Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (31 page)

“I hope you’re satisfied now,” he was saying, shouting almost. “Now your father’s dead and buried.”

The Prince – Bertie – replied in low tones.

“But it is your fault, young man. I’ve watched you. I watch you cavorting around. Too long you’ve vexed your parents. Your father was already heartbroken, how you were carrying on with this trollop of an actress. Then he catches his death, telling you off.”

Bertie asked a question.

“I didn’t have to tell him. The whole of London knows. An actress! No wonder she goes round bragging she’s bedded a prince of the realm.”

“Old chap,” Bertie raised his voice for the first time. “I simply won’t have her spoke of in that way. She’s a sweet girl and–”

“She’s an actress. That’s an end of it.”

“Look, old man, I know I’ve been foolish, but I’m– I was so terribly fond of her.”

Here Wardle adopted a softer tone. “Look, son, you’ve done no different from these army officer types, I know – college saps with lax morals and full wallets. But you are the heir to the throne of England. The British Empire. It has to stop.”

Bertie remained silent a moment.

“Like your father said. The only hope for you is marriage to this Danish filly and early marriage at that.”

“Inspector, old chap,” he said dolefully, “you’ve been a real brick through this whole business. But let’s not do anything hasty. Some days, I tell you, I wonder if I’ll go mad with it all, the way mother is mad–”

“Enough of that.”

“Over dear Papa, I mean.”

“This new threat,” Wardle interrupted. “Let’s see it. Hmm.
Monster is slain… Belly of hellfire
…”

“Unnerving, ain’t it, old man?”

“So much bloody mumbo-jumbo. What I want to know is why now, out of the blue? It’s years since that last nonsense.”

“Not so long, I think,” Bertie said apologetically.

“Since the business at Euston? Two years, boy.”

“There may have been one or two other incidents.” Bertie coughed.

Now it was Wardle’s turn to speak so low that I could not hear.

“That’s right, threats too,” Bertie went on uneasily. “Forgot to pass them on. Slipped my mind, you see.”

“How many?”

“One or two. You know.”

“How many?”

“Every few months since the Euston thingy, and the one before even.”

“What do you mean, the one before?”

“When I was inspecting Bazalgette’s embankment, you know. Then the Haymarket, the Evans and the rest. It’s uncanny. They seem to know where I’m going before I do.”

A butler came towards me down the corridor. As Wardle was shouting, it seemed best to cover their voices by humming an air. After the man passed, without a look askance, Bertie was speaking urgently, marshalling the emotion in his voice.

“You were all so incensed about it. I could perfectly well understand, but it seemed so dashed unfair. She’s a darling of a girl. What kind of a world is it where a chap who likes a girl isn’t allowed to see her? So I couldn’t pass on the threats, because I was afraid it showed that someone knew I was seeing her, when I’d promised everyone, not least father and your good self, that I would stop.”

There was silence for a moment, then Wardle spoke with a terrible withering tone. “Have you stopped now? Have you? Now that your father is dead of it?”

There was no reply.

“Don’t give me that quivering lip.” The door flew open, and Wardle burst out, muttering. “Bloody fool.” As the door slammed shut behind him, I caught an image of the chubby Prince, face buried in his hands, sobbing.

“Where is he?” Wardle barked suddenly, as we reached Green Park.

“Who, sir?” I suppose I knew very well what he meant. But it pained me to think that, on top of the uncertainties around us, Wardle and I should still be mincing words.

“Bloody Skelton. That’s the man, isn’t it?”

“Why, sir?” I was sick of all the pretence, the half-truths, and I’d be damned if I told him what I knew until he took me into his confidence. “What’s happened?”

He breathed out through clenched teeth. “Bloody fool of a boy. I’ve lost one royal and I don’t intend to lose another. Where is he?”

“I was hoping you might know, sir.”

“Me? Why?”

“I was under the impression that you were three steps ahead of me all the way. That you’d spoken to everyone I was looking for.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so offended, son. I’m just trying to protect the idiot Prince. Have you found no more trace of him in your poking around?”

I hesitated. “Traces everywhere, but all leading nowhere. He’s truly gone to ground, sir. Could be in Clerkenwell or the Cape.”

He snorted. “Is he in heaven or is he in hell?”

“I don’t think the heavy-handed approach will work.”

“We’ll just have to smoke him out.”

“I think Nellie will know. If I could only find her.”

Wardle made no reply. Instead he absently handed over a scrap of paper.

“‘The monster is slain in his tortuous lair’,” I read aloud.

I stared at it, fascinated, studying the impersonal print for hints of the handwriting I had seen in the finely bound tome at Madame Skelton’s.

“Bloody fool of a boy now tells me there’s been something every few months. The madman’s been tracking his every move. Why play games? If he wants to do something, he should come out and do it.”

“Sir, I should like to see all these threats.”

“Why?” he said grimly.

I was about to mention Miss Villiers and her notion of codes and hidden messages, but I mustn’t admit divulging secrets to the uninitiated. “He wants us to understand.”

“He wants us afraid.”

“Maybe so, but he has a plan, and if we’re to understand it, I’ll need to see all the threats. I’d also like to hear Bertie’s version of what happened following each threat.”

“I’ll get you the details.”

“May I not speak to the Prince?”

“I said, I’ll get the details.”

I looked away in annoyance. Of course, Wardle’s sense of hierarchy would preclude a sergeant speaking with a prince. “Does he not understand what’s happening?”

We were approaching the Yard and he looked about him before he spoke. “He doesn’t know it’s about Nellie.”

“Hasn’t he noticed how the things happen when he’s with her?”

Wardle sighed. “Look, he’s a contrary fool. I was afraid it would make him more pig-headed. I led him to believe it was anti-royalist protest. You know, having a go at the debauched Saxe-Coburgs. I thought it might curb his other vices and all.”

As we walked into the Yard, Darlington was waiting for us in the hallway. “Inspector? Thank goodness. You’re wanted in Chelsea.”

“I’m busy,” he barked. “It can wait, can’t it?”

Darlington gave a deferential cough. “Sounds like a new skeleton theft.”

Wardle put his head in his hands.

PANIC IN THE STREETS

That afternoon, Wardle handed me the envelope of threats. I was afraid to use the Worms to contact Miss Villiers, lest Wardle hear of it and ask about her. So I stopped in at the library myself and waited at our tea room.

“Ah, Detective Fever,” said Miss Villiers, buzzing in like an electric storm. “On the rampage again?”

“Yes,” I said. “Somebody ought to put a stop to me.”

“If it’s not one disease it’s another.”

I was surprised how pleased I was to see her. Books spilled from the satchel she hefted onto the table. “Studying hard, I see.”

She laughed hollowly. “I’m so busy hunting down your man’s reading habits, I’ve no time for my own studies. What’s wrong? Don’t you have books in the provinces?”

“We have our own national library, thank you very much, quite the equal of yours, in Edinburgh.”

Her eyes softened. “Edinburgh? Is it pretty there?”

“Pretty? It’s beautiful.” I surprised myself with this outburst. I had never thought myself capable of feeling homesick. I coughed. “Are you allowed to take out so many books?”

“Ah. I was forced to borrow Aunt Lexy’s card. She wouldn’t mind, if she knew.”

“Which she doesn’t.”

“Which she doesn’t.” Aunt Lexy was the waspish maiden aunt who was the benefactress of Miss Villiers’ studies. When her father disowned her, set on her marriage, the aunt stepped in to pay the fees. She also arranged the library job, which enabled her to pay her own rent. She tapped the books. “I have almost everything that he’s had from Mudie’s over the past four years.”

“Almost?”

“He still has the translation of the
Ramayana
. I’ve asked them to let me know when it’s returned.”

“We could set guard,” I said, enthused. “Catch him when he returns it.”

“That’s what I thought. But he’s renewed it twice.”

“That only means we’ve missed him twice already. We must stake out the desk.”

“You might watch for months. The lending period is four weeks. Even then, he could get someone else to slip it back on to the returns desk. He could renew it by post.”

“It seems a long shot,” I nodded, racking my brains. My head filled for a moment with grandiose notions, mounting my own operations. “Unless I set a team of Worms on vigil. Couldn’t do it without Wardle’s say-so. And I’m reluctant to tell him about–”

“About me?” she raised her nose. “You shouldn’t be involving innocent young ladies?”

“I shouldn’t be consulting anyone outside our office, not without his approval.”

She glared at me briefly. “There was a chap the other day who seemed to shy away from me stamping his card. It wasn’t him, though. Our man was chubby and genial. This chap was thin-faced and slight. Couldn’t have been a disguise. But it made me wonder.” She shook her head and fell to looking rapidly through the volumes before her. “Pay attention,” she said sharply. “In every book there are pencil underlinings. Grand ideas. Fine phrases.”

“What sort of phrases?”

“Apocalyptic visions. Revolutionary incantations.” She stabbed at a page and I saw underlined in fine pencil something about “a family blind in blood”. She looked at me closely. “Mean anything to you?”

“Rings a bell. But perhaps,” I said, pulling the envelope from my pocket, “it has something to do with these?”

Her eyes lit up.

“I thought it curious,” she said, poring over the series of messages Bertie had passed on to us. “Giving warning of one thing and not of the others.”

“Why give warning at all? To taunt us?”

“No.” She waved a dismissive hand. “He’s no fool, just showing off. He wants to make us think. To understand why he’s doing it.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I’m sure you did,” she nodded. “Well done.”

“I did,” I said indignantly. “Anyway, he’s foolish enough not to know the date of fireworks night.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The spout was preceded by the Guy Fawkes threat, but it went off on the ninth of November, not the fifth.”

She frowned. “Why do you think he waited?”

“Wardle kept them out of town.” I had told Miss Villiers as much as I felt I could, that Coxhill was on the train with Nellie and her new man, and that the other girl contacted Berwick. But I had kept from her the fact that the other man was the Prince of Wales.

“He waited till he had an easier target.”

She nodded. “Then why did he let them come back, sir, if he was so anxious?”

I hesitated. It did seem surprising. If Wardle was concerned enough to be at Euston at two in the morning, why had he not simply told them to stay away?

“I know very well, Campbell Lawless, when you are hiding things from me. For my own good, no doubt, you man of mystery. Nevertheless, I am not too stupid to realise you think the gentleman in question worth protecting. Let us think more laterally. Guy Fawkes vented his spleen upon an important personage by setting Parliament on fire. Berwick embarrassed the man who thieved his sweetheart, and his accomplice, showering a railway station with water. The parallels are clear enough, leaving the date aside.”

I nodded. An attack on a king; an attack on a prince.

“Am I warm?”

I nodded. “So what is his aim? To set clues for us?”

“More likely he wants to embarrass his enemy. Shame him before destroying him. He says it himself. ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’”

“Destroying him?”

“It’s the rules of tragedy. There’ll be no dignity to the downfall unless the man understands it. Think of Caesar. Think of Macbeth. What makes it profound, rather than absurd, is that the hero understands his fall. He recognises that his own hubris leads to his nemesis. His
hamartia
leads to his
peripeteia
.”

“You’ll have to stick to English. I’m afraid I was useless at Latin.”