Death and the Princess (15 page)

‘Quite,’ I murmured. ‘I suppose there is no question of her father, at times, providing the restraining influence required?’

The Secretary, literally, and with more energy than he had displayed hitherto, shuddered.

‘No.
No.
Dreadful heredity there, you know. He’s got a mixture of German melancholy with quite obsessively rampant sexuality. His mother was a Bourbon Parma. No, he most definitely would not provide the restraining influence you are talking about.’

‘Well,’ I said, sticking to my guns, ‘you will need someone, in my opinion, who will take a firm line with her, and stick to it. Who won’t stand any nonsense. Someone willing to wield the big stick if necessary.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ said the Secretarial Personage. ‘Strong-minded, determined, impervious to feminine charms. There
is
such a person.’

‘Good.’

‘Only she happens at the moment to be Prime Minister,’ he said, with a wistful sigh.

CHAPTER 12

Acting Styles

When I got back to Scotland Yard after my glimpse of life at the top, I found myself in the middle of a conference about security during the State Visit, due to start next day. Not the routine safety on the streets during the drive through London and the various public festivities, but security during the rather more private events, including a gala performance at Covent Garden and a dinner given for the Queen at the Savoy by the Prince of Liechtenburg. All this sort of stuff was vital but dull, and I won’t bore you with the details. This is not one of those police procedural books, where you get so much detail about all the routine slog involved in crime that you wear out the soles of your shoes just reading them.

After the conference was over I could go to my office and catch up with the details of the Brudenell murder, as they were emerging from the painstaking investigations of the dour McPhail. The report on the gun was the first thing I looked at. It had almost certainly been bought in the States. Of course (granted their laws) there was no record of where it had been obtained, or who by, but from the number it seemed likely that it had been sold in the first half of the previous year. The Princess had paid a visit to the United States that March, where she had
received an honorary degree from a little-known New England university, and attended the opening night of the Royal Ballet season in Philadelphia. Mr James Brudenell had accompanied her. It seemed, therefore, as if he was indeed shot with his own gun, probably bought to protect himself against the murderous marauding muggers and crackpots who (in British mythology) make up fifty per cent of the American population.

Another report lying on my desk confirmed (by analysing dust samples) that it was the most recent of Brudenell’s scrapbooks that had lain open on his study table on the day before he died, though all the scrapbooks had been fairly recently consulted. The report was unable to suggest any particular pages that had been of interest to him. He seemed, in fact, to have worked his way methodically through it. McPhail had left the scrapbook in question in my office, and I conscientiously went through it too. It was the fullest possible record of the Princess’s activities from day to day, with the announcement from the Court Circular heading the page, and with reports and press photographs underneath, sometimes from local newspapers, more often from national ones. I struggled through the unveilings of statues, the launchings of gun-boats, the charitable annual general meetings, the visits to geriatric units, but the book said nothing to me. What I was really looking for was a mention of the five places on Bill Tredgold’s list, but beyond a visit to Keswick, in Cumberland, to open a Youth Hostel I could find none, not even during the engagements in the Midlands one weekend the previous November, when I presumed she had first made Bill Tredgold’s acquaintance. It was all a big disappointment. It seemed likely the scrapbook was of no significance at all.

There was also a report on the typewriter, and it was just as I expected. The only fingerprints on it were
Brudenell’s, but all the letters which appeared in the second half of the typed note had little smudges on the edges of the keys, while the ‘j’, for example, which was only used for the ‘John’ in the opening, had no such mark. It was this report which made it quite clear we were dealing with murder. The killer had not been quite clever enough.

I also had waiting for me on my desk a rather negative report from the police at Shrewsbury. They had found out that four of the addresses in the guest book at The Wrekin, Knightley, were phoney or questionable. Two ‘married couples’ had given false addresses (which was not surprising), but so had one single man and one woman. The woman’s was in handwriting so indecipherable that it was possible there was no intention to deceive. On the subject of the wine and the glasses they had drawn a blank. They had visited all the off-licenses and pubs, and very generously were going now to continue with the classier establishments in the Shrewsbury area — the three-star hotels, the clubs, the better restaurants. They did not hold out much hope.

So there it was — the routine grinding ahead, turning out little driblets of results. Though we were now sure that we were investigating a murder, and probably two murders, the advances otherwise could not be said to be encouraging. And meanwhile I was faced next day with a spectacular interruption in the form of a State Visit. Normally at this point I would have gone back to the flat and soothed the nerves by chatting over the case with Jan, and parrying all her questions about the interior of Buckingham Palace. But Jan and Daniel had driven back to Newcastle the day before, slightly late for the beginning of Spring term, and the best the flat could offer me was a bath and an evening’s television. I felt a bit like the Princess — starved of glamour and high life. That sort of thing can act like a drug, I suppose. Luckily a shot
of the necessary was to hand. I remembered the invitation I’d had from Jeremy Styles. It was an hour to curtain up at the St George’s theatre. It was the first time I’d ever dropped in on an actor in his dressing-room. Routine-bound a policeman’s lot may be, but now and again you do see life!

I just sent my name in at the stage door, but it acted like a charm, and in a matter of minutes I was being led through dark, linoed corridors (theatrical glamour seems to end at the footlights) to the star’s dressing-room.

‘Ah, my friend the cop,’ said Jeremy Styles. ‘Sit there and talk to me while I make up, and I’ll study you for when I star in a Francis Durbridge.’

‘You wouldn’t play the cop,’ I said. ‘You’d play the cocktail-drinking commuter-belt lady-killer.’

‘What a word to use. Not a Freudian slip, I hope.’

I sat down quite happily and looked around me. Jeremy Styles was half-dressed for the part, and making up his face with a rather grubby towel round his shoulder to protect his shirt. He dabbed, and drew lines, and studied the result with a total professional expertise. He was ministered to and fussed over by his dresser, a small, tough, elderly man. I suppose the theatre is the last place where you find the total domestic devotion that in an earlier age all the great families would demand from their servants. Even fifty years ago, a great lady might expect to have an elderly, grim-faced personal maid, the female equivalent of this dresser, a woman whose devotion was total, who chivvied while she curtsied, grumbled while she ministered, who had been with the lady since girlhood, knew her infinitely better than her husband did, and made the lives of the other servants hell by insisting on her special relationship. I guessed that Jeremy Styles’s dresser was of this sort: perhaps he had been inherited from his father or mother. It was quite clear, anyway, that there was nothing that Styles would not say
in his presence: he treated him, in fact, as if he were not there, though he would probably have created hell if he were not. I was reminded of the old story of Queen Victoria and the Empress Eugenie in their box at the opera: Eugenie looked round for her chair before she sat down. Victoria sat down knowing her chair would be there. Jeremy Styles came from an acting dynasty.

‘And how go your investigations?’ asked Styles, slapping and patting his cheeks like a love-besotted masseur. ‘Do I gather you have a corpse on your hands?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Careless.’

‘And do I gather you have been talking to the Princess?’

‘Of course. We talk almost every day. Especially now, when I gather they’re keeping her on a fairly tight rein.’

‘If,’ I said, ‘she is allowing herself to be kept.’

‘I expect Lady Dorothy, the upper-crust policewoman, is doing her best. It’s what she’s there for.’

‘She’s not an old friend of the Princess’s, then?’

‘Good Lord, no. Can you imagine it? She was picked because she was utterly repressed and respectable, and a sort of throw-back to old Queen Mary’s time. And Helena accepted her because she’s fairly repellent physically, and as you’ve probably noticed Helena is a vain little thing, and thought the piquant contrast would be all to the good. I think it works out very well. Lady Dorothy has someone during the day to whom she can drone on endlessly about her family tree and her noble relatives — she’s a sort of walking stud-book, as you’ve probably found out. To the point of obsession. And in the evenings Helena is left free to do what she wants, to go to places Lady Dorothy wouldn’t be seen poking the sharp end of her Roman nose inside the door of.’

‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘If only she wouldn’t — ’

‘Go to that sort of place? Give up the idea. She’s never going to grow up, you know. How could she, in that sort
of environment, doing that sort of job practically from her teens?’

‘You once said all actors were fourteen,’ I said. ‘I suppose that applies to Royals as well.’

‘Exactly. The environments are practically identical: the hothouse atmosphere, the public adulation, the little “in” group, with in-fighting and in-loving, the imprisonment of being a known face, being constantly in the public eye. The only chance for Helena would be to marry a rather dull man, and sink into respectable obscurity.’

‘I can’t imagine it happening,’ I said.

‘Nor can I. You realize she hasn’t got a brain in her head?’

‘No-o-o,’ I said, a bit dubiously. ‘I remember using that phrase myself once. And yet, the more one sees her . . .’

‘She’s got cunning. Not brains. She has the sort of imagination needed to get what she wants. At least she’s the sort of egotist who understands other people. The egotists who don’t are the sad, the unsuccessful ones. And because she understands them, she knows how to use them. But she hasn’t got brains. You take her to a play and listen to her comments afterwards. They wouldn’t do credit to a ten-year-old. I think she just sits there planning what she’ll wear tomorrow. She’s totally self-absorbed. That’s what I love about her. I understand it. She’s an actress.’

‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘that her life isn’t as exciting as a real acting life would be.’

‘You have illusions about the stage,’ said Jeremy Styles. ‘The reason actresses like scenes — and actors too now and then — the reason they throw tantrums, is because their lives are so confoundedly dull that they wouldn’t be bearable otherwise. Dreary rehearsals, dreary dressing-rooms, dreary repetitions of the same old motions night after night, like being on the production line of a factory.
It’s the same with Helena. Her life is one long crushing boredom. She phoned me, you know, to get me along to the Wellington Club that night. That’s typical. Just now and then she has to light a firework and watch the sparkles.’

‘I’m very much afraid,’ I said, ‘that she’s planning to send up a rocket in the near future.’

‘Of course she is,’ said Styles. ‘And I wouldn’t mind betting when it is.’

‘Oh?’

He took one more look at his face, then took off the towel, let it drop to the floor, and while his dresser retrieved it began setting his costume to rights. Then he went over to a little shelf in the corner and took from it a card.

‘An invitation,’ he said, gazing at it with mock awe, ‘from Edwina, Lady Glencoe.’

‘That name rings a bell.’

‘A bell the size of Great Tom, I should think,’ said Jeremy Styles. ‘She was notorious in her time. She wore out so many lovers in her youth she made the original Glencoe massacre look like a minor mopping-up operation. Now she’s just a fairly disreputable old bag. Now why should she invite me to a party?’

‘Because she has designs on you?’

‘That, I admit, is one interpretation. It is, however, a rather special party. Lady Glencoe is a director of Covent Garden, thanks to her entire and utter ignorance of things operatic. The party is to be held in the Crush Bar tomorrow night. After the Gala Performance — ’

‘In honour of the State Visit of His Highness the reigning Prince of Liechtenburg.’

‘Precisely. Now, beyond having once understudied the apprentice in
Peter Grimes,
I have no connection with Covent Garden. Nor have I the slightest connection with
Edwina, Lady Glencoe. What’s the betting I’ve been invited — ’

‘At the behest of the Princess Helena.’

‘Exactly. And what’s the betting that Edwin Frere has also been invited. And her MP boy-friend. And even her old flame in the world of football — have you got to meet him yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘A real charmer. He’s a Northern Irelander. A Protestant. He has all the quiet modesty and delicate tact we know so well from their political leaders. Well now, if I’m right, that should be quite a line-up.’

‘Plus, I shouldn’t mind betting,’ I added gloomily, ‘the young lady’s father.’

‘Ah, the blood-sucking Bavarian. Very likely. All the chemical ingredients for a really nasty blow-up. In other words, the little scene at the Wellington last week whetted the Princess’s appetite for confrontation politics. She is thirsty for men fighting over her, and she plans something on a more extended scale.’

‘Will you go?’

‘Oh, I’ll go. But I certainly won’t make a scene, or play up if anyone else makes one. In fact, much though I love her, I have the fancy to disappoint the young Helena. She’s getting just that bit too spoilt by success. But if she’s to be disappointed, I need co-operation. I’m quite sure the last thing Harry Bayle would want would be a public fracas. On the other hand, one can hardly expect the same of Edwin Frere. Or the footballer. That one thrives on being sent off the field. So we shall have to see. Perhaps you could do something about it?’