Death and the Princess

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to be a bit careful about going to places like that?’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

  She looked at me, wide-eyed and giggling.

  ‘But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!’ she said. ‘Frightfully exciting!’

  I was reminded of an Ibsen heroine: wasn’t it Hilde Wangel who went around saying things like that? But another name occurred to me still more forcefully: Hedda Gabler, the lady who liked to make exciting things happen around her. The very thought made the blood run cold. I was responsible for the security of a royal Hedda Gabler.

  CHAPTER 5

  House Visiting

  The phone call came next morning while I was shaving, and while Jan was somewhat blearily giving Daniel his breakfast cornflakes (for she had been busy way into the night pumping me for details of the previous night’s fracas, with all the persistent gentleness of a KGB inquisitor). I wiped myself free of lather and went out into the little hall, knowing somehow I wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘Perry Trethowan,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘Big Perry of Scotland Yard, no less, whose father was done in while doing his evening bend-and-stretch.’

  ‘Who is that?’ I said frostily (because that is a topic I always nip in the bud).

  ‘Don’t you recognize the voice? The voice you heard playing Mr Darcy on television — the series you saw while you were down under?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you I’d blown your cover — is that the expression? I never get roles in spy stories; not seedy enough, I suppose. I puzzled and puzzled over who you were through my drunken haze last night — after I’d blacked that little pimp’s eye and been politely shown the door. This morning it came to me in a flash. Actors always say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I suppose the same doesn’t go for policemen, does it?’

  ‘There’s no question of blowing my cover,’ I muttered untruthfully. ‘I’m in charge of the Princess’s security.’

  ‘Then why all that garbage about Australia? But don’t worry, I won’t gab. I like the thought of your keeping an eye on that upper-class ponce — even if you are keeping it on me at the same time.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said, making my uncertainty rather obvious. ‘Would you mind if I came round to see you some time?’

  ‘Any time. Come round to my dressing-room before the show. Or I’m in the book, under my real name.’

  ‘What’s your real name?’

  ‘Mervyn Bowles. We all have our guilty secrets, don’t we?’

  Well, I suppose I should have expected it. It will be a few years before I can attain anonymity again. In the circumstances it seemed sensible to attempt no more cover-ups of who I was, or of what I was doing, though there was every reason not to broadcast the special fears we had for the Princess’s safety. Although it was certainly not normal practice to case the friends and boy-friends of royal personages (except, of course, very discreetly, if they were in any way contentious), the current crop were not to know this. I intended one way or another to interview them all. But that wasn’t the only thing on my plate, or even the most immediate. I had to go over all the routines of royal protection, and as soon as possible I intended taking a trip to Knightley. The death of Bill Tredgold interested me, and I wasn’t sure that the police had done as much as they might in that direction.

  So that morning I accompanied the Princess on a visit to a canning factory in East London. There seemed no particular reason for the visit, except perhaps to support those few areas of British industry not actually bankrupt, and it was all stupendously boring, I can tell you. All there is to report is that the Princess behaved admirably throughout: she almost convinced even me that she was interested in what she was shown. And the lady-in-waiting — whose name, I gathered, was Lady Dorothy Lowndes-Gore — kept close, maintained a profile lower than a snake’s armpit, and drawled out odd little driblets of conversation with the firm’s functionary deputed to look after her. So we all did our job, but really it was a right drag, and after a dreary lunch I was happy to be able to deliver them back to the side entrance of Kensington Palace and follow my own devices.

  My own devices took me to a very different palace.

  I knew the Palace of Westminster better than I had known Kensington Palace. I had had a stint of guarding the assembled Lords and Commons during my early days in the Force. It had mostly consisted of standing at the main entrance looking impressive, and answering questions of stupendous idiocy (‘Where is Margaret Thatcher’s powder room?’ or ‘Is this St Paul’s Cathedral?’) from every nation, colour and creed under the sun. Not an enlivening period of my life. Still, I knew the place, the routines, even some of the personnel. It seemed a good idea to beard Harry Bayle there, rather than at home. Perhaps even observe him in action. So I made my way to the Mother of Parliaments.

  The people in charge of security and handling the public at Westminster are a stable lot. Me, I’d regard it as a life sentence in a madhouse, but some of them seem quite to like it: it adds a new dimension to the television news. Anyway, knowing some of them from my earlier stint helped a lot, because things were a bit hectic there, in preparation for a big debate on Trade Union reform, due to start later in the afternoon. It was like a bank holiday football match. The place was swarming with seedy Union officials backed up by real horny-handed sons of toil, all of them going through the charade of pretending that anything anyone did could persuade the Prime Minister to change her mind. Such pretences are part of the democratic process, I suppose, but they are also powerful aphrodisiacs to inflated egos. Everyone was huffing and puffing like mad. I got one of the boys aside and told him what I wanted.

  ‘Harry Bayle?’ said Sergeant Crosse, gentle, firm and unflappable. ‘Well, I know he’s meeting the boilermakers at half past three, and then the sheet-metal people at five. And he’s bound to want to talk in the debate, if he can catch the Speaker’s eye. He pisses the Speaker off, by the by, so he leans over backwards to be fair to him. He may even have a question down . . .’ He consulted the order paper. ‘Yes, he does. Would you like to see him in action?’

  I would indeed. So Crosse led me through various passages, full of members of the public with special passes from their MPs, and finally I found myself in the well-remembered shadow at the back of the public gallery. It was full, in anticipation of the debate, and so was the House. MPs, like actors, give of their best to a full house, and lots of them try to get in on the act if they know they have constituents in the gallery, to prove they’re alive. I gazed down on the opposition benches, full of Libs and Labs and Social Democrats; and there, sitting with studied ease but really panting to be heard, was Harry Bayle.

  He’d been Henry in his first election addresses, of course, but since then his matiness had grown with his arrogance. His father had been a bank manager — and one has to be wary of the matiness of bank managers too. Henry had been brought up in a highly genteel Hertfordshire town, gone to a minor public school, seemed destined for a life of middle-class comfort somewhere in the gin-and-tonic belt. But then at Oxford he had swerved to the left, professing all sorts of nonsenses traceable back to Cultural Revolution slogans. He’d righted himself as soon as he got his degree, and he’d got himself elected in 1974 as a sort of Wilsonian Socialist, if that isn’t a totally meaningless description. He was then twenty-four — not the baby of the house, but definitely kindergarten. He hadn’t behaved with the modesty and deference appropriate to his youth and newness. He had veered rapidly left again, attached himself to Tony Benn, but then, after a disagreement with that gentleman’s acolytes, had more recently begun staking out a left-wing pasture of his own. Jan’s parents, whenever they saw him on television, muttered, ‘He gets his orders from Moscow’ — they are working-class Tories of the worst kind, and their vocabulary of abuse is hardly of today, when the line-up in Red Square looks like a day outing from a particularly dreary old people’s home. I couldn�
��t see Harry Bayle taking orders from them. I think he had an instinct for the main chance and took orders from it.

  And here he was, on his feet now; tall, striking-looking, with dark straight hair deliberately not too tidy; he exuded confidence, and had a ringing voice that had had its middle-class, home counties twang flattened out into classlessness.

  ‘Is the Minister aware — ?’ Oh God, is the Minister aware. How I hate their jargon! The assumption that the Minister ought to sit up all night pondering the defective sewage system of Much-Piddlebury-on-the-Wold. It’s just another aspect of their appalling self-importance, and it really got me down when I had to listen to it every day. Actually, in this case the matter of which the Minister ought to be aware was a thoroughly disgraceful case of a firm which employed immigrant women, grossly underpaying them, and resisting any attempts they made to unionize themselves. One would have been totally on Harry Bayle’s side if one hadn’t had the suspicion that the question was designed to improve his ratings with the anti-racial, feminist and Trade Union lobbies, and that it had been put down for today in anticipation of his meetings later with the boilermakers and the sheet-metal workers. In the public gallery I noticed grizzled heads nodding approval.

  Anyway, the question and supplementaries, and the answers from the Junior Minister (all about giving time for the due processes, not rushing in, the determination of the government not to intervene in matters which — you know the patter: business as usual at Westminster) took about five minutes, and at the end Harry Bayle sat down, obviously well satisfied. After sitting through the next question or two, for form’s sake, he slipped out of the chamber. And so did I.

  By the time I got back to the main hall, he was there himself. He was clutching a batch of papers and an attaché case, and seemed to be on his way somewhere, but he had got tangled with some constituents, and he was glad-handing them in a big way. It was ‘Bill’ this and ‘Sally’ that, and clapping Jim on the back and putting his arm around Betty, and lots of laughter and ribbing. Watching him from a distance I could see he was itching to get off in search of stray Trade Unionists around the place: it was, after all, Trade Unionists who had the big say in Labour Party elections these days. But he didn’t let them see this, not at all, because he managed the whole encounter very nicely indeed. I began to see that there was more to him than the smart political operator: there was the power-seeker, the crowd-pleaser, the publicity manipulator and the pure and simple shit.

  It was as he was extricating himself from the devoted tentacles of Bill and Sally and Jim and Betty that I approached him.

  ‘Mr Bayle? I’m Superintendent Trethowan, CID. I wonder if I could have a word with you for a moment? Just a little matter of security.’

  He was obviously annoyed at being interrupted in his purposes again, and he put on a rather sickening smile.

  ‘Security? Really, is it necessary? I don’t think any of my constituents wants to assassinate me.’

  He was gesturing towards them in a sycophantic way when I said: ‘It was the security of the Princess Helena that I wanted to talk about, sir.’

  He froze. He looked like an Archbishop of Canterbury who has just been accused of owning half shares in a pædophiliac brothel. After a full second, and a swallow, he shook himself and ushered me over to a corner.

  ‘Really,’ he said, settling himself down on to a bench with his bag and papers. ‘Did you have to do that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?’

  ‘Well, you might have realized that . . .’ He found it impossible, or too embarrassing, to explain. ‘Oh, never mind. I suppose one can’t expect too much sensitivity from the fuzz.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said. ‘We’re not paid for our quivering sensibility. I take it that you mean your constituents would be shocked by your associating with the royal family?’

  ‘Most of them would be tickled pink. But those particular ones . . . Well, I might not be able to convince them that to me she’s just — just a — ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, get on with it, man. What is this all about?’

  I launched myself confidently into the sea of untruth.

  ‘The fact is, sir, we’ve reason to believe that there may be a threat to the Princess’s life — in fact, from the IRA.’ (Thank God for the IRA! What would we do without it? Have to go back to the old-fashioned anarchists, I suppose.) ‘This being the case, we’re naturally checking up on all the Princess’s . . . contacts, so I should want to talk to you in any case, since we gather you’ve been seeing something of each other. What worries us about you, sir, is that together you would make such a doubly inviting target.’

  I obviously wasn’t convincing him. His face slid into a sneer of disbelief.

  ‘Oh, come on, now, Inspector, or whatever you are. I’m pretty well known to be on the left of the party. I’ve no particular interest in Ireland, but it’s us those boys get on best with. We speak up for them from time to time. It’s the Conservatives these chaps would want to get at, particularly now they’re in power.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘the Princess is not associating with any Conservatives at the moment. She is associating with you. And as far as we can see, you could be a brace of sitting birds.’

  He sat there, complacent, impatient, not open to conviction. ‘This sounds like a lot of police bullshit to me, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ve always said that the police create more crime than they solve.’

  ‘It’s a point of view,’ I said, suave, very suave. ‘I’ve heard people say that politicians create more problems than they solve. We all have our critics. Tell me, sir, where have you and the Princess been accustomed to meet?’

  ‘Oh, we met at a film première. Charity do. I don’t hold much with charities — most of them are just excuses for bourgeois do-gooding — but I do sit on a Parliamentary Commission on the British film industry. I think we’re meant to find out if it still exists. That’s why I was there.’

  ‘I see. But that wasn’t quite my question. I asked you where you had been accustomed to meet.’

  He floundered visibly. ‘Well . . . we’ve met at parties, that kind of thing . . . been to the theatre, though frankly that’s a bit too public for me . . . met in my flat.’

  ‘Ah yes, that would be at — ?’

  ‘I live in Dolphin Square.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But according to our information the flat you took the Princess to was in — ’

  ‘So you’ve been following us?’ He flung open his arms in an angry gesture. ‘I’ve half a mind to ask a question of the Home Secretary about that.’

  ‘I doubt whether, on thinking it over, you will want to, sir.’

  He was not dim. That thought had struck him even as he said it. He gave in with bad grace.

  ‘Oh, all right then. The fact is, some of us here have a place — a sort of pied-à-terre — where we can go to, to — you know. My wife lives in the constituency, but she’s taken to coming up to London unexpectedly. She caught me once, and — well, I don’t have to spell it out to you, I suppose. So there’s this little flat down river — it used to be Price-Feverel’s, before he married — and we club together to pay the rent, and . . .’

  Well, well, I thought. Price-Feverel was a Conservative, a Junior Treasury Minister, one of the rigid monetarist types the PM seemed to get on best with. An inter-party knocking shop, then! Well, well, as I said. Good to see that some things transcend party barriers.

  ‘There’s really no cause for embarrassment, sir,’ I said, reapplying the suavity. ‘That sort of thing is no concern of mine, so long as you keep within the law. It’s only a question of knowing where the Princess might be if she is with you. Of course, one would like to be sure that the IRA knows nothing about this flat.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Inspector, you don’t really think they trail us when we slip out for a quick naughty, do you?’

  ‘That is exactly what I do think, sir. They might very well enjoy catching you
with, so to speak, your trousers down. They are probably not without a sense of humour.’

  ‘I’d say that is exactly what they are without, and I’m sure I know them better than you, Inspector. I had something to do with them while I was at Oxford.’

  Of course. He was in student politics at the time when young left-wingers would express solidarity with anyone provided they threw bombs. But I refrained from following him up the garden path after my own red herring. I did not think the IRA had anything to do with this.

  ‘What I came to ask you, sir, was this,’ I said. ‘You can see that if there is a threat of any kind to the Princess, it presents the police with special problems.’

  ‘I’m not really very interested in the police’s problems.’

  ‘But perhaps you might be a mite interested in the young lady’s safety?’ He pursed his lips. It wasn’t quite on to say he didn’t give a bugger. ‘It’s particularly difficult because we’re anxious not to let the Princess know we’re especially worried. What I’d like you to do is this: if you’re going out with the Princess, could you phone this number and leave a message telling me where you both are? Just “Bayle, 35 Cheyne Walk”, that kind of thing.’

  I handed him a card with a Scotland Yard number on it, but he took it only with reluctance, and stuffed it in with his papers.

  ‘Really, I don’t know . . . This does seem like an intolerable invasion of privacy.’

  ‘Even though the Princess’s life may be at stake?’ I asked. And as he seemed so little concerned, I added: ‘And yours too.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ He looked at his watch, scowled, and began stuffing his papers into his briefcase. ‘You’ve made me late for the boilermakers. But I’ll co-operate as far as I can.’

  A paper fluttered to the floor and I picked it up for him. It was an old election address. It had a picture of Harry Bayle, his wife, and two little boys. The wife was sensible-looking rather than glamorous — a down-to-earth, busy, right-thinking body, a typical Labour Party wife.