Ten Lords A-Leaping

by Ruth Dudley Edwards

  ‘Leaving him in the tack room?’

  ‘Yes. But he promised to lock up afterwards.’

  ‘After what?’

  She wriggled. ‘He said he’d paint a few slogans. What could I do? I couldn’t tell anyone, and I made him promise he wouldn’t do any real damage. And I was really relieved when it looked as if he hadn’t done anything. But I suppose it must have been him who did that to Daddy-in-law’s saddle.’

  ‘But you didn’t report that afterwards.’

  She spread out her hands in dumb entreaty.

  ‘Lady Poulteney. You may have been leaving a would-be murderer on the loose.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have known where to find him anyway.’

  ‘You didn’t see him again?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I mean, it’s not as if he’s the sort of person you have an affair with. He was very common.’

  The telephone rang. ‘Yes, sir. OK. Now.’

  He stood up. ‘I’ve got to go to a meeting now, Lady Poulteney. I would like you to tell Sergeant Pooley everything you remember about this gentleman. He will then type your statement and give it to you to sign and you may then go for the time being. We will have to check out aspects of your account.’

  Relief overcame her. ‘Oh, gosh, thank you.’ And almost humbly, ‘Will it take very long?’

  ‘Perhaps half an hour,’ said Pooley.

  She looked apologetically at Milton. ‘Would it be awful to ask you if I can make a phone call to the restaurant to say I’ll be a bit late?’

  ‘Not at all, Lady Poulteney. Ellis, when you’ve finished taking details, show her ladyship to a telephone.’

  As he left the room she said to Milton, ‘I’m sorry for being such a silly-billy, telling lies and all that, but I was terrified. I mean, what would Jamesie think if he knew what I’d been doing? I’d never hear the last of it.’

  ‘Well, let us hope, Lady Poulteney, that there will be no need for him to know. But I can make no promises. However, I would like to make one thing clear. The only way you can be proved innocent is if this gentleman can be located and will corroborate your story. If that doesn’t happen, you will remain high on the list of suspects for attempted murder at least. So for your own sake I recommend you to be as helpful as possible to Sergeant Pooley. Now, if you’ll forgive me…’ He nodded dismissively and left the room.

  ***

  By its sheer preposterousness, the Cavalry Club lifted Amiss out of his gloom. As he climbed the staircase to the bar, past the vast canvases of heroes riding boldly into battle with sabres flashing, horses perspiring and officers urging their men forward in dozens of forgotten encounters of imperial days, he felt his troubles to be minor by comparison.

  To his regret, the room overlooking Piccadilly to which Beesley took them to lunch bore no resemblance to an officers’ mess, for—as a member of the gentler sex—Jack Troutbeck was barred from the main dining room.

  ‘One has to accept casualties in time of war,’ announced Beesley. ‘I agree that the thing to do is to just get on with it. Just like Reggie would have wanted.’

  ‘And turn our reverse to our advantage,’ said the baroness. ‘How many of ours have we lost?’

  Beesley’s forehead puckered as he looked down the list. ‘I make it five: Reggie, Connie, Robbie, St John Fostock, and Tuffy Dreamer. Joe Taylor was an anti and Campden and Wilson were don’t knows.’

  ‘Hmmm. Not good. Still, it could have been much worse. Bertie has a pacemaker.’

  ‘Good God, I didn’t know that.’ Beesley’s jaw went slack. ‘How did he escape?’

  ‘He tells me it must have happened when he went out to have what he described as “a quiet word with a bishop”.’

  ‘What a blow to the tabloids,’ said Amiss. ‘A dead duke would have had their cup of joy running over.’ He saw Beesley looking at him with incomprehension and continued hastily: ‘Funny thing. One of the papers said this morning that six of them were life peers. Isn’t that odd?’

  ‘You’re not thinking,’ said the baroness. ‘There’s nothing funny about that. We tend to be older than the hereditary lot. That’s why the media are so daft when they go on about new blood. Life peers are usually pretty old blood. Not, of course, that we’re necessarily any the worse for that.’

  Amiss noticed that she seemed in curiously high spirits, brought on by that combination of adversity and adrenaline on which she always flourished.

  ‘So what next?’ asked Beesley. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Propaganda war. Robert will draft a letter of the are-we-men-or-mice variety.’

  ‘If you were mice, there wouldn’t be a problem,’ said Amiss sourly. ‘They’d be making you a protected species instead of murdering you. Look, before you go on—and I see where you’re heading—may I just remind you that these people aren’t just murderers. They’re crazy. Do you really want to put your heads above the parapet so they can more easily be blown off?’

  ‘Not heads above the parapet. More leading the men over the top.’ Tragedy seemed to be a great rejuvenator for Beesley. ‘Can’t risk a collapse in morale. Got to show fighting spirit, leadership. Just like all the chaps who inspire us in this club. Swords out, break into a gallop, and up and at ’em.’

  ‘What we want to avoid is the Charge of the Light Brigade.’

  ‘Don’t like this defeatist talk. Surprised at you, young man. That’s what comes of ending military service. Encourages cowardice.’

  The baroness responded to Amiss’ mutinous glare. ‘Lay off, Tommy,’ she declared briskly. ‘Nothing cowardly about young Robert here. We’ve seen action together before, and I can tell you he played the white man. And he has a point. Even people in the front line should take sensible precautions.’

  ‘Like checking under your car before you get into it,’ said Amiss. ‘Some nutter tried to blow up a research scientist that way a few years ago.’

  But the baroness’ attention had wandered. ‘Good. So you’ll draft a letter to be signed by…what do you think, Tommy? Us, Bertie, Sid, and a few more of the boys?’

  ‘Well, keeping the numbers down will certainly make it easier for the assassins,’ said Amiss.

  ‘All right, all right. We’ll make it harder for them and increase the number of targets to a few dozen. You and I can get down to rounding them up, Tommy, starting this afternoon. Now, what about some brandy? And I hope there’s no nonsense about barring pipes from the dining room.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pooley’s eyes were shining with triumph. ‘Looks as if our hunch was right, sir. There was a “Stewart” and a “Stuart” booked in Rutland for disturbing the peace during Lord Poulteney’s Hunt and looks as though the “Stuart” is our man. He’s young, dark, and the best of it is he was also booked for possession of an offensive weapon, i.e., a Stanley knife, which, as you’ll remember, was given by the lab as the most likely kind of knife to have done the damage.’

  ‘So why in hell didn’t they follow that up after they heard about the saddle?’

  ‘They did, but he denied everything and produced a girlfriend in London who said they had been together all night in her camper van.’

  Milton thought for a moment. ‘Bring the girl in.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Get him when you’ve already got her.’

  Pooley nodded obediently and turned towards the door.

  ‘One more thing, Ellis.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘It was your hunch, not ours. Well done.’

  ***

  ‘One of the aspects of my job I most dislike is bullying the inadequate,’ said Milton, as he and Pooley sat in Amiss’ living room late, two evenings after the murders. ‘But it worked. The girlfriend was a pathetic washed-out creature who seems to have joined the sabs for a social life, the way girls in the Home Counties join the Young Conservatives. She got so upset when I told her that her pal Stuart had been having it off in the tack room, that he had tried to murder someone, and tha
t she would be charged with being an accessory after the fact if she didn’t cough up the truth smartly that she burst into tears and blubbed everything out immediately. It was made easier by the fact that he isn’t really her boyfriend. He just deigns to screw her occasionally when it’s convenient.’

  ‘And Stuart himself?’

  ‘In an effort to keep both ladies out of it, I told him that if he confessed immediately to causing criminal damage I would drop the charge of attempted murder. He wanted to know what we’d got on him and I simply said, “Enough,” and that if he didn’t accept my offer now it would be withdrawn. He shrugged and agreed.’

  ‘But can you be sure you didn’t frighten an innocent man into admitting something he didn’t do?’

  ‘Give me credit for not being an idiot, Robert. He described the tack room in some detail.’

  ‘Why didn’t he split on Vanessa?’

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps he’s hoping she might be in the market for a bit of rough trade on a regular basis. Anyway, that’s it. She’s out of it. So, by the way, is he, since he has a solid alibi for the evening of the murders. So I’m back to the conclusion that it’s not credible that anyone would indulge in such an elaborate massacre as a cover for killing one person.’

  ‘But you’re not ruling it out,’ said Pooley.

  ‘No, no. Don’t fret, Ellis. You know nothing is being ruled out. But the fact is that if you want to knock off your granny, you can find a hitman for a couple of thousand quid, so it’s hard to see why you would decide to mount an operation of such complexity—not to speak of such wickedness.’

  ‘What a nice old-fashioned word, Jim.’ Amiss handed him a tumbler of whisky and a jug of water. ‘Only the cops, the religious, and the very old use it these days.’

  ‘Evil would be better in this case.’

  ‘So how was it done?’

  ‘The assassin was almost certainly located behind the false ceiling of the chamber.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. False ceiling. There’s lots of room up there, and there was recent disturbance to the dust.’

  ‘Any useful clues?’

  Milton shook his head. ‘A pro, it would seem. Plastic bags on his feet, protective clothing, all that kind of thing.’

  Pooley shook his head sadly. ‘Even Freeman Wills Croft wouldn’t have had any joy with what he left.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh Jim, you really should read some old detective stories. You can’t imagine what you’ve missed out on. He had this sleuth, Inspector French, who was always discovering the identity of the murderer by extrapolating from minute clues, like a thread from a sports jacket or the fact that the 5.03 was seventeen minutes late on the evening in question.’

  ‘Thanks, Ellis. I can’t wait.’ He turned back to Amiss. ‘But though he did a pretty thorough job on scattering the dust in the areas he walked on, our lads are pretty convinced from a couple of the better prints, that he’s of average height and weight.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine then,’ said Amiss. ‘They’ll have him in no time. How did he do it?’

  ‘By use of what the boffins call a “microwave-directed energy weapon”.’

  Amiss looked blank.

  ‘A kind of souped-up stun-gun.’

  ‘Must be pretty damn souped-up to kill at that range. What are we talking about? A hundred feet from behind the ceiling to the poor old buggers beneath?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And it just simply jammed the pacemakers.’

  ‘More than that. Most of them could have lasted for hours or days before their hearts gave out. But this weapon induced enough resonance in the pacemakers to give a fatal kick to the heart before complete electrical failure.’

  ‘Where did the power come from?’

  ‘Electrical energy stored in a bank of capacitors. If you really want the technical details, I’ll dig them out of my briefcase.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Amiss hastily. ‘I can’t even understand how electricity works. Just tell me about size and availability.’

  ‘It probably needed about three feet of capacitors and the same length of tube. As for availability…These things can be got easily in America and anything you can get there you can get here for a price.’

  ‘So could he have taken out more than he did? I can’t believe the only pacemakers in the House of Lords were on the Tory benches.’

  ‘No, there were about four on the cross benches and about a dozen on the other side.’

  ‘So he was positioned deliberately to get the Tories?’

  ‘Presumably. It was an impressive operation all round. I can’t think he’d have slipped up on where to direct his death ray.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pooley. ‘Although he could hardly have been certain he would definitely get whoever he wanted to get. So presumably he was relaxed about that.’

  ‘Any clues about the motivation?’

  Milton took a piece of paper out of his inside pocket and passed it to Amiss. ‘The Avengers sent this to the Press Association this evening’:

  We issued a warning that anyone who tortured or defended the torture of animals should expect punishment. We have therefore made an example of Lord Poulteney along with some of his companions in evil.

  In order to bring home to other criminals what will be the consequences of continuing along this path, we had to secure maximum publicity. It was for that reason that the execution of Poulteney was carried out in the manner in which it was. We regret that some innocent people died, but in war, innocent people always die. If more deaths are to be prevented, then all those opposing the bill must drop their opposition and agree to have it go through committee unamended. The wages of their sin will be death. The Avengers will show no more mercy than do the hunters.

  ‘Well, you certainly can’t accuse them of ambiguity.’ Amiss passed the paper back. ‘Although it would be helpful to know on what scale they are proposing to operate.’

  Milton shrugged. ‘Bombs? Running amok with Kalashnikovs? Nerve gas? Who knows. All we can do is step up security massively, which we’ve done. But you can imagine what it’s like trying to make the Lords secure. For all we know, it’s crammed full of murder weapons already.’

  ‘Haven’t you searched it?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve searched it, but it’s a bit like sending an army of ants into the QE2. It would take us months of lifting every floorboard and every panel to declare that building safe—and even then we couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Christ.’ Amiss ran his fingers through his hair. ‘As the Yanks would say, I really can’t get my head around this one. There’s too much frantic behaviour by too many people on too many fronts.’

  ‘Well, I’m just a simple policeman. Unlike you intellectuals, all I can do is go down the obvious paths along with the rest of my colleagues.’

  ‘And what are they?’

  ‘Our hypothesis is that they really are Avengers and that they mean what they say. These seem to be big-time boys.’

  ‘What do you know about them?’

  ‘Nothing. But we’re looking. Our antiterrorist people—supplemented by resources from the Murder Squad and local police forces—are dredging up all the information they have on animal activists and interviewing those thought to be most dangerous. So we should have a clearer idea of who’s who in a day or so. But we are, of course, keeping an open mind and interviewing the family and friends of all the deceased just in case there turns out to be an exceptionally strong motive for murder.’

  ‘I know I have a vested interest here, but what are you doing on the preventative front?’

  ‘Special Branch have been drafted in to guard those seen to be most at risk. But there are an awful lot of them and not enough chaps to guard them. I put you high on the list, but I’m afraid you were turned down as insufficiently important. But we’ve got around-the-clock guard on Jack Troutbeck and her pals.’

  ‘I see. You have to be titled to be worth protecting these days.’
>
  ‘It’s more that our people think you have to have a title to be worth murdering. Sorry about that.’

  ‘I fervently hope they’re right. On some issues, I have no objection to being discriminated against on grounds of class. Another drink?’

  ‘Please. Now what have you been up to?’

  ‘Helping Jack and company regroup their forces. This has so far involved our lunching with Beesley at the Cavalry Club, dining with Stormerod at the Carlton, and tomorrow we’re lunching with Deptford at the Lords, assuming it’s been given security clearance by then. I’m certainly being fed and watered well and regularly on this job.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Basically, to conduct what these days is called a charm offensive, but Jack calls it a publicity blitz. Her thesis is that since the media are going to be alive with this story for some time to come, we should capitalize by trying to force people to think rationally about fox-hunting and interfering with the rights of others.’

  ‘Seems sensible if you can find good spokesmen. What else?’

  ‘Hold the group together. Do a good job in committee. Stop any tendency to cave in. We’re going to have a meeting to stiffen resolve and cry, “No surrender!”’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Pooley, ‘I bet there’ll be a considerable falling-off in your numbers. I don’t want to disabuse your romantic notions, but in my experience not all the aristocracy are heroes. Don’t be surprised if there’s a lot of backsliding.’

  ‘It’s a pretty perilous business backsliding when Jack Troutbeck doesn’t want you to. It might require even more heroism than standing firm.’

  ‘Just be careful,’ said Milton. ‘I had a routine interview with your friend Jack yesterday and I took to her. But while it’s one thing for her to risk her own life, I’m not so happy at the cavalier way she’s risking yours.’

  ‘Cavalier’s the word. That’s our Jack. The problem is, you see, that she believes that she is invincible and that therefore, by extension, so must be anyone under her protection.’

  ‘I see. The way she put it to me was that it was a matter of noblesse oblige.’