t bed down with their police bodyguards,’ I said.

  ‘I bet her mot
her did,’ said Jan, and I didn’t feel like taking her up on that. ‘But it’s not so much that I want to keep an eye on you,’ she went on (why is one always insulted when one’s wife says things like that?). ‘I want to hear all the details. What the apartments are like. What she wears. What she eats. Who she’s going with. Particularly that. It’s not often you get a chance of absolutely reliable inside gossip about the Royals. It’s usually “I know a chap who knows a girl who knows another girl . . .” ’

  ‘You,’ I said, ‘are a thundering, old-fashioned, arse-licking snob.’

  ‘I don’t know where you get that idea,’ said Jan, who did.

  Then the car came, and I marched off to my date with the Royal Family — spick and span, resplendent, the very model of a modern police superintendent. Joplin was in the car already, and we went over the day’s security arrangements and some of the general do’s and don’t’s about protecting royal personages, about which he had been thoroughly briefed at the Yard. Joplin’s about twenty-two, and a marvellous bloke to work with. He looks stolid, sensible, even a bit thick in a pleasant kind of way — until you notice his eyes. Then you realize there isn’t a thing that he misses, not a detail. Those little London peepers are darting everywhere. He not only picks up everything that’s said, he photographs the scene while he’s listening, so that he can reproduce it for you afterwards, down to the tiniest detail. A marvellous young man, Joplin.

  We got to Kensington Palace in a matter of minutes, or so it seemed. The driver, well-briefed, took us round to a discreet side-entrance, overlooking a street of embassies, and I took in a brief impression of a solid, comfortable Bill-and-Mary sort of pile while I talked to Joplin and sent him off to natter with the regular bobbies around the place. I myself was looked for, and met, very smoothly; then I was dribbled from flunkey to flunkey, like a genteel football, until finally I landed up in what must have been some kind of antechamber — mostly dark wood, with a peeling ceiling and a lot of musty greens and faded golds — and talking to a lady in her nondescript thirties. She had ‘lady’ written all over her, and was apparently ‘in waiting’ to boot. She was rather prim, severe, even repressed, and would have seemed rather an odd companion for the Princess Helena, had it not struck me that she could have been chosen either by the young lady herself, to provide piquant contrast, or by Someone Higher, to act as a watchdog.

  ‘Her Royal Highness will see you at once,’ she said, in the sort of flat upper-class voice I like least, replete with frigidity and effort. She went on, as if screwing the words out, and forcing an appearance of amiability: ‘She always likes to meet new members of her security guard. But she has to leave for a luncheon engagement at eleven-thirty. I may have to interrupt you. She has very little idea of time.’

  ‘Worrying,’ I said.

  She looked at me frostily, blinked, and led the way forward. I walked behind her, wondering idiotically whether there was any etiquette about room-entering that I was too raw to know about, whether it was right foot first or something lunatic like that. And I was still thinking about that when I was formally (very!) introduced by the lady-in-waiting, who then drifted in a superior manner out of the room.

  And so there we were, together. And she was breathtaking, she really was — every bit as gorgeous as the press spreads suggested. I suppose delectable is the word that sums it up. She had a wonderful little body, confidently carried, and the dress she was wearing, while in every way royal, decorous, and hideously expensive-looking, still seemed to cling provocatively at interesting places and tantalize you by new suggestions every time she moved. Her hair was dark, short, and beautifully modelled around her ears; her mouth was wide, her eyes were enormous, dark and sparkling. Oh, she was a pippin all right!

  ‘Hello,’ she said. And then she giggled. ‘I say, aren’t you large.’

  The voice was a let-down, I had to admit. It was tinkling, trivial, more than a little silly. Possibly a voice for bed, but hell to hear over the breakfast-table.

  ‘Yes, Your Royal Highness,’ I said. ‘I am generally considered too much of a good thing.’

  She giggled again, delightedly. ‘Oh, I didn’t say that. Not at all. You’re not a bit like your predecessor, you know.’

  ‘My predecessor, Ma’am?’

  ‘My personal bodyguard. I’ve had several of them, and some have been perfectly lovely. But McPhail was awfully dour.’

  She pronounced it ‘dower’, but I knew what she meant. Inspector McPhail always looked as if he’d only spoken twelve words in the last week, and bitterly regretted six of them.

  ‘Yes, McPhail does seem to take the idea of the Silent Service a bit far,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

  She giggled again. ‘I’m glad you’re not like him. Because I like somebody to talk to. My lady-in-waiting is perfectly sweet, of course, but terribly quiet. I like somebody with something to say for himself. I say, though, you’re not an intellectual, are you?’

  ‘No, Ma’am. I hardly have two ideas to rub together, most of the time.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad. Because I’m awfully stupid, really. I sometimes have dreadful difficulty with the speeches they give me.’

  ‘Oh, does somebody write them for you, Ma’am?’ I said.

  ‘Of course. What did you think?’

  I was leading up to saying that I thought royal speeches were written by computer, but instinct told me that would be going too far in the first five minutes of our acquaintanceship. Couth of you, Perry old chap! And the fact is, there was something about her, in spite of the giggling and the girlishness, that warned me off, told me there were borders not to be strayed over.

  So I merely said: ‘Silly of me, Ma’am. I should have realized.’

  ‘They’re all written out. Otherwise I should just stand up there and gape at them. I say, you wouldn’t like to hear me say my speech for this afternoon, would you? I’m having lunch with Aid for the Elderly, and then I have to address the Annual General Meeting. And I know they’ll have put some frightfully long words in it.’

  ‘Of course, Ma’am, if you think it would help.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she said, looking at me with those eyes, those enormous eyes — dark, inviting, appealing eyes which had everything except intelligence. She blinked them with conscious provocation, then danced over to the desk.

  ‘If you’re with me for a long time,’ she said, ‘you’ll get awfully used to speeches about the Old. The Old are rather my thing.’

  Come to think about it, I had seen an awful lot of pictures of her visiting Twilight Homes — pictures of toothless old men mumbling speeches of loyalty and gratitude as they shook the royal paw. So the Royals specialized, did they? It seemed incongruous, at first, loading the delectable Helena with the burden of the national old age. On the other hand, she must obviously have brought dim, warm stirrings to innumerable aged loins the length and breadth of the country, happy reminders of remembered pleasures, vain hopes that all was not lost. So no doubt there was a grain of sense in it, and she did a lot of good in her way.

  She picked up a couple of sheets of paper, on which I saw some very widely-spaced typing — to minimize the peering at a script, I supposed.

  ‘It’s awful bosh,’ she said gaily, ‘but you have to read it as if you know what it meant, even if you can’t pretend you do actually mean it. Well, here goes.’ She swallowed, and dived into the shallow waters of royal prose.

  ‘It is a great pleasure to me to be present this afternoon at the Annual General Meeting of Aid for the Elderly. As your Patron, I have seen, in my travels up and down the country, the splendid work you do in providing retirement homes and special comforts for the not so young, those dignified and independent citizens who are in too many ways the forgotten members of our community. In their twilight years, old people need above all to maintain their independence and self-respect, and in this context the motto of our Society is both significant and inspiring: “Self-reliance where possible, help where necessary.” We are all committed to this
common gaol —’

  ‘Goal,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ She raised her eyes from her script with more than a touch of hauteur. Not a young lady, definitely, to step over the border with.

  ‘I think, Ma’am, it should be “goal”: “We are all committed to this common goal.” ’

  She thought for a few seconds, and then giggled.

  ‘Oh yes, I suppose it should. The way I said it sounds like some of the Old People’s Homes I’ve visited. Aren’t you clever! And you couldn’t even see the script.’

  She went back to her text and droned her way through it. It sounded like the collective wisdom of a Sunday School class from a particularly dim suburb of Bournemouth. Occasionally, however, it got more technical, and I was able to advise her on the pronunciation of ‘gerontology’. She was awfully grateful, she said, because she must have been getting it wrong for years and no one had told her. At the end she was quite effusive.

  ‘I can see we’re going to get on awfully well,’ she said. ‘Most of the other policemen have been just that bit stuffy. I mean, always trying to stop one. I do think at my age you’ve got to have just a bit of freedom, don’t you?’

  She opened those enormous eyes still wider, in appeal.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Now, in that connection, Ma’am — ’

  But we were interrupted by the lady-in-waiting. She knocked discreetly and entered in what must have been her characteristic way: silent, thin-lipped, fussy, disapproving.

  ‘The car leaves in ten minutes, Your Royal Highness,’ she drawled. ‘One doesn’t want to be late.’

  One didn’t mind in the least being late, I suspected, if one was the Princess Helena. There was something almost of petulance in her reaction.

  ‘Oh dear, what a shame! Just when we were beginning to be friends. You’re not coming with us, I suppose.’

  ‘No, Ma’am. Sergeant Joplin will be with you today.’

  ‘Is he nice?’ She caught a look from her lady-in-waiting, and pouted still more. ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll have lots of opportunities in the future. I must fly!’