Your Royal Hostage (22 page)

It was at that moment that Lamb, alone in her self-imposed vigil at the door, cramped, stiff, icy with a despair as acute in its own way as that which Princess Amy was trying to keep at bay, decided that death was the only answer.

She wondered how she would make out with the automatic pistol: was it easy to fire? With some confused idea of target practice, Lamb fired two shots rapidly into the door jamb.

When the sound of shots — and the instantaneous police reaction outside - reached Beagle upstairs, he recognized it to be disaster. He had been half expecting it of course. For one thing Beagle knew that he should not have taken off his mask and that some time in the remote past his mother (who liked such things) had read some silly fairy story to Jossie a.k.a. Beagle (who did not) in which a princess persuaded a prince fatally to unmask... everyone turned into an animal, no, a swan. Or was it only the prince? In this case the story was somewhat different: Beagle was already the animal and nothing could turn him back into a prince. Beagle, once Jossie, jerked himself into the present.

Ever since the wounding - or possibly death — of the detective, Beagle had been seized with a feeling of doom. He knew the disaster to be irreversible. There would be no kingdom of the innocent now, he was aware of that. He was doomed. As he had told Lamb the night before, it was more a case of who or how many he took with him. And yet — it had been worth it, hadn't it? What he had planned, worked and waited for, in one way he had achieved it. Beagle, aware, since Lamb's unwise shots, of the strong police presence outside, felt none of the sick tension and fear which had possessed him throughout the Royal Gala, leading up to the climactic abduction from the box.

When the noise of the loud-hailer reached him, the strong voice of authority reverberating in the tiny mews, he knew that control had already passed from Innoright, in so far as they had ever had it. It was over, all over. Wasn't it? And no fucking fairy-tale ending either. Not for this prince. He was still, in a strange way, happy.

But it wasn't all over. Not
for Lamb at any rate, crouching
outside the studio door. She grippe
d the pistol in her hand. Lamb,
intent on what now seemed to her the only possible solution as 
dictated by a mind already be
ginning to spin away, away from
all it had once held dear, ha
d not heard or not taken in the
police reaction outside. Despite a childhood spent despising and 
protesting against such countr
y pursuits as shooting, she was
confident that in an atavisti
c way she now knew quite enough
about the gun to use it — just as she had managed easily to fire it 
downstairs. Colonel Q's da
ughter Somewhere in her spiral
ling state, Lamb managed to be gri
mly grateful for that loathsome
upbringing. That horrifying collection of guns, guns for killing 
animals;
her father used to display
to them in the library, making
her feel utterly powerless and d
istraught. ('Just smile and say
nothing, Leelee,'
Ione
used to urge her. 'Above all don't cry; 
Daddy hates tears.')

Lamb did hear the loud-hailer. She hear
d it without taking in the full
import of the words, more taking the echoing sound as a kind of call to action - her predetermined action, the action which she had sometimes turned over in her mind in the past, during the long nights, caught as she was in the bondage of her jealousy, her lust - and her despair. The image of suffering Snowdrop, her calming mantra, had long ago vanished to be replaced by that of Colonel Q, the hunter.

To Beagle and Princess Amy, frozen the pair of them like the figures on a Grecian urn — what mad pursuit, what maiden loth — the words declaimed by the loud-hailer were not only totally audible but immediately and totally understandable.

'... We have you completely surrounded. Do not attempt to escape. You are surrounded.
There are marksmen on the roof.
Throw
your weapons out of the window.
Do not attempt to
escape.' The loud-hailer continued to give its sonorous message. Then: 'Do you hear us? Send out your prisoner. You may indicate with a white cloth or some other other signal that you are sending out your prisoner. ... We can see where you are holding your prisoner. Repeat. We see you. ... We have you surrounded.'

How could they see us? wondered Beagle. Those new X-ray spy cameras no doubt. Their range was extraordinary even if their use in surveillance circles, British as well as Iron Curtain, was not advertised to the general public. Then he wondered how they had traced the lair. The possibility of confession by Mrs Taplow, betrayal by his father, had not occurred to him, when another quite different voice, the unmistakeably well-bred and surprisingly collected voice of
Ione
Quentin, was heard. Beagle immediately assumed Lamb to be in some way responsible for the betrayal.

Ione
Quentin was addressing h
er sister: 'Lydia, no harm will
come
to you if you surrender, Lydia!
'

'The bitch,' he thought, 'I should never have got tangled up with her. I have to admit that royal connection turned me on. And she was raving for it. But she's a loony. Never trust loonies. It should be a motto, Innoright's motto. Protect the innocent! Avoid the loonies. Just supposing there's a difference.'

Princess Amy remained silent. She could not trust herself to speak, since the prospect of rescue had the effect of diminishing rather than increasing her reserves of courage. At Beagle's side she began trembling violently. The voice of the police - and wasn't that
Ione
? - by bringing reality into what had been a kind of hideous dream sequence, fundamentally unreal however horrible, actually terrified her.

Was he now finally going to kill her? But he didn't seem to have
a
gun. Would he let her go? She must try and assert control again, she must, she had been getting somewhere with him, hadn't she? They had even been in an odd way friendly this morning, they had talked about the past, he had talked about his mother, that was a good sign, wasn't it? Above all, she must stop trembling. She suddenly remembered his name, his childhood name. She would use it.

'What are you going to do with me,
Jossie?’
enquired Princess Amy in a small hoarse voice, the best she could manage.

Hearing her say 'Jossie' — and aware perhaps of the effort it had cost her, otherwise how explain his ironic smile? - Beagle began to guide Princess Amy, still bonded to him at the wrist, in the direction of the shuttered window.

What had he intended to do? Was he going to open the window? And was he then going to show her, tattered but like the princess disguised as a goose-girl in another fairy story, still recognizably Her Royal Hig
hness Amy Antoinette Marguerite
C
aroline, Princess of Cumbe. rland
But the exact intentions of
Jocelyn Taplow, photographer,
a
.k.a. Beagle, would never be known for certain and in so far as they subsequently became
a
matter for debate, it was an academic debate at best.

For it was at this point that Lamb, touched off finally herself to action by t
hat whispered breathless 'Jossie
,' pushed open the door of the room. The blown-up images of Princess Amy were still strewn about; Beagle had pinned some of them up to cover the huge photographs of the seals. Lamb thought confusedly that the seals who survived were gazing at her reproachfully as though at an act of betrayal; but that was wrong: it was Beagle who had been the betrayer. She tore down the photograph next to her with her left hand.

What happened then, unlike Beagle's intentions, did subsequently become the subject of quite hectic debate - none of it academic. Nevertheless, for all this debate, the exact course of these events, too, would never be known for sure, even if in this case some kind of official solution had to be proposed. Witnesses, as so often with a violent but unpremeditated crime, witnesses and their actual state of mind at the time of the crime were the problem.

Certainly Beagle shouted: 'Don't shoot!' as Lamb lunged forward with her pistol and having lunged forward apparently recklessly, stood quite steadily with the pistol levelled in the direction of
- but that was when the questions began. Was Lamb's pistol levelled in fact at Princess Amy or was it all along levelled at
him.
Beagle, Josh Taplow, the man with whom she had had some crazed and mixed-up sexual relationship?

Princess Amy cowered instinctively backwards, tried to put up both hands to cover her face, made it with the free hand, but the use of the bound wrist pulled Beagle closer to her.

'No! Don't shoot!' shouted Beagle and at least one person -Princess Amy - believed afterwards that he had actually been trying to save her from the shots fired at point-blank range by Lamb in rapid succession. Certainly his body fell heavily down across hers as if he were already curled around her. He had protected her, taken the fire and fallen. That was Princess Amy's version of events; and she herself was quite convinced that she had been Lydia Quentin's original target: 'I saw her expression,' was her succinct shuddering comment.

All Lamb herself said afterwards was: 'Look what you've done. I've killed him. You've made me kill him,' as she stood with her now empty pistol gazing with her huge mad eyes across the blood-strewn body of Beagle, still half supported by Amy, half dangling. And that could be taken either way. Just as Beagle's cry of 'Don't shoot!' could have been an attempt to save himself rather than the Princess. But that way, of course, he would have pulled the Princess in front of him rather than vice versa. Wouldn't he? At all events, Beagle was not there to give his own version of it all since he had died very shortly after Lamb's attack, probably before the police actually reached him.

He did say or rather mutter something more as the heavily armed besiegers, at the sound of the shots, burst in from the roof, through the windows, burst in from everywhere, even out of the air, as it seemed to the two people left alive inside the house. Amy heard the word innocent' but that could have meant anything, including a reference to Innoright itself. The last words she could distinguish as Beagle still looked up towards her from the floor to which he had now sunk, pulling her towards him, his eyes beginning to glaze over, a main artery close to the heart hit, as it was found afterwards, were 'Your Royal Hostage'. And that once again proved nothing either way; only that Beagle still knew who Amy was as he entered the straight towards death.

Did the word 'Hostage' mean that Beagle still understood what he had done? 'My Royal Hostage' would have been a testimony to that. 'Your Royal Hostage' on the other hand was probably only Beagle's confused attempt to pay Princess Amy her due with what turned out to be quite literally his dying breath.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Questions

'The wedding will go ahead. As planned,' said Jemima Shore to Rick Vancy, still holding the car telephone in her hand. Privately she thought it was amusing that the only truly important message that Rick Vancy had received while travelling in his car, had been taken by her, Jemima. This was because the profound shock — to Rick Vancy, let alone to the rest of the world - of recent events had had the unfortunate effect of making Rick take up smoking again. And he was currently lighting a cigarette - his fourth during the journey between Jemima's flat and the
tus
office.

'I do not believe it!' Then: 'I simply do have to have a cigarette.' That was Rick Vancy's reaction not only when he heard of the traumatic course of the siege but also that Jemima herself had been in a certain sense involved. His reaction was in itself a mixture of outrage - what
about
her contract with
tus
? - and admiration for the kind of upper-class British person whose contacts enabled her to be present somehow even at the denouement of a British royal siege.

What she did not tell Rick about was the mixture of frustration, apprehension and excitement which had possessed her at the hidden police command post as she stood beside the rigid figure of
Ione
Quentin. In truth, the initial frustration of being a passive onlooker at the drama soon faded in face of her fears for the outcome. Admiring the extraordinary self-control of the police, given the exceptional nature of the hostage involved - up till the moment when the shots were heard inside
the house – Jemima
herself found it difficult to maintain an equivalent calm.

She knew that their calm was preserved in the interests of efficiency; perhaps if she had had something to do beyond supporting
Ione
, she too might have found it easier to stop her thoughts dwelling on the awful possibilities of the siege ending in some innocent death.
'Some
innocent death'? Since Princess Amy was, it seemed, the only person who could be described as innocent inside the shuttered shop, she had to face the fact that it was her death or injury that she dreaded.