Honourable Intentions

by Gavin Lyall

  About twenty minutes later, a telephone rang and the Commander gestured Ranklin to answer it. It was Jay at Scotland Yard. “It is respectfully requested that someone more senior than myself get himself over here and do some explaining.” His voice dropped. “Or bluffing.”

  Ranklin relayed this to the Commander, who whispered raspingly: “If it’s to see Sir Basil, I’ll go. Anyone more junior and it’s your job. And I want you back by five: meeting of the Steam Submarine Committee, including Noah Quinton.”

  Ranklin gave him a puzzled frown. The Commander had perked up a little, and was now smiling deviously. “How d’you get a man to keep a secret? – you tell him more. Take him into your confidence. Always works with the middle classes.”

  Strictly interpreted, that should put Corinna on the Committee, too, but Ranklin chose not to suggest it. Anyway, the telephone was squawking plaintively: “Hello? Hello? Have we been disconnected?”

  Ranklin answered: “No, still here. Who wants us?” And when he knew: “Tell him the deputy chief is on his way – oh, and what name are you using?”

  Scotland Yard was barely five minutes’ walk to the Westminster Bridge end of Whitehall. There, Ranklin was shown up a long flight of stone steps and abruptly from high-ceilinged space into a small cubby-hole of a waiting-room with a uniformed constable sitting behind a table and the walls hung with photographs of uniformed policemen seated in stern moustachioed rows. And Lieutenant Jay, apparently known to the police as “Mr Hopkins”.

  “Captain Ranklin, Deputy Chief of the Secret Service Bureau,” Ranklin reported briskly to the constable. It sounded odd, said out loud like that, a bit like releasing a bat in daylight. He turned aside and fell into muttered conversation with Jay.

  “Tell me about this advertisement,” Ranklin demanded, and Jay did better: he’d copied it (presumably from Lacoste’s cable) into a notebook. But it was just as the Commander had said, except that it had been published in both French and English. That was a point that nobody had brought up: how long Mrs Langhorn had been in France and how good her French was.

  Ranklin read it twice without learning any more, then murmured: “You know who probably placed this?”

  Jay nodded. “Will they tell us if she appears?”

  “Not they. They obviously think they can handle this by themselves, and if she turns up it’ll convince them they’re right.” He pondered this. “And maybe they are and we can go back to our proper job. But I somehow doubt it.”

  “Could we find out through the consulate?”

  “O’Gilroy might be able to.” He frowned at a thought. “The Palace must have sent their own man over, they wouldn’t trust this to consuls.”

  “Fine, no skin off our nose.”

  “There oughtn’t to be.” But if something went wrong, it was unlikely that the Palace would volunteer to take the blame.

  Then a buzzer sounded and the constable said that Superintendent Mockford would see them now.

  “Just like a dentist,” Jay said cheerily, and Ranklin gave him a warning look.

  As his experience with Whitehall grew, Ranklin was developing a theory that went along the lines of: Rooms where the inhabitant and his furniture really belong are devoted solely to comfortable time-serving. The real work is done in rooms where everything is mismatched and looks temporary.

  If there were anything to Ranklin’s Law, Mockford was a worker. His room was long but half of it had just a table and chairs and looked unused. At the far end, a big desk backed on to a window and a rolltop one stood against the opposite wall, with a dusty, cold fireplace in between. There were cases of law-books and piles of papers, and the walls were painted light green up to a hip-high dado rail and shiny cream above. Ghastly, but normal.

  There were three people in the room: presumably Mockford himself behind the desk, Inspecteur Lacoste in a chair near the fireplace, and Inspector McDaniel swinging gently in the swivel chair by the rolltop.

  Mockford stood up to shake hands. He was stout, stout all over, his eyes made lazy by pouches of flesh and with a full set of double chins. The only non-stout thing about him, appropriately for a detective, was his lean, sharp nose. Long strands of dark hair sprawled untidily across from his right ear without hiding the pink beneath. It looked as if he didn’t mind going bald but his wife had told him to do something, for Heaven’s sake.

  “I think you know Inspectors McDaniel and Lacoste.” Ranklin got a friendly nod from McDaniel and a stony look from Lacoste, who was dressed as before only more rumpled. He must have brought just one suit, while the one-day hearing had already dragged on for three. “Pull up chairs. Now: can you tell us what’s going on?”

  Mockford’s manner was polite but he didn’t waste time on pointless courtesy.

  “Before we start,” Rankin said, hauling a stiff dining chair towards the grate, “I wonder if you can track down a motor-car for me. A dark red Simplex landau with a London number.” He sat down and read out the number.

  Mockford said: “Naturally we want to help, but this sort of request usually comes from Major Kell’s Bureau and through Special Branch.”

  It was a polite reminder that the Secret Service was supposed to ply its trade abroad. Ranklin took a decision. “It’s been parked in Clarges Street with two men in it, most likely watching the address where Ma’mselle Collomb is staying.”

  “Give it to McDaniel, he’ll try. Now, can we go back to my question?”

  “I’m afraid the answer to that is No. Half we just don’t know, the other half we can’t mention without a specific direction from our masters. And frankly, I doubt you’d get that, even going through the Home Secretary.”

  “Hm.” Mockford leant back in his chair, producing a distinct creak. “Then was it your Bureau put the advertisement in the Paris papers?”

  “We did not. As our title implies, we prefer more secretive methods. And this must have involved the consulate, who wouldn’t touch it without permission from the Foreign Office, who don’t love us.”

  “Yes, I tried to explain that to Inspecteur Lacoste. He’s bothered that we might be interfering in a purely French case of arson.”

  “I quite understand, and I wish it hadn’t happened,” Ranklin said for Lacoste’s benefit, and then expanded it. “The FO thinks we intrude on their God-given right to collect foreign intelligence and get in their way. Just occasionally they may be right, as when we stir up a local fuss and they have to apologise for us – since we, I’m sure you understand, don’t exist.” This might confirm Lacoste’s worst beliefs about British perfidy, but perhaps intrigue him as well. The way things were heading, Ranklin didn’t want to add the Paris police to their enemies. “So if we wanted the FO to help us, it would go to Cabinet level, take at least a week and the answer would still probably be No.”

  McDaniel, who was using a telephone on the open rolltop desk, suddenly popped his safety valve: “I dinna give a hoot how short-handed ye are, Superintendent Mockford wants that name!” It seemed that anger brought out the native Scot in him.

  Mockford ignored the outburst. “Then to find who placed that advertisement, we have to think of who could order the Foreign Office around. Hm.” He looked at Lacoste, who gave a neutral shrug. So he looked back at Ranklin. “The King is visiting Paris next week, had you remembered?”

  “I believe he is,” Ranklin said, matching Lacoste for stony-facedness.

  “So there’ll be no thanks for stirring up trouble between our nations right now.”

  “We regard that as primarily a matter for the Palace.” There was, he recalled, an Irish phrase O’Gilroy sometimes used: “Mind ye, I’ve said nothing.”

  “I see,” Mockford said and looked at Lacoste to see if he saw.

  This time, Lacoste looked resigned.

  McDaniel pivoted round from the rolltop desk. “The motorcar belongs to a Mr Rupert Peverell—”

  “A fact!” Mockford said with rich satisfaction. “A nice uncomplicated fact. Now I do hope your Bureau isn’
t going to complicate it for us.”

  “It’s not much of a fact,” Ranklin objected. “The only thing you’ve got against that motor-car is that I’ve told you it’s been watching the flat where Berenice Collomb now is.”

  “Not much, I agree, but we’re grateful for any straw to clutch at. And I’ll tell you why we’re so interested in any motor-car that might be involved. It’s because we’ve been thinking and studying tide tables and the like and, while this isn’t useable evidence, we think Guillet was pushed into the river some way upstream. But we don’t think he walked up there, nor took a bus or cab – but he might have gone for a ride in a closed motorcar, where nobody would see him getting conked on the head and rolled out on a quiet stretch of bank.”

  So Mockford had paralleled – only more scientifically – Ranklin’s own thinking. However, he’d also gone further: “And there might be signs in that motor-car, human blood spots and so on, that nobody’s yet cleaned out. Now I’d like you to explain why we should give them time to clean it out.”

  “I quite understand,” Ranklin said, “albeit, as you say, tenuous. What d’you know of this Rupert Peverell?”

  “Nothing. Do you?”

  “Not me, but–” Ranklin turned to Lieutenant Jay.

  “He’s the second son of General Sir Caspar Peverell of Downshire Hall, and just come down from Cambridge where he acquired some rather extreme political views and a taste for free love.”

  “You know him well?”

  “Never met him,” Jay smiled.

  Taken aback, Mockford blinked and paused, impressed by Jay’s encyclopaedic knowledge of upper-class gossip – but perhaps not just by that. Rupert Peverell sounded like somebody who didn’t get jumped on by policemen.

  Ramming it home, McDaniel said reproachfully: “I did try to say, sir: the address given is in Belgrave Square.”

  Jay said cheerily: “Yes, that’s the family’s London place.”

  You didn’t go kicking down doors in Belgrave Square, either. Not unless you were a good friend of the family.

  There was a long silence. Mockford clasped his hands at his chins and thought. McDaniel swung gently on his pivoting chair. Lacoste went on being stony-faced, only now gloomy with it.

  At last Mockford raised his head. “I could have a beat bobby ask the men in the motor-car what they’re doing.”

  “We know what they’re doing,” Ranklin said. “They’re keeping an eye on Ma’mselle Collomb. He’d just frighten them off.”

  “Is your Bureau proposing to do anything about it?”

  “We’re interested,” Ranklin said cautiously.

  “When there’s any policing to be done in this town, the police are going to do it,” Mockford warned. Then he seemed to come to a decision. He hauled himself to his feet and suddenly became fawningly polite. “Thank you so much for taking the trouble to drop in on us, Captain Ranklin. And you too, Mr Hopkins. I do hope we’ll meet again soon.” It was as false as a half-crown gold watch, and intended to seem so. Except for the bit about meeting again soon, perhaps.

  On the way out, Jay said: “He’s going to put watchers on that motor.”

  “I think so. But you heard him: it’s his beat, not ours.”

  “And they won’t be as good as O’Gilroy, so they’ll probably be spotted.”

  “Let’s hope the two in the car aren’t as good, either.”

  * * *

  Ranklin was back well before five, but O’Gilroy had already been deputed to get the flat ready, which meant little more than putting decanters on the sideboard and ashtrays on the vast table. Jay had gone up to brief the Commander; they both came down soon after, and everyone sat down to wait for the voice-pipe to announce Quinton. Pedantically, he arrived on the dot of five.

  Ranklin met him at the lift, explaining misleadingly: “This is just a quiet place we maintain. It’s right across from the War Office, so . . .” Implying that that was where their real offices were.

  In the big, gloomy dining-room Quinton carefully placed his topcoat and hat on a chair and looked around. “I imagine this is a good place for extracting confessions.”

  The Commander chuckled. “Not our business. And we took this as is when the previous tenant died.”

  Quinton sat down. “I see he liked William Morris wallpaper.”

  “Possibly better even than Morris did,” Ranklin said with feeling. “Can I get you a drink while the Commander does the introductions?”

  So Ranklin was mixing a brandy-and-soda at the sideboard as the Commander reminded Quinton that he already knew Ranklin, and the others were “Lieutenant Jay” and “Mr Gorman from Paris”. The Commander might not remember to stick to those aliases; he was just spreading an aura of professional secrecy to make Quinton feel he was being allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults.

  The table itself was too big for handshakes, so there were distant smiles and nods and Quinton carefully positioned his chair and briefcase to colonise his few square feet. Ranklin put his drink on the table and Quinton positioned that, too.

  The Commander said: “Very well, the Steam Submarine Committee is in session again. We welcome Mr Noah Quinton to our humble table.”

  “May I second that, chairman?” Jay said smoothly. “We’re well aware of Mr Quinton’s distinguished record in the law and honoured to have him join us.” This was obviously pre-planned: Jay didn’t normally say things like that. “And if I may presume to call on Mr Quinton’s extensive knowledge of the law, could he explain why young Grover Langhorn can never lawfully become king? – assuming, of course, that he is the King’s eldest son. Is it the Settlement Act of 1700-odd?”

  “Not that one,” Quinton said briskly. “That’s mostly concerned with putting the House of Hanover on the throne and keeping Roman Catholics off it. No, it must go back earlier than that, but this isn’t a question that crops up every day, you know. I’d need to look up a few things.”

  Since this was all a ploy to make Quinton feel important, Ranklin tried to keep him going by saying: “As I recall from my schooldays, when the Tudors were feuding about religion, both Mary and Elizabeth were declaring each other illegitimate and having Parliament re-legitimise themselves.”

  Quinton nodded. “The very point being that illegitimacy would have kept them off the throne – so we have to look back even further than the Tudors. We’ll probably end up in common law.”

  “Surely not common law?” Jay said, reverting to his usual self and getting a sharp look from the Commander.

  “The common law of England,” Quinton said firmly, “is a sight more sensible and reliable than many of the half-baked measures dreamed up by Parliament these days.”

  The Commander could agree on that. “Self-serving tradesmen,” he said in a cloud of pipe-smoke.

  “And under common law principles of inheritance, neither property nor titles of honour can pass down an illegitimate line. Perhaps monarchy comes under ‘titles of honour’.”

  The Commander sniffed loudly. “Let’s assume it does. After all, history’s full of royal bastards and none of them acceded to the throne. Now—”

  But now Quinton had got the taste for exposition. “You know, this has interesting echoes of the Mylius case three years ago.”

  Form his expression, the Commander could have managed without Mylius, but said politely: “Do tell us.”

  “It was a criminal libel case. I believe the Palace wanted to ignore the whole thing, but the Home Secretary – then Winston Churchill – took a more aggressive line. Mylius – he was writing in an English-language paper published in Paris but distributed over here – claimed the King had secretly married a daughter of Admiral Culme-Seymour in Malta in eighteen-ninety. What he was really attacking was the supposed doctrine that the monarch can do no wrong.”

  He paused and Ranklin asked: “Does that still hold?” He got a look from the Commander for encouraging the man.

  “What Mylius wrote, and I quote –” he had even brought a paper to qu
ote from “– was: ‘The King is above the law and can do no wrong. He may commit murder, rape, arson or any other crime, yet the law cannot try him.’ Of course, he could have pointed out that any diplomatist enjoys as much immunity, possibly more. However, the doctrine that the King can do no wrong is thought to obtain, for a constitutional monarch, only so long as the King does not act except upon the advice of his ministers. So unless one can envisage a minister advising the King to commit murder, rape or arson–”

  “Lloyd George?” Jay suggested.

  The chuckles threw Quinton off his stride and the Commander took the opportunity to say: “Most instructive. Now can—”

  “Mylius got a year in jail,” Quinton muttered.

  “Richly deserved. But if we can get back to the present day . . . We haven’t established that this anarchist puppy is the King’s son—”

  “Probably impossible to do so.” Quinton bounced back fast; probably lawyers had to. “Presumably his birth certificate – have you dug that up yet?”

  “He may have been born in America,” the Commander said. “What weight does a birth certificate have in court?”

  “It’s accepted as proof unless it’s challenged. And even then, you can only show that the father named couldn’t be the real one – by reason of impotence, say, or that he was discovering the North Pole at the required time. But that tells us nothing of who the real father is. So, assuming that the birth certificate says the father is Langhorn senior, I’d say the King was not liable in law. But have you found out whether he did . . . ah, know the boy’s mother?”

  “Dammit, of course he was poking her,” the Commander growled. “Every lieutenant who could afford it had a loose woman in Portsmouth. Place was stuffed with them. That’s not the point. It’s what the foreign newspapers will make of the lad’s claim to be a royal bastard if they get to hear of it. Now: is there any legal way of stopping that?”

  “You – or rather, the Palace – could take out an injunction. That can be done secretly–but in the end, all it could do is bring the wrath of the law on Langhorn’s head if he spoke out. And if he wants to shout it out the next time he’s in court . . . well, I’ve advised him not to, but in the end I can’t stop him. And what he says in court is privileged, and could be reported even here.”