King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  Miss Durdon had needed all her will-power to pay attention to what he was saying, because she’d just felt herself beginning to slide into another of the wave-like dips of consciousness, but she forced herself to understand.

  “That’s very kind,” she squeaked.

  “Trouble is,” he said, “I can’t bring anyone else in on it. I’ve got to look after things by myself, because you can’t expect the others to see things our way. They might, they might not—you can’t take the risk. My problem is I’m working in the dark, and there’s always a danger I’ll make things worse. That’s why I worked it so it was me they sent up to check the clock, because I wanted to have a word with you. For instance, I’d be able to move a lot freer if I knew why HRH took it into her head to say she’d seen McGivan up here when she hadn’t, and then to go messing around with that clock.”

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

  “Ah, come off it. I’m sure as I’m sure my name’s Desmond Theale that she hasn’t been doing anything wrong—and even if she had I’d stand by her. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, old lady. But if whatever she’s been up to is important enough for her to muck up a murder investigation—and she’s a sensible little thing—she wouldn’t be doing that for a lark—then I’ve got to know what it is, so as I don’t go putting my big feet in it, see? The only other thing is for me to chuck up trying to help and go and tell the Superintendent about the clock being mucked around with.”

  He had a funny way of speaking, with a rising lilt as though even the last threat weren’t a serious one. Miss Durdon lay and looked at him. He was outside her experience, she realised, not just because of what he’d done, but because he was a complete loner. She wondered whether he’d ever had any family at all.

  “Well?” he said.

  “You killed poor Ian McGivan,” she said.

  I’m getting deaf again, Louise kept thinking, but it was only the horrid silence of breakfast. Usually there’d be quarrels over the papers, and Mother reading out bits of recipes and Father grousing about his Ministers saying “refute” when they meant “repudiate” and Nonny trying to get advice on what horses she should back; but on Wednesday morning the loudest sound in the room was the crunch of Albert’s carrots, and it was that steady rhythm that told Louise that her ears were almost well again. Mrs Mercury, the housekeeper, did Pilfer’s work, stealing in and out and looking as though she’d been crying all night, though she and Pilfer had been ancient enemies. Mother looked tired and old, and had moved her place so that she sat between Nonny and Albert; she and Nonny were breaking all custom by muttering their way through Mother’s schedule for the day, long before Sir Sam was due to appear. Nonny was her unreadable self; only once, when Father looked up from his paper, began to say something and stopped in mid-sentence, Louise thought she glimpsed another Nonny, the one you never saw, tense as a tennis player waiting for a serve. Father himself was in a state Louise had never seen; it looked as though he were furious about something but couldn’t get his temper to catch fire. Mostly he hid behind his paper, eating his food with one hand. When Louise caught Albert’s eye she could see that he was as mystified as she was. She ate her breakfast quickly, as though she were getting ready for school, and managed to slip out of the room unnoticed. I can’t stand any more of that, she thought. I’ll go and see Durdy and make her tell me the truth about that clock. Then I’ll know where I am.

  The sense of deafness came back as she walked along the corridors and climbed the stairs. All the usual mutters of the Palace getting ready for the day were there, but muffled and tentative, as though even the Hoovers vacuuming the miles of carpet were conscious that their next stroke might set off a booby-trap. Louise opened the door to the nursery suite without any of the old sense of coming to a haven.

  Kinunu was leaning against the jamb of the door into her bedroom gazing up at the inner monitor screen, but she turned to Louise with a grin of happy wickedness and beckoned to her to come and see.

  “What’s up, Kinunu?”

  “Pleathemith, pleethman. Mithmith tell ee marry Kinunu.”

  “No!”

  “Yethmith.”

  Louise hesitated. She’d been gearing herself up to tackle Durdy alone and didn’t want to have to put on a public face and make conversation till the man went away. She could hear the murmur of his voice, and as she crossed the room its direction changed, coming now from the monitor in Kinunu’s bedroom. He stopped talking before she reached the bedroom door.

  The monitor was trained on Durdy’s bed. You could see only a corner of the console, but its dials were wired to an identical display by Kinunu’s bed so that even in the middle of the night she could check them without disturbing Durdy. On the other side of the screen Louise could see the arm and shoulder of a man’s jacket. Durdy was looking up at him. There was a long pause. Then the familiar voice squeaked out.

  “You killed poor Ian McGivan.”

  “How do you make that out?” said the man. It was unmistakably Theale.

  “If you knew he wasn’t here when the Princess said he was, then you knew when he died. And I’m told it was you that checked the thrones for bombs. You said he wasn’t there then, but you knew he was.”

  Theale bent down, still mostly out of sight, and seemed to make a small adjustment to Durdy’s bed-clothes.

  “That’s right,” he said. “And I’d do it again.”

  “Poor Ian. He never did you any harm.”

  “Didn’t he just?” said Theale. “Didn’t he just? Trying to fix me with those stupid jokes of his. Bloody little erk.”

  “I knew all along there were two of you,” squeaked Durdy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a lot more to poor Ian than met the eye. Those jokes of his—just like some of my babies. You wanted to belt them but you couldn’t help laughing. But not after you killed him.”

  “Didn’t mean to.”

  “That’s what they always say. Oh, Durdy, I didn’t know it would break.”

  “That’s right. How did you know?”

  Theale sounded surprised and a bit less cocky. For the first time Louise could see his head as he moved round the foot of the bed and up the other side. Suddenly she felt that he was going to do something to Durdy and started to move towards the Day Nursery door, but Durdy’s answer was so placid that she turned back. Theale was standing in front of the console now, with only his other arm visible.

  “Go on,” said Durdy. “Tell me.”

  “Go on,” said Miss Durdon. “Tell me.”

  There was nothing she could do. He had twitched the buzzer a couple of inches beyond her reach, and all the will in the world couldn’t make the fingers stretch down to it. He had used the butt of his pencil to move the temperature lever down to the very bottom of its groove. He was sending her over the edge—he couldn’t know that she was going anyway. The troughs between the waves were getting deeper, and each time she felt the downward slither begin it needed more will-power to force her consciousness to stay aware. I’ll go soon, she thought. But I’d like to know how Kitten’s story ended. Ian was all that was left of Kitten, and I’d like to know how he died.

  “What do you mean?” said Theale.

  “It wasn’t your fault, was it? You want to tell somebody it wasn’t your fault.”

  “That’s right. Silly little erk, and useless with it. It got on my wick, the way he was somehow in with the Royals, and the rest of us wasn’t. I’d had my eye on him since that business with the pianos, because I knew he could do voices. I was just waiting to catch him. That night we had to check the ball-room and apartments double thorough, because of a rumour about some terrorists, and that’s how I found him sitting on HM’s throne in the dark, with his moustache combed down like HM’s, grinning to himself like an ape. I’d switched on the spots when I came in, and for a couple of secs I
thought it was HM himself—but of course you couldn’t really mistake him, so I saw who it really was pretty well at once. Now I’ve got him, I thought. Setting up another of his jokes. He didn’t even look round, though he must have noticed the spots come on. ‘What the hell are you up to, McGivan?’ I said. ‘Don’t you use that tone of voice to me, Theale,’ he says. No accent, mind you. Might have been HM speaking. ‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘I know it’s you who’s been playing these stupid tricks around the place, and first thing tomorrow morning I’m putting in a report.’ ‘Oh, no, you’re not, Theale,’ he said. ‘No harm your knowing I did play one or two jokes on the Family—I thought if they were cutting down on staff it’d do us a bit of good if there was plenty going on to investigate …’ ‘And you tried to frame me for it,’ I told him, ‘so if anybody got the chop it wasn’t you.’ ‘Well, maybe,’ he said. ‘You’d have done the same thing if you’d had the wits. But that’s all over now. They can’t get rid of me any more, not knowing what I know, and you can’t either, Theale. I think I’ll have you posted,’ he says. ‘We’re spending too much on security staff. There’s got to be cuts, hasn’t there?’ It was that ‘we’ that did it, old lady. He was just sitting there, grinning at me, legs crossed, pulling at the corner of his moustache the way HM does. He was even beginning to look a bit like HM after all, spite of everything. And when he said ‘we’ like that I hit him. I don’t know what came over me, but it was one step forward, chop, and there he was with his neck broke. That’s how it happened.”

  “Course it was,” said Miss Durdon. “It’s always the one who starts the trouble that ends up in tears. I could have told you that.”

  “You should have told him that, old lady. So there I was. I didn’t panic, not really, but I didn’t have time to think things out, not then. If I had I’d have left a red cross somewhere, but that only came to me later. I propped him up, made it look as if he was still alive, because I thought anyone who came on him might think it was HM sitting there and let him be. Give me a bit more time, you see. I’d left my fingerprints on the doors and switches, so I had to say I’d been there, but I nipped off and joined up with the other security staff and prayed the body wouldn’t be found till the cleaners come in the morning. How was I to know that HRH would go sneaking around like that? I was dead scared for a couple of hours, but then I found I’d got an alibi. I couldn’t believe it. First of all HRH gave me an alibi when all those pianos were sent to Kensington Palace, and that got me out of one mess, and now she’d given me another. I want to ask you about that in a minute, but I’ll finish telling you what happened first off. The Yard turned up, you see, and started on this terrorist caper, and I thought it was all going to quiet down. Then, because I was working alongside them, I began to see that some of them were beginning to think it was a nonsense, and they’d bring the Superintendent round to that in the end. Now, of course I didn’t want it coming out that McGivan had been the joker, because everybody knew how the joker had tried to fix me, and I didn’t think my alibi would hold up once they really got to work on it. So the thing was to carry on with the jokes. You’re right about that, old lady. It’s not my line. Funny how hard it was to think up a couple of jokes.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” said Miss Durdon. “As soon as they told me about the zoo I knew it wasn’t poor Ian.”

  I had my worst moment of the lot there,” said Theale. “HRH fetched me along, and as soon as I was through the door that bloody bird said ‘Go get ’em, you two.’ Just what I’d said to the cats. I thought the Prince had spotted me and fetched me along to see how I reacted. You could have heard my jaw drop in Scotland. But they didn’t seem to pay much notice, so I carried on as if nothing had happened. I’d picked Saturday morning because I’d got my eye on Pilfer already. He was another one got on my wick. You see, it wasn’t enough having the jokes going on, I had to end them in a way which tidied it all up, so nobody’d ask any more questions. So I thought I’ll frame Pilfer for them and then I’ll suicide him. Being security, of course, I’d got a spare key to his room—same with the zoo—so I could plant all the evidence, but I had to fix it so it’d look as though he thought he was going to get copped any day, and that meant eliminating everyone else, see? Anyway, it all worked a treat, and I was down at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the bomb to go off so I could rush up and find Pilfer dead and shove a card with a red cross in his pocket—but what do I find if it isn’t HRH in the middle of the smoke, deaf as a post, trying to save the old bugger’s life? When all we needed was to have him dead and everybody could settle down to a bit of peace and quiet at last?”

  His voice rose to a questioning lilt. It caught Miss Durdon’s attention as she floated up out of a deeper trough, in which his voice had been only a hazy sound, a buzzing in her ears. He had killed McGivan. He had killed Pilfer. He was a bad boy. A dangerous bad boy.

  “How are you feeling, old lady?” he said.

  “As well as can be expected, young man.”

  “Glad to hear that, because there’s a couple of things I want to ask you.”

  “Ask isn’t the same as get,” she snapped.

  “We’ll see. McGivan knew something, didn’t he? Something important enough to make him feel that he could do what he liked and the Royals wouldn’t be able to touch him? What was it, old lady?”

  “Those that ask no-questions will be told no lies.”

  “And another thing—or perhaps it’s the same thing. What did HRH mean by saying she’d seen McGivan up here when she hadn’t, and saying it was six o’clock, and then, when HM tells her McGivan must have died before that, the two of ’em mucking around with the clock there? I’ve got it into my head that what McGivan knew was something to do with HRH. What is it, old lady? You know, don’t you?”

  Miss Durdon felt her lips tighten. The blood in her brain seemed weak as water. She was very “cold”. It would be a good moment to go now, before he could ask her any more questions.

  “Ah, come on,” he said. “If it’s something big enough I won’t need to do you in, because HM will have to look after me. I was thinking last night how he’d fancy me as a son-in-law one day. Show what a democratic age we live in …”

  Bee-bzp. Bee-bip. Bee-bip. Bee-bip.

  The sharp note of the warning-signal forced itself through the misty chill in Miss Durdon’s mind.

  “What’s that?” snapped the bad boy.

  “That’s my friend, telling me I’m cold,” she whispered.

  McGivan could never pretend to be Father. But the opposite wasn’t true. Father loved charades. They were spit images. You looked at the moustache. You heard the snuffle. So you saw McGivan. He’d been more McGivanish than ever. Because he’d been Father.

  Bee-Up. Bee-bip. Bee-Up. Bee-bip.

  The sharp note of the warning-signal forced itself through the swirling images in Louise’s mind. She had no idea how long she had stood here, only half hearing the buzz of Theale’s talk, full of the sickness of knowledge. She remembered writing a note for Kinunu to take to Father, telling him to come at once. Yes, Kinunu was gone.

  “What’s that?” snapped Sergeant Theale.

  “That’s my friend, telling me I’m cold,” whispered Durdy.

  “You answer my questions, old lady, and I’ll warm you up again, quick as winking. I’ve got to know, in case they get onto me after all.”

  Louise dragged her gaze from the monitor to look at the dials by Kinunu’s bed. On the third one along the needle was right down into the red segment, and the orange light beneath it was winking off and on in time with the signal. Louise put on her public face, ran to the door of the Day Nursery and walked in without knocking. Theale stopped whatever he was saying in mid sentence.

  “Hello, Durdy,” said Louise. “Good morning, Mr Theale. Did you have a good night, darling?”

  “Quite good, thank you,” said Durdy. “But I’m talking to Mr Theale ju
st now, Your Highness.”

  “All right, I’ll push off and come back,” said Louise. “I’ll just give you a kiss, shall I?”

  She walked round the foot of the bed as though she were still too deaf to hear the acid whine of the warning-signal. Theale was between her and the console but she came forward like somebody who was used to people standing out of her way, and at the last instant he did so. There was no need to say anything. Durdy would recognise the public face and know that she knew. As she bent for the kiss Louise put out her left hand to balance herself and slid the lever up its groove. The signal stopped.

  “I’m not going to school,” she said. “I’ll come back in half an hour.”

  “All right, Your Highness,” said Durdy. Her voice was faint and drowsy, but the sentinel will still stood to its post.

  “You mustn’t let her get tired, Mr Theale,” said Louise, straightening up.

  He didn’t answer. She turned and saw that he had moved away from the bed and was taking something out of a black Gladstone bag that stood on the old high chair by the cuckoo-clock. He walked with quick steps to the door. For an unbelievable second she thought he was going to make a run for it, but he simply opened the door, looked out into the Night Nursery, closed and locked the door and turned back. The thing he had taken from his bag was a pistol.

  “Where’s that nurse?” he said.

  “I sent her to get help,” said Louise.

  Theale paused, looking at her with his quick, intelligent stare. Louise looked back at him, confident in the mask of her public face.

  “Stand where you are,” he said. “Check you got that lever right. OK? Now don’t move. I’m going to open the windows. I want to be able to hear if anybody tries anything fancy from the roof.”

  Louise watched him haul the sashes down. He climbed on to the little desk where she’d learnt to write her letters and peered briefly out over the bars at the three-storey drop, then jumped back into the room. He still looked as though he thought what was happening was somehow amusing.