Death and the Princess

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Nice picture,’ I said, handing it back to him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Country Pleasures

  I’d got the idea that the next day was to hold another factory visit for the Princess. When I had started on the case I had gone through the Court Circulars and ‘Social Engagements’ columns of the papers, constructing the Princess’s round of activities for the last few and the next few months. But there must have been a change of plan, because when I rang Joplin that evening I found that next day was to be the first of two days of engagements in the Midlands. The opportunity was too good to be missed. I told Joplin that both of us would be going with her, but that I would be sloping off for a time to Knightley. I had a date with the dead Bill Tredgold.

  Well, we took the Royal train up to Birmingham — attended to the platform at Euston Station by all manner of station-masters and things, top-hatted and togged up to the nines, and all the more conspicuous when compared to the slovenliness and grime of all the other functionaries in sight. All the bowing and scraping was enough to make a cat laugh, but the Princess took it all in her stride — her demeanour commonsensical (didn’t everyone who went by train get this sort of treatment?) and a shade demure. I sat on the train with her and Lady Muck, in what was not so much a compartment as a large, rather plush room. Joplin patrolled the corridors, and seemed to consider himself well out of it. The Princess Helena and I talked about the day’s engagements, read the papers, commented on the news. The Princess read the Daily Grub for preference, which rather shocked me. In spite of that, though, I was beginning to revise my opinion about her intelligence. She might not have an idea in her head, not an idea of the abstract kind, but she did have a useful practical streak, a knowledge of where to draw the line, an ability to deal with people, and get them to do what she wanted. She coped admirably, for example, with Lady Dorothy Lowndes-Gore. She sat, upright and cool, in the corner of the apartment on wheels, reading one of those glossies that assumes its readers run a couple of Rolls and have more Georgian silver than they know what to do with. The Princess, in the midst of our chat, kept throwing remarks in her direction, and paid solemn attention to her drawled, inhibited replies. I could see she wished her a hundred miles away, so we could have a cosy chat about the fracas in the Wellington Club, but not by a whisker did she give any sign of this.

  The only time Lady Dorothy made any independent remark, it was addressed to me: ‘You’re one of the Northumberland Trethowans, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was,’ I said.

  She looked at me for a moment, as if my answer smacked of Jacobinism. Then she said: ‘I met your cousin Peter once,’ and dropped her head down once more into her glossy. I rather got the impression that much of her conversation was of this kind, that she acted as a Waugh-like ancestral voice, charting the ramifications of the Great Families, and lamenting their downfall.

  The engagement for the morning was of the Princess Helena’s traditional type: we all visited an old people’s home that was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. You can imagine what it was like: product of the Depression, its aim was obviously to produce just that in anybody who had anything to do with it today. There was a smell of new paint, obviously for the visit, but through doors one caught glimpses of peeling walls, sagging ceilings and arthritic sofas in the rooms the Princess was not to be taken into. The staff seemed to be recruited from the female relatives of Methodist missionaries, and the old people themselves gave every appearance of waiting impatiently for the last feeble spark to be extinguished.

  In this sort of environment the Princess flowered, like an outrageous orchid in a herbaceous border. She smiled, she flashed those splendid eyes, she bent solicitously over and chatted, and she made the staff feel they were a cross between Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry, fit only for translation to a heavenly home, or for CBEs at the very least. I began to appreciate her, not as a person, but as a performer: on duty she was a non-stop, never-flag show. At length we all tottered into the dining-room for drinks and lunch. The old people, we gathered, would be partaking of a ‘light lunch’ (cabbage-stalks and potato peelings, most probably) elsewhere in the building.

  The array of local worthies we were lumbered with was a mixed bunch. There were lots of the sort of red-faced, paunchy businessmen we’d met at the Wellington, whose rubicund, heavy-lidded aspect told of business lunches, and wage negotiations into the early hours. Then there were the Midlands gentry, consciously giving the event tone. They self-consciously left the Princess to the commercial interest — rather implying that they could talk to her any day of the week. I was given a drink to hold (I suspect on the direction of the lady-in-waiting, who had decided that I could not be treated like any old policeman), and I tried to mingle while not letting my guard down. I found myself talking — my eye on the Princess all the time — to someone who seemed to be a nob of some kind.

  The conversation turned out to be an elegant variation on the lady-in-waiting’s family obsession: we played the ‘I suppose you know’ game.

  ‘I hear you’re one of the Northumberland Trethowans. Everyone survive that nasty business last year?’

  ‘Everyone except my father,’ I said. ‘Mostly they thrived on it.’

  ‘Harpenden’s close to the Yorkshire border, isn’t it? I suppose you know the Witteringhams?’

  ‘I think I may have — ’

  ‘And the Northumberland Fortescues. Not the Derbyshire lot, but the younger branch. Now, they wouldn’t be all that far from you, would they?’

  ‘No, about twenty — ’

  ‘I say,’ he interrupted, with a sort of nervous intensity that covered the rudeness, ‘wasn’t your mother one of the Cumberland Godriches? You know, I think we must be related. I say, Dot — wasn’t my Aunt Margaret second cousin or something to the Cumberland Godriches?’

  ‘Yes, through her maternal grandmother,’ drawled Lady Dorothy.

  I was surprised to hear Lady Dorothy addressed as Dot, but not surprised to hear she had everyone’s family tree at the tips of her well-manicured fingers. The conversation pissed me off no end, but after a bit I got him on to horses and dogs, which I suspected were the only other things he knew anything about, and eventually we sat down to lunch. Lunch was one of those predictable disasters which occur when cooking staff used to making boiled fish and cottage pie try to do something a little special. After it, farewells were said, little speeches made, and the Princess was driven off to the home of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, where she was staying overnight. Later in the day she was to attend Beckett at the Birmingham Rep, but seniority goes for nothing if you can’t hand that sort of job over to the lower ranks, so I delivered the Princess, like a gorgeous parcel, into the safe-keeping of Joplin, commandeered a car from the Birmingham CID (who had been informed of my mission and had promised all co-operation) and about four o’clock hit the road for Knightley.

  Knightley, it turned out, was a charming little village of about four or five hundred inhabitants: not one of the Shropshire showplaces, not an obvious venue for Housman fanciers bent on tracing the course of the celebrated Lad from plough-shaft to gallows, but still a very pleasant little place indeed. I could see no obvious reason why Bill Tredgold should have found himself here, unless the reason was the hotel itself, where he spent his last night. It doubled as the local pub, called itself The Wrekin, and was a splendid Elizabethan half-timber job with about thirty-odd bedrooms, which no doubt filled up nicely in the summer and in the spring holiday periods. It was not one of those places that aim to provide every mod. con. to go with the frisson of uneven floors and oak-beamed ceilings. In fact, I doubted whether much modernization had taken place in the last fifty years or so. But it was comfortable and unpretentious, while being just that bit run down as well. Even the foyer, where the hotel reception was, had a nicely lived-in appearance, as if generations of farmers had eased their ample bottoms down into the armchairs.

  It was the owner who came when I rang, and I booked in for t
he night. I liked the look of the man, so I opened in on the subject immediately.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to like this, but in point of fact, I’m Police. Scotland Yard. It’s that business of William Tredgold again.’

  ‘Good God, surely we’ve had enough of you here going into that, haven’t we? It’s not good for business, you know.’

  ‘It might be better for business to have had a murder in the place than to have had a leaky gas-fire,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the owner admitted gloomily. ‘That’s not the sort of publicity we like though, either way. Look, you’d better come through to the office.’

  So I went round the desk and settled snugly into the little den behind — more of the threadbare old furniture, and a nice coal fire for both of us to sit around. He introduced himself as Terence Shaply: he was about fifty-five — a capable, intelligent chap, the sort who might have retired here from his own business, enjoying both the occasional bustle and the normal humdrum course of things. I had no doubt the place was well-run, in an unostentatious sort of way.

  I said: ‘Look, I have the details of the previous investigations, but it might be helpful if you went over the main points again.’

  He sighed. ‘That’s what they all say. Well, here goes. He — or rather they — checked in somewhere around seven o’clock.’

  ‘Had the room been reserved in advance?’

  ‘Oh yes, earlier in the day. I took the call myself.’

  ‘So it definitely wasn’t just a casual visit — they hadn’t just been driving through and decided to stop.’

  ‘Oh no, we get quite a bit of that sort of custom, but this wasn’t one of that kind. To tell you the truth, they didn’t seem to know each other that well, and I’m afraid I assumed it was a dirty weekend, arranged pretty much on the spur.’

  ‘You hadn’t had him before, for that reason?’

  ‘Never seen him in my life, to my knowledge.’

  ‘Do you — don’t be offended — do you get many people here on dirty weekends? You’re not, so to speak, known for it?’

  ‘Certainly not! Many more likely places than us for that. If we have dirty weekenders it’s likely to be the quiet here that attracts them. In other words, one or both of them are probably married.’

  ‘Yes — and that wasn’t the case here.’

  ‘No, I gather not. Well, he booked in at the desk there, and we swapped a few remarks about the weather. She stood well aside, and didn’t say anything. They went up to their room, weren’t up there long, and then came down and had dinner. That’s when I got the idea they didn’t know each other all that well — ’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, the conversation was just that bit forced: lots of jokes and laughing, but some awkward silences too. They played footy under the table, and giggled. You don’t do that if you’ve been going out with each other any length of time.’

  ‘Indeed not. What did they do next?’

  ‘They didn’t linger over dinner. They went straight upstairs, and that was the last anyone here saw of them. Alive.’

  ‘I see. I suppose in the morning one of the maids smelt the gas, did she?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘There are two interesting points here, aren’t there? First of all the gas-fire.’

  ‘Right. We’re still on the sort of gas-fire that was installed twenty or thirty years ago — these were put in before my time, but are still quite serviceable. We’ve had this one inspected, naturally, and the police had a look at it too, and they say there was no fault there, and no reason why the flame should have gone out. Of course, most people would turn it off before they went to sleep.’

  ‘Perhaps they did,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they did. Now the other thing is the wine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I must say I find that odd. There were glasses, you see, two glasses. And they certainly weren’t the hotel’s glasses. Of course they could have brought them with them, but they had very little luggage, and it seems an odd thing to pack. Most people who bring a bottle of anything to drink in their rooms use the bathroom glasses. And then, you see, it was white wine — so if they brought it with them they must have drunk it unchilled. Perfectly possible, but most people would have brought red.’

  ‘Had they drunk wine at dinner?’

  ‘Yes. A bottle of white — a Jugoslav Riesling.’

  ‘Did they have a corkscrew with them?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. Apparently they’d brought glasses, but not a corkscrew. That was one of the things that worried the police here, right from the beginning. On the other hand, you can get your bottle opened for you in the shop where you buy it.’

  ‘Certainly. There’s an awful lot of slightly odd things that could be explained. If they had ordered wine up to their room, who would have taken it up to them?’

  ‘Anyone might. Whoever happened to be free in the dining-room or the bar. Or it might be myself or my wife. This isn’t the sort of place where you have uniformed maids or wine-waiters.’

  ‘Could I see the hotel register for that day?’

  ‘Surely. Just that day? Several of the guests that night would have been here some days already.’

  ‘I’m assuming that the person I’m interested in would have decided to come here only when Tredgold and his girl came. But you’re quite right, it could conceivably be more in the nature of an accidental meeting here. In fact, I’d like a list of everyone in the hotel that night, if you can rustle one up.’

  The register showed five married couples to have booked in on the same day as Tredgold, and also three men and two women in singles. I noted them all down, and their place of origin, mentally registering more interest in the people in single rooms: murderers rarely hunt in pairs. When Terence Shaply had rustled up the complete guest list we went back into the foyer. He said: ‘Like to have the room they had?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and he gave me the key to Room 39.

  The Wrekin ran true to form for its kind: corridors that rose and fell like the North Sea, odd side passages leading to laundry cupboards, steps with no rational excuse for being there. No. 39 was near the end of a passage, and I have to admit that when I opened the door I got the silliest eerie feeling. I tried to suppress this access of schoolgirlishness: after all, probably every room in the house had had someone die in it at one time or another. Still, this was so recent, and so subtly nasty. But when I got in and looked around, the feeling left me: this was just another hotel room — more irregular than some, but not as large as you sometimes get in these old places. The window had a wonderful view out on to the Shropshire hills. I put my bag on the bed and sat down on a rather insubstantial upright chair. As far as the room itself was concerned, there was nothing now to be done that hadn’t already been done. I had no fatuous idea of finding a vital scrap of material which had caught on a nail, or suchlike detective-story clues. With current standards of service in hotels any such clue could have been left by any guest over the past two or three years. On the other hand, this did seem to be the ideal place to think the thing through — if, indeed, thing there was.

  Ignoring for the moment the possibility of accident, how could the murder have been done? They had drunk white wine at dinner — and could have been seen to do so by any other guest, or of course by the hotel staff. They then came up to this room, with obvious intentions. Assuming this murder wasn’t well premeditated (and in detail it could not be, granted that Tredgold had only booked into the hotel that evening), the murderer then had to make his plans. First he had to get hold of a bottle of white wine. Where from? If he was a guest he could order it from room service, but surely that was too risky. From a pub, then, or from Shrewsbury, which was only twelve miles away. Both options involved a car, but I imagined most — perhaps all — the night’s guests at the hotel came by car.

  So he picked up the wine, and presumably the glasses, at a late-night wine merchant’s or from a pub (a Shrewsbury pub would be safest, and least likely
to remember a customer who bought a bottle of wine, and conceivably pinched a couple of their glasses). But what then? How to get them to accept and drink it?

  Perhaps one should not make too much of that. Britain has become so dizzyingly alcoholic in the last couple of decades that few people will look a gift bottle in the neck. Posing as one of the hotel servants (no need to dress up for that, because as the owner had implied it wasn’t that kind of hotel), the murderer could knock on the door, pretend that the hotel was celebrating something (the owner’s silver wedding, or the building’s four hundredth anniversary, perhaps) and explain that all the guests were getting drinks on the house in celebration, ‘And as you had been drinking white wine at dinner, the owner thought . . .’ Thin, but probably adequate. With one proviso: for this work, the murderer could not conceivably be known to Bill Tredgold.

  And the wine, of course, was drugged. The drug could very easily have been brought with the murderer, in case of opportunity. And when they fell asleep, tired but happy, the murderer could sneak in, in the middle of the night, and turn on the gas-fire. The bedroom door was a rickety Yale lock, presenting no problem to anyone with a bank card. Very neat, very simple, and after this time all but impossible to prove. There was no reason why the murderer should have left any trace of himself behind him, and in the morning he could be up early and away before the deaths were even discovered. If murder there had been, it looked like a hopeless case, from the police point of view.

  Nevertheless, some lines of future enquiry did suggest themselves. I took out my notebooks, which so far were practically virgin as far as useful leads on the case were concerned, and after some thought, wrote:

  ‘Why here?’

  Why come away for a weekend with your bird, when you’ve got a perfectly good flat of your own to go to? One answer to that would be that Bill or his girl just felt like a weekend away. Still, there could be other answers. Journalists are very good at mixing business and pleasure (frequently to the detriment of the former), and choosing this place, which apparently neither of them had been to before, did suggest that the excursion had more than one end in view. This put me on to another line of thought. I wrote again: ‘What about his luggage?’ and ‘Reporter’s notebook.’