Death and the Princess (3 page)

‘Would you think she sleeps around?’

I considered. ‘Well, hazarding a guess, I’d say
no.
Sleeps
with,
now and again, yes. But sleeps
around,
no. She’s got a fair sense of her position. Why don’t you ask McPhail?’

‘You’re not suggesting — ?’

‘No, of course not. That would have been offering rump steak to a vegetarian. I merely meant he ought to know.’

‘Well, I did ask. In so far as I got anything out of him at all, he agreed with you. Now and again, without a doubt, and perhaps fairly regularly with one or two, but certainly no nympho. Still, the fact is, she’s got any number of young men sniffing round her skirts.’

‘So the newspapers imply.’

‘If she had been sleeping regularly with any one of them, that might have been as good a point of departure for us as any. Blackmail, sensational serials in the
Sunday Gutter
— you know the kind of stuff. Then we might conceivably have found some kind of criminal connection that led us back to Snobby Driscoll. But the fact is, we can’t pick on any one of them. It’s a nightmare, because there are so many. As far as collecting casual companions is concerned, the young lady is not discriminating. In fact, she’s bloody unwise.’

‘Oh? Who is there, then?’

‘Well, for a start, there’s an MP.’

‘That shouldn’t matter, surely, provided he’s of the right party?’

‘He’s of the wrong party. And he’s way to the left of
it — used to be a cheer-leader for Wedgwood-Benn, now branching out with ambitions of his own. Even worse, the man used to be a card-carrying Communist.’

I never understand why to people of Joe’s generation Communists are always card-carrying. Do they go around with them clutched in their little hot hands?

‘When was that?’ I asked.

‘At Oxford.’

‘Everyone at Oxford joins the Communist Party. I believe you sign up when you join the Oxford Union. Denis Healey was a Communist at Oxford. If it had been Cambridge we might have got worried.’

Joe grunted. ‘Then there’s another of her escorts, if that’s the word, who’s an actor. Name of Jeremy Styles.’

‘I know him. Of him, at least. Opened in the new Simeon Black play last week.’

‘That’s the boy. Done a lot of television work as well — used in those classic serials because he looks well in costume. But
not,
as far as we can see, safe. And then there’s the Honourable Edwin Robert Montague Frere.’

‘At least it sounds as if he’s the right class.’

‘Hmmm. He’s that all right. He’s pretty as a puma, and about as safe. His father is the Earl of Leamington. The Honourable Edwin (who the hell thought up that title?) is to be seen most nights hanging around the tables at the Wellington Casino, in Park Lane. In dire need of the necessary, that lad.’

‘Like most younger sons of peers. Like most of the elder ones too, come to that. I’d have thought you’d only hang around casinos if you had money to lose rather than if you were in need.’

‘He’s in need
because
he loses money. Very often he watches more than plays. Fascinated. And he leeches on to people.’

‘Charming. Is that the lot?’

‘By no means. I’ll give you the list, with what notes
we’ve been able to get together on them. It’s quite a collection. Even, God help us, a footballer.’

‘Not George B — ’

‘I said a footballer. Anyway, he’s a bit out of her age-range. She mostly goes for men in their twenties. Now, the fact is, there are limits to how far we can fence the young lady in.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘No, I’m not being snide, Perry. She’s a young thing, and naturally she wants her fling. Works hard for it too, as far as I can gather: does a lot of the fairly depressing jobs the other Royals won’t touch. She’s got to have her fun, and her freedom, and we’ve got to make sure she has hundred per cent protection. And that’s the devil of it: the two just don’t go together.’

‘That’s for sure.’

‘The only thing I can think of is to go to her, put it to her: tell her what I’ve told you, tell her to keep her eyes open, tell her to report to us everything, but
everything,
that happens that’s just that bit out of the ordinary. Tell us where she’s going, so we can case it in advance. Tell us who she’s going with, where she might possibly go on afterwards. In other words, rely on her good sense and get her co-operation, down to the last detail.’

I thought for a bit: ‘There’s just one thing you haven’t taken account of in that scenario of yours.’

‘What’s that?’

‘She hasn’t got a brain in her head.’

Joe looked disappointed. ‘Think not?’

‘Not on the surface, anyway. Unless it’s a front, part of the cocktease act. If it was for real, she could blab the whole thing to any of those young men she goes with. And I imagine absolute discretion is the first order of the day?’

‘Oh absolutely,’ Joe said, worried stiff. ‘You think it might be more danger than it’s worth?’

‘I do. Now, come on, Joe: you’re still holding out on
me. What was that about a death?’

‘Ah yes. You’ll have to know about that. But it’s all pretty nebulous. The fact is, while we’ve been doing this double-quick investigation of her young men these last few weeks, we’ve turned up the name of William Tredgold a couple of times. Bill Tredgold everyone knew him as.’

I wrinkled my forehead. ‘Never heard of him. Should I have?’

‘No. He was a reporter. Unwise again, you see. He worked for the
Birmingham Standard.
Was up for a job with the
Guardian.
Roly-poly sort of chap, from his pictures, but attractive in a scruffy-puppy sort of a way. She went around with him for two or three weeks. Went to several rather dubious parties with him while she was doing a round of charity openings and suchlike in the Midlands. Very possibly slept with him, in his flat in Solihull.’

‘I like the idea of Royalty getting to know how the other half sleeps.’

‘You won’t by the time you’ve finished this job. Anyway, the affair seems to have fizzled out, if it ever was much of one. But the fact is, the young man died . . .’

‘I see. How?’

‘He was staying at one of these genuine Elizabethan bash-your-head-on-a-beam kind of inns, at a place called Knightley, in Shropshire. Rooms heated by gas. Seems he left the fire on when he went to bed. There must have been a fault in it: flame went out, gas stayed on, consequences just what you’d guess. Verdict of accidental death.’

‘Hmmm. I see.’

‘Windows shut tight. Nothing against that. It was early December. But his mother says he
never
slept with the window shut.’

‘Yes. Go on.’

‘He’d been drinking before he went to sleep. Bottle of white wine. Nothing against that. But there were white wine glasses there, and a tray. And yet the hotel had no record of any order for it.’

‘I see. Fixed in any way?’

‘By the time we got around to looking into it, the case was dead. Evidence destroyed.’

‘Yes, of course. Anything else?’

‘One thing. He wasn’t alone. There was a girl with him.’

‘She died too?’

‘Oh yes. Both of them dead as doornails in the morning. The trouble is — ’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there was nothing close, you understand, but the fact is, that this girl . . . just vaguely . . . rather resembled the Princess Helena. Get me?’

I got him.

CHAPTER 3

Flunkeydom

So there it was. We sat about for some time, Joe and I, talking over the various alternative possibilities. They amounted, in essence, to these: that the deaths were indeed accidental, as the inquest had decided; that someone had wanted to kill either Bill Tredgold, or his girl-friend, or both; or that someone had intended to kill the Princess Helena. We had to admit that, abstractly considered, the last seemed by far the most likely.

In the end we got down to brass tacks, and I made various suggestions about security: that my job should be duplicated, so that when I was busy on the case, the
Princess Helena’s routine security would be in good hands. I suggested a chief inspector who was both competent and personable, to keep the Princess happy as well as safe. I suggested doubling Joplin’s position too, and said I’d say more about routine security at the Palace when I knew more about the current arrangements. Then I went off with the dossier Joe and his men had made about the affair so far.

I settled down to it in my own office, feet up amid its rather bleak but familiar comforts. What the dossier amounted to, in fact, was a record of the Princess’s ‘off-duty’ engagements, with details of, and an assessment of, the young men she had recently been going around with. I felt she had been getting more private life than we are usually told royalty is able to manage, but of course, for all I knew, much of what I was learning would have been commonplace to readers of Nigel Dempster or Lady Olga Maitland. My own family had provided too much fodder for gossip columnists for me to get much enjoyment out of them. I felt rather shabby, going through all this intimate stuff, like some sort of dating-service adviser, or a second-degree pimp. No doubt the feeling was going to grow in the course of the case. For as long as there seemed to be a threat against the Princess, the poor girl was going to have no private life, whether she knew it or not. Unless, of course, she twigged, and outwitted us. Quite dim-witted people can be very sharp in matters that affect them personally, and it was on the cards that she would get wise to any additional security we devised, and give it the slip. If she did, she could well sign her own death-warrant.

Anyway, they were a right bunch, her boy-friends, to my way of thinking. I’ll give you the details on them when you meet them, but there was hardly a one of them I’d trust with my old granny’s last sixpence, apart from Bill Tredgold, and he was dead. All of them would have to be talked to, sized up, thoroughly gone into. The question at
the moment was, what approach was I to use? If I was completely open and interviewed them in my official capacity, then the case was wide open, with newspaper headlines — the lot. With ten or twelve names on my dossier, you could be quite certain one of them would pocket Fleet Street Danegeld and blab. One thing I’ve had more than enough of is cases that hit the headlines.

My mind honed in on the Honourable Edwin Robert Montague Frere. The nightly frequenter of casinos. Mostly to be seen, if the dossier was to be believed, hanging over the roulette wheel in the Wellington Club, panting at the restrictions that indigence imposes.

Now, anyone can go to a casino. Policemen went, in their private capacity, to casinos (though
not,
I may add, any policeman of whom I had any opinion at all). It seemed a good enough starting-point, while I worked out a plan of campaign for the rest of the desirable Helena’s male harem. The fact that the Wellington was a club would not, I suspected, present insuperable difficulties. I found the number in the book, and asked the discreet voice on the other end of the line about membership.

‘Your name, sir?’

‘Leopold Trethowan,’ I said, feeling that discretion was the better part of honesty. I slurred the surname, hoping it would be heard as Tregorran.

‘That will be perfectly all right, sir. When were you thinking of coming along?’

‘I thought perhaps tonight . . .’

‘Splendid, sir. I’ll have your membership card ready for you.’

How easy. How wonderfully, illegally easy!

Meanwhile there were still many hours before the wheels would be spinning at the Wellington Club. I decided to make a return visit to Kensington Palace and check up on the behind-the-scenes security. As I expected, it was tip-top, but I enjoyed nosing around the
palace and its surroundings, I noted without joy the proximity of the public touring the open areas of the place, and finally I made one or two suggestions aimed at meeting the special situation we were in at the moment. While I was talking to the man in charge of general palace security the royal limousine drove by, with Sergeant Joplin in the front seat, and when the ladies had disappeared inside in a flurry of
haute couture
I went over and had a word with him.

‘Have a nice day?’

‘Boring as hell,’ Garry Joplin said. ‘I don’t know how she sits through it and keeps looking interested. Gave me the screaming ab-dabs. The lunch was all right, I suppose.’

‘Better than meals-on-wheels, I imagine. What about the people, though?’

‘Nothing of interest for us, I’d say. Nice enough lot, mostly middle-aged or elderly themselves. Hard-working, do a lot of good — you know the type. Hardly what we’re after.’

‘No — except we don’t really know what we are after. Nothing else out of the ordinary — no accidents on the way?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘What about the lady-in-waiting?’

‘Stuffy bitch. What do you mean, what about her?’

‘Does she keep her eyes open, keep close, do her job?’

‘Oh yes, like a well-dressed leech. Close, but yet in the background, if you get me. Drops the odd genteel platitude here and there, but mostly stays mum and keeps her eyes open. She relaxed a bit when it came to the private bit.’

‘Private bit?’

‘Just the committee, for cocktails before lunch. Just ten or twelve of the top nobs. I hung around, of course, not getting offered a shot myself. They all stood up clutching
their grog and making well-bred conversation about the weather. One of the do-gooders was a noble relative of Lady Muck the train-bearer, and she had a bit of a jaw with him. Otherwise she’s been at the lass’s side all the time, passing the sort of remarks you get in language primers. Fun for the little girl!’

‘Cramped your style, Garry, I can see that. Never mind. If I know the young lady she’ll get on friendly terms before many days are out. I thought I might go and have a word with the secretary johnnie — coming along?’

‘Might as well,’ said Sergeant Joplin, and we had a word with a flunkey and found ourselves shunted forward on the conveyor-belt of flunkeydom until finally we found ourselves ushered into a rather raggedly splendid office — large, ornate, sparsely furnished, and cold as charity. A dowdy secretary typed at a side table miles from anywhere, and intoned that Mr Brudenell would be in in a moment. She motioned us to two upright chairs, eighteenth-century jobs, seemingly designed for midgets with spinal problems. We stood and waited.