The Blood Royal (10 page)

He looked at her in sharp astonishment, scanning her face for signs of flirtation.

‘But may I substitute Nice as our destination? I hear it’s much more agreeable than Monte Carlo in high summer. And they have palm trees along the promenade. I’ve never seen a palm tree.’

Her manner, relaxed and completely un-coquettish, let him off the hook. There was no hint in her tone that she had interpreted his suggestions as in any way salacious. The potential dynamite of his careless third proposition had, in a cool way, been acknowledged and playfully rendered harmless. Joe responded with a surprised stare and a cough, and was back in control again. ‘Point taken, constable. Nice it is, then. We’ll agree on that much. Though perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss Biarritz too readily … Now, finish up those biscuits. You won’t be getting any lunch today. I’m going to leave you here to absorb that lot while I dash to my rooms and change and then set out for Jermyn Street for a shave. There’s a man at Trumper’s who can make a down-and-out look like Douglas Fairbanks in ten minutes flat. He may well be able to work his magic for me. Can’t be seen going about London looking like a ruffian. To think that today of all days I chose to wear a slouch hat!’

He grabbed a black felt hat from the hat stand and put it on, pulling it down exaggeratedly low over his forehead and leering. ‘There! What do you think? Shall I be taken for a Bolshevist, do you suppose?’

Lily responded to his flash of good humour with a chuckle. ‘Well, it’s certainly a
look
, sir. It goes with the red eyes and the purple bags under them. Cosmopolitan roué – would that be what you’re aiming for? It may pass in Piccadilly but I wouldn’t try it out in Eaton Square. They’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post.’ She turned back to the notes he’d passed her, eager to make a start.

‘And don’t think of making a run for it,’ he said, before he left. ‘I shall alert my secretary on my way out and tell her she’s to have you detained if you so much as put your nose round the door. She’s just across the corridor and she has a button to the desk downstairs. Oh … er, should you need to … um … Miss Jameson will show you the way.’

Oh, Lord! That was another thing. Facilities: females for the use of … Could they provide? He assumed there were such things in the Yard as Miss Jameson would have complained otherwise. And it was likely to be the least of the problems this wretched scheme threatened to lumber him with. Joe glanced over his shoulder at the earnest young face already totally absorbed by the distracting bone he’d thrown her way.

Bloody orders! This was a good officer. She deserved better.

Chapter Six

Left alone, Lily sat for a few minutes trying to make sense of the hastily assembled file. This was decidedly ‘works in progress’. A pile of papers had been scraped together from various sources: scene of crime notes, press cuttings and even letters on headed writing paper. This bird’s nest was destined, she expected, after passing through Miss Jameson’s typing machine, to be the building blocks of the final case file. After reviewing all the material and admiring the quality of the scene of crime work carried out by torchlight through the night, Lily managed to put it all into chronological order.

A devastating tale was beginning to emerge. From the earliest documents, she understood that Sandilands had, last month, set up a protection force from the ranks of the Special Branch for Lord Dedham, along with one or two other prominent military gents. Evidence had led him to suppose that they were likely targets for the Irish gunmen of Sinn Fein. Three distinguished men, including General Lansing, had been attacked in varying and – Lily judged – amateurish fashion the month before on the streets of London. There had been an attempted cudgelling, a knifing and – most seriously – a shooting where the bullet, mis-aimed in the struggle, had passed harmlessly through the general’s upper arm. All the victims had defended themselves with spirit and none had been seriously hurt. None of the assailants had been apprehended.

‘Thuggery on the streets of the West End,’ had been the deduction of two of the victims. But the third, Lansing, had sought out the receptive ear of Sandilands to express a different, more thoughtful, view. He’d exchanged words as well as blows with his two assailants and had been intrigued to receive a torrent of abuse delivered with an Irish accent. A southern Irish accent, he’d said firmly. His family had property near Dublin and he knew what he was talking about. Apart from Lansing’s certitude, there didn’t appear to be an obvious Irish connection and no one had claimed responsibility for the outrages, but someone – Sandilands? – had taken the pattern as a warning of worse to come as the situation in Ireland grew ever more inflamed.

Every day Irish desperadoes were setting their own cities ablaze, shooting and blowing up their countrymen, with no regard for age or sex, it seemed. Lily had cringed at the reports of families bombed to bits in the middle of the night, of men kidnapped, tortured and executed, of bodies left in the gutter. Only the day before, a little girl had answered a knock on the door and been shot in the stomach. With a shiver, Lily remembered reading the press speculation that the daily murders and explosions being suffered by that country could easily be exported to England.

Beaverbrook’s journals had thundered on for weeks about the dangers. It was just a matter of time and opportunity, they asserted. Significantly, the words ‘desperado’ and ‘hooligan’ had been replaced by the more alarming ‘terrorist’. There was a large population of Irish settlers in London, many with military training in the British army. They would have easy access to the arms and ammunition which lingered on in anonymous dumps in discreet places after the war and they would have the will and the skill to use them. In a city crowded with immigrants from many nations, the Irish blended in better than most, being indistinguishable in appearance from the native Englishmen. And unless they cared to engage you in conversation, revealing their accents, or announce to you at gunpoint that they were Irish, you would never know who was about to blow your brains out.

Sandilands seemed to have been handed a list of endangered politicians and public figures. Police squads had been allocated to these gentlemen. But before his plans could be put into action, the patrols had been stood down at the request of the potential victims themselves. Copies of their letters to Sandilands had been kept.
Dear Commander … frightfully grateful and all that … military man myself … not in my own capital … no necessity … must therefore decline …

With the protection withdrawn and the admiral shot dead, questions would be asked in the press and in Parliament – to say nothing of every public bar in the land. ‘And where were our policemen in this?’ was likely to be the most politely phrased enquiry. Resignations would be expected. Sandilands was quite right to have fallen on his sword – Lily feared that his position was, indeed, untenable. Until she turned up a note he had carefully kept. The note authorized – indeed, demanded – the instant suppression of the police guard on the gentlemen concerned, who had no wish for it to continue. It was judged an expensive manoeuvre and an unnecessary one. The note was signed by the Home Secretary himself.

Lily put it conspicuously at the front of the file.

The investigating CID officer at the scene of the assassination of Dedham, a Superintendent Hopkirk, had been there in minutes and seemed to have done a thorough job in the short time that had elapsed. She noted and admired the neat handwriting, the succinct phrasing. The officer must have been miffed to find a deeply involved, guilt-ridden and angry commander on site and breathing down his neck, she guessed. With the map of London she always carried with her and the pencilled sketch on squared paper provided by the inspector, she was able to pull together the outline of the atrocity. And Lily was left, after absorbing all the dimensions, bullet counts, and initial witness interviews, with a feeling of sorrow for the dead man. And for his wife, who had reacted to the outrage with incredible courage, throwing herself into a firefight with the retreating gunmen. A formidable pair, the Dedhams.

Everyone in the land knew of Lord Dedham. Naval man turned politician, speechmaker extraordinaire, rather in the simple style of Mr Churchill, he told the truth as he perceived it with a clarity that appealed to everyone.

When it came to political speeches the admiral used the tactics of the bare-knuckle fighter: get the first blow in and make it a cruncher. His views on the unrest which had preceded and accompanied the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty had been delivered with the gloves off very recently in Dublin. He’d accused the prime minister himself, Lloyd George, of working with the king’s enemies and had gone so far as to condemn him for having ‘shaken the bloody hands of murderers’. Dedham was a clear enemy of Sinn Fein and denouncer of the bombs and bullets that organization used instead of words.

The admiral had been sure of many things, but after his years of service in the Navy he was most certain that ‘if we bale out and leave Ireland, Britain is faced across the sea with an enemy that blocks its trade routes. And that is to say – the end of the British Empire. Shall all the gallant sacrifices made fighting the German foe to the east count for nothing, set at nought by a treacherous stab in the back from our neighbour to the west?’

Sandilands had inserted a news cutting reporting this speech, delivered to an enthusiastic audience on 24 May – Empire Day. The occasion had been a memorial supper to mariners lost at sea and Lord Dedham had further stoked the fires of patriotism by finishing with a quotation from Rudyard Kipling:

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

‘Ouch!’ Lily muttered as she leafed through the details. ‘Bet there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’

They were dealing with a national hero but also a victim who had enemies running into the hundreds if not thousands. Enemies with powerful, armed and ruthless forces behind them to do their bidding. ‘A crazed and driven foe’ might have been Kipling’s verdict.

It had been Dedham’s first day back in London when he’d been ambushed. A crucial moment of imbalance, well judged by the assassins, Lily thought. And yet something had gone disastrously wrong for them. The gunmen, both Irish by birth, it was surmised, had been caught almost immediately after the killing. They’d been arrested and interrogated initially in the Gerard Street police station only two streets away from the admiral’s doorstep.

Rustling her way through the sheets Lily began to pull together a story of remarkable courage. The cabby whose taxi the killers had commandeered had driven off in the direction of Paddington station but had almost immediately taken a turn off the main road into Gerard Street. There he’d swerved at the last minute and driven his vehicle at speed in through the gates of the police station, hooting his horn. The duty sergeant at the gates had instantly slammed them shut, trapping the taxi and its occupants in the courtyard. A squad of coppers just coming off duty in the West End had surged out and arrested everyone.

Their bag consisted of four persons: two gunmen, both injured. At the moment of arrest, one had a slash across the left cheek and a .22 bullet embedded in the muscle of his back, the other had a broken wrist.

A young lady passenger, hysterical but otherwise unhurt. She’d given her name and a Mayfair address and, after interview, had been released from custody, insisting on a police escort back to Park Lane. Lily had a clear impression from Superintendent Hopkirk’s dry phrasing that they’d been only too glad to lay on a squad car and driver to take her home. Anything to get her out of their hair.

Lastly, the taxi driver. Discovered slumped over his wheel unconscious and at first thought to be dead. Revealed by his licence to be a Mr Percy Jenner, ex-London Rifle Brigade, he’d been hit over the head with a blunt instrument, probably the butt of a gun. He’d been conveyed to St George’s hospital where his condition had been stabilized. A constable with a notebook was at his bedside.

The bodies of the admiral and the beat bobby who died trying to stop the taxi had been taken to the morgue and post mortems were under way. The work was top priority and in the hands of Dr Bernard Spilsbury himself. Report awaited.

Lily looked up from her task, stretched her back and considered. It seemed straightforward enough: successful assassination, bungled getaway, capture of culprits. But there were details that left her with an unease, a need to know more – and more precisely. She began to write a list of questions in her notebook. She was finishing her reading of the file with the last of the exhibits – a cutting from the previous week’s
Times
newspaper quoting the whole of Admiral Dedham’s rip-roaring speech in Dublin, a clear incitement to murder – when she remembered there was one important thing she had to do before Sandilands returned.

Lily looked at the clock. He’d been gone for almost two hours. Where were his rooms? How long did it take for a shave? He’d said ten minutes. Allowing for brisk walking time there and back to somewhere close by … Albany? … she’d probably left it too late, she judged. She listened. All on the third floor was silent. She crept to the heavy door and opened it an inch. She was reasonably certain that she would now have early warning of anyone approaching down the corridor, or the door of Miss Jameson’s office opening. Lily returned to the desk.