Who Guards a Prince?

by Reginald Hill

  “Hello, Wainwright,” he said. “Have a drink?”

  “Not just now. I’m here on business,” he said, holding up his bag. “We look after the staff here. I just noticed you in passing.”

  McHarg stood up to talk to the doctor. Heather Davison tried to engage her husband in conversation but he made no bones about eavesdropping on what the two men were saying.

  “It’s about that business last night.”

  “Yes?”

  “There must have been a mistake. I saw that tongue. It was definitely human.”

  “It was dark on the beach,” said McHarg reasonably.

  “It was light enough in the police station,” retorted Wainwright.

  “But surely without tests…”

  “Listen. Have you ever looked in a dog’s mouth? Even a bloody policeman could tell the difference!”

  Wainwright’s tone was angry enough to have attracted the attention of other occupants of the bar. Tim Davison stood up, smiling.

  “Dr Wainwright,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Chief Superintendent Davison. I think you’re being a bit unfair to the Inspector.”

  “What do you know about it?” He scrutinized Davison closely, then added, “You’re the fellow in the car, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Look, Doctor, we’re just simple laymen caught between experts. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll have the—er—exhibit sent to the University. Professor Foster there, you may have heard of him, he sometimes acts as a consultant in such matters. Shall we let him have the final word?”

  “Send it by all means,” snapped Wainwright. “Though I don’t know why busy people should have to waste time preventing the police from making fools of themselves.”

  He strode away, hitting the swing door with his black bag like a battering ram.

  “An impressive bedside manner,” said Davison.

  “He’s not going to let anyone else have the final word,” said McHarg.

  “You reckon not?” said Davison thoughtfully. “Well, let’s sit down and finish our drinks or he’ll be reporting us for taking extended lunch hours!”

  McHarg remained standing and said, “I’ll leave you two to it, I think. You’ll want to get into the dining-room.”

  “But you haven’t touched your whisky,” protested Heather.

  “I haven’t? So I haven’t. Another time, when I really need it. I’ll see you.”

  He left, a big, broad-shouldered man, rather menacing with his square, grey-thatched head thrust forward and his hands clenched deep in the pockets of his black overcoat. The cold wind tousled his hair and pinched at his leathery cheeks. It had been a childish gesture to leave the whisky. He could have done with its comfortable warmth in his gut. But Davison’s cracks about his drinking had got to him, mainly because of their truth. It must be taking its toll of his body. God knows what it was doing to his mind.

  He crossed the road on to the promenade. The tide had not been long on the ebb and only a narrow strip of beach was visible, glistening wet and strewn with bits of driftwood, shells, the occasional bottle, a tin or two—all the mingled detritus of man and the ocean.

  It was the sight of this rubbish that triggered off the association in McHarg’s mind. He recalled a stooping figure; a face almost invisible in a tangle of greying but once gingery hair; those features you could see worn and sculpted like a piece of driftwood to a state beyond nature; a trailing gunny sack; a spiked walking stick.

  This was Old Haystacks, no one knew of any other name for him. He was a local derelict, almost invisible because so familiar, keeping out of the way when the beaches were crowded in summer, but as soon as the season was over, he was there, following the receding tide up and down a ten-mile stretch of coast, picking up and making a borderline living out of what the benevolent ocean left behind.

  Wainwright had said the tongue was undecayed, had not been long buried, which meant probably the ghastly ceremony had taken place at ebb tide just before dawn that morning. No one would be around at that hour.

  No one except perhaps Haystacks whose working life was built around the ebbing of the tides. It was a long shot but McHarg had been shooting long all his life. Turning his collar up, he set out along the promenade, and when that came to an end he climbed down the steps on to the shingle.

  Old Haystacks’s hut was situated in a tumult of broken sandhills about a mile out of the town. McHarg had stumbled upon it when out walking with his wife shortly after their arrival. He shut his mind against the memory and concentrated on pushing his feet forward. He was finding the walk heavy going but he didn’t pause till he reached the sandhills.

  His memory told him that wind and weather had rearranged them since his walks here with Mavis, but he hadn’t expected to find Old Haystacks’s hut in the same place anyway. “Hut” was really too dignified a term for what was basically a lean-to of planks and sacking against the steep wall of a sandhill. From time to time the local health authority moved the old man on, but he merely reassembled his fragile shanty in another part of the dunes, treating officialdom as a natural inconvenience like frost or mosquitoes.

  The old man had another peculiarity. He didn’t beg and he didn’t accept gifts of money. On the other hand, whatever he found on the beach was his. McHarg carefully wrapped a few silver coins in his handkerchief and when he finally found the ramshackle hut with Haystacks repairing the piece of sacking which served for a door, McHarg coughed loudly and blew his nose, apparently regardless of the falling coins.

  “Nice day, Haystacks,” he said. “How’s business?”

  Five minutes later McHarg was beginning to think he’d struck lucky.

  Yes, Old Haystacks had been out on the beach early the previous morning. It had been the first calm period after a big storm and he wasn’t going to miss first go at the extra goodies likely to have been unloaded by such a stir-up on the ocean bed. In fact, pickings had been disappointingly slim and he had reached the area in front of the promenade with a half-full sack just about the time the tide had been at the ebb.

  “Did you see anyone?” demanded McHarg.

  The old man scratched his chin through his tangled beard. Dim memories of the unwisdom of becoming a witness might have been flitting through his mind. McHarg placed a foot firmly on a couple of silver coins and ground them into the sand. The old man nodded sadly as though he recalled the unwisdom of not cooperating with the police also.

  Yes, there had been two men. Suspecting (because self-interest operates at all levels) rivals in beachcombing, Haystacks had ducked behind a groyne and watched them. They had been walking away from the sea. No, he couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) describe them. But they had got into a big silvery blue car on the promenade.

  A Jaguar.

  This seemed potentially very useful, till further questioning revealed that, just as for soldiers all trees are “bushy-topped” or “poplars,” so for the old man all cars were Fords or Jaguars.

  McHarg took a stick and drew various shapes in the sand and after five minutes or so was hopeful that in this case the old man might have been more specific than he knew.

  But it was hardly enough to justify rescuing a case he’d been told in no uncertain terms to jettison.

  As he retraced his path across the sandhills he glanced back.

  Old Haystacks was standing where he had left him. McHarg felt a pang of mingled pity and approval; pity for the derelict’s aimless life, approval that he had dignity enough neither to beg nor to be seen grubbing for the coins he had dropped.

  And as he walked on, both emotions were superseded by a vague uneasiness as though something in the old man reminded him, distantly and absurdly, of himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  The morning after the ceilidh, Conal Connolly quarrelled briefly with his grandfather, but it was only a token quarrel, a reminder by the old wolf that he still ruled the pack and by the young that he wouldn’t do so forever.

  The
truth was they needed each other. The old man’s frequently expressed wish was to do something great for Ireland before he died. Connolly money and Connolly arms had been available almost on demand for the IRA throughout the ’seventies, but the decisive battle had never been fought. A Connolly in the White House was his last hope of having a significant influence in the future of Ireland, and Conal was the only one qualified. But he in his turn knew that without the Granda’s money and influence, he could run forever and get nowhere.

  Rather than use the chopper, he opted to drive into Boston with Dree, who was following Christie’s station wagon in her emerald green Porsche (Old Pat’s twenty-first present). His ostensible reason was that it would give him a chance to chat, away from fiddle music, jigs and patriotic songs.

  But he had relapsed into a moody silence as they left Castlemaine, never once glancing back, and he maintained it almost all the way to the airport.

  “Are things really bad between you and Mary?” asked Dree gently.

  “Bad enough,” he said. “And she’s a good Catholic girl, which makes them desperate.”

  “I’m sorry, Con,” said Dree. “Politically it won’t help, huh?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you’ve got plenty of time to sort it out. Or to put it behind you if it won’t mend.”

  “Plenty of time before what?” he asked.

  “Before you start chasing the nomination.”

  “Not if I go for it next time,” he answered.

  “Next time!” she said, amazed, taking her eyes off the speeding road to glance at his impassive face.

  “That’s right. I’d be the youngest ever, wouldn’t that be something to stick down their throats?”

  “’Whose throats, Con?”

  He shrugged and said lightly, “Anyone’s throats.”

  At the airport she said, “I hope it all works out, Con. Take care.”

  “You too, Dree. You take extra special care.”

  They kissed and he went out to the waiting plane.

  By the time he reached New York the clouds which had been white and fluffy over Boston had thickened into stormpeaks, and as his cab crawled over the Queensboro Bridge, they spilt a livid light into the canyons of Manhattan and from time to time an italic scrawl of lightning flicked across the sky like a tired neon sign.

  The storm broke as he reached his hotel. He checked in and left his bag before returning through the bloated raindrops to the waiting cab. It dropped him on East 62nd between Park and Madison and the storm poured water over him like a shower-bath as he dashed into the apartment block which contained what till recently had been his New York home. But for the past four months his wife and Peggy, their young daughter, had lived here alone. The porter was new and Conal had to show him identification before he summoned the elevator. Even now the humiliation was not finished. He put his key into the lock on the apartment door but found it wouldn’t turn. Then it was opened from the other side.

  “You’ve changed the locks,” he said, more accusingly than he meant.

  His wife, Mary, was a small blonde woman, with doll-like features and a child’s calm untroubled gaze. Her face registered little of the extremes of delight and pain, but she was far from being insensitive to either.

  “I had to for the insurance,” she said. “They like a woman living alone to have stronger locks than the others. You don’t grudge us protection, do you?”

  Once she had been loving, trusting, yielding, admiring. Now she was a counter-puncher, always ready with a blow.

  “Where’s Peggy?”

  “Out at friends. It’s a birthday party.”

  “Yeah? Better than the one I’ve been at, I hope,” he said, sinking wearily into a chair.

  “How’s the Granda? OK?”

  “Same as ever. Annoyed you and Peg weren’t there.”

  “But you explained why?”

  “Yes. I explained,” said Conal. “Mary, listen, I’ve come to beg. I haven’t got a speech prepared. You can write it for me. Whatever lines will move you, whatever arguments persuade you, you put them in and I’ll say them and I’ll mean them. For my sake, for our sake, for Peggy’s sake, even, if you want, for your country’s sake, stick with me now. Please. I beg you.”

  She looked at him blank-faced, a little doll waiting for someone to turn the key so she could speak.

  Her voice when it came was most undoll-like. “After what you told me, Conal? No way!”

  “I told you because I trusted you, I needed you, I thought you could help me!” protested the man.

  “Did you? Then you were a fool. Poor judgment, that should disqualify you from the White House even if your ethics didn’t,” she snapped.

  “But why should it make this difference to us?” he asked. “OK, it’s a shock, but it was a weakness, a once-off thing, I’m mortally ashamed, it had nothing to do with us, though…”

  “Nothing? It had everything. It made disgusting everything we’d ever done; all those things you liked to do, I’d just been puzzled by them before; but what the hell, you were a man, perhaps all men were like that, how should I know, little innocent, straightforward, normal me?”

  Her voice had risen and there was a faint, rather becoming flush around her cheekbones as though the dollmaker had lovingly stroked them with a tiny pinkladen brush.

  Conal opened his mouth as if to speak again, but instead he threw up his arms in a spontaneous gesture of surrender. Anything more would be rhetoric. Perhaps it had all been rhetoric. One of his political strengths was knowing when he was beaten—sometimes in advance of his opponents knowing they had beaten him.

  He stood up. She looked at him in surprise at his suddenness.

  “You’re not waiting for Peggy?”

  “I don’t think so. Not today. Goodbye, Mary.”

  “That sounds final.”

  “Does it? What’s final? Remember, any time you decide after all you’d like to be married to the President of the United States, just let me know.”

  “I’ll always be married to you, Con, whatever you become,” she said steadily. “Though if you became that, then God help us all.”

  “He’d better help me,” said Conal. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

  Mary sat down and remained very still, staring fixedly at the closed door with those shell-blue eyes which looked as if weighted lids would slide smoothly over them if her head fell back. After the silence had stretched for half a minute, she rose and went to the window. After a while she saw Conal come out of the apartment block and stand on the sidewalk. Almost immediately a cab drew up and he got in. He had always been lucky with cabs.

  The cab bore him swiftly away. The hotel he had named was not far but during the short journey the driver managed to put the country’s domestic problems to rights and Conal’s mind and spirit were racked by a storm of thought and emotion which made the turbulent skies above seem placid. But his face showed nothing of this as he paid off the driver and walked swiftly through the hotel lobby.

  His bag lay on the bed. He unlocked it but did not begin to unpack. Instead he burrowed his hand in among the clothes till they met the cold hardness of the automatic which he always kept by him at night.

  He did not pull it out but sat on the bed, his hand on the gun, his eyes on himself in the dressing-table mirror.

  Then he grinned without much humor, said softly, “Some other time, that’s a promise,” released the gun and picked up the phone.

  After that he lay on the bed, lit a cigarette and waited. Half an hour later there was a knock at his door.

  He opened it. A broad, motherly-looking woman smiled at him.

  “Nice to see you again, sir. Here’s Emily, I think you’ve met before.”

  She ushered into the room a girl of about fourteen in pigtails and large round spectacles.

  “Yes. Hello, Emily,” said Conal. “How are you?”

  “She’s fine, sir. If you’ll excuse us just a moment.”

  The matronl
y woman hustled the girl through into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

  Conal didn’t move, but stood as if in a trance staring at the closed door till it opened again a few moments later. The woman came out alone.

  “There we are, sir. All ready,” she said cheerfully. “Would you care to settle now, then there’ll be no need to disturb you later?”

  Still not speaking, Conal took out his pocketbook, peeled off a small bundle of notes and handed them over.

  “I’ll be back in, shall we say an hour, sir?”

  He nodded. With a last amiable beam, the woman left. A moment later the girl appeared at the bathroom door. She was stripped down to her underclothes, a pair of thick cotton pants and a cheap bra which didn’t look at all necessary.

  Conal looked at her for a long minute and sighed. At this moment he always got a feeling of nightmare but it quickly passed. The nightmares all lay outside this room, though in a sense they started here.

  Turning, he locked the door. The precaution suddenly struck him as absurd and he smiled. Locking doors was an empty gesture in these days of two-way mirrors, microbugs, hidden cameras. He should know if anyone should. Hadn’t he seen it all on film, heard it all on tape?

  And hadn’t he been crazy enough to confess it all to his wife in the touchingly naive faith that she would understand and absolve?

  But, he reminded himself sardonically, the one positive thing to arise from all these horrors was that he didn’t have to worry about being spied on any more. Once was far and away plenty.

  He made an ironical obeisance to the possible sources of surveillance around the room.

  The girl looked at him warily. She’d probably been warned about weirdos.

  He smiled at her.

  “A little private joke, Emily,” he said.

  Then he gestured towards the bed and began to undress.

  An hour later to the minute, the motherly woman returned to collect Emily. She left without shutting the door and before Conal could close it, two men entered. They looked, dressed and spoke like high-ranking business executives, which in fact was what they were. The first time he had met them had been in this very room in these very circumstances only nine months earlier. But his reaction then had been very different. He had raved, threatened and offered bribes as they laid photographic prints neatly on the bed and played tapes. Finally their lack of reaction, their self-contained silence had driven him silent in his turn.