Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  “What happened? Was it all in the warehouse with the books?”

  “I burnt it in my stove. What I could not burn I took out piece by piece and threw in the river.”

  Louise stared.

  “When you reach my age,” said Mrs Walsh, “you cannot know how soon you may die. You must do necessary things while you still possess the strength and will. That is all I am prepared to tell you. I have shown you this so that you may tell your father with what little comfort I am prepared to live. As his loyal subject I am grateful to him for his continued permission to reside here, in recognition of my husband’s long service to His late Majesty. As I have said, I need no more help than that. None at all.”

  She moved aside and waited for Louise to go first down the stairs, but Louise stayed where she was.

  “Yes, I see,” she said. “I don’t understand, I mean, but I suppose I accept what you’re telling me. It’s very difficult. You see, Aunt Bea really ought not to have Granny’s papers. I know she wouldn’t do anything to let my family down, and I’m sure you wouldn’t either, but it doesn’t stop people being extremely jumpy about them being here. You’ve read a lot of them by now. You know the sort of things Granny said about people. The trouble is, that the rest of us don’t know exactly what she said, and there’s people in the Palace and the Foreign Office and so on who are already putting pressures on my father to hand the problem over to the security services. I can’t tell you what a nuisance that might be, not just to us, but to you and Aunt Bea too. They’ll want to come and see you, and ask all sorts of questions, and bother people who used to know you, and so on. The reason I’m here at all is because we’ve been fighting them off, trying to save Aunt Bea—and you too, of course—that kind of fuss, but I’m afraid if Aunt Bea’s going to go on taking that line that’s the next thing that’ll happen.”

  Louise had been reasonably sure that Mrs Walsh was going to refuse her first appeal, and so had thought out her line with care; she had spoken in tones of sympathetic worry, and got it about right; but she hadn’t expected to enjoy the process. It was the sort of devious, bullying, backstairs work which her ancestors had employed courtiers for, and which had in the end got most other monarchies booted into exile. As it turned out, though, she felt no shame. The tour of the flat had changed her attitude to Mrs Walsh. Previously she had found her forbidding but impressive and, despite the nuisance of her intervention into the imbroglio over Granny’s papers, had assumed that it was nice for Aunt Bea to have fallen so quickly into the dependent relationship she needed—anyway, a distinct improvement on Granny. Now she began to wonder whether Mrs Walsh mightn’t turn out to be an even worse monster.

  Mrs Walsh listened to the speech, nodded a couple of times and tapped her stick on the ground. The cold on the landing seemed to close round them. It struck Louise that there might be a far more basic and straightforward explanation for Mrs Walsh’s wish to prolong the sorting of Granny’s papers, at least till the summer.

  “It must have been desperately cold here in that spell we had in January,” she said.

  “Your winters are nothing. I have known real cold. I have seen my mother left to die in the snow like a foundered horse, with the dribblings freezing to her cheek.”

  “How ghastly.”

  “It is how we were treated.”

  “Let’s go and warm ourselves up with a pot of tea.”

  Louise was in bed, giving Davy his goodnight feed, when the telephone rang. She picked it up with her free hand and cradled it into her shoulder.

  “Lulu? I got a message to call you.”

  “You owe me a bottle of champagne or something.”

  “I can spare a Mars Bar. What are we celebrating?”

  “Aunt Bea says we can have Granny’s papers back.”

  “Excellent. How did you manage it?”

  “I went over and saw her this afternoon. I had a bit of luck, because I spotted Mrs Walsh on the way and gave her a lift, and that meant I got a chance to ask her not to come in while I was talking to Aunt Bea. Anyway Aunt Bea tried to tell me a lot of fibs which Mrs Walsh had put her up to about Granny giving express orders that she had to hang on to the papers, so I trotted off to see Mrs Walsh. I talked to her about the pension, but she wasn’t interested—do you know she lives in the most appallingly spartan way, no carpets, no heat, a hard bed, a few kitchen chairs; she showed me to prove she didn’t want anything. She’s a bit dotty, I think. I’m not sure she’s going to be good for Aunt Bea after all. Anyway, when she said no to the pension hike I told her that in that case we’d hand the whole thing over to Security, and they’d start investigating her …”

  “I trust you didn’t put it in those terms.”

  “Of course not. I said what a nuisance it was going to be for poor Aunt Bea, and just mentioned they’d do Mrs Walsh too while they were at it, but we both knew what I was talking about. Anyway Aunt Bea rang up before I’d even got home and left a desperate sort of message with Joan. Poor old thing. I felt awful when I rang her, listening to her squirming. But the upshot is I’m going over to pick the papers up next week.”

  “We could send people round.”

  “I’d rather do it myself. It’ll be Janine’s day off, so I’ll take Davy over and let Aunt Bea hold him. John can carry the heavy stuff. I’ll take one of the big cars. It’ll be all right. I thought if we just send men round Aunt Bea doesn’t even know …”

  “Well, if you can spare the time.”

  “Davy will love the ride. And then that’ll leave your people free to see what they can do about Alex Romanov. How’s that going?”

  “Last I heard they were having trouble locating the blighter.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s pushed off somewhere. Gone skiing or something.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought he was the type. Piers might know. I’ll ask him, soon as he comes to bed. Hold it, I’m just switching the brat to the other barrel. No, don’t ring off—I want to know about Soppy … OK, ready now. Joan told me you’d found her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s something. You don’t sound too happy.”

  “No. That is to say, from our own immediate point of view, things have perhaps taken a turn for the better. It seems that we all rather misjudged the Lipchitzes. They’d only had the girl in the house a couple of days before they’d cottoned on something was seriously wrong …”

  “She probably ate a passing steer, or something. Sorry.”

  “It is far from funny. They had their doctor flown up from B. A., and a nursing team to keep an eye on her. I’ve talked to the doctor. He knows his stuff. He’s doped her pretty thoroughly and we’re making arrangements to have her flown home.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Can’t say. These things take a hell of a lot of investigation and trial and error. Most of them are more treatable than they used to be though, but even when you’ve come up with a treatment you don’t always know what went wrong in the first place. She’ll certainly need treatment, and there’s a very good chance that it will be effective.”

  “Poor thing. I suppose the next question is, is it the same thing Lady Bakewell had?”

  “Whatever that was. Schizophrenia appears to have an hereditary element. We did a pretty thorough investigation at the time, and we couldn’t turn up anyone else in the family who had shown signs of instability.”

  “I sometimes think that you have to be a bit potty to be as unpleasant as Aunt Eloise.”

  “Power mania is not a recognised disease. It is a normal human condition. You have of course hit on the most serious aspect of the problem, as it concerns us. All I can say is we won’t be able to make up our minds until we’ve been able to form some sort of diagnosis of Soppy’s case …”

  “At least you can let everyone know it was mainly pressure from the bloody hacks that
brought it on.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Well, it must have been.”

  “Not necessarily, but in any case not what I meant. If we take that line, whether openly or with a leak or two, they’ll go on the defensive, and their best line will be that Soppy was mentally unstable from the start and we should never have let Albert marry her. That, of course, is why it’s such good news that you’ve persuaded Beatrice to release my mother’s papers. My own view is that there are going to be quite enough busybodies of various kinds taking the line you suggest for us not to need to. We are proud to have a free press and while regretting certain recent excesses blah blah blah.”

  “And let them tear each other’s throats out.”

  “If we’re lucky we might get two or three months of slightly less repulsive manners.”

  “From some of them, anyway.”

  “It’s about the best we can hope for. Look after yourself, darling.”

  “Same to you.”

  Davy had fallen asleep between suck and suck, a bad habit he was supposed to be getting out of. Louise squinted down at the almost abstract shapes, the round cheeks, the round skull, the round of her breast. How long was Father going to live? No guessing—you couldn’t help feeling that someone with such a bad temper might pop off any moment. He’d often said he was going to retire when he was sixty-five, like everyone else—in seven years’ time that would be—supposing Mrs T. would let him. She intended to be still going by then, and she might regard it as a bad precedent. Let’s say he did, Davy would be pushing eight … of course it wasn’t really going to matter until Albert snuffed it or retired, and by then his two would be in their forties and if they were going off their rockers it would have shown up, surely … Only the in-between years, growing up as a might-be-heir, that would be bad … worse if he’d been a girl, of course … poor Soppy.

  “Oh, come on, you little brute. Wake up!”

  In answer to her shake Davy tilted his head away from the breast and snored, the personification of smug male apathy. Briskly Louise swung herself out of the bed, took him back to the nursery, slapped a dry nappy round him and shoved him down into his cot. Of course he would wake in less than an hour in an outrage of wind. Let him.

  3

  “Not a word. He was supposed to ring me—when was it? Friday.”

  (They had already talked about Soppy, back and forth, round and round, useless. They had kissed and started to drowse when the grit of a small undissolved duty had grated in the wards of sleep and woken Louise to ask about Alex.)

  “What about?”

  “Some sort of traffic control project his firm wants to tender for. It involves a bit of math I did a paper on a few years back—too abstruse for anyone on his team, but I’ve got a student who could do with the money. There’s a deadline on the tender, apparently.”

  “So he hasn’t gone skiing.”

  “Wouldn’t have thought so. Most likely they’ve decided not to use Simon and Alex as a result is locked up with a towel round his head trying to sort out the math himself.”

  “If you do hear from him will you let Father know?”

  “Um.”

  “It’s important, darling. It isn’t for us, mainly it’s for Soppy.”

  “Um still. It seems to me not a question of the motive, but what your father—or rather his minions—would then do with the knowledge. I would very much prefer Alex to hand the papers over, but even for Soppy’s sake I will not be involved in underhand methods of forcing him to do so. I will if you like explain the position to him and tell him as forcefully as I can that in my opinion he ought to do as you wish.”

  “My turn to um. I mean, I know it’s outside the contract, you going that far. I really appreciate it. The trouble is, if you tell him what’s up … Do you believe him when he says he’s doing all this just out of respect for Granny’s wishes?”

  “Nobody does anything for a single motive. All actions are the outcome of a series of inner compromises, mainly unconscious. I don’t, as a matter of fact, think Alex is very interested in the money, though no doubt it plays a part. If I had to choose a dominant motive, I would guess that, haying been brought up as a fringe member of what had once been a dominant family but which itself had been suddenly marginalised by the Russian Revolution, a family whose chief activity must have seemed to a child to be the interchange of minor personal details, Alex would like to be taken seriously as a practitioner in that field.”

  “I love it when you get to the end of sentences like that.”

  “He is clearly a skilled gossip. He would like his skill recognised in the publication of a book. If gossip were a degree course—and a lot of them aren’t much more—he’d already have a chair and a string of publications to his name.”

  “So we aren’t going to be able to buy him off.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so. I can tell you from experience that if that is his motive, it is a very strong one.”

  “Can I tell Father? He’d understand.”

  “Suggest that he aims for a compromise.”

  “When they’ve seen Aunt Bea’s collection they’ll have a clearer idea what they’re talking about.”

  “You fixed that?”

  “I’m going to collect them on Wednesday. I won’t tell you how I did it. My methods were underhand, but I wasn’t ashamed. I’m still not. I think Mrs Walsh is off her rocker. You remember that book, the one you got Mr Brown to read for me? I told you she’d asked if she could have it because it was the last copy, and I got Mrs Suttery to get permission for me to give it to her—I think she’s burnt it. She lives in an almost totally bare flat, no carpets, curtains, just sticks of furniture, no heating except an old stove—she showed me round. She’d been burning paper in the stove. I know it could have been anything. I just have an intuition.”

  “I have a counter-intuition that I am about to fall asleep.”

  “Me too. Sleep well.”

  MARCH 1988

  1

  “That you? Now listen, because this is the last time I’m calling you. You’ve got just this one chance, and for both of our sakes you better bloody take it …”

  2

  The rover came to rest while Louise was still on the car-phone. It was a bad spot, blanking the signal completely.

  “Hell,” she said. “We’re too close to the building. I thought brick was OK.”

  John was leaning across to unbelt the nest-egg. He looked round. “It’ll be the scaffolding over on the other wing, ma’am. That’s not that far. Shall I back up then?”

  “Don’t bother. You can do it when I’m out. Joan was trying to check something with me about a change in the Portsmouth visit. Tell her to call me on Lady Surbiton’s number—give me a couple of minutes. OK?”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  He got out, opened the door for her and handed her the nest-egg. Davy woke as the now familiar lift doddered up. When it stopped he would think about yelling, but for the moment the movement kept him happy. He had his Edward VII look strongly today, the heavy eyelids and the rolls of blubber.

  “You’re a smug, self-satisfied little piglet,” said Louise.

  He blinked at the sound of her voice and blinked again as the lift bumped to a stop. Louise pushed the inner gate aside, the outer door was opened for her and held by a smiling man in paint-splodged overalls.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  As she stepped past him he moved, leaping against her and clamping her body violently to his, pinioning her arms. Her shout was still in her throat when a hand closed over her mouth from behind, another hand forced her head right back till she could no longer clench her jaw shut, and a roll of dry fabric was forced between her teeth and lashed there with a cloth. The nest-egg was prized from her grip. A moment later Davy’s scream of frigh
t was muffled, though not stopped. The man who had opened the door for her let go, gripped her left wrist, bent and jerked her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

  Louise had already gone limp. After Chester Father had insisted on everyone doing a course in how to react if something like this happened. You control the useless urge to struggle and scream, you signal to your attackers any way you can that you’re going to do what they want, you wait for help from outside. She even knew what a gag felt like, and how not to choke on it.

  The man turned not to Aunt Bea’s door but to Mrs Walsh’s. It must have been already on the latch. Upside down, under his arm as he carried her up the stairs, Louise caught glimpses of the other man. He had the nest-egg under his arm, and one large hand with a tea towel clamped over Davy’s face. The ridiculous little arms and legs threshed against the belts of the nest-egg.