‘One thing puzzles me,’ I said, knowing this was the last time I would see her. ‘That evening at Knightley. At the Wrekin. I just can’t somehow see you acting the part of a hotel maid.’
She looked at me, as if making a decision, and then suddenly, screwing up her mouth, she let fly in the broadest cockney, in tones of almost cheerful vulgarity: ‘Can’t yer, then? But yer don’t know me at all, do yer? Family charades. Every Christmas. I always did the skivvies.’
And resuming her frozen posture, she walked off into the dark of the station, leaving me to reflect that from the beginning I had totally misjudged her, that really she was a most astonishing woman.
Five days later I heard that she was dead.
CHAPTER 18
Endings
I talked a bit to the Princess about the whole business. She told me about Bill Tredgold, and how he had been interested in her public engagements, and what charities she patronized, and who was on their committees. She seemed not at all affected by the fact that this interest had led to his death. She was more interested in Lady Dorothy, but hardly at all worried by the idea she might have committed murder. She kept saying over and over: ‘Golly, think of poor old Dot having a great passion in her life. You can’t imagine it, can you?’
And she giggled. I think the Princess finds the idea of anyone over thirty having a great passion in their lives frightfully absurd and amusing. I imagine she is going to sail through life, gaily leaving behind and around her the wreckage of other people’s lives. The rich are different from us. They take more for granted. Especially they take people for granted. But perhaps when she comes to be thirty, and then forty, she will find that other people are less willing than before to cover up, to pick up the pieces.
They put Nuneaton and Stourbridge up on trial, and the overwhelming evidence ensured they each got four years. They are serving it in the best possible conditions, and Nuneaton is actually in an open prison that used once to be a stately home. The evidence against the older men was found to be too frail to stand up in court, so in effect they got away with it. I didn’t worry too much about that. Old people in the dock always seem to me more a sad than a salutary spectacle. I regretted more that they never got anything on the repulsive Edwin, so that he got away scot free. Except that the family shipped him off to Tasmania, a highly traditional thing to do in those circles. I imagine he is bored to sobs, but someone told me the other day that Tasmania is the only state in Australia where gambling is legal, so perhaps the family would have done better to choose New South Wales.
Jan and Daniel were home for the Whitsun break not long ago. We took Daniel to the National Portrait Gallery, to see what Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter looked like. With a typical child’s perversity he preferred Mr Gladstone, and he was tickled pink by a picture of Charles II, because he said he had sausages in his hair.
But the picture he really liked, and one he stood in front of for ages, was one called ‘Queen Victoria Presenting a Bible in the Audience Chamber at Windsor’. It shows the Queen handing over the Good Book to some benighted black, the whole doubtless designed to represent the conquered savage receiving the benefits of British religion. There’s the savage, kneeling, looking all handsome and picturesque. There are Vicky and Albert, standing, looking neither. There, gazing benevolently on, are the politicians, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, I would guess. And there, in the background, dark, a mere shape, an outline, is a dim figure that for a long time you do not notice, one that can only be the lady-in-waiting.
Whenever I see that picture in the future, I am going to think of this case.
When we came out of the Gallery, I put Jan and Daniel on a bus home to Maida Vale, and walked down towards St James’s Park and New Scotland Yard, where I was to go on evening duty. As I crossed the Mall, a limousine sped by, and I saw the Princess was inside. She waved. I did not know whether she waved at me, as there was a knot of tourists nearby, and it was a typical royal wave. I did not wave back.
ROBERT BARNARD is internationally acclaimed for his mystery novels that poke fun at everything from literary pretensions to royalty. His Death of a Mystery Writer and Death of a Literary Widow were nominated for Edgar Awards as Best Mystery of the Year in 1979 and 1980. His most recent book was Death by Sheer Torture. He lives in Tromsø, Norway, where he teaches English at the northernmost university in Europe.
by the same author
DEATH BY SHEER TORTURE
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
DEATH OF A PERFECT MOTHER
DEATH OF A LITERARY WIDOW
DEATH OF A MYSTERY WRITER
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Copyright © 1982 Robert Barnard
First published in the United States by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1982
www.SimonSchuster.com
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Barnard, Robert.
Death and the princess.
I. Title.
PR6052.A665D38 1982 823'.914 82-6022
ISBN 0-684-17759-5 AACR2
ISBN 978-1-4767-1625-1 (eBook)
This book published simultaneously in the United States of America and in Canada — Copyright under the Berne Convention.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Scribner.
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