by Gavin Lyall
“But he must pretend not to be an anarchist to be set free?”
“It more-or-less seems that way,” Ranklin said, getting annoyed with himself, the law and anything else within reach.
She shrugged vigorously, almost toppling her hat. “The law, the law, the law. It is hypocrisy . . . And you ask why we do not believe in it?”
Ranklin hadn’t asked, but was tempted to lean over and clout her across the chops as a demonstration of what a world without law was like; however, he knew that was – mostly – just his annoyance. He confined himself to saying: “You could have stayed in Paris. But tell me, if Grover is returned for trial in France, what does he fear?”
She pouted at his innocence. “The flics paid that meat porter to lie. Naturally, they will pay him again.” When he looked appropriately gloomy, she went on: “I know where he stays – at the Dieudonné at R-y-d—”
“Ryder Street, I know. French hotel.”
“Last night I tried to see him, to ask him why he has sold another worker to the police, but they would not let me.” A threadbare and probably angry female . . . even a French hotel would draw the line somewhere.
“Terrible.” Ranklin shook his head. “But something I don’t understand: the American Consul who saw M’sieu Langhorn said that he claimed to know of some royal scandal . . .”
Berenice suddenly smiled. It didn’t make her pretty, but for a moment she looked more gamine then poisson. “Oh, that stupidity. Him and his silly mother with her fairy tales.”
“Oh?”
“She told him he is the son of your English King and so he is the next king.”
* * *
“Well, that’s what she said,” Ranklin reported into a stunned silence. They had gathered in the Commander’s office: the Commander himself and Lieutenant Jay, who was there because Ranklin had insisted they needed another pair of hands, and particularly feet. Right now, however, Jay was coming out of his concussion into delighted but stifled laughter.
The Commander, not in the least delighted, said: “The boy must be barmy.”
To distract attention from young Jay, Ranklin said: “Of course, I suppose you can’t be sure who your father really is; by definition, you aren’t around at the time. It’s the mother’s word that matters, and this could tie up with the letter she sent to the consulate. And her being English originally, I suppose.”
“Any chance of getting hold of a birth certificate?” the Commander growled.
“What’s the betting that it doesn’t say the Ki – no, Prince George in those days – is the father?” Jay asked cheerfully.
Ignoring that, Ranklin said: “The boy must have been brought up in America, but I don’t know where he was born.”
There was another long silence. The Commander broke it again by growling: “But he’s such a bloody dull king.”
“But equipped with all the normal urges,” Lieutenant Jay smiled. He had a pleasant smile, along with slimness, dashing, clean-cut good looks, longish fair hair – all refined through a line of ancestors able to afford the most beautiful women of their day. He could no more pass for a coal-miner than a kingfisher could, but then, the secrets of Europe weren’t kept in coal-mines but in chancelleries and drawing-rooms. And in such settings, it was difficult to see where Jay ended and the Louis Quinze furniture began.
But that was only the half of Jay that you saw. The other half, which should include concepts of honour, scruples, honesty, was unseen because, Ranklin suspected, it didn’t exist. He would trust Jay with his life, but not much else.
The Commander added: “You didn’t get much out of this French floozie, did you?”
Ranklin wasn’t standing for that. “Damn it all, if I’d started cross-examining her, she’d have seen I was taking it seriously and then she’d take it seriously. And God knows what she’d do or say to get her lover out of jail.” He stared defiantly at the Commander.
“All right, all right,” the Commander soothed – but then another thought struck him. “If this girl told you, what’s to stop her babbling to anybody else?”
“Me,” Ranklin said, still belligerently, “telling her she was likely to make Grover more enemies than friends over here if she did.”
“Good. Excellent . . . Then I suppose we have to look into the chances of this being true.”
Jay stared. “That this lad’s the next king?”
“Of course he’s not. He’s an American citizen.”
“Oh, that can’t be any bar. We took William and Mary off the shelf from Holland, and the Hanovers from Germany and the present House of Saxe-Coburg from . . . well, Saxe-Coburg, I suppose.” The long-established British families could regard the Royal Family as very much johnny-come-latelies.
“The first thing,” the Commander said firmly, “is to discover whether there might be anything in what the lad says about his father. What’s his age again?”
“Twenty-three,” Ranklin said. “And his birthday was given in court as November the twenty-first, so his date of conception must have been in February 1890.”
There was a pause while they checked his arithmetic.
Ranklin went on: “If the mother met and married an American merchant sailor in this country, that could be Southampton, American passenger ships come in there. And it’s just round the corner from Portsmouth, where quite likely Prince George was stationed in the Navy.”
The Commander made an expression of distaste; things were fitting together too well. He nodded at Jay. “Get down to Somerset House first thing tomorrow and look for a marriage certificate from Southampton or Portsmouth for Langhorn-Bowman . . . But that apart, it must be easier to trace the movements of the King – Prince George, as you say – than the woman.”
“Not all that easy,” Ranklin warned. “At the time he was doing mostly just normal naval things –” now the Commander’s expression turned sour; after all, he should know what “normal naval things” included, “– not worth reporting. But someone can try going through the Court pages of The Times for that spring—”
“Never mind that,” Jay said, “what we need is my old nanny.”
The Commander stared, then exploded. “Are you suggesting we include HER in this . . . this gathering?”
“No, of course not, sir. But she was – still is, I’m sure – a terrific monarchist. She followed the doings of the Little Princes, as she called them, almost day-to-day. Used to fill dozens of scrapbooks with bits cut out of newspapers and magazines. My father thought she was potty and she thought he was bound for hell-fire.
“Both right, I dare say,” he added thoughtfully.
The Commander demanded: “Can you lay hold of the right scrapbook, d’you think?”
“Perhaps this evening. She’s with a family in Berkeley Square now.”
“Get round there as soon as we’re finished.” He shook his head mournfully. “The Secret Service Bureau borrowing some dotty old nanny’s royal scrapbook. God Almighty . . . What else?”
Ranklin said: “We’ll have the Paris view of the crime itself when O’Gilroy gets in tonight. And after that, he’ll be sitting around with nothing to do while we buzz about like bees.”
The Commander looked at him. “And you still want him to join our select throng, don’t you? I’d’ve thought the last thing we want in all this is an Irish renegade.”
“Odd, ain’t it?” Jay mused. “The Irish want a republic but the Englishman they hate most was our leading republican and regicide, Cromwell.”
“Don’t try to make sense of history,” the Commander warned, “particularly not in Ireland.”
Ranklin said: “And when we’re finished here, I want to try and get a word with the Paris meat porter who gave evidence today.”
“D’you think it’s worth the risk? I don’t want us getting sidetracked by the crime itself. It’s hardly relevant, now.”
“It’s very relevant to Grover Langhorn, and it’s what he might say next that worries us.” Ranklin looked at the Commander a
nd shrugged; the Commander looked and shrugged back. Permission, reluctantly, granted.
Serious for once, Jay said: “Surely it’s still what the mother might say that really matters . . . And incidentally, why isn’t she over here, standing by her only son – is he her only son? – in his hour of need?”
“From the way she’s vanished,” the Commander said, “it sounds as if she expects us – somebody, anyway – to be looking for her and an explanation of that letter. And we’re a bit stuck, there: we can’t ask the French to help because they’d ask why . . . No, for the moment, we stick to finding out whether we need to find her. Now, do we have anything else? Well, I have: we’re going to have to tell the Palace.” That brought a sudden silence. “It risks secrecy, but it’s pure self-preservation: if they find out for themselves that we’re investigating His Majesty, that’ll be the end of the Bureau.”
“I say,” breathed Jay, “are we going to ask if the King really was once roger-the-lodgering this female?”
The Commander ignored him. “I think he’s back from Windsor by now, but anyway, I’ll fix a meeting with one of his secretaries. You’ll come too, Ranklin.”
“Aren’t I supposed to be back at Bow Street?”
“This takes precedence, but it all depends on what time we can fix a meeting at the Palace.”
Ranklin nodded unenthusiastically and Jay, perhaps trying to make amends for his levity, said: “I suppose we have noticed that the King’s going on an official visit to Paris next week?”
They hadn’t, of course: the King’s movements didn’t usually concern the Bureau. So they sat and thought about it for a while. At last the Commander said: “Is there any reason to suppose that isn’t pure coincidence?”
Except that, professionally, they didn’t like coincidences, nobody could think of one. Jay said: “The British papers won’t touch a story about the King having a bastard son. But the Continental and American papers would lap it up. Particularly with the Paris visit putting him in the news for once.” He shrugged. “But that still doesn’t make it anything but coincidence.”
Ranklin said: “If the royal visit’s a goodwill thing, it may make us less willing to undo that goodwill by refusing to extradite Langhorn. But again, that doesn’t mean it’s anything but coincidence, either.”
The Commander shook his head slowly and sighed. “But he is such a dull king.”
* * *
When Ranklin got back from the Hotel Dieudonné, O’Gilroy had obviously just got in. There was an unopened Gladstone bag in the middle of the floor, a cap and coat thrown on to a chair, and O’Gilroy himself in another with a cigarette and large glass of whisky. He was lanky and loose-limbed with dark hair and he looked like an intellectual buccaneer such as schoolgirls dream about and don’t exist. However, if they did, they too would come from Ireland. He was in his early thirties.
“Did you have a good crossing?” Ranklin asked cheerfully.
“Terrible.” But O’Gilroy could find breaking waves on a skating rink. “Most jest the fuss of it. Cab in Paris and then train and boat and train and London cab, with tickets and papers and two sorts of money all the way . . . Ye never get time to settle. Ah, I’m getting old and soft. Thank God.” He reached inside his jacket and handed over a wad of notepaper. “That’s yer . . . report, like –”
“Résumé.”
“– of what ye wanted. Made quite a fuss, it did. Say ‘anarchist’in Paris and the rozzers, Préfecture and Sûreté both, they throw a fit. They want this feller Langhorn serious. Can ye tell me why we’re interested?”
Ranklin had been careful not to ask the Commander if he could – the answer must have been “No” – so one might say he hadn’t been told not t o. “I can drop a few hints, but if you haven’t eaten, call down and get something sent up. And the same for me.” He sat down to riffle through the notes. After a year in Paris, O’Gilroy’s spoken French was still “picturesque”, to put it politely, and his knowledge of French literature nil, but he read their journalistic jargon fluently.
Passing a bookshop, Ranklin had picked up a copy of Our Sailor King, a biographical work for those of a reading age to cope with pictures; he’d been hoping to pinpoint some dates in the King’s career. It now lay on a table near the voice-pipe and O’Gilroy picked it up. “Jayzus – are ye studying for a promotion exam?”
Over supper – it turned out that what O’Gilroy had been missing was mulligatawny soup and game pie – Ranklin explained what was going on. When he reached the allegation about the King, O’Gilroy reacted as he had feared: gave a sardonic cackle and observed: “Ah well, kings will be kings.”
“Damn it, the thing’s far from proved—”
“And ’tis our job to see it never is, right? Funny job for a secret service, with all the trouble there is in the world, but . . .” His shrug was quite as expressive as his laugh.
Ranklin’s voice was tightly controlled. “You’re jumping to an assumption just because he’s the King. With anyone else you’d wait for some facts. As for the Bureau’s involvement, that was originally because Corinna wished it on us – and because the good name of the King is part of our national . . .” Did he mean “fabric” or “constitution” or what? He waved a hand irritably. “Anyway, what would happen if somebody claimed to be the bastard son of the French President?”
“Be told to get to the back of the queue,” O’Gilroy said promptly.
“All right, let’s say the Kaiser, then?”
“Ah, there,” O’Gilroy acknowledged, “probly be in jail if’n he wasn’t lynched first. Ye made yer point. But are we looking to find out if it’s true?”
“We need to know if it’s possible, then if it’s likely. But whether anything could be proved after twenty-three years . . . Still, that could work as much against us as for us.”
“What’s Mrs Finn think of it all?”
“She doesn’t know the whole story and, please God, never will. She’s already blackmailing us for some concession for her bank.”
This time, O’Gilroy’s laugh was genuine amusement. “Ah, never gives up, she doesn’t.” He thought for a while. “But jest suppose ye find it could be true, do ye fiddle the books to get the lad off at his trial here? And after that, how d’ye keep him quiet?”
Ranklin sighed. He had been so busy watching where he put his feet in the hour-by-hour investigation that he hadn’t looked ahead to the big questions. “I don’t really know . . . What the lad himself says is just hearsay. In the long run, it’s what his mother says that matters.”
“She wrote the letter ye told me ’bout, didn’t she?”
Ranklin nodded but said nothing. He had the pages of the résumé spread beside his plate and had been skimming through O’Gilroy’s schoolroom copperplate script. There was no doubt about the excitement the fire had triggered. Whether the police originally took their tone from the journals or vice versa, they were now feeding off each other in spiralling hysteria. Anarchist outrages obviously sold newspapers this season.
The only calming note came from the Sûreté Générale, but one editorial suggested this was just sour grapes. In effect, although presumably not intention, Paris had two competing police forces: the Préfecture and the Sûreté, and when it came to catching anarchists, real or alleged, alive or dead, the competition was no-holds-barred.
“Did you form an opinion on the case?” he asked.
“Jest from the newspapers. And guessing, mebbe.”
“We’re not lawyers; let’s have it.”
“Then sure enough the boy could’ve done it – and he could’ve shot the President and cabinet jest as easy. I mean he’s a real anarchist, drunk on the stuff like he’s never tasted that bottle before. Left a good job on an ocean liner –” Ranklin hadn’t noticed that that detail, so carefully kept out of the Bow Street court by Noah Quinton, was available to any Parisian reader. The law, he reflected, was like a fixed telescope: it magnified what it saw, but it missed an awful lot; “– to work in a st
inking shebeen. I mean a real hell’s kitchen of a place.”
“You’ve seen this Deux Chevaliers café? Been into it?”
“Went down there this lunchtime. But not in. Yer not paying me enough to get meself knifed for a police spy.” He sounded offended to have found a place too disreputable even for himself; after all, among the toffs of the Bureau, his forte was knowing the underside of life.
“Did you look at the police station where—?”
“I did.”
Ranklin thought. Then he gathered together O’Gilroy’s notes and handed them back. “Here, you make a report to the Commander tomorrow. Give him the full à la carte and he should invite you to join our charmed circle and we can do this properly.”
O’Gilroy put on his lopsided smile that, once you knew him, could have so many variants; this time it was rueful cynicism. “Nice of ye to say so . . . Only I wisht it was a real job and not hauling the King’s wild oats out of a fire.”
5
Major Alfred St Claire looked correct, but also as if he hadn’t been born that way. You could well imagine his stocky, broad-shouldered figure leaning on a farm gate and being knowledgeable about turnips. Instead, a service career and then the Royal Household had smoothed him. His dark hair was now sleek, his long face pink and shiny, even his wide cavalry moustache (he hadn’t actually been in the cavalry; he was nominally a Marine) looked sleekly dashing.
And by now he had a courtier’s or woman’s ability to wear anything and make it seem natural. On him, a frock coat wasn’t awkward or old-fashioned; indeed, it made Ranklin in his severe dark lounge suit feel like a tradesman. Perhaps he should have worn uniform, like the Commander, only that wouldn’t have been correct because he had thankfully got rid of the regulation moustache which, on him, refused to grow to more than a schoolboy wisp. And the Palace was, after all, the fountain-head of correctness.
With old-fashioned courtesy, St Claire did his best to make them feel at home, coming out from behind his writing-desk and joining them in the elegantly uncomfortable chairs crowded around the tiny fireplace. The room was small, with a view over the inside courtyard, and true to the Palace’s reputation, cold even when it was unseasonably warm outside.
