King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  “All right. What about poor McGivan?”

  “Well, sir, I still don’t go along with McGivan’s death as fully part of the series. We’ve drawn a complete blank so far in our investigation of terrorist groups, and in the matter of entry and exit from the Palace—but you’ll understand that all that’s a very complicated matter to check. I understand that Pilfer was younger and stronger than he looked, and the unarmed combat manual suggests he might have been able to kill McGivan. But there was no red cross left. So it’s possible that Pilfer was interrupted in the process of setting up a joke—by Her Royal Highness, maybe—or alternatively that he simply found the body and fixed it like that.”

  “Hang on,” said Father. “Pilfer wouldn’t have been on duty at the reception. He was our personal family servant.”

  “He was seen in the vicinity not long before the body was found, Sir.”

  “I know about that,” said Louise. “I saw him too. He’d got a bee in his bonnet about Mr Lambert nicking Family silver for official binges. He used to hover about and count the spoons.”

  “If you saw him,” said Father, “that was quite a bit after McGivan died.”

  “By the way,” said d’Arcy, “we’ve had the pathologist’s full report now, Sir. You’ll remember we had it checked because of the apparent discrepancy over the possible time of death? Well, it’ appears the original report was a bit inflexible, and the symptoms are now thought to be consistent with death at approximately twenty to six—that’s to say immediately after McGivan was seen by Her Royal Highness and the nurse Kinunu. When I say consistent, I mean not inconsistent. Without other evidence the time of death would have been put some twenty minutes earlier.”

  “You mustn’t go too much on the cuckoo clock,” said Louise. “It was wildly fast yesterday.”

  “Was it by God?” said Father.

  There was something odd about his tone, Louise glanced at him. She could read nothing in his face, but for a moment the old nightmares stirred. Don’t be stupid, she told herself. It was poor old Pilfer, and now everything’s going to be all right. Mr d’Arcy didn’t seem to have noticed the oddness and went on checking his notes.

  “Well, that’s about it,” he said. “The immediate point is that the princess thinks there was not enough time for Pilfer to have attached a bomb to the gong immediately before hitting it. Therefore he must have arranged it earlier, when there’d be fewer people about. It would take at least two minutes, in the opinion of our explosives chaps.”

  “He’d have had the place to himself from about eleven on, apart from the other servants,” said Father. “The whole family were eating for England—I mean we had lunch engagements.”

  “Good,” said Mr d’Arcy, snapping his notebook shut. “At least it’s a working theory.”

  He would have made a good courtier. In the short time he’d been in the Palace he’d learnt the curious shorthand of inflection and expression which meant that he was now ready to leave if His Majesty would be so gracious as to grant permission. Father grunted. d’Arcy rose. His little nod as be reached the door was an exact replica of Sir Sam’s mini-bow.

  Father shook his head as the door closed. “Not quite out of the wood yet, Lulu,” he said. “Sure about that clock?”

  “Yes. Durdy was rather rambly, but when it struck eight she pulled herself together and cursed it.”

  He shook his head again, frowning.

  “Father,” said Lulu. “When Pilfer saw the toad on your ham-dish, that was a real faint, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s what I mean about not being out of the wood. McGivan was the joker all right … but listen, suppose Pilfer worked it out—he might even have done that from the toad, somehow—and tackled McGivan and then suppose that they started to work as a team, pooling their information, and then McGivan finds out about you and Nonny and tells Pilfer and Pilfer kills him …”

  “Why?”

  “Depends how mad you think Pilfer was. If not very mad, because he realised that the knowledge could be used to squeeze a great deal of money out of us, or to sell to the media. I’d have paid up without a murmur, Lulu. If very mad, out of loyalty, because he didn’t want the secret to come out. I’d rather it was the second. I liked old Pilfer. He was very good to me when I was a kid. Sorry. Yes. OK, then killing McGivan unhinges him a bit more—he starts setting the body up as a joke, then panics, but hovers about. You saw him, and thought it was for the spoons. Then he does the zoo. At least that explains the savage attack on Bert’s toad—the way he fainted that breakfast shows he had a thing about toads—and of course he’d have known where Bert kept the keys. And then he decides to do himself in. He does it with the gong, because be had a thing about it. I don’t know … What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either. It sounds a bit wishy in places. I hope it’s true. Are you going to tell Mr d’Arcy?”

  “I don’t see the point. It doesn’t make any real difference, and I never managed to persuade them that McGivan was the original joker; if I brought it up again it’d take us nearer a lot of things we don’t want known. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, eh?”

  And lying dogs sleep, Albert used to add. When Father had taken her pulse and temperature and asked a few medical questions, brusquer even than his usual bedside manner with the family, Louise lay back on the pillows. In the silence the whine in her ears seemed worse, but she closed her eyes and waited. She woke somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, to judge by sunlight on her window-frame. Mother was sitting in the arm-chair, wearing her specs and working at the tiny-stitched embroidery which she believed to be the only proper occupation for the idle hands of queens.

  “Don’t huake up, darling,” she said.

  “I’ve done it now. Are you all right, Mother? Was anybody else hurt?”

  “Nobody, thank heavens, and Vick says your ears hull soon be huell. If I huere a Catholic I huould light a hundred candles in thanks to Holy Mary.”

  “Why don’t you do it anyway? I’d like that. You could do it in secret. Nobody would ever know.”

  “God and the saints huould know. And there are too many secrets already.”

  Looking at her properly Louise saw that she was paler even than usual, and her eyes were sunk into dark sockets.

  “Darling Mother,” she said. “It’s all over now. It’s going to be all right. It’s not going to be the same as it was, but it’s going to be a new all right. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Mother smiled at her, a tired and unmeaning movement of lips. Louise sank back on the pillows and shut her eyes again. It’s not all right, she thought. Something else is wrong. Something to do with Father. Something I mustn’t know about. Oh, God.

  Chapter 14

  In the hush of Wednesday morning Miss Durdon lay and listened to the wireless—the old, brown, domed box from which she’d once heard the boy-King’s voice coming clipped and firm as he made his first Christmas broadcast to his people in 1938. A year later she’d heard the same child speaking to an Empire at war, and almost a year after that to him saying, in words which he had for the first time insisted on writing for himself; that though Hitler’s armies seemed poised for an invasion, he had persuaded his advisers to let him stay with his people in England.

  In Miss Durdon’s mind the box seemed to vibrate with an unheard duet—Churchill’s thick, furry, melodramatic bass interlacing with King Victor’s no-nonsense tenor. The box had had three new sets of innards since those days, but to Miss Durdon it was still the same wireless, just as Vick was still King Victor II in spite of his baldness and his bad temper and his doctoring.

  This morning there was a flavour of wartime in the announcer’s voice. For months it had been like that as the economic crisis lurched on, and every new fall in the pound had to be greeted with a darkest-days note, such as had announced the sinking of HMS King Victor by the Scharnhorst or the surrender of
Singapore. And, just as in wartime, any heartening little gobbet of good news or story of British courage was given its special rift-in-the-clouds resonance: “In a bulletin issued from Buckingham Palace this morning, and signed by the Otorhinolaryngologist Royal, Sir James Corker, it is announced that the hearing of Her Royal Highness Princess Louise continues to improve and is unlikely to be permanently damaged. No further bulletins will be issued. It will be remembered that apart from the dead man Her Royal Highness was closest to the explosion that occurred on Monday evening in the private apartments of the Palace. She was found by rescuers attempting to stem the flow of blood from the man’s arm. In recognition of her bravery the President of the Royal Humane Society, HRH the Duchess of Kent, has suggested …”

  That Eloise, thought Miss Durdon. Trust her to stick her oar in. Bad as the Dowager Princess, she is.

  After the News came the Today programme. Miss Durdon had already forced her good hand to press the buzzer when a voice said, “And now, with an account of American reactions to the tragedy in Buckingham Palace, here is Sir Alastair Cooke.”

  The door opened and Kinunu came prancing in.

  “No, don’t switch it off,” squeaked Miss Durdon. “I want to listen. Just do the clock.”

  “Yethmith.”

  Miss Durdon approved of Sir Alastair. This morning he talked about the American love-hate of British Royalty, and some of the absurd things that were said and done on old King Victor’s visit to the States in 1936, and then picked his way delicately back to a tone of grave sympathy. Meanwhile Miss Durdon watched Kinunu cross the room, check and wind the Mickey Mouse clock, pull the chain that wound up the weights of the cuckoo clock and finally move its big hand ten minutes forward. Then she came round the bed and waited by the wireless for the voices to change.

  “Yes, turn it off now, thank you,” said Miss Durdon. “Kinunu, my dear, I feel a little cold this morning.”

  That was only a way of putting it. Miss Durdon could no longer feel the drop in body temperature. Memory could construct for her the icy draughts of Abergeldie, and the, rubbery shivers of her own skin under a flannel nightdress with the inner warmth fighting outwards against the chill, and the feel of two bodies clinging close as if their love was a hearth for them to cluster to; but nowadays all she knew of cold was that the blood seemed to run thin in a tired brain.

  Kinunu had already checked the console of instruments by the bedside, as she did first thing each morning, but now she went round the bed again and frowned down at the dials, comparing each with the chart His Majesty had drawn above.

  “OK. All OK,” she whispered.

  Then it will be soon, thought Miss Durdon. Perhaps it will be today. I feel cold when I’m not cold. That’s a sign. I’m going over the edge at last. I mustn’t tell Vick. I’ll try and live long enough for another crumpet tea. I’ll die with butter on my lips.

  “Make me a little warmer,” she squeaked.

  Gingerly Kinunu slid a lever an eighth of an inch up its groove.

  “I talked to His Majesty last night,” said Miss Durdon. “I told him he’s got to find you a husband. He’s got such a lot of worries now, poor man, but he said he’d try.”

  “Yethmith. Marry pleethman, pleathe.”

  “A policeman!”

  “Yethmith.”

  “Policemen don’t grow on trees, you know,” said Miss Durdon sharply.

  Kinunu’s frown was beginning to deepen with worry when there was a firm rap at the door.

  “See who that is, my dear,” said Miss Durdon, glad of the chance to collect her old wits and explain—as she must have done ten thousand times to other greedy infants—that Father Christmas could not gratify all conceivable wishes, even in a palace. A man’s voice muttered at the door. Kinunu turned.

  “Pleathemith. Pleethman,” she said.

  “We’ll talk about that later,” snapped Miss Durdon. “Who’s there?”

  “Pleathemith. Pleethman. Thee you.”

  Cunning little wretch, thought Miss Durdon. She’s already found herself another follower, and she’s had him out there, listening to that dratted monitor; she’d have brought the subject up herself if I hadn’t.

  “All right, I’ll see him if you want me to. You’d better wait outside.”

  The man who came in wasn’t in uniform. He had a doggy look, not McGivan’s boring-old-housedog air, but the bright-eyed sharpness of a hunt terrier, or a good ratter. He was younger than McGivan, and ten times more of a man. Kinunu wouldn’t tease him, thought Miss Durdon.

  “I don’t know you,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Sergeant Theale, Miss,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re one of our people?”

  “That’s right, Miss. Only I’ve not had the honour to visit the nurseries before. All right if I check this clock now?”

  The question caught Miss Durdon so much off balance that he had crossed to the far wall and put the black Gladstone bag he was carrying down on the high chair before she’d collected her wits.

  “You leave that clock alone, young man,” she said. “It’s not been the same since King Haakon went meddling with it, and I don’t want it getting any worse.”

  “Orders, I’m afraid, Miss,” he said.

  He pulled a stop-watch out of his pocket and set it going. He seemed to be counting the swings of the pendulum. The tick of the clock came and went, sometimes seeming to be inside her head and sometimes far away, beyond the barred windows, as though the cuckoo was hovering with it out over the gardens. She felt herself sliding down the slope of a shallow wave and then gradually floating up to the crest of consciousness again. When she was fully herself the clock was back on the wall with the man still counting its ticks. Miss Durdon felt what she called “hot”, but there was no knowing whether the buzzing in her mind, like the beginnings of a fever, was caused by Kinunu setting the lever too high or the panic of watching the man check the cuckoo clock or was something to do with the slide out of the whirlpool and over the edge. I can’t go yet, she thought. I must do something.

  “Excuse me, Mr Theale,” she squeaked. “That dratted girl’s set my bed too hot. Be so kind as to move the switch down for me, save me calling her in with my buzzer.”

  He stayed where he was for a few more ticks, stopped his watch and made a couple of notes in a notebook. At last he turned and crossed to the console, which he stared down at, smiling slightly.

  “Like the flight deck of a jumbo,” he said. “I’m Miss Durdon. Fly me to San Francisco.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Miss Durdon in the tone she used for boys whose independence she approved of but whose impertinence had to be kept in check. “It’s the third lever along. There’s a chart above it shows how it ought to be. And don’t you be pert about my friend there—that machine’s the better half of me, these days. It does my heating and my breathing and Lord knows what. If it stopped working I’d be dead in half an hour.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see him using the butt of his pencil to move the lever down to its proper setting.

  “Lot to go wrong there,” he said.

  “Lot to go wrong with all of us, young man.”

  “And they’ve given you a buzzer too?”

  “Under the bedclothes by my left hand, where my two good fingers are.”

  She wanted to keep him talking, to prevent him going back to the clock. But he wasn’t to be put off.

  “Your clock’s running a bit slow, far as I can see,” he said.

  “Or your stop-watch is fast, young man.”

  “No, it’s spot on. I do a bit of hurdling and I need it for training, so I have it checked, regular. I make it your clock’s losing two or three minutes a day. Funny it’s being fast while it’s running slow.”

  “It has its ups and downs,” snapped Miss Durdon,
no longer indulgent.

  He nodded and returned to stare at it, then opened his case and took out an aerosol can with which he carefully sprayed the clock face, producing a fine grey film all over it, like mildew.

  “Stop that,” said Miss Durdon. “Stop that at once, or I’ll know the reason why.”

  He paid no attention but stood on tiptoe to peer at the clock through a pocket magnifying glass.

  “Somebody’s been dusting, I see,” he said. “It’s not often you get ’em conscientious enough to dust the clocks.”

  “But here’s a nice print. Now, that’s a small finger—would that be Princess Louise’s, Miss Durdon?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ll trouble you to clean the mess off my clock this very instant.”

  He stood gazing at the clock a moment longer and then, to Miss Durdon’s great surprise, he took a duster out of his bag and cleaned the whole surface. She watched him spray the clock again and photograph it with a neat little camera. Finally he cleaned it up for the second time. When he turned to the bed he was smiling.

  “Good thing to get everything dusted pretty regular,” he said. “Now, I’ll tell you something, old lady. You see that pendulum wagging to and fro? Suppose somebody wanted that clock to go fast, there’s a little screw under the weight there, and they’d only have to take a couple of turns on it, shortening the pendulum, you see, and it’d begin to swing faster. Perhaps they might take it into their heads to rub a bit of dust into the thread under the screw, make it look as though it’s been like that a long time—you follow me?”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No, of course not, old lady. You’ve seen a lot of ’em come and go, but never seen anything like this, I dare say. Perhaps you’ll explain to Princess Louise next time she comes up … it won’t matter if she touches it again, or that nurse of yours … you can’t tell from a fingerprint whether somebody’s been putting it forward a-purpose, or putting it back because it’d got fast of its own accord. I only went through all that palaver to show you I’m on your side, see?”