Death and the Princess

by Robert Barnard

  One thing was certain: he would not have travelled, even on a purely pleasure trip, without a notebook of some kind. Reporters never did. Who had it now? His parents?

  All this was vague, but to me necessary, because various new lines of enquiry were opening up, as far as I could see. Hitherto we had seen the most likely explanation for Tredgold’s death as being that it was an attempt on the life of the Princess. On the other hand, if the murderer, coming in with the wine, had seen the girl (if, in other words, she did not conceal herself under the bedclothes with shame, which was hardly likely in this day and age), then he would certainly have known she was not the Princess. But the murder could still have succeeded rather than failed: the intended victim could have been Bill Tredgold or Carol Crossley, his bird. And if it was Bill, there was no reason totally to rule out the possibility that the Princess was still involved. He had recently been sleeping with her, and his reporter’s instinct (a nice way of saying his nose for dirt) could have smelt something fishy going on around her. In which case, it was a fair bet that the details would be in his notebook.

  The rest of the day was spent pleasantly, but not very productively. I questioned the staff and the owner’s wife about the procedures when wine was ordered to a room, trying to discover whether any of the other guests had ordered wine that day, but I was not surprised when I drew a blank. I phoned the Shrewsbury police, with whom my coming had been cleared in advance, and had them start an enquiry for anyone who had bought a bottle of white wine in a public house, and perhaps in some way got hold of glasses at the same time. I told them also to check the wine dealers, but asking about people who had bought a bottle of wine there three months before really did seem to be wasting the Salop police’s time most unconscionably. Then I went and sat with the locals in the public bar, drawing, once again, very much a blank. Not, of course, that they were not interested in the matter: the death of these two — ‘not wed, they weren’t, an’ too much on their minds to worry about a little bit of gas,’ etc., etc. — would in any case have been the local event of the year. If it were to turn out to be murder, it would be the event of the century. Whisper had already got around about this possibility, but it didn’t prevent the locals finding the whole thing rib-nudgingly funny. On the whole their explanations tended towards the comic-supernatural.

  ‘Reckon if you ’n’ I, Jim ’ed gone upstairs that night, we’d ’a found a phantom waitress, all rustlin’ skirts, carryin’ a tray wi’ wine an’ wine glasses, a-goin’ to do ’em in for havin’ a bit o’ what you fancy.’

  They had a good chortle over that one. All their remarks were of that sort. They reminded me of bit parts in a particularly tedious comedy by Goldsmith or somebody. I could have sat with them all night, if I’d got that much time to waste. As it was, I turned in early.

  CHAPTER 7

  Family and Friends

  Bill Tredgold’s family lived in an unattractive suburb of Birmingham, the sort of area where people struggle valiantly with a little patch of garden, but where nature fights a losing battle against fumes and dirt, and the shadow of jerry-building. Their semi-detached probably dated from the age of Baldwin, when the virtues of Englishness were proclaimed even as England was being destroyed: thin strips of board were pasted on to stonedash, in an effort to assert tradition. At least, I thought, Bill Tredgold’s short life could be seen as some sort of progress: from mock-Tudor to the real thing.

  I had phoned in advance to say that I was coming, and when his father opened the door to me, he muttered: ‘Don’t set her off if you can help it, will you?’ Their loss was clearly too recent to have been assimilated. I squeezed myself into the dim little hallway, and he led me through into the front room, which was obviously opened up for the occasion. It was cluttered with furniture, some pre- and some post-war; there were embroidered headrests on the backs of the chairs, and a virulent orange fire of simulated logs. I edged my bulk carefully through the clutter, and sat down. The two of them sat down too, looking at me quietly but expectantly.

  Both of them were in their sixties, comfortable, slightly seedy people, pleasantly without pretensions: she probably made a good steak and kidney pie, and he could fix up a shelf or mend a fuse without making a fuss about it. Small business people, perhaps, or local government office workers. The room was dotted with framed snapshots of children and grandchildren: Bill Tredgold had not been an only child.

  ‘So you’re not satisfied either,’ said Mrs Tredgold — the motherliness coming warmly through the nasal Midlands accent. ‘And I must say I’m glad to hear it, because I certainly am not.’

  ‘Now, Mother,’ said her husband, for all the world as if he were in a J.B. Priestley play.

  ‘Well, I’m not, and that’s flat. And it’s no good saying raking the thing up won’t bring him back, because I’m not daft and I know that. That doesn’t stop me wanting to get to the bottom of it all.’

  ‘I’m interested to hear why you’re not satisfied,’ I said. ‘Because you’re quite right that I’m not.’

  ‘Well, there was the window, for a start. The other policeman who called, he said it was tight shut. Well, a mother knows these things, and our Bill would never sleep with the windows closed: he’d had asthma as a child, and he always wanted them open, to get the fresh air. And don’t say he might have changed, because he slept here often, when he’d been round for a meal, and it was always the same — the windows were open, winter or summer.’

  ‘I see. Yes, that is the sort of thing people don’t change their minds about. Of course, the girl could have insisted.’

  ‘Our Bill wasn’t one to take any insistence from a girl.’

  ‘Did you know the girl?’

  ‘Never even heard him mention the name. It’s terrible, isn’t it, but that’s how it is these days, our Bill as well as the rest.’

  ‘Did he tell you he was going to Knightley?’

  ‘Not to say tell. Our Bill went all over: he was a real reporter, and we’ve always been that proud when we saw his name in the Standard, but we never knew quite where he’d be. He kept in touch, though, and by chance he did ring up the day before he died, and he mentioned then he’d be going into Shropshire.’

  ‘But he didn’t say anything more than that?’

  ‘Not really. I just said, “Oh, on to a story, are you?” and he said, “Have you ever known me not?” ’

  ‘That’s interesting. So it wasn’t — well, just a night away with a girl?’

  ‘Oh, I could tell he was on to something — he was never off duty, our Bill. If he took a holiday in Benidorm, he’d still manage to come back with something for the paper.’

  ‘You say you hadn’t heard the girl’s name. Did you hear about most of his girl-friends?’

  ‘Well, no. On the whole he kept that part of his life private.’

  ‘We’re chapel, you see,’ put in Dad.

  ‘And he was brought up in it, but somehow it just didn’t stick.’

  ‘So he didn’t normally mention his girl-friends?’

  ‘Hardly ever. Only generally, you know, because he knew we wouldn’t approve. Now they say he’d been seeing a lot of this Princess Helena, at one time. You’d have thought he might have mentioned that, knowing we’d be interested, but he never did. I suppose you could say he was just that bit cagey-like. I suppose it came of being a reporter.’

  ‘Perhaps — they’re not the most open people. Can’t afford to be. Tell me, I suppose they’ve sent back the things he had with him at Knightley?’

  ‘Oh yes, after the Inquest.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a little scrap of flowered handkerchief.

  ‘Did he have the tools of his trade, so to speak, with him? Was there any sort of notebook, for example?’

  She cast me a quick, intelligent look. ‘No, there wasn’t. I noticed at the time. It was so odd. There was hardly anything in his briefcase at all, and he never went anywhere without his notebook, because he always had two or three stories on the boil as it were. It was
a sort of family joke, wasn’t it, Ern, that he always had them in his trouser pocket. He used to note down things he saw, and sometimes just phrases that came into his head — might be when we were all sitting round the table at tea. And I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t one.’

  ‘What about in his flat?’

  She thought hard. ‘Well, I’d rather forgotten by the time we went over his flat. It was sort of . . . distressing, and it went out of my mind. There were lots of papers: versions of stories we’d seen in the Birmingham Standard. And there were two notebooks — but I remember they were full ones, weren’t they, Ern, because we went over them afterwards. Most of the things in them had been crossed through, after he’d used them. That was his method, to prevent him using the same phrases twice.’

  ‘Do you still have them?’

  ‘Oh yes, we’ve thrown nothing away. Get them, Ern, will you? . . . They’re in his room . . . We call it his room, still. There’s one other thing, Mr — ’

  ‘Trethowan.’

  ‘Mr Trethowan. With his things from Knightley, there was a half-bottle of whisky. Unopened. Now that struck me as odd. He’d obviously brought it for the evening — you know these young people, never can be without it, I don’t know why. Now, why would he go and order a bottle of wine from the hotel?’

  ‘He didn’t order one.’

  ‘Yes, so I gathered. Well, why would he go out and buy one? As I say, I don’t cotton on to the younger generation, not to their habits, but I can’t see him taking a half-bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine with him when he goes for a night out with a lass. Can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I’ve got the notebooks,’ said Ern Tredgold, coming back into the dowdy little sitting-room, ‘and I thought you might like these: they were in his flat — seems like they’re the articles he was working on when he died.’

  I took the sheaf of papers he had in his hand, and the two fat, thumbed little notebooks, suitable for slipping into trouser pockets. I stood up to go.

  ‘I hope they’ll be of help,’ said Ern Tredgold; and then, rather hesitantly, ‘We would both like to be of help, Mother and I. It isn’t that I wanted to throw cold water on it. I know Mother will be upset, but still we’d both rather know how he died, if there was anything wrong in it.’

  ‘Of course we want to know,’ said Elsie Tredgold, more robustly. ‘The trouble with you is, you’d rather let sleeping dogs lie, even when it’s your own son as has been killed.’

  ‘It’s just that I haven’t wanted you upset, Mother . . .’

  ‘I’d be more upset being in doubt . . .’ She opened the door for me, and I edged my way out into the dim winter sunshine. ‘You will get to the bottom of it, won’t you, Mr Trethowan? We love all our children, naturally, but he was — well, he was the pride of them. He was so bright, and sharp as a razor, and that cheerful with it. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t have done. He could have been editor of The Times!’

  A mother might have wished a safer long-term prospect on her son than that, but I took her point. I had every reason to think Bill Tredgold had been a first-rate reporter.

  I won’t inflict on you in detail my conversation with Carol Crossley’s family, or her flatmate. The family was the sort that washes its hands so enthusiastically of its young when they reach maturity that you wonder why they had kids in the first place. They hadn’t seen Carol for three months or more before she died, and they did not seem to have expected to. For what it was worth, they agreed with her flatmate that she had no discernible enemies. I got the impression of a nineteen-year-old shorthand typist, with no very strong personality and a rather aimless existence. I found it almost impossible to believe that she — in her own person, rather than as the Princess surrogate — was the intended victim. She did, however, look a little like Helena, but mainly in the sort of way girls started looking like the Princess of Wales as soon as the engagement was announced. It was clear from her flatmate’s account that she slept around a bit, though hardly frenetically. I asked about her relationship with Bill Tredgold.

  ‘I’d never heard the name before the inquest. Honest. It was dead embarrassing, in a way. Nor had the other girls in her office. Makes her look so cheap, doesn’t it? But I was away the day before, and it’s my bet she met him on the Thursday night, and he persuaded her to get off work early on Friday and go away with him for the weekend. She liked that sort of offer, because she loved travelling, and you don’t feel you’re giving it away for free then, do you?’

  ‘Did she close the window at night?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘When she slept, did she like the window open or closed?’

  ‘Oh, sorry — misunderstood. Well, normally she’d have it open, unless it was really freezing.’

  So there it was. As far as I could see, Carol Crossley was a casual pick-up of Bill Tredgold’s, someone to take on a trip he’d already decided on, and not someone to insist on their closing their window on their night of love. I felt sorry for the poor girl: rarely has a casual night’s sex led to such immediate retribution.

  More useful, from my point of view, was a conversation I had with one of Bill Tredgold’s fellow reporters. This chap had shared an office with Bill at the Standard’s headquarters, and like him he was young and eager — he hadn’t got that dingy, hollow-chested, nicotine-stained look of the reporter who’s been on the game all too long. I suppose he was on the way there, though, because I had to take him to the nearest pub and buy him two or three pints before I really got him to open up.

  ‘He was a bright boy, Bill,’ he said, gulping down thirstily, and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand in a Coronation Street kind of way. ‘Quick. Bright. The sort of chap you could see would make his way to the top. Barring accidents. He could smell out a story at a hundred paces. You could practically see his nose quivering. That’s why the Guardian was interested. He’d had several first-rate Specials on the Standard — immigrant housing, illiteracy, battered wives — all good Guardian stuff. But he wasn’t just social conscience: he did a first-rate piece on the Solihull child molester, and last year he did a series on municipal corruption. There was a city councillor had to resign over that one, even if they did call it “ill health”. The Standard’s missing him already, because he was a first-rate all-round reporter.’

  ‘Do you know what he was working on when he died?’

  ‘A young lass called Carol — sorry, shouldn’t joke about that. Still, it was a bit Tristan and Isolde, wasn’t it? Bill would have burst his sides if it had been one of his stories. Sorry, I’ve forgotten what you asked me.’

  ‘What was he working on when he died?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. We’re reporters, remember: we don’t go handing each other scoops. He was damned excited about whatever it was, I do know that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, he said one day, over a pint it was, this very pub, he said: “I don’t know whether to offer this thing I’m on now to the Standard, as a last gesture, because they’ve been good to me, or sit on it and give it to the Guardian.” ’

  ‘What did he decide?’

  ‘I don’t think he had. But he did say it ought to go to the Guardian, because it was a national thing, not just a local one.’

  ‘It wasn’t something he’d been assigned to?’

  ‘Oh no. We all have jobs like that, the things that take up most of our normal working time. This was something he’d nosed out for himself — that was why he was secretive about it, that’s why he could offer it to the Guardian. He used to call it Operation Seneca. Those were practically the last words I heard him speak, as a matter of fact. That was lunch-time Friday: I asked him what he was doing over the weekend: “I’m fully employed with Operation Seneca,” he said. I chaffed him a bit about working his tripes out to get on the Guardian, and he said: “Oh, Operation Seneca isn’t all work. I always manage to combine a spot of pleasure with business when I’m on that little
job.” Next thing I heard he was dead.’

  Well, that was about all I got out of my second day with the Princess in the Midlands. ‘In the afternoon I went back on duty, to Joplin’s intense relief. He had had to endure all manner of dire official visits and charity receptions, quite apart from the Beckett, but all I had was the Birmingham premiere of a new Christie film, in aid of the Civil Service Widows’ Benevolent Fund. The Princess asked me in the middle who’d done it, and I told her, and in the train going back to London I gave her my chain of reasoning. I didn’t tell her I’d read the book anyway. Lady Dorothy said personally she preferred Dorothy Sayers, which didn’t surprise me one little bit. Anyway, the Princess and I were rather light-hearted and jolly, and (not to put too fine a point on it) getting on like a house on fire.

  Of course, we weren’t to know we were travelling back to another murder.

  CHAPTER 8

  By His Own Hand?

  With the exception of one royal engagement, the next day was devoted entirely to research. That one engagement was a football match, and there is not a lot to say about it, except for one thing I noticed about the Princess: she was not only delighted when she evoked admiration and applause, she was also adept at augmenting it. She was like nothing so much as Callas at curtain-call. She timed her entry for the precise psychological moment to get most attention, she feigned most subtly a sort of humility, and as she stood there acknowledging the raucous, good-humoured (and possibly jollily obscene) cheers and claps, she had one or two little gestures which touched the heart and screwed enthusiasm up to fever pitch — an uncertain movement of the hand to the breast, expressive of modesty and pleasure, though I suspected it was actually neither uncertain nor modest, and in fact it was a movement which helped to show off the gorgeous form of the girl to perfection. Artful little minx. I wondered if the Queen went in for these admiration-stimulators, but rather doubted it.