Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  “They had been married how long?” said Mrs Walsh.

  “Just over ten years, wasn’t it, Aunt Bea?”

  “That is a very good time to lose your husband,” said Mrs Walsh, with a banal finality, as if laying down the law on the proper season for the spraying of peach-trees. Louise was saved from having to answer by the beep of the pager from her handbag.

  “Bother,” she said. “Somebody’s after me. Do you mind, Aunt Bea?”

  She rose with Davy still leeched to her breast and juggled one-handed in her bag to check the number of the Rover car-phone.

  “Lucy Ford,” she said. She always felt a bit of a fool using the security code when anyone was listening, but John Dyce would have to report her if she didn’t.

  “There’s an alert, ma’am.”

  “A real one?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You mean something’s happened?” Davy gave a fretful snort as the chill of tension cut off his milk supply. Bert and Soppy were due in Belfast tomorrow, on a post-Christmas cheer-the-troops whirl. It was secret, of course, but you could never be sure.

  “Not that I know, ma’am. They just said to check your timing.”

  “We’ll have a cup of tea and go. Half an hour?”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “Perhaps you’d better look out a different route home.”

  “I’m doing that. Not to worry, ma’am.”

  Louise put the handset down and turned, smiling.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “It wasn’t anything.”

  Still, it was more than a minute before Davy could suck satisfactorily again. This sort of thing happened about once a week, Louise thought, but Security didn’t usually tell you about it unless you were alone and unwatched.

  “Let me get the tea ready, Beatrice,” said Mrs Walsh, rising. “You will need to come and carry the tray. I will call you when it is ready.”

  She left the room, using her stick to lean on more heavily than on Louise’s last visit. Aunt Bea gazed after her till the door closed.

  “Isn’t she wonderful?” she whispered. “Such a good head, and so sure of herself. She tells me I ought to assert myself more.”

  “The girl who’s minding me while Joan’s having the twins goes to self-assertion classes.”

  “Classes? With desks and blackboards?”

  “I think they act little plays asserting at each other. She says it helps. Don’t worry, Aunt Bea—everyone likes you as you are. Why didn’t Mrs Walsh want us to go on talking about her adventure?”

  Aunt Bea’s doughy pallor was incapable of blushing, but everything else proclaimed her embarrassment.

  “Oh … oh … well, you see, my dear, you’re so young.”

  “Not in front of the children?”

  “It’s all right for us old things who’ve knocked about a bit …”

  Aunt Bea was no fool. She knew she was talking nonsense. She’d seen videos of Louise at bedsides in the harrowing hospitals of refugee camps, babies born after accouchements as primitive as the one Mrs Walsh had been describing with such relish. It was a rotten fib, and she knew it, but Louise couldn’t hound the poor old thing any further, so she let Davy finish his feed and then handed him over to Aunt Bea to be burped while she went into the kitchen to fetch the tray.

  During tea Mrs Walsh talked very forthcomingly about her life in St Petersburg before the First World War. The family had lived close to the Catherine Embankment, and strong among her childhood memories was the daily walk, with perambulators and nursemaids, past the spot at which Tsar Alexander had been assassinated thirty years earlier. One of the nurses, she said, used to describe the attack, always in the same words, ritualised like a fairy-tale, the racing carriage, the explosion, the Tsar climbing down to inspect the damage, and then the second explosion and the screams, and the smoke clearing away to show the Tsar and his assassin lying almost side by side, bleeding their lives out into the snow. Louise took Davy from Aunt Bea and sat nodding and oohing while she ran her fingers up the elastic little back, easing the knots of wind in the tubing. Of course, she realised, Mrs Walsh was talking so freely in order not to have to answer questions about her later adventure. She couldn’t know how close the Chester bomb had come to doing the same thing to Mother and Father—that had been largely hushed up, and most of the trial had been in camera. All the same, it was pretty tactless. Deliberately? Probably not. With a personality as powerful as Mrs Walsh’s, the most trivial phrase or gesture tended to seem deliberate.

  It was cold when Louise came out into the open, and dark under the cloud-layer, though it was still well before dusk. She slid the nest-egg across onto the passenger-seat, expecting John to be ready at the other door to fasten the seat-belt round it, but he was standing well back from the car, one hand in his jacket pocket, glancing left and right along the worn old facade with its nooks and crannies and buttresses. He didn’t climb in until she had the engine started.

  “Looks as if it might snow,” she said.

  “Feels that way, ma’am.”

  But not blood, she thought. No one’s blood.

  Piers rang before she’d been home five minutes.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said. “All all right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Oh, well, one of your minders rang to check my movements, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. Just said not to worry, which was counter-productive. What happened?”

  “Probably nothing. They didn’t tell me either. Anyway they haven’t asked us to cancel supper.”

  “That’s what I’m ringing about. I’m afraid Adrian’s got flu. Tracy says she’s had it and isn’t infectious but do we still want her? I said yes.”

  “Good. While I’ve got you—you remember that book, the one about Mrs Walsh and her husband escaping from the Bolsheviks …”

  “Talking about it only this morning. Archie gave it to a chap called Harrison—I don’t know him—who passed it on to one of his students. The student has apparently read it. Harrison rang to ask if we wanted a written report, or what.”

  “Oh, no—I just want to talk to him—the student, I mean. I say, you couldn’t get hold of him for this evening? He could fill in for Adrian. If he’s free, I mean.”

  “You don’t want me to issue a royal command?”

  “No, of course not. See you later.”

  She rang off, irritated. He shouldn’t have asked, though he’d meant it as a joke. This was supposed to be one of her ordinary-person evenings, but he’d reminded her that there weren’t many real ordinary people who wouldn’t have cancelled other engagements, however pressing, if like this unnamed student they’d been asked at the last minute to join her.

  Piers had kept his ramshackle little flat near the university partly because he sometimes needed it but also because Louise could then use it to act bits of that fantasy life in which she was just Mrs Chandler, and nothing much else. In the early days of their marriage she’d tried to go the whole hog, doing all the work herself. She was a barely adequate cook, but that wasn’t the main problem. Shopping, for instance, only emphasised the unreality of the fantasy. Other shoppers were mostly unintrusive, but there was something about dithering in front of a meat display with a dozen people watching out of the corner of their eyes to see what she bought that made her panic and choose wrong. It was absurd. Most of her job consisted in being stared at, but that didn’t help. She’d read that professional strippers were often as prudish as anyone else off-stage. All Louise was, she sometimes thought, was a stripper who didn’t undress. Anyway, Chester happened, and Security put their foot down about popping in to Sainsbury’s and it was a relief.

  Security would have liked to stop the parties in Piers’s flat and let Louise have her guests over to Quercy, but as Father said you had a sort of duty to the Family as a whole to insist on your own sma
ll freedoms, or you’d all finish up living in separate bunkers and being brought out on state occasions to be whisked through the streets in bomb-proof carriages like the poor old Tsar, and look how much good that had done him. So nowadays Mrs Newton was driven over from Quercy in the afternoon to get everything ready, and all Louise needed to do was remember to turn the cooker off before she dished up.

  The student’s name turned out to be Don Brown. He was about twenty-five, tubby and crop-haired, with a strongly American look but with an equally strong Scots accent. He shook hands but didn’t smile. Piers had brought him along, and Tracy and Isabelle arrived less than a minute later, so Louise merely said hello and took Tracy off to the kitchen, ostensibly to help her check that the cooking was on course but really to catch up in private on the latest episode of Tracy’s medical cliff-hanger. Tracy was as healthy as anyone else, on average, but seemed to have the psychic ability to cause any doctor who looked at her to produce a wrong and usually alarming diagnosis, so that by her own account (foul-mouthed and in a dispassionate, flat Midland voice) she had spent a third of her life fighting her way out of operating theatres just in time to save kidney or spleen, or with Adrian desperately trying to persuade the psychiatric nurses who’d turned up on the doorstep that the alarming symptoms she’d been displaying two days ago had ceased since she’d stopped taking the last wrong lot of pills she’d been prescribed. She managed to regard these episodes as being both a serious outrage and pure farce. The current series, obscene even by Tracy’s standards, concerned the latest attempts to achieve a long-wanted pregnancy. It was sad, because it didn’t look as if anything was going to happen—but by the time they went back into the living-room Louise had barely managed to control her laughter and now had hiccups.

  Alex must have just arrived. Piers was watching with benign mild malice to see how he took Isabelle’s treatment of any new man she met, which consisted of batting cartoon-size eyelashes at him and at the same time rattling through a questionnaire on such things as his opinion of the novels of Walter Scott, post-modernist hypermarkets, the landscape of Umbria, heroic tapestry and Scriabin. Alex was beaming, clearly loving the game and batting back counter-questions. Mr Brown, who had no doubt gone through the same culture-mill but with less enjoyment, was watching. He almost jumped round as Louise approached him. She could feel his nerves, poor man. Some people reacted like that, and there wasn’t much you could do about it—not just students and other innocents but people you’d have thought knew how to cope, directors of large firms, admirals, bishops even. You could feel them vibrate as if responding to some kind of mystic ray you were beaming out at them. Usually a few minutes of chat would calm them, but sometimes they went on twanging all the time you were with them, and it became difficult not to twang in harmony. Mr Brown, Louise guessed, had the added problem of having believed he didn’t bother himself much about royalty, either way, and now finding that this wasn’t true.

  “Don’t worry about Isabelle,” she whispered. “She won’t keep it up. It’s just her way of showing she isn’t just a brilliant boffin. Drat. If this goes on I’m going to have to hold my breath. How’ve you been getting on with my book?”

  “Um … well … um … ma’am …”

  “Is it really only a lot of stuff lifted from other books? I mean that’s what it reads like, isn’t it?”

  Mr Brown looked relieved. The vibrations lessened. No doubt the hiccups helped.

  “I haven’t traced it all yet, of course, er, ma’am …”

  “You just say it once and then forget about it. But you’ve found bits like that?”

  “With the Diehards in Siberia by Colonel John Ward. Sirius has copied extensively from that throughout the opening chapters. Occasionally he inserts paragraphs from other sources—more than one, I think—but I haven’t traced them yet.”

  “That’s what I thought. Really, it’s the second half I’m interested in, after he leaves the train. I want to know if any of it’s true. I’ll tell you what happened. I met an old lady who told me this marvellous story about escaping from Russia during the revolution. It was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. Of course I wanted to know more and when she said her husband had written a book about it I asked if I could borrow a copy, but she said they’d all been destroyed in the blitz. Then I found this one in the Palace Library—the husband had sent it to my great-grandfather and they never throw anything away—but I was terribly disappointed when I read it. There’s hardly anything about the adventure at all, is there? I’m not just being inquisitive, by the way. I’ve got to know whether the old lady I was talking about is above board, if you see what I mean.”

  “I can find no trace of the book having been published.”

  “That’s right. She says pressures were put on the publishers from certain quarters. I don’t know what that means.”

  “By Colonel Ward’s publishers, presumably—Cassells, I think. The book would have been sent to the same reviewers, and some of them would have got in touch with Cassells. Danton and Bute wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. They’d have been forced to withdraw the book before publication, for breach of copyright. Mr Sirius must have been dead naive.”

  “He was an adventurer, she says. He might have been a sort of gentleman con-man, who’d somehow got involved in that bit of war. He seems to have conned my great-grandfather, but that wasn’t difficult. She says Danton and Bute went bankrupt.”

  “Having to withdraw the book could have bust them. Do you know … Sorry … They told me I wasn’t supposed to ask questions.”

  The next hiccup came in the middle of Louise’s laugh, and hurt. Before she’d recovered the kitchen buzzer sounded.

  “We’ll have to leave it for the moment,” she said. “But listen. I’ve got a problem. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I only thought about it on the way over. Alex Romanov will be on my other side, and for reasons I can’t tell you I don’t want to get him involved in this book. It’s nothing sinister, just awkward. You might find him interesting in other ways, though. He knows a lot of old exile gossip.”

  Mr Brown nodded, already, despite himself, a loyal servant of the Crown. Louise scuttled off to dish up, holding her breath as she did so, but her hiccups resisted the treatment. The subject came up again before she had taken her second spoonful of melon.

  “How’s life been treating you?” she asked Alex.

  “Benevolently at the moment, ma’am. The only cloud in my sky is that I am having unexpected difficulties with dear Lady Surbiton. For reasons known only to herself she has taken all the Grand Duchess’s papers with her to Hampton Court, and now appears to have hired a dragon to protect her hoard. A dragon fluent in Russian, what’s more.”

  “Mrs Walsh. Her upstairs neighbour. She’s helping Aunt Bea sort Granny’s papers.”

  “She didn’t vouchsafe even that much on the telephone. All she will say is that Lady Surbiton isn’t yet ready to see me. If I have the good fortune to be answered by Lady Surbiton herself she hands me over at once to the dragon. I suppose I should be grateful that they are doing the tedious part of a literary executor’s job for me, but I would prefer to undertake it myself. Do you think there is any danger of their deciding to destroy anything?”

  “Oh, I hope not. I mean, I know Aunt Bea’s worried about the sort of things Granny probably said about people, but … Tell you what—I’ll ring the Palace tomorrow and get them to tell her not to.”

  “And this Mrs Walsh is to be trusted, you think? In other ways?”

  “We’re trying to find out. She’s got a hold on Aunt Bea because she looks a bit like Granny. The first time I met her I asked if she was a Romanov too.”

  “Is she?”

  “She said no, but she as good as told me her grandmother had been friendly with a Grand Duke Aleksei who had a bit of a reputation.”

  “Aleksandrovich, presumably.”

  “That’s rig
ht.”

  “Fast women and slow ships,” said Mr Brown, getting his oar in rather too firmly from Louise’s other side. Alex gave him a blink of encouraging surprise.

  “Mr Brown’s doing research in that period,” said Louise.

  “Later—some of the émigré pamphleteers,” said Mr Brown. “But I have to know the antecedents. The Grand Duke had a penchant for ballet-dancers, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, Mrs Walsh is grander than that,” said Louise. “Her family name’s Belitzin.”

  “Belitzin?” said Alex. “I don’t know of any Belitzins. Very grand, you say? It wasn’t, for instance, Belayev?”

  “No, Belitzin. A lot of my job’s getting names right.”

  Alex looked across at Mr Brown, who shrugged ignorance.

  “I know a bit about the Belayevs, of course,” he said. “There were four of them still raising hell in Paris in my period, challenging everyone to duels and so on. One of them ran an Absolutist sheet for a few months, and two of the others put on counter-agitprop melodramas—there was one with a climax in the Ekaterinburg cellar which caused a riot when a lot of leftists packed the audience and broke the theatre up.”

  “Yes, I remember my mother talking about it,” said Alex.

  “The Belayevs were always interested in the theatre—they’d a family tradition of maintaining their own troupe of actors—or rather they employed servants who could also act. They insisted on their learning English, too, so that they could perform Shakespeare in the original language. Were there any daughters in that generation? I don’t think so—just seven wild boys. Of course it could have been another branch of the family, but really, if a Countess Belayev had had a liaison with the Grand Duke Aleksei and produced a genuine Romanov by-blow my mother would certainly have told me. She took a veritably scholarly interest in such ramifications.”