Death and the Princess (23 page)

Authors: Robert Barnard

BOOK: Death and the Princess

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They put Nuneaton and Stourbridge up on trial, and the overwhelming evidence ensured they each got four years. They are serving it in the best possible conditions, and Nuneaton is actually in an open prison that used once to be a stately home. The evidence against the older men was found to be too frail to stand up in court, so in effect they got away with it. I didn’t worry too much about that. Old people in the dock always seem to me more a sad than a salutary spectacle. I regretted more that they never got anything on the repulsive Edwin, so
that he got away scot free. Except that the family shipped him off to Tasmania, a highly traditional thing to do in those circles. I imagine he is bored to sobs, but someone told me the other day that Tasmania is the only state in Australia where gambling is legal, so perhaps the family would have done better to choose New South Wales.

Jan and Daniel were home for the Whitsun break not long ago. We took Daniel to the National Portrait Gallery, to see what Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter looked like. With a typical child’s perversity he preferred Mr Gladstone, and he was tickled pink by a picture of Charles II, because he said he had sausages in his hair.

But the picture he really liked, and one he stood in front of for ages, was one called ‘Queen Victoria Presenting a Bible in the Audience Chamber at Windsor’. It shows the Queen handing over the Good Book to some benighted black, the whole doubtless designed to represent the conquered savage receiving the benefits of British religion. There’s the savage, kneeling, looking all handsome and picturesque. There are Vicky and Albert, standing, looking neither. There, gazing benevolently on, are the politicians, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, I would guess. And there, in the background, dark, a mere shape, an outline, is a dim figure that for a long time you do not notice, one that can only be the lady-in-waiting.

Whenever I see that picture in the future, I am going to think of this case.

When we came out of the Gallery, I put Jan and Daniel on a bus home to Maida Vale, and walked down towards St James’s Park and New Scotland Yard, where I was to go on evening duty. As I crossed the Mall, a limousine sped by, and I saw the Princess was inside. She waved. I did not know whether she waved at me, as there was a knot of tourists nearby, and it was a typical royal wave. I did not wave back.

R
OBERT
B
ARNARD
is internationally acclaimed for his mystery novels that poke fun at everything from literary pretensions to royalty. His
Death of a Mystery Writer
and
Death of a Literary Widow
were nominated for Edgar Awards as Best Mystery of the Year in 1979 and 1980. His most recent book was
Death by Sheer Torture.
He lives in Tromsø, Norway, where he teaches English at the northernmost university in Europe.

by the same author

DEATH BY SHEER TORTURE
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
DEATH OF A PERFECT MOTHER
DEATH OF A LITERARY WIDOW
DEATH OF A MYSTERY WRITER