Death and the Princess

by Robert Barnard

  ‘I say, look there, Garry. Isn’t that about what we’re looking for?’

  Down beside one of the armchairs near the hearth was a series of shelves, intended for periodicals and newspapers. But on the bottom shelf were three very large books, bound in dark red leather. I took hold of the top one gingerly. They were scrapbooks, specially made, and inside were pasted pictures of the Princess Helena on her various public appearances, as well as family portraits and other such mementoes of her. It seemed that Mr Brudenell was sentimental about the activities of his mistress, or perhaps took a certain pride in his part in her career. I took the enormous scrapbook back into the study and laid it down on the table. It fitted exactly.

  Then I got on the phone to McPhail and told him to put his boys on to it.

  CHAPTER 10

  Young Woodley

  When finally we got back to Kensington Palace, towards ten in the evening, I did a very traditional thing: I sent Joplin below stairs to talk to the Palace staff, while I had a private interview with young South Pole, up in the eaves. It was a bedroom without any character, one that was used by any member of the staff who happened to be on duty. There was a Utility bed, and several sticks of furniture that looked as if they had been discarded by William or Mary. No doubt I would have got a more definite impression of the fair footman if I had interviewed him at home. As it was, he sat on the bed in footman’s trousers and open-necked shirt, his manner apparently courteous and concerned, masking an undertow of hostility and suspicion.

  ‘Your name is — ?’

  ‘Malcolm Woodley.’

  ‘And you’ve been in service here in the Palace — ?’

  ‘A little over a year.’

  ‘I see. And did Mr Brudenell engage you?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Mr Brudenell had nothing to do with the domestic arrangements.’

  As well as a desire to distance himself from Brudenell there was also a slight superciliousness in his reply, as if any fool knew about the organization of a royal household. It riled me.

  ‘And were you already sleeping with him when you were engaged?’

  I often find a direct approach pays dividends, and it certainly saved a lot of time now. There was a short pause, tense and defensive, and then the young man suddenly relaxed. He looked at me unsmilingly, but with something of an urchin’s cheek.

  ‘Somebody talking downstairs, I suppose. Mrs Broadbent, perhaps? She’s got a foul mind, but she hits the nail on the head, as often as not.’

  ‘Actually, my sergeant spotted it, and I imagine he’s at this moment confirming it. He’s right, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s right. So what, anyway?’

  His voice had taken on a slight cockney twang that was much more attractive and individual than the laundered neutrality of his usual speaking tones.

  ‘Well, naturally,’ I said, ‘we think you probably know more about him than most. So far as we can see, he didn’t have a wide circle of friends.’

  ‘Don’t I know it. The burden of being sole buddy and confidant was almost more than I could bear.’

  ‘When did the relationship start?’

  ‘Oh, six months ago, I suppose.’

  ‘He seduced you?’

  ‘Of course not. I seduced him.’ The boy laughed for the first time, not attractively, but with an air of uncertainty showing through that proved he was still only a boy. ‘It took time, I can tell you. I thought I was condemned to a lifetime of fatherly pattings, hand-squeezings and sentimental sighs. But finally I made it.’

  ‘I presume you didn’t go to all this trouble because you found Mr Brudenell attractive?’

  ‘Too right. Who could? No doubt his old mother, of whom I have heard my fill over these last months. A whining old biddy she must have been, and no mistake. But for anybody else, he was a bit of a dead loss, though in a sort of way I did get fond of him, as one does.’

  ‘What was it, then, you wanted from him? Did you get the job at the Palace with the aim of seducing him?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. I knew nothing about him. And I’m not particularly that way inclined. If I could have got the same out of the Princess, I’d have gone for her instead, and enjoyed myself a lot more. I could have had her, too, let me tell you. But she could never have been bothered to give me the help I needed, and in any case, she wouldn’t have had the insight.’

  ‘To do what?’

  Malcolm Woodley paused. Then he lay back on his bed, his head pressed against the wall.

  ‘I suppose it won’t do any harm to say. I’ve never told anybody, except I suppose James, and him only by fits and starts, with hesitations and shy blushes. But him getting killed changes everything, doesn’t it? Well — laugh away — I wanted to be a gentleman.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all I could think of to say.

  ‘Yes, it’s terribly Victorian, isn’t it? The pushy young man trying to live up to his betters. We read Great Expectations at school. Most of the kids thought it a drag, but I didn’t. I understood Pip. I didn’t blame him a bit. I loved the middle bits where they taught him to behave, how to fit in. It said something to me, that book.’

  ‘I don’t think it said quite what the author intended.’

  ‘ ’Course it didn’t. But books hardly ever do, do they? And anyway, he loaded the dice, by making Joe so good and forgiving and generous, so you were meant to feel Pip was a louse for wanting to get away from him. But what about if he hadn’t had a Joe in the background? I certainly didn’t. I just had my Mum.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Factory worker and part-time whore down the East End, Limehouse way. Foul-mouthed, didn’t give a damn. I don’t think she knew who my father was, but she always said it was a sailor off a Danish boat. Or Swedish, she was never quite sure. I don’t think communication was too good, but it produced me. She called me Mel, by the way, on the birth certificate, after some American singer or other of the time. James made sure I changed it to Malcolm, so that got rid of about the only thing she ever gave me. I haven’t set eyes on her since I left school.’

  ‘You left home when you left school, did you?’

  ‘Yes. First opportunity.’

  ‘Why? To make it easier to become a gentleman?’

  ‘Oh no, it wasn’t as premeditated as that, at first. But I was working as a waiter, first in a scruffy Greek café, then in a rather good Italian restaurant in Soho. The pay was all right. But half the kids I’d known at school were out of work, and these days no one can say they’re safe. So it came to me gradually that what I needed was a job that was a hundred per cent safe, where I could learn what I wanted to learn. I knew it would take time, I knew it would be like going back to school again. But I thought it was worth it. So I took a whacking drop in pay and came here. I’ve never regretted it.’

  ‘So what precisely was it you wanted?’

  ‘Oh God — how to explain? You know, when I was a waiter in that Italian restaurant, people used to come in — men — at lunch-time, doing business and that: smart, or well-dressed, anyway, public-school accents — ordering the right things, knowing about wine. Probably not out of the top drawer, otherwise they’d have been in a top-drawer restaurant, but still able to pass, When these men talked, half of what they said wasn’t in the words: there was a sort of sign language underneath the words. They used it to signal to each other, and it showed they were of the same kind. Gentlemen. Natural rulers. People with a history. It made no difference that half of them probably had awful little jobs with PR firms. They were still part of the gentleman network. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to talk right, to dress right, to eat and drink right. Waiting showed me a door to this new world. I wanted to go through into it. I wanted to understand those signs. Eventually, perhaps, to be able to make them myself. Do you blame me?’

  I sighed. It seemed a sad little ambition.

  ‘Of course not. But as you say, it does seem a bit out of date. Obviously you don’t believe that Britain has become classless.’

&nb
sp; Malcolm Woodley laughed. ‘People who say that are always upper-middle or better themselves. The view from under the bridge is different.’

  ‘And that was what you got from Brudenell?’

  ‘Roughly. Of course, eventually I’d have gone on to someone with more finesse, someone more sophisticated, with better contacts. But he was good at all the obvious things: the food, and the clothes. That manner I have — remote — you know — ?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He taught me that. He said I had to learn not to give myself away before I could learn to relax again. And he was right. Without that . . . unapproachableness, I’d have made myself a laughing-stock a thousand times over.’

  ‘Had he begun to introduce you round, then — I mean, get you into his set?’

  ‘He didn’t have a set. But we had put our toes into the water. It was hellish difficult. Say I’d gone to one of his little supper parties after the opera, or say we’d gone to the theatre together: the implications would have been totally obvious. And very damaging to James. Certainly one thing he could not afford to do was to “come out”. So we had to be more subtle. If we went to the theatre we had to meet by chance in the bar at interval — then he could introduce me to anyone he knew. He could come to a restaurant knowing I’d be already sitting there — “Hello, old boy, fancy seeing you!” You know the drill. We must have had more stagey chance meetings than the couple in Brief Encounter. But it was beginning to work. I could pass. At first I had to stay very quiet; then I could start talking a bit. Soon I’ll be able to take the initiative, make friends of my own.’

  ‘You were beginning not to need him?’

  ‘If you like to put it like that, though that certainly doesn’t mean I wanted to get rid of him. But I knew where to buy clothes, and what to buy. I couldn’t afford it, but then — few and good is the motto, isn’t it? The eating and the drinking came easily. I’d picked up most of the drill, and James only had to teach me the philosophy behind the drill. When I’ve got a bit more confidence I’ll start constructing a background for myself. Mum in Limehouse will not find a place in it. Well, that’s it. That’s my story, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘That clears the air. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, which is Mr James Brudenell.’

  Malcolm Woodley sat up on the bed, and looked at me through cold, narrowed eyes.

  ‘What about you coming clean first, then? You think it was murder, don’t you?’

  ‘If you mean the Police as a whole, we haven’t made up our minds yet. If you mean me personally, yes, I do.’

  ‘So do I,’ said the boy frankly.

  ‘Good. Now we both know what we’re talking about. Why do you think that?’

  ‘Well, first of all, from what we’ve heard downstairs, it was either suicide or murder. James was hardly the type to point a gun playfully at his head and then accidentally pull the trigger. James didn’t live dangerously: he was a woolly vest and galoshes man. But the fact is, he wasn’t the type to commit suicide either. He wouldn’t have had the nerve. And anyway, he was perfectly happy. I don’t suppose he’d ever been so happy in his life. He loved his job, and he loved me. There was no reason.’

  ‘So things hadn’t gone wrong between you?’

  ‘Certainly they hadn’t. As I say, I’d pretty soon have been thinking of going on to someone else, but he definitely hadn’t twigged that. You know, granted that he was a fussy, repressed little twit, he was really beginning to get a bit of enjoyment out of life. Now and again you’d have said he was a cat with two tails.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider it possible that he was being blackmailed — for example, by someone else he had been involved with?’

  ‘He hadn’t been involved with anyone else. I was the first, I told you, and I was the only. Blackmail? It’s a laugh. He would have told me.’

  ‘You weren’t blackmailing him yourself?’

  ‘That’s a stupid question. I wanted things from him, but money wasn’t one of them. You say your sergeant noticed us: did he say it looked as if I was blackmailing him?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. And I don’t think it looks like that. But in fact, I’ve always thought blackmail was a red herring. Now, when were you last together?’

  ‘James and I? Just a couple of nights ago. Wednesday. I went to his flat. It wasn’t something that happened very often. James was obsessed with the neighbours, though in fact it was a very shut-in place: nobody seemed to have much contact with anybody else. I hardly saw a soul, the times I went there.’

  ‘Where did you meet, as a rule?’

  ‘Mostly James came to my place. It’s a room in Pimlico, and it was very much infra his dig, but he pretended he got a delicious sense of slumming it. Sometimes we drove out at weekends to one of the less popular country houses open to the public, or to a little-known restaurant. We once actually had a weekend in Brighton — off-season, separate rooms.’

  ‘What did you do on Wednesday?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. We usually began with what you might call tuition. That could take all shapes and forms. On Wednesday we talked about schools. James had lent me a book about public schools. We talked, and he told me the sort of things they don’t put in books. The marks of a Winchester man, the special codes of a Harrovian. He had a bit of a complex about schools: he wished he’d gone to one of the major ones. Then we ate one of his ladylike little suppers, talked a bit, went to bed, and I went home about one o’clock.’

  ‘What about his mood? Not depressed, or anything?’

  ‘No, I tell you, he was happier these days than he’d ever been, I’d guess. In fact, he seemed a bit cock-of-the-walk about something or other.’

  I groaned: ‘Don’t tell me — I can see it coming. The silly bugger didn’t tell you what it was.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘All my cases are like that. Look, search your mind. Didn’t he give you any indication?’

  ‘Well, not really. I presumed it had something to do with his job here — at the Palace.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he didn’t tell me anything about it. If anything happened to him (and not much did), he’d generally tell me all about it. But not if it was anything to do with the Princess. Or the Royal family in general. It wouldn’t have done. Close as a clam he was. He called it “Proper Discretion”. I once approached the subject of the Princess’s love-life. Never again. He shut me up good and proper.’

  ‘So he didn’t say anything at all about why he was in a perky mood?’

  ‘Perky doesn’t quite describe it. He was, sort of indignant too — not outraged, but very tetchy. Not with me, but . . . with I don’t know who.’ He sat there in thought, trying to recreate the scene. ‘When I got there I was completely whacked, and I said so. Only I called it utterly exhausted. We’d had a delegation in the afternoon of the Countrywoman’s Guild of Needle-workers, and they’d stayed to tea, by arrangement, of course. Unbelievable, they were. Then the Princess had given a small dinner-party, before going out to the theatre. That MP friend of hers was there, and I wouldn’t mind betting she went on with him afterwards. Anyway, I said I was whacked, and James said he’d done a very good day’s work (you know how he talked). I didn’t ask what, because that was forbidden territory, but he did say, just after that, and quite out of the blue: “I do hate people who take advantage.” And then: “People should realize I occupy a position of trust.” ’

  ‘And that was all?’

  ‘That was all I remember. We started in on the lesson then.’

  ‘Tell me, when you were there, did you go into the study?’

  ‘Oh yes. I always borrow an improving book from his collection.’

  ‘Did you notice whether he had a big scrapbook open on the little table?’

  Malcolm Woodley screwed up his eyes. ‘Yes, it was there. It took up all the table. It’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it? He pasted in newspaper cuttings of the Princess, acres of them, just as though he
was some besotted ageing Elvis fan.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve looked at it. He didn’t comment on the book on Wednesday?’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t. I think he was a bit embarrassed about it.’

  We chewed the cud a bit more, but that in fact was about all I got out of young Woodley. By the end I felt he wasn’t such an unendearing individual after all. I wondered what was to become of him. Gentlemen without money have one advantage over pseudo-gentlemen without money: they have contacts — family, school-fellows, the old boy network. Probably Limehouse has pretty much the same sort of network. In fact, I believe that’s the only way you can get work in the docks. But I did have an awful feeling that young Woodley was in danger of falling resoundingly between two stools.

  I had a cosy chat with Joplin in the car, on the way back to the Yard. Mr Brudenell’s little romance was of course no secret below stairs, but on this subject they could add nothing to young Woodley’s own frank account. General opinion of the Princess was mixed. All the staff liked her, but a good half of them thought she needed a good smacking. ‘She’s a spoiled little minx,’ the under cook had said, ‘wilful and cunning as a fox, but she’s only got to look at you, and smile, and she gets over your defences, and you smile back and do exactly what she wants.’ As far as her boy-friends were concerned, three were known at the Palace. There had been an early, servile preference for the Honourable Edwin Frere, but this had soon effectively evaporated on closer acquaintance with the gentleman himself. The favourite was now Jeremy Styles, whose performances as Mr Darcy and Steerforth in television serials had apparently given him, in the eyes of the domestic staff, the patina of an honorary gentleman.

  Oh well, perhaps there was hope yet for Young Woodley.

  CHAPTER 11

  High Places

  By now Joplin and I both had ‘doubles’ at the Palace, policemen who could take over our security duties when necessary. However, next morning I had no alternative but to attend the Princess on an official function. She was visiting the Local Government Offices at Kilburn Town Hall, and since Kilburn contained a large Irish population, everyone was jittery. It seemed necessary for the senior man to be there. Even the lady-in-waiting came out of her upper-class carapace and expressed the opinion in the car that the Irish were ‘lower than animals’ — though since the only living thing I’d ever heard her express favourable opinions of were horses and dogs, this description didn’t seem to me to have quite the cutting force she intended. Anyway, the local Irish apparently had other things on their minds that day than minor royalty, and apart from a boycott by some Labour councillors the visit went off very well, and we were back at Kensington Palace by half past twelve. It was an unexpectedly sunny early February day: daffodils were certainly not out, but there seemed to be daffodils in the air. I think the stirrings of spring affected the Princess too.