King and Joker (16 page)

“But it still could have been Sanderson, or anybody, couldn't it?”

“The reorganisation part, yes; but the other part no. Practical joking runs in the blood, Lulu. McGivan was my Father's first cousin.”

Chapter 11

W
hile Louise sank out of her private wulli-wa of shock into the soft dark of the sedative Father gave her, the Palace Press Office came to life. The Duty Press Officer called Commander Tank, and he summoned the rest of his staff from chess club and night club, from dismal bedsitter or raucous family abode. Cats went unbrushed, children unbathed, neighbours uncuckolded. Commander Tank always tended to treat any contact with the media, unless he had personally arranged it, as an armed invasion; now it was as though Hitler's landing-fleet had been sighted in the Channel and he with his Few were all that stood against it. Of course he was overwhelmed, but he went down fighting, or at least shouting.

At ten o'clock the Press Office issued a statement that the body of a Palace Security Officer had been discovered during the course of a reception for a South American Cultural Mission. The Police were working on the theory that in the course of his duties he had found a group of South American guerrillas planning to disrupt the reception and that they had killed him and then escaped. A tip-off had been received shortly before the reception, but His Majesty had personally given the orders that it should go ahead as planned.

Even those scanty scraps would have been enough to fill every front page on the British breakfast table; but by midnight somebody had told somebody that Princess Louise had found the body. Commander Tank's Few withdrew to hastily prepared positions, but in less than an hour they were being blasted from an exposed flank by reporters wanting to know whether it was true that the dead man was a double of King Victor, that Princess Louise had found him sitting in the dark on the King's throne, and that the police were working on the theory that the assassins had believed that their victim was the King himself. By dawn they had no knowledge left to withhold and the Palace switchboard was flooded with calls from five continents.

That was how it happened that Scotland Yard Traffic Control came through on Nonny's private phone in the Breakfast Room to ask whether Princess Louise was going to school, as serious jams were building up in Church Street caused by crowds waiting to see her do so.

“Tell them no,” snapped Father. “Can't you see, Lulu …”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Louise. “You needn't go on me. Honestly. At least it means I can go and see how Durdy is. I bet you've all forgotten her.”

“She's fine,” said Father. “I was up there first thing and she was still asleep. But every dial was right back to normal.”

(Of course. He'd have been to try and tell Kinunu what to say. Poor Kinunu. Perhaps he'd been the first to tell her McGivan was dead.)

“Nonny huill ring up the school and get them to send you some huork to do,” said Mother. “And you huill please not make that face at me, Lulu. You are behaving like a baby.”

“I don't think that's quite fair, darling,” said Nonny. “Everybody feels like that. It's a ripe tomato situation.”

Father and Bert grunted agreement. In the Family slang a ripe tomato was anything which caused an unexpected or undignified jolt in the royal routine. Once, when Queen Mary had been visiting an East End soup kitchen, somebody had thrown a real tomato at her and caught her full on the toque. She had stalked on, smiling and gracious, as though the dribble of yellow pips and scarlet juice were part of her normal coiffure. When a ripe tomato occurred your instinctive reaction was to try to behave with the same inhuman calm. If circumstances permitted, you allowed somebody to wipe up the mess; if they didn't you acted as though the tomato were an impolite fiction.

Nonny was right. McGivan's death was a ripe tomato of the most ghastly kind. Louise had known all along that she wouldn't be allowed to go to school, but she'd woken full of a determination to behave as though this were an ordinary day, and herself an ordinary girl. Going to school was the most ordinary thing she could think of. She was confusedly aware that when somebody is murdered in a house where an ordinary girl lives she probably doesn't go off to school next day, or react to the horror with ripe-tomato behaviour; but at the same time she felt that going to school would have been a definitive method of shutting the story princess away like a doll in a drawer. As it was, the story princess stared across the table at her from the front page of the paper Albert was reading. That particular paper had chosen the funeral face.

“Has anybody found how these alleged assassins got in and out?” said Albert suddenly.

“What do you mean ‘alleged'?” said Father.

“I think they're a load of codswallop,” said Albert. “The joker was planning something and it went wrong.”

“Huat sort of something?” said Mother.

“Well, for instance, get Father out of the reception somehow, switch on the spotlights, start the motor which draws the curtain and there, apparently, is Father sitting on his throne. Respectful silence. Nothing happens. Then somebody spots that he's unconscious. Yes, that's it! The joker only meant to lay him out and when he realised he'd killed him he panicked. That's why there was no red cross.”

“Have you told Mr d'Arcy about the joker, Vick?” asked Mother.

“He was polite but not all that excited.”

“Well, I think he ought to be gingered up,” said Albert.

“So do I,” said Mother. “Can't you … ?”

“Oh, for God's sake!” said Father. “It's out of my hands. I've got a tricky relationship with poor d'Arcy.”

“But couldn't one of our own people …” said Nonny.

“Theale's working on the other jokes already, isn't he?” said Albert.

Father banged down his cup so violently that he spattered the table with coffee. For a moment it looked as though he was going to start one of his breakfast shouts which would certainly have relieved the tension. Usually these explosions were set off by a spark between his public and private selves, and to most of the family this must have seemed to be just what was happening—a burst of fury because he wanted to behave like a good citizen helping the police in their investigations, and now he was being asked to tell them what and how to investigate. But to Louise there was something else behind his fury and its unwonted suppression. Having decided not to tell the Family that he thought McGivan had probably been the joker, he'd be exasperated by a conversation in which he knew things he'd deliberately kept from Mother and Nonny. That had been a mistake, Louise thought. There wasn't any real reason why he shouldn't have told them about it, or about McGivan and Kinunu. “Spit it out,” Durdy would have told him. Only he'd made it seem to matter so much last night …

“Oh, all right!” he said suddenly. “If d'Arcy can spare Theale I'll suggest he does a bit of work on this. And now will everybody please stop screaming at me and let me catch up with the newspapers!”

He didn't get much chance, because Sir Sam, looking very tired but neat and smooth as ever, turned up earlier than usual with a long list of alterations to the next fortnight's Royal engagements. After all, if the assassins had had one go at His Majesty …

As Louise slipped away she heard Mother and Father beginning to react with a classic display of ripe-tomato behaviour, niggling at every change and trying to restore the original schedule. Just like me, she thought. They're snaking things ordinary again.

But nothing was ordinary. McGivan's death was like the first sign of a disease that was going to infect the whole Palace. At breakfast Pilfer had actually spoken without being spoken to, telling Father that one of his ham radio contacts in Honolulu had heard the news and tried to get him to talk to a local reporter. Now Louise found Sukie cleaning her bath with grim energy, muttering “Those dagoes—we'll show 'em!” as though somehow spotless enamel would foil assassins' vileness. Messengers moved down the forbidding corridors at a different pace, half-uncertain, as though the ancient machinery of the Palace routine had at last packed in and everything now had to be learned afresh. Sanderson was on the landing of the Private Stair, checking everybody who passed.

And even in the cloister of the nurseries the disease had hold. Kinunu was crying. Louise found her loading the washing machine with tears running down her flat smooth cheeks. There was no mockery in her weeping. More than ever Louise wanted to hold her close and comfort her for her dead lover.

“Oh, Kinunu, I'm so sorry,” she said, moving towards her as she did so.

But just like a cat being choosey and unpredictable about who it will allow to touch it, Kinunu rejected her.

“Tho thorry,” she whispered, then rushed into her bedroom and shut the door.

Damn, that's stupid of me, thought Louise as she finished loading the washing. She put the soap in, switched the machine on and the monitor off, and crept into the old Day Nursery.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” said the squeaky voice. “Have you done your business?”

“Oh, Durdy, you are marvellous! I believe you'd say that on the last morning of the world!”

“Perhaps I should. I never let that Kaiser stop any of my children sitting on their pots each and every morning,” said Durdy, as though this had been the German Emperor's prime aim in starting a world war.

“I was worried about you last night. I thought I might have made you too tired.”

“Worry's a bad master, I always say. I was a little bit tired, darling, and when I'm tired I can't sleep. But His Majesty came up and gave me an injection and I was in dreamland before he'd taken the needle out.”

“Did he tell you what's happened?”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It's the end of an old story, darling, and I daresay it's time it was ended. You never know how things will turn out, never.”

Louise was about to ask what she meant when she remembered about the other monitor. She went out and found Kinunu in the Night Nursery, ironing, with her back turned. She made no sign as Louise crossed to the bedroom and checked that that set was switched off too. Back in the Day Nursery she settled as usual on to the rocking-horse.

“Did you know that Mr McGivan was a relation?” she said.

“Oh, yes, darling. His Majesty didn't, not when he brought him down here, but I knew who he was the moment I clapped eyes on him. His granny was a … was a poor silly girl I used to know … dearie me, yes. But we'll let bygones be bygones, shall we? His Majesty tells me that you found the body.”

“Yes. That's right. I wish I minded more, Durdy. It was quite horrible when I thought it was Father, but now well, sometimes I feel as if I was suddenly going down in a lift into a black place, too fast to stop, but, mostly it's just something that happened and I can think about it quite easily without getting the shudders. I get a bit browned off when Bert keeps on badgering away about people's alibis …”

“He should leave all that to the police.”

But the mention of alibis had reminded Louise. She twisted in the saddle and looked at the cuckoo clock.

“It is fast,” she said. “I can't have been up here three quarters of an hour already.”

“Nonsense!”

“But Durdy it is. It's terribly important, because …”

“I know that clock as well as I know my own name. Your great-grandfather King Victor brought it back for me from Geneva after he'd been to the opening ceremony of the League of Nations, and what a precious waste of time that turned out to be. That clock doesn't gain, it loses. Three minutes a day in summer, and five minutes a day in winter. It's been like that ever since His Majesty King Haakon tried to stop it ticking so loud. He said a loud tick was bad for the nerves. So there!”

“But listen, Durdy. Don't you remember? I was talking to you yesterday evening and you got a bit tired and then the clock struck six, and I suddenly thought I was late with starting my homework and Kinunu was late with bringing you your green pill. You do remember that, don't you?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don't.”

“Well you'd better make up your mind, because it's important. When I went out I found Mr McGivan in the Night Nursery. He'd been talking to Kinunu—she's terribly upset this morning, Durdy—you'll have to be specially nice to her—oh, dear, and I'm afraid I made it worse …”

“Least said soonest mended. What were you saying about that dratted clock, Your Highness?”

“If you start Highnessing me now, Durdy, I'll burst into tears. The point about the clock is that if it was fast I saw Mr McGivan at twenty-five to six. If it wasn't fast I didn't see him till six. But it must have been fast, Father says, because if he'd still been alive at six his body would have been warmer and things like that. Don't you remember in all those Agatha Christies you used to read, it's always frightfully important when the murderee was last seen alive?”

Sniff.

“Oh, Durdy, you're hopeless!”

“And why aren't you going to school today, Miss?”

“Because the whole of Kensington is jammed solid with foul photographers waiting to take pictures of the girl who found the body, that's why.”

“It would never have happened in your great-grandfather's day. That Ray Bellisario! I'd have liked to have heard Queen Mary speak to him!”

Louise smiled. Durdy detested reporters with a fervour equalled only by Commander Tank, but she pored like a stamp-collector over the end-product of their work. Now she seemed determined to talk about anything else but the murder.

“If you aren't going to school you won't see my friend Master Jerry, then? How is he these days? Is he in love again?”

It was curious that Jerry, the son of a postman, had hit it off instantly with Durdy, whereas Julie had not, despite coming from a Debrettish sort of family. Louise laughed and explained the awfulness of the new girl, and the things that Julie had said about her, and Jerry's blindness. It was an effort to keep the giggling stream of chat flowing, because now, suddenly, she found herself going down in the lift into blackness again. McGivan. Cousin Ian. Rightful King. Snuffler. Dead. The stream dried up. The rockers of the horse grumbled and stilled. Into the silence the cuckoo clock injected its fluting hiccoughs.