Who Guards a Prince?

by Reginald Hill

  The line went dead.

  Jopley replaced the phone but remained under the visor, his thoughts swirling. The Preceptor had warned him, but against what? But even as the whirlpool in his mind still raged, he knew where it was sucking him down to. There was no sense in mocking up an IRA assassination of the girl. Things had changed now that she’d missed the accident. She was no longer the target.

  It had to be the Prince.

  Jopley was aghast. There’d never been any suggestion of this. The removal of people who were dangerous, he had accepted the necessity of that. Morrison had been ready to talk; McHarg had been hot on their trail; P.X. Connolly had overshadowed his much more controllable brother; and the girl herself, Deirdre Connolly, she was a menace not only to Conal as a man of potentially vast wealth and power but also to the Prince. So, remove her. He could stomach that. But not the Prince. Jopley believed in the Prince as part of an ill-defined but noble ideal of global order and authority, based inevitably on wealth and political power and, equally inevitably, needing the support and loyalty of a kind of Praetorian Guard. That was where the Templar Thanes came in. Their work was secret and ruthless, and at times even squalid. But ultimately it was on the side of order. The Prince and his family were part of that order. It might be necessary to remind him of his duty sometimes, to protect him from the wiles of colonial adventuresses, but to kill him was to reduce the whole affair to a mere money-grubbing, profit-making business. It was not for this he had joined, not for this he had taken and enforced those terrible oaths. The memory of the red ruin of Morrison’s gaping mouth rose in his mind and was with difficulty pushed away.

  Less than ever he wanted to talk to Spier now. Deep in thought, he walked out of the hotel into the snow-filled air. What was there for him to do? Perhaps face to face the Preceptor could explain, convince? He was a soldier, knew that there were often forces at work far beyond the grasp of the man on the battlefield. Obey orders, that was the soldier’s role, that kept him sane.

  But why should it have come to this? he asked himself angrily. Someone had been inefficient. If they’d removed the Connolly girl as planned…And what was it the Preceptor had said? Somehow, crazily, they had managed to kill McHarg’s daughter instead? Jesus!

  He shuddered, not at the cold but at the thought of what it would feel like to have McHarg alive and on the trail still with that bit of news to put the scent of blood in his nostrils. Thank God they’d succeeded in killing him at least!

  He climbed into the jeep and switched the engine on straightaway to boost the independent heater. The snow was thickening. Thank God for four-wheel drive. He was going to need it. The snow lay against the windows, turning the inside of the vehicle into a sort of box, shut off from the outer world and all its troubles, a refuge, almost cosy. He sat for a moment without turning on the windscreen wipers, enjoying the feeling of otherness, of respite.

  The hand that came to rest on his shoulder felt for a brief flash of time like the hand of brotherhood, of friendship, encouraging, reassuring.

  But the pressure increased instantly far beyond the power of his wishful thinking.

  He turned his head sharply and shrieked like a woman. Suddenly his safe cosy box felt like a coffin.

  “Hello, Captain Jopley,” said McHarg. “You and me have got lots to talk about. But first things first. Where the hell has the Prince gone?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Arthur looked down at the naked body of the sleeping girl and marvelled at its smooth perfection. They had made love with a passionate, almost despairing frenzy twice in very quick succession and then she had curled up against him like a child secure at last after much tribulation and, unexpectedly, suddenly, fallen asleep. He must remember to ask her if it was a compliment to the exhaustive demands of his technique or a comment on his soporific conversation.

  He ran his fingers lightly along the curve of her breast and she stirred under the touch and he found himself stirring again also at the sight and feel of her. But there would be plenty of time for that. Or perhaps there wouldn’t. Either way he had to think, to work out where it was they had reached in their relationship. Gently he disengaged himself from her light embrace and rolled off the bed.

  What is it I want? he asked himself, trying to ease himself into a mood of serious ratiocination. I want a cigarette came the frivolous evasive answer. He smoked very little and never in public but now he felt like one. There had been a cigarette-box in the big room, he recalled. Slipping on his underpants as a sop to Dewhurst in case he was sitting out there, he went out of the bedroom.

  He had been right. There was a freshly filled box on the old colonial dresser. He lit one with a glowing billet from the log fire and drew in deeply. Dewhurst had not returned, he observed, unless he was elsewhere in the building. Poor fellow, he’d be swanning around outside somewhere, looking for an AA box! This had been a good place to meet, he decided. It gave them as much chance of uninterrupted privacy as anywhere else he could think of. On the other hand its very remoteness and separateness were in a way counterproductive. Instead of getting down to the serious business of working out a future, he found himself inclined to sink into a pleasantly sybaritic state of timelessness and let the world go hang itself.

  But a decision had to be made. He hated himself for his uncertainty. To be hesitating now, here, at this stage, with the warmth and scent of Dree’s flesh still on him was monstrous, a betrayal. So, be honest, rational. Get the perspective right. OK. His position, his function. That was the obstacle. So what was he?

  The answer came pat. He was nothing, unimportant, an irrelevance, an anachronism; the majority of his fellow countrymen would applaud with delight if he got married to Dree; even his family would not be all that disapproving. They would rather he didn’t, but there wouldn’t be any of that old exile business, nothing like that.

  So why was he hesitating?

  The answer suddenly struck him with the force of divine revelation.

  Simply, he was afraid of being married!

  He sat down and studied this proposition.

  The more he looked, the more obvious it became. He’d seen the syndrome in others, members of his own family even, who had viewed the prospect of approaching matrimony with a mixture of doubt and panic which had seemed almost comic to the outside observer.

  It’s nothing to do with other people, he realized. Nothing to do with public duty or private loyalty, nothing to do with politics or religion, nothing to do even with his own feelings for Dree, which were as free from ambiguity as such feelings ever could be.

  When it came down to it, he was simply terrified at the prospect of being married; public approval or disapproval did not enter into it.

  He stood up and tossed his cigarette butt into the fire. It was a gross oversimplification, of course, but it offered hope. This was something different to talk about, something normal, something manageable. Perhaps it would turn out that at bottom Dree had the same fears. Once confronted together, surely they would evaporate?

  He headed back for the bedroom, but paused as he heard a noise outside. Dewhurst returning. Not before time. Any longer and he’d have been seriously worried about the poor devil!

  The door opened. He smiled in anticipation of the policeman’s embarrassment at catching him in his pants.

  And the smile remained there, set in that instinctive mask of courtesy which years of conditioning had taught him to wear in the face of no matter what surprises, as Ember and Goldmann came into the room.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  Goldmann glanced enquiringly at his partner. He would have been happy to blast the guy here and now and get on their way. But Ember knew how to take as well as give orders.

  “Your Royal Highness,” he said in a light, lilting accent. “Please to consider yourself under arrest.”

  “Arrest? said the Prince, wondering for one mad moment if these men could be from the U.S. Immigration Office come to get him for illicit
entry.

  “For grievous crimes you and your family have committed for many centuries against the Irish people,” said Ember. “You’ll get a fair trial.”

  It was unnecessary to talk like this without witnesses but Ember believed in working his way into a part.

  And now there was a witness.

  Deirdre had appeared at the door from the bedroom with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were still dewy with sleep and sex, but they cleared rapidly as they took in the newcomers.

  Arthur moved towards her.

  “Stay still, buddy boy,” ordered Goldmann, who would have needed surgery to give him an Irish accent.

  “It’s all right, my love,” said the Prince reassuringly, not breaking his step. “These gentlemen…”

  Goldmann hit him with the butt of his automatic, catching him just behind the ear and dropping him like a log.

  Deirdre shrieked and tried to run to his recumbent body but Ember caught her by the shoulder and spun her round to face him. Enraged, she drove her fingernails at his eyes but he moved his head back and cracked his open hand against her jaw, making her cry out again, in pain this time.

  He repeated the blow with the back of his hand on the other side. She staggered back now and the blanket slid from her shoulders, leaving her naked.

  “Whore,” said Ember. “Fornicating with your country’s enemies. Filth.”

  Goldmann grabbed her hands and forced them behind her body. His eyes ran lasciviously down the slender, sun-tanned body. He dumped her in a hard upright chair and pushed her arms through the wooden bars of the back rest. From his pocket he took a small roll of thin wire with which he bound her wrists together, pulling it so tight that in places it broke the skin.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “The usual for her kind,” said Ember. “Cut her hair off.”

  “All of her hair?” grinned Goldmann.

  Ember regarded him coldly. In the little file he kept, Goldmann was marked down as unreliable on jobs involving direct contact with women. Blowing up their cars was one thing, working at close quarters quite another. It was bad enough if the woman had to be taken out. But this one was to be left alive as a witness and what she was supposed to have witnessed was an attack by two IRA fanatics, not a rape by an oversexed hoodlum with a Bronx accent.

  “Will you hurry it up?” he said quietly.

  Goldmann met his gaze, gave a token sneer of defiance, then took a switchblade from his pocket and, dragging the girl’s hair back so hard that her head cracked against the bulk of the chair, he began to saw away at the long dark tresses.

  On the floor the Prince stirred and groaned. Ember watched till he saw that full consciousness had almost returned.

  “Stay down there,” he said, levelling his gun. “Or I’ll take your leg off.”

  The Prince’s eyes flickered to the unwavering barrel and he lay quite still.

  “What do you want?” demanded Deirdre, whose pain and terror had receded just enough to make speech possible again. “What are you going to do to him?”

  To him. Both Ember and Arthur noticed the altruistic concern. It must be love, thought Ember. Or perhaps she was just bright enough to have worked out that her boyfriend was about to lose more than his hair. It was sometimes a shitty job, thought Ember. He hated close-ups. And he hated play-acting. But it had to be done right. The newsmen were going to be the first to hear of this and what they printed would be the only report his employers were interested in.

  “We’ve some friends outside,” he said. “Like I said, he’ll get a fair trial.”

  “Trial for what?” The question ended in a shriek as Goldmann jerked on her hair again. He was taking far too long, cutting a strand at a time, alternately caressing the flowing locks and twisting them painfully. But Ember was ultrasensitive to people’s moods. He usually knew to a millimeter when a victim had tensed himself for a final suicidal dash. Sometimes this sensitivity had saved his own life. And now he knew that he mustn’t lean too hard on Goldmann. With any luck the bastard would shoot his load into his pants before much longer and then perhaps they could get this business over and be on their way.

  “Trial for what?” repeated the girl.

  “For murder, rape, arson, theft and attempted genocide,” said Ember, glancing out of a window.

  The snow was easing off, thank God. Being snowed in up here he could do without. But it was definitely getting brighter, and through the softly floating flakes he could see quite clearly the trees which ringed the clearing, their dark ribs picked out now by this lacing of white. There was one a little in advance of the others, tall, slim, elegant, spearing the feathery sky. He’d no idea what kind of tree it was. They were all firs to him. But it would do very nicely, he thought.

  As soon as that perverted mother, Goldmann, had finished his barbering, they would take the Prince outside and tie him to that tree and blow his brains out.

  CHAPTER 8

  The chopper pilot had viewed the darkening skies ahead and listened to the weather reports crackling over his radio with increasing perturbation. Conal, in the front passenger seat, had been too rapt in his own thoughts to pay much heed till the pilot dug him in the ribs a couple of times to draw his attention.

  “We’ll have to go down,” he yelled. “There’s no future in this.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  The pilot, a fierce dark little man whose immigrant great-grandparents had Americanized their Italian name to Patch, rolled his eyes expressively.

  “The trouble is not being able to see. That’s the trouble!”

  “It’s that bad, is it?”

  “It will be if we keep on going. There’s a chance it’ll clear up later, but it’ll be too dark then, I guess.”

  “Don’t you have lights?”

  “Gee yes, Senator, we have lights. But you do know where we’re going, don’t you? I’ve been there before on a bright sunny day, no cloud, visibility clear to Alaska, and that was difficult. It’s no nice bright helipad down there. It’s a tiny hole in a big forest and you get there by following a road and then a track, neither of which I am about to be able to see, let alone the hole. We’ll get down in Bangor.”

  “Bangor! For Christ’s sake, that’s miles out of our way.”

  During the exchange Old Pat Connolly who was in the seat behind the pilot remained in the posture he had held since they left Boston, narrow tight-skinned head sunk between thin hunched shoulders, dull unblinking eyes fixed on his fragile white hands which clutched, talon-like, at the briefcase he held on his knees. He had given no indication that he was aware of the passage of time or of distance and, looking at him now, it struck Conal that the best place for the Granda at this moment would be a hospital bed.

  This was probably a wild-goose chase anyway, prompted by the Granda’s senile neuroses and his own unsavory guilt feelings. Perhaps the McHarg girl’s death had been accidental, simple mechanical failure compounded by unfamiliarity with the car. The police too had their neuroses.

  Anyway, the point was the Granda was not about to contribute to this discussion and the fourth man in the small cabin, Sam, was there to take orders, not vote.

  “OK,” Conal said to the pilot. “Put her down. We’ll hire ourselves a jeep.”

  Patch nodded his relieved agreement.

  Then Old Pat spoke.

  “No,” he said.

  Patch glanced at him, raised his eyebrows, and shook his head sadly.

  Conal said, “Are you OK, Granda?”

  Old Pat ignored him. His skinny thumbs were pressing on the catches of his briefcase.

  It snapped open. He reached inside.

  When his hands came out they were holding the old Webley .45 revolver which for so long had rested in the cabinet on his study wall.

  He found it so heavy that he had to hold it in both hands, but when he rested it against the back of the pilot’s seat with the muzzle about three inches from Patch’s neck, it was steady enough.
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  “Keep going, Patch,” he said.

  “Granda, don’t be so stupid!” yelled Conal.

  “Keep going,” repeated Old Pat.

  Conal twisted round and looked at Sam, who was directly behind him. He signalled him with his eyes. It would be easy for the security man to reach over and grab the Granda’s gun.

  But Sam shook his head.

  Oh shit! thought Conal. He’s expiating guilt feelings too. Only Patch had no axe to grind and he was taking a long look over his shoulder at the Granda’s face.

  “OK,” he said finally. “I’ll try. Though I think that either way we all die.”

  “No tricks,” said Old Pat. “Keep that road in sight even if you’ve got to run along it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Patch, dropping the chopper a couple of hundred feet. “There it is now. Not much traffic now. Think how lucky we are. It must be a hell of a day for driving!”

  The jeep was aquaplaning so smoothly across the snow-covered road surface that it might have been a sleigh. Jopley had glanced once at the speedometer, then he glanced no more but sank a little deeper into the passenger seat and from time to time studied the map on his knee by the light of a flashlamp.

  There had been no resistance on his part, little overt pressure on McHarg’s. Somehow, despite the security net, the man had got close enough to the cabin to see their return from the hunting trip through his binoculars. Bright shirts and fancy hats had meant nothing to him. Their three-second dash from the vehicle to the building had told him the Prince was not in the party. And when Jopley had re-emerged only a few minutes later, he had followed him.

  Now Jopley had leisure to analyze the ease of his agreement to cooperate. McHarg he’d always feared. There was in the man a center of stillness and strength which he had always felt as a rebuke to his own secret uncertainties. He had been pleased when McHarg left the Prince’s service, horrified when he learned he was somehow on the track of his car after the dreadful night at Sanderton, doubtfully relieved when he heard of the frame-up accident and incredulously delighted when the Preceptor assured him of the man’s demise.