Who Guards a Prince?

by Reginald Hill

  “How’re you feeling?” asked Dree.

  “As well as can be expected. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Deirdre Connolly, Judith’s sister-in-law.”

  The injured woman turned and gave her a clear-eyed stare with a hint of cynical amusement in it.

  “OK,” said Dree. “Obviously I’d like to keep this quiet, but I’m not about to kidnap you, bribe you or bear false witness against you. If you want to make a complaint, I’ll tell what I heard and saw. But first let’s get you to a doctor.”

  “I’m all right,” said the girl. “Really.”

  It was Dree’s turn now for the cynical look.

  “Maybe. First thing you learn when you’re a Connolly is, get the evidence clear. In court six months from now, talk of fractured skulls and brain damage is going to be pretty hard to deny.”

  “Forget it,” said the girl. “You’ve nothing to worry about. There’ll be no courtroom drama.”

  “OK, I believe you,” said Dree. “I’ve nothing to worry about, but you might have. Suppose there is a fracture? For your own sake, please, let me take you to a doctor.”

  The girl pressed the sodden handkerchief close against her brow and grimaced.

  “For my own sake, then,” she said

  The Connolly name gained them rapid attention at the Massachusetts General and the X-ray plates were processed quicker than holiday film. There was no fracture; there would be a bump and considerable bruising for some days; ointments were supplied for this and pills for any accompanying headache. It took only twenty minutes.

  “This beats the National Health Service,” said the girl as they came out of the hospital.

  “Only if you’re stinking rich,” said Dree. “You’re English, is that right? I don’t even know your name.”

  The other stopped and turned to face her.

  “Perhaps we should get one thing clear, Miss Connolly,” she said. “What your sister-in-law said was true, in general if not in detail. I have been, occasionally still am, your brother Christie’s lover, mistress, whore, I’ll leave the term to you.”

  Dree thought a moment. “How about paramour?” she suggested, smiling.

  When the girl laughed in reply, Dree said, “Look, I’d better get back now and check on my sister-in-law. But I’d like the chance to talk a lot more with you.”

  “I’d like that,” said the girl.

  “OK. They call me Dree, by the way. For short.”

  “They call me Flora,” said the girl. “Neither for short nor long. For precision. Flora McHarg.”

  CHAPTER 2

  McHarg was on the beach again, making heavy weather through the crumbling sand and against a chill sharp wind. But the wind was having an even harder time cutting through the after-haze of a three-day drinking bout.

  The boy in the car had been eighteen, his girlfriend seventeen. They were planning to get engaged on her eighteenth birthday. He was training to be an accountant and they had been out celebrating his success in his first public examination.

  There was not enough alcohol in the world to wash out their faces behind the flame-lurid windscreen of the ruined car.

  There had been a great deal, however, in McHarg’s bloodstream, nearly three times the permitted maximum. His claim that his brakes had failed was quite uncheckable in the charred and twisted remains of the Volvo. And his discovery, semi-conscious, in the middle of a field some hundred yards from the accident was being treated as an attempt at flight rather than a search for help.

  All this Davison had told him. The papers could not print it all, not so explicitly, but the message was clear, underlined by a quotation of Heather’s unconsciously damning, horror-struck reaction, “Oh God! and we told him he ought to stay!”

  Davison himself had come to see him on Saturday afternoon.

  “They’re going to throw the book at you, Douglas,” he said. “The CC’s terrified of any hint of a cover-up. It’ll be manslaughter, almost certainly. The only good thing’s that beating-up you took in town. If he’s got any sense, your brief’ll play that up for all it’s worth. Possible blackout. Do you know the name of the doctor who patched you up?”

  “Why don’t you fuck off?” said McHarg.

  “Come on, Douglas! Don’t play the hard man still. It’s done you no good in the force. It’ll do you less out of it.”

  “Out of it?”

  Davison regarded him with a strange mixture of curiosity and sympathy.

  “Hasn’t it got home yet? This is the end, Douglas. I’m sorry. Talk it over with your lawyer, but I’m sure the best thing is to resign now before the trial, plead guilty, go for a suspended sentence. Judges aren’t daft. They know what happens to ex-cops in jail. You fight it and they’ll put you away for sure. And you’ll be chucked out of the force anyway. It’s over, Douglas. Save what you can from the wreck.”

  “Go to hell,” said McHarg harshly. “In my life, I decide what’s over. Go to hell!”

  And that was when the drinking bout had started. It had finished not because of any conscious decision but merely because he had run out of booze. He had pulled his overcoat over his shoulders and set out to buy more. But by the time he reached the off-licence, the brain-searing, eye-dazzling greyness of the cold March afternoon had lit his inner consciousness to a point of self-awareness which admitted shame, and he continued past the store, through the blank suburban streets till he reached the beach.

  Now as he walked through the sand he forced himself back into contact with the external world, the white-flecked sea, the occasional, quickly repaired rent in the drapery of cloud, the gulls treading air, a group of boys hurling stones into the indifferent water. And, approaching him, a man and a young girl, hand in hand.

  It was Wainwright and his daughter.

  The two men stopped and silently faced each other. The little girl broke free and made for the water’s edge. It didn’t seem the time for inconsequential courtesies.

  “I read about your trouble,” said the doctor. “I’m sorry. Will it finish you in the police?”

  “Very like. But I’ll survive.”

  “I hope you do,” said Wainwright, watching his daughter trying to emulate the stone-throwing boys. “But a man needs something outside himself, something to live for. Don’t you think so, McHarg?”

  “Perhaps. Within himself too.”

  The doctor shrugged. “We make our own rules,” he said cynically. “Good luck to you, McHarg.”

  He called to his daughter who reluctantly abandoned her unconscious playmates.

  “Wainwright,” called McHarg. “Before you go.”

  The doctor paused a few strides away and half turned. “Yes?” he said.

  “That business about the tongue. Why did you drop it?” The little girl had come up now and her father reached down and clasped her hand.

  “The world can look after its own messes,” he said. “A man has enough to do without minding other people’s business. Especially when other people don’t want it minded.”

  “Other people? Who do you mean?”

  Wainwright shook his head sharply.

  “I’m speaking figuratively,” he said. “Stick to your own troubles, McHarg. They’re big enough in all conscience. Besides”—and there he grinned lupinely—“it was only a dog’s tongue. Wasn’t it?”

  And, turning, he walked away.

  McHarg too continued his laborious trek, leaving the populous part of the beach behind him till the only signs of life were the wheeling gulls and far out at sea an unidentifiable ship stoically butting its way up the Channel.

  There was an idea somewhere in his head but the mists of three days’ alcohol swirled around it as the seafret swirled about the distant ship, and now it could be seen no more. But the idea was not so easily absorbed.

  He stopped and lit a cigarette. It tasted vile but he persevered. Ahead rose a tumult of sandhills. That was where he was heading, he realized. Not directed by reason, but a detective can have his reasons th
at reason knows not of, especially if his ancestors tilled the soil and tended sheep in the misty wastes of the Hebrides.

  He threw away his cigarette and went purposefully forward.

  When he came in sight of Old Haystacks’s hut, nothing seemed changed. The wormy planks, frosted with salt from long exposure to the insidious sea-mists, leaned against the steep sandhill still. As a man-made structure, it looked ramshackle and impermanent; as a natural arrangement of natural materials, it looked as right as all the rest of that casually spilled landscape.

  He called the old man’s name, but there was no answer, only a bird-like flapping as the wind caught the sack which stood for a door and whipped it back and forth against the planking.

  Through the hole thus revealed, the inside of the hut was so dark that it looked solid. McHarg approached it reluctantly. He had gone through many more uninviting entrances in his time, but this one had some special quality of fear. Was it his island ancestry speaking again?

  He knelt down and pushed back the sacking and realized at once his premonition had nothing to do with second sight. His first sight had been good enough. The darkness looked solid because it was solid. The inside of the sandhill had collapsed and filled the interior.

  Desperately, because he knew it was vainly, he began to scrabble at the sand.

  He didn’t have to dig deep.

  A couple of feet down his questing fingers touched a tangle of hair on a frame of stiff cold flesh. His own body blocked the light from the entrance so with fumbling fingers he struck a match and held it in one hand while with the other he brushed the dry grains from the old man’s face. After a moment he desisted and let the match go out.

  He was a hard man but just now he had no stomach to meet Old Haystacks’s questioning stare and to see the old man’s cheeks and nostrils puffed out with the sand that had choked him.

  But his mind could not be shut off like his sight and in it he was seeing the face of another old man who had been found, bulging-eyed, with the breath stopped in his throat forever.

  When he got home McHarg ran a deep hot bath. While it was filling, he stripped the old crumpled sheets from his bed and replaced them with a newly laundered pair. Next he took his usual cut-throat razor from the bathroom cabinet, held it long enough to observe the slight but persistent tremor in his hand, replaced it and went in search of the almost unused electric shaver which Mavis had bought him for Christmas five years before.

  Half an hour later, bathed and shaved, his flesh pink and warm, he sat on the edge of his bed, his mind and body eager for the embrace of the crisp cold sheets. But there was a phone call to make first. He knew enough of human psychology, had listened to enough long rambling explanations in the white hours of the night, to know that reality warps in the heat of self-justification. Equally he knew that in human behavior, nothing was impossible.

  “Hello,” he said. “Dr Wainwright, please.”

  “The doctor’s not on duty,” said a high, precise voice. “If this is a medical call, you should ring—”

  “It’s not medical. This is the police. Get him,” he commanded harshly.

  There was an indignant gasp. A moment later Wainwright’s voice said testily, “Yes?”

  “McHarg. I won’t keep you. Two questions. First, would an old man with diabetes be likely to suck mint humbugs?”

  “For God’s sake, McHarg…”

  “Come on! I’m serious.”

  “Serious? All right. No, he wouldn’t. Not unless he were a very stupid old man.”

  “He wasn’t that. Right. Now listen, Wainwright, and listen well. On that hill, my brakes failed. No excuse. Sober, I might still have avoided the crash. But they did fail.”

  “What the hell has that…”

  “Listen. Second question. No follow-up. Not now. Not ever. Have you been got at? Don’t even answer. Just put the phone down.”

  There was a long long pause.

  McHarg said, “Doctor?”

  There was a distant click and the line went dead.

  Now McHarg slid between the voluptuously cool sheets.

  He had time to say a prayer for Old Haystacks. Or more of an apology for leaving him for someone else to find, like a piece of that same flotsam that had been his livelihood. Though perhaps the old man would have liked the idea. Perhaps it was the best hope of us all, to float, to be washed up, to be found…

  McHarg slept.

  CHAPTER 3

  The jury had taken less than thirty minutes to acquit Stanley “Sailor” Partington on all counts shortly before lunchtime on the eighth day of his trial.

  As he emerged under the portico of the Old Bailey, the press were sucked towards him like iron filings to a magnet, and it took a pair of burly constables to clear a small space before him. He turned up the astrakhan collar of his brushed-mohair coat against the chill March wind and regarded the reporters seriously. The open ruddy-complexioned features which had in the past won him many votes looked pale and tired.

  “How do you feel, Mr Partington?” yelled one of the pressmen.

  “Relieved but weary,” he said.

  The reply triggered off a barrage of equally banal questions till someone demanded, “This verdict seems to bring into doubt the whole basis of the police evidence against you. Do you intend taking the matter any further?”

  “You must talk to my solicitor about that,” said Partington, indicating a fat pig-faced man by his side. “I myself am only too happy to have been reassured that English justice will be done no matter who attempts to bend it.”

  This answer brought a renewed spate of questioning but now Partington set off down the steps with the policemen clearing a passage before him and climbed into a waiting car driven by a spectacled brunette recognized by many there as Jane Sykes, his secretary. The car moved away pursued on foot by some of the more enthusiastic photographers, while the unsatisfied journalists took their own routes to Partington’s Kensington apartment. Finding it unoccupied, a few of the more energetic headed next to Jane Sykes’s more modest flat in Swiss Cottage but were equally disappointed there. Some laid siege to the offices of the porcine solicitor, but the majority retired to El Vino’s for lunch, taking turns at keeping the telephones in both apartments sounding a vain summons all through the afternoon.

  The telephone rang frequently in the bar of the Queen of Bohemia in Lambeth too. Some local historians claimed that the Queen had been the resort of homosexuals since it was built in 1854, while another more macho local tradition asserted that the area hadn’t known what a homosexual was till the opening of the National Theatre in 1976.

  Phil Wesson in a sense combined both traditions. He was a local lad and as tough as they came. And he was a homosexual.

  The barman was irritated by the frequency with which the phone rang this lunchtime, but he was careful not to let his irritation show when he called, “Phil, this one’s for you.”

  Wesson pushed his way to the phone. He was a solidly built man with a sullen, aggressive face that would probably have cleared a way for him even if most of those present hadn’t known his reputation.

  He took the phone without a thank-you and said, “Yeah?”

  “Wesson?” The line was crackly, the voice indistinct, the accent broad East End.

  “Yeah.”

  “You heard the news about Mr Partington? Well, he wants a meet. Urgent, like. Like straightaway.”

  “What’s the panic?” said Wesson surlily.

  “Panic is, that bastard McHarg’s loose and he’s here in the smoke.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Listen, pussycat. McHarg gets his hands on you and you’ll know what it’s got to do with you, right? So get your skates on.”

  “Shit,” grumbled Wesson. “Where’s the meet then? Partington’s pad?”

  “Don’t be thicker than you look, you ’orrible bloody fairy,” crackled the voice wearily. “There’s press all over there, isn’t there? The other place, right! And
don’t hang about.”

  The line went dead.

  Wesson stood at the bar for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and headed for the door, leaving the telephone dangling.

  “Thanks a lot,” called the barman after him. But he waited till he was sure that Wesson was out of earshot.

  Outside London was grey, cold and windy and Wesson pulled his sheepskin coat close around him as he walked the few hundred yards to Waterloo station. Here he descended to the Underground and headed north on the Bakerloo line to Piccadilly Circus, where he changed to the Piccadilly line and travelled two stops west to Hyde Park Corner. Crossing the bottom of Park Lane, he now headed back up Piccadilly a little way before turning left through gloomy Whitehorse Street into that complex of narrow ways and pavements called Shepherd Market.

  Here he slowed down and began to window-shop, examining souvenir trinkets and café menus without much appearance of enthusiasm. Then, suddenly, as a crowd of tourists moved by him, he slipped through a narrow doorway between two shop fronts.

  Inside he moved purposefully up a steep, gloomy staircase. There was a half-landing between floors and here he paused to look back and listen, and again on the first floor. Satisfied, he went without pause up to the second floor, where he stopped outside an unmarked door, inserted a Yale key in the lock and turned it.

  The man who had been coming stealthily up the stairs behind him abandoned his efforts at quietness and hurled himself forward. His shoulder caught Wesson full in the back sending him crashing against the half-open door with such force that he scarcely had time to cry out against the pain of first contact before the door bounced back off the wall and broke his nose like an old walnut.

  Meanwhile the man had let his impetus carry him across the empty room and through a second door straight ahead. Here beneath a powerful light on a narrow bed were a naked man and woman. She was kneeling astride him and he was inside her. An old mahogany wardrobe stood alongside the bed with the door opened so that the full-length mirror inside reflected the scene to the narcissistic couple. The woman had frozen in amazement and terror and the man beneath pushed himself up on his elbows to glare with amazed fury at the intruder. It was “Sailor” Partington and he’d got his color back.