Your Royal Hostage (13 page)

But that was later. At the time the
tus
team allowed themselves to be dismissed courteously, more or less as arranged, with a few final platitudes about 'wishing you both every happiness', a few final curtseys from Jemima and Susanna Blanding, and a final bow from Rick (he reckoned they'd earned it). Only Curt and the American producer remaining sternly unbowed and uncurtseyed; but then since Curt had taken no active part whatsoever in the entire proceedings, his lack of gesture
at least was not necessarily
to be interpreted in any positive fashion.

Nevertheless the unvoiced tension, at least on the part of Rick and Jemima, as they drove away from the Palace, was considerable. As was the surprise and the excitement.

'There's that man with the funny-looking dog again, the one that nearly got itself killed,' remarked Jemima by way of light relief.

It was true: Fox and Noel, who had in fact been circling the Palace anxiously during the duration of the interview, had come to rest once more at their previous observation post by the Palace drive. Noel was manifestly exhausted: to tell the truth, the dog, unlike his master, was not a great walker and would in dog terms probably have agreed with Rick Vancy's irritable remarks that dogs should be banned from urban conurbations, since that meant master-led long city walks instead of more leisurely solitary country rambles. But Fox's excitement at the prospect of the revolutionary programme which was being enunciated within the white walls of the Palace, had meant he had been unable to keep himself - and Noel - away.

Somewhere in the distance the bark of sea-lions from the Zoo caused Jemima to think of Louis MacNeice and murmur poetically: 'Smell of French bread in Charlotte Square.' This in turn caused Susanna Blanding to say: 'I'm terribly hungry. That, or I must have a cigarette,' and Rick to suggest that they talked the whole thing through at Le Caprice. (Curt, with his enviable capacity for relaxation, had fallen asleep again.)

'Isn't that dynamite we have there with all that animals lib talk from
her!’
he remarked as he dialled the Caprice number on the car phone. 'Connections to the French lady only too easy to establish. Say, maybe
he
gets turned on by animals —'

'Maybe so, but it bothers me,' confessed Jemima. 'Why did the Palace - predictably — say no statement from them along the Innoright lines, we don't give in to blackmail etc. etc.? And then she made it. Whose plot was it, his, theirs - or hers?'

'Or those courtiers,' suggested Rick, 'those background figures, royal anchors, I guess.'

'Not
Ione
Quentin!' exclaimed Susanna in a shocked voice from the back seat. 'She's an absolute
pillar.
So's Major Pat. Still, you never know with the Palace. They can be awfully wily.'

'If it was her idea,' pursued Jemima. 'Why? That's what I want to know. Why do it?'

A few hours later when the programme 'Prince and Princess of Hearts' was being shown nationwide on British television, members of the Innoright cell who were watching it together, would echo the words of Jemima Shore more or less exactly.

'Why?' cried Lamb. 'When they said they wouldn't.'

'She said it - well, more or less,' Fox sounded bemused.

'She did not.' That was Pussy, four square.

The rest of the country turned their sets off with contented clicks.

'Listen to that, Kenneth,' said Mrs Taplow to her husband as they sat in their Eaton Square kitchen. 'HRH has turned out very nicely after all, I couldn't have put it better myself about loving animals.'

'Couldn't you, Lizzie? Are you sure?'

Mrs Taplow gave him a sharp look, then addressed herself once more to polishing the Prince's already exquisitely shiny leather shoes.

'You'd better get on with that, Kenneth,' she said after a moment; she spoke equably enough. 'Otherwise it will never be ready.' She pointed to some embroidery on the table: a royal crest was in the process of being created from silk and beads; it had the air of an intended wedding present. Taplow sighed but he obeyed her and picked up the embroidery; once he was immersed in its intricate design, however, his expression relaxed.

The Innoright members had no soothing tasks to which to turn.

'What do we do now?' Chicken turned to Monkey who was still gazing stolidly at the blank television screen.

'We go on with the Underground Plan,' replied Monkey sombrely. 'We don't release the photographs but we go on with the Plan. Mark Two. That wasn't the statement we asked for, the reasoned statement, that was just an outburst from an hysterical girl.'

'Grab her,' said Beagle with a laugh. 'Grab her all the same. She d
eserves it.' He laughed again. I
deserve it.'

Lamb, who tended to feel cold since her illness, experienced a special chill within her.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

St
Francis

'You're not really expecting anything to happen?' enquired Jemima of Pompey over their respective 'jars' (white wine and whisky) in Jemima's secluded top-floor flat overlooking Holland Park. Pompey had dropped in for an early drink on the way back from work to Mrs Pompey: his pretext being that Jemima needed a little off-the-record background briefing on security arrangements for the wedding.

'From our point of view something
has
happened,' pointed out Pompey: but his relaxed tone was not one that Detective Sergeant Vaillant, for example, would have recognized. 'A man was killed and we're not much nearer solving the case,' he add
ed. 'One or two things have com
e up of course:, there's a man with a dog. At the Republican,
with
the bloody dog that afternoon except they wouldn't let him in without a fuss. Said he was a humble fan of Princess Amy, always tried to follow her public appearances from
The Times,
nothing wrong with that, was there?'

'And was there? A good many people are like that.'

'True. But this man had once been a member of Innoright, resigned when there was some fuss about the very same unwelcome dog. We had some leads on him; small, of restricted growth I should say, works on and off for Leaviss' - he mentioned the name of one of the leading theatrical costumiers — 'non-violent, or so we believe, but loves to distribute anti-vivisection posters in the most awkward places. Could well have been intending to do so at the Republican if the dog hadn't scuppered his plan.'

'The dagger - paper-knife - is odd, Pompey. It didn't
have
to be someone at the Press Conference, did it? Quite a few of them of course.'

'Quite a few paper-knives, too. And anyone could have helped themselves to the kit, including paper-knife, after the conference began. Knives and kits not picked up remained at the checking-in desk. By then empty. Your Americans must all have had knives.'

'I'm currently using mine. Useful for dealing with royal memoranda from our industrious English researcher.'
Jemima picked it up from the table in front of her and felt the point. 'Yes, bit of a mistake in manufacture, that. Very sharp indeed. Rick has presented his to the aforesaid industrious researcher, who claims to have buried hers somewhere in her historical files. Curt, the silent American, uses his to pick his teeth; when he's awake, that is.'

Jemima, discussing the new details of the case, thought how she had developed an excellent if unacknowledged working relationship with Pompey since their first association (over a television appeal for a missing child).

Jemima was tacitly allowed to g
ive vent to her natural inquisi
tiveness by discussing those details of
a
case that Pompey found it discreet to reveal over a 'jar' (as a matter of fact not a few). Pompey on the other hand was a man on whom life with the hard-working albeit whimsical Vaillant sometimes palled. Besides, as he put it, the necessarily hothouse atmosphere of the incident room could also produce 'a wood for the trees' situation. In these moods he welcomed Jemima's proffered jars'; including contact with her aforesaid inquisitiveness.

It was true that J
emima's famous 'woman's instinct
' was the subject of many traditional jokes between them in which Pompey gave way to heavy gallantry while defending the superior role of patient relentless investigation in the solution of a murder case. Jemima for her part generously allowed Pompey to term it
a
'woman's instinct' from long usage (furthermore it did not do to argue overmuch with
a
contact). Nevertheless she contended strongly that the famous instinct was in fact no more than the thought process of a reasonable human being - not necessarily female.

'What about his own private life? Nothing there? Although I agree it's odd that whoever killed him should choose such a bizarre occasion as a Royal Press Conference if there was no connection. Odd or cunning.'

'Lamentably respectable,' replied Pompey. 'Unmarried. Not gay but no regular girlfriend. Several he took out confirm that.'

'That's
too
respectable,' said Jemima firmly.

'He took out that woman who's working for you once or twice, the writer who goes on history quizzes on the telly; Mrs Pompey likes her. Nothing in it, however.' In case Pompey should have seemed to imply that Mrs Pompey's taste had corrupted his official judgement, he added quickly: 'We checked it out. Talked to her.'

'She didn't tell
me,'
thought Jemima. 'But then, why should she? Besides, Susanna Blanding's attention at present is equally divided between the Cumberland family tree and Rick Vancy.'

'Then the woman Moscowitz - remember I told you about her? Going to sleep in the lou
nge with dead-as-a-doornail Sch
warz-Albert lying there all along? We've checked her out, naturally. Seems her daughter was a well-known model who died in a rather hideous car crash. Caro Moss. Ve
ry beautiful, rath
er weird. Decapitated.'

'Ugh. I remember the case.' Jemima also remembered Caro Moss from the famous advertisements for health foods: an exquisite giraffe-like girl gazing up at a real-life giraffe munching leaves from a tree: 'Since I can't reach a tree,' ran the wistful faintly accented voice-over.

'Mother made a scene at the inquest, and again when the male driver was not sentenced to prison, only a fine.'

'One can hardly blame her,'
Jemima reflected. 'No chance that Schwarz-Albert was the driver of the car and Mrs M the lurking figure of vengeance from the past, as in an Agatha Christie?'

'No chance at all,' replied Pompey coldly, who, unlike Jemima, did not retain a strong worship of Agatha Christie. 'Naturally we checked that out. Caro Moss's slaughterer - manslaughterer - is alive and well elsewhere.' He added with a return to joviality: 'So what does your woman's instinct say?'

'My perfectly good
reasoning
powers,' riposted Jemima, 'suggest that it isn't a coincidence your chap was killed at the Republican and at the conference. Someone took a risk - because it was a risk worth taking. Or because they didn't have another good opportunity. Yes, that must be it.'

Seeing that Pompey's brows were still drawn together at the mention of Agatha Christie, Jemima decided to return to the subject of the Royal Wedding. 'My question meant: are you - or they - expecting something to happen at the wedding itself?'

Since Pompey did not choose to answer, Jemima pressed on: 'Did you see the story in the
Exclusive?:
a city prepares
. Plus a lot of stuff about offices along the route being secretly commandeered. Either for some secret hidden marksmen. Or to prevent terrorists getting there first, it wasn't quite clear which. Some maps and photographs of likely angles. Explanations of how specially vulnerable this route is because it isn't the usual one from Clarence House or Buckingham Palace. The bride has to come from Regent's Park and they both go to the Palace for the wedding breakfast. Then Westminster Cathedral is bang in the middle of Victoria Street. A busy place. Lots of offices. Not cut off at the end like Westminster Abbey.'

'a city prepares
indeed! It
certainly loses nothing in the
telling,' was Pompey's comment. '
That sort of thing only encour
ages the buggers of course: gives them some bright ideas about
the weak links along the route, I
always think. But what can you
expect? In spite of their reputation Special Branch adore publicity.
Always
sneakily talking to the Press
'

Pompey seemed fortunately unaware just with whom he was sitting at the time of this less than generous comment concerning his colleagues.

'Am I naive in assuming the
ira
are not interested since this is a Catholic wedding?' queried Jemima.