The man carrying Louise strode along the bare boards of the top landing. He twisted to ease her through the door of the main room so that she didn’t see what happened to Davy, but she could hear from the muffled yells that he was being taken somewhere else. The man bent and slid her from his shoulder, still holding her wrist and spinning her as she straightened so that he could force her arm up behind her back.
“OK,” he said. “One peep or wriggle from you and the baby gets a bullet. Understand?”
Louise nodded.
Three chairs had been placed facing the near wall, behind the door. Aunt Bea and Mrs Walsh sat in the further two. Louise knew them by the shapes of their bodies and their clothes but their heads were hidden in coloured pillow-cases. Mrs Walsh’s grey toque lay on the floor by her chair. Their wrists and ankles were lashed to the chairs. The man pushed Louise to the empty place. She sat without his having to force her down and placed her legs and arms ready.
“Look at the wall and don’t move,” said the man.
Louise stared at the beige surface. Her ears strained for Davy’s voice, still yelling, still muffled, but different now, she thought, not the yells of fresh fright and outrage, but outrage remembered, as if someone was trying to calm him. Not daring to move her head she squinted down over the blur of her cheek at the back of the man’s head as he knelt to lash her legs. Close-cropped blond hair, faintly coppery, the glint of the metal earpiece of his spectacles. Purposefully she reconstructed the memory of his face, seen for those two seconds in the dimness of the landing below. She was good at faces. Flattish, snub-nosed, eyebrows strong and level, chin dented but not dimpled. She would know him again.
He rose and stood behind her. She heard the rustle of cloth, but before he pulled the pillow-case down over her head he bent and whispered into her ear.
“All right. Ten minutes and we’ll be going. We’re taking the kid with us. He’ll do—we’ve got people who know about kids. Then when we’re safe away we’ll call your police and tell them where you are. They’ll come and get you. Now I’m giving you a message for them, so listen. They won’t be seeing the kid again, nor will you, nor will anyone, without they do what we’ll be telling them. You got that?”
Louise nodded.
“So it’s down to you. You see that they play along with us and you’ll have your boy back inside of a week, not a hair of his head touched. Right?”
As Louise nodded again the pillow-case slid deftly down over her head. She gazed dry-eyed at the yellow unfocussable blur. Footsteps dwindled across boards. A hinge moaned. She seemed to have nothing inside her but a chilly, timeless hollow, far bigger than her own real body. She tried to think about the time. A couple of minutes, she’d told John. Joan would ring Aunt Bea’s, get no answer, wait, try again—the Portsmouth decision was urgent—then ring the car again. Ten minutes, the man had said, and they’d be going, so if Joan didn’t call John soon … Could she have fought for time, held things up, pretended not to understand what the man was telling her? He would just have thought she was being stupid. Stupid. Oh, they were stupid, these people. Not stupid, blind. Couldn’t they see that whatever happened, whatever it was they wanted, they couldn’t have it in exchange for Davy? Suppose she’d sold everything she owned—several million pounds it would come to—and offered them that? For herself she’d do it, of course, or given her own life or anything else that was hers to give, but she’d never be allowed to, never. Father, Mrs T., everyone else … Couldn’t they see that? It was so obvious, but you’d never persuade them. For them the world simply had to be the shape and way they imagined it was so as to justify the things they did, the maimings, the bombings … These were weary old thoughts, rehearsed again and again, every time something happened in the news or she did a visit to Ulster. Now they reeled through her head, useless, repetitive, the old imaginary scenes of argument and pleading … not that they’d ever give you the chance …
Her body leaped in her chair, jerking against the bonds, actually teetering the legs off the ground so that she thought it would topple. By the time it was still the signal that had set it off, Davy’s scream of pain, was muffled again. She willed the tension away. What were they doing? Not a hair of his head, the man had said. But they’d have to keep him quiet. Yes, of course, that must have been the needle going in. He loathed jabs. Oh, please, please, let there be someone who knew to get the dose right! Oh, let them be competent, please! Ghastly, cruel, wrong, but not idiots. She drew a deep breath of the dank air in the pillow-case and tried again to relax. The jerking about, the automatic attempt to yell out, had shifted the pad in her mouth, almost choking her. Trying to work it back in its proper place brought a bubble of vomit up. Carefully she swallowed it back down. Davy was still crying. It wasn’t one of those instant knock-outs, then. Oh, let them wait, not try a double dose, let them think how much more use he was to them alive …
Closer, right in the room, a new noise, the three quick tones of the pager. It had been in her handbag. They must have dropped that in the room somewhere. John would wait, say, a minute, and try again. She counted the seconds. Had they heard? Davy was yelling still, but she could tell from the tone that any moment now he would give up, and between one indrawn breath and the next yell fall with hardly a whimper into darkness. What would John do if she didn’t answer this time? There, again the pager, and almost at once hurrying steps on the boards. The pillow-case off, hands at her neck, the gag plucked free, the voice at her ear.
“Someone calling you, then? Careful, now, look straight at the wall. What’s up?”
“My secretary was going to ring me at Lady Surbiton’s. It was something urgent, so when I didn’t answer she must’ve rung the car and asked my detective where I was. That’s him paging me.”
“What’ll he do now?”
“Try once more, and then probably come and look for me.”
“Just the one of him?”
“He’ll tell the men in the other car what he’s doing.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Got the number for your car?”
“In my Filofax. I think I can remember it.”
“Right. I’ll call him for you, and you can tell him you’re all right. No, wait. We’ll have him up here. Give him a reason, tell him to just say to the others he’ll be here in the next twenty minutes.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
“Give us that number, then.”
The pager sounded again through the beeps of the portable telephone as the man pressed the keys. Then the usual long wait. Then John’s voice.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” she said. “Princess Louise here.”
The name sounded unreal on her tongue. She never used it herself if she could help it. Surely the man would notice, or notice John’s pause …
“Uh … They’ve been trying to call you at Lady Surbiton’s, ma’am. They want, uh, to know if you’ve heard anything from Miss Lucy Ford. They’re sorry, ma’am, but it might be urgent.”
Louise could feel the faint pressure of the man’s hand on her hair where he was holding his own head as close as he could to the earpiece. She kept her muscles tense, trying not to signal her relief that John had picked up her breach of the security code, and answered in a way that showed he had.
“Quite urgent,” she said. “Tell Mrs Pennycuik I’ll call her as soon as I’m free. She couldn’t get me at Lady Surbiton’s because we’re in Mrs Walsh’s flat. When you’ve spoken to Mrs Pennycuik could you come up? We aren’t ready yet, but we’ve got a load of papers to shift. We could do with a strong arm. You could tell the others you’ll be about twenty minutes.”
“Mrs Walsh’s flat, ma’am?”
“The door straight opposite the lift.”
“Very good, ma’am. I understand.”
“Thanks.”
The telephone bipped once as
the man switched off. The gag went back in Louise’s mouth and the pillow-case slid over her head. She heard quick movements close by but didn’t understand them till the man spoke.
“Now, you, lady. We’ll have you at the top of the stairs. The door will be on the latch. He’ll knock, and you’ll call to him to come up. You’ll stand by and send him on in here. No tricks. You try anything, and your friend’s dead, dead as him next door. Right?”
“I do not know that I can stand,” said Mrs Walsh’s voice, loud and tremorless.
“I’ll help you up. You’ve got a minute or two yet—he’s a call to make. Steady now.”
“I shall need my stick.”
“Take my arm. There’s a table out there, you can hold on to that—keep you in the one place, right.”
The footsteps receded. Louise felt her self-control beginning to give. In his hurry the man hadn’t pulled the pillow-case right down over her shoulders, and she had to force herself not to try and thresh it free. Her heart thudded. The unusable adrenalin pumped round her bloodstream. Footsteps returned—two men, she thought, waiting just inside the door ready to jump John. What would he have done? Called Security, alerted the other car—there’d be an AI alert by now, red-red, cars and men flooding in. Then he’d have to come up, alone, because that was what she’d asked. With his pistol ready? No—not yet. He wouldn’t want any shooting … slam, slam, slam, went her heart. She was going to faint. She could feel the dark drumming vapour welling up … perhaps if she let them think she’d fainted … She slumped herself forward as far as the cords would let her, forcing her head down. The movement shifted the pillow-case a couple of inches, letting fresher air in. Faint but clear the whine of the lift-motor. Whispers from the men by the door. Silence. John’s knock. Mrs Walsh’s voice, dispassionate, totally under control.
“The door’s open. Please come up.”
John’s steps climbing the bare treads, two at a time. Mrs Walsh again. “In there please.”
Three more steps.
“Freeze! Hands on your head.”
“I got the bugger …”
Then the explosion, stunning loud, right in the room. Louise’s body leapt at the sound and this time she deliberately converted the movement into a lurch that unbalanced the chair completely. If they start shooting, throw yourself flat. The crash of her fall belted the breath out of her. It took her a moment to realise that not all the noise had been caused by her hitting the floor—there’d been another shot as she fell. The pillow-case was almost clear. She tried to thresh it away. No use. Her head still rang with the first explosion—perhaps it had had been one of those stun-bombs and not a shot. Through the ringing she heard new noises, grunts, thuds, threshings, gasps, the whole floor juddering with the movement. The fight rolled suddenly towards her. Something heavy and solid—a shod foot, she realised as the pain cleared—crashed against her forehead and swept by, taking the pillow-case with it. She could see.
She was lying on her side, looking slantwise across the room towards the corner between the windows and the door. The struggle was going on out of sight behind her head. Straight in front of her, face down on the bare boards, lay a man in blue paint-splashed overalls. His metal spectacles were twisted against his cheek. His cropped hair had been blond but was now a mess of blood. The back of his head was the wrong shape. Beyond the body Mrs Walsh sat slumped against the door-post. Her face was blue-white, her lips purple, moving as if she was muttering her prayers. A patch of blood was spreading across the grey wool of her suit, fresh glinting beadlets still seeping from the wound behind. Her toque lay upside-down against the skirting, the jewel hidden. As Louise watched she tried to reach for it, almost toppled, and then pulled herself into something like her proper erect posture. Her head came up and she noticed Louise. A last spark flashed into the death-dulling eyes.
“The blood of emperors,” she announced, equal speaking to equal.
She reached again for the toque, fell with it just beyond her grasp, and lay still.
Feet on the stairs, running. A man in motor-bike leathers sprang into the room and crouched, his stubby gun at the ready. ZAP! said the scarlet letters on his chest. He held the pose for an instant and rushed out of Louise’s line of sight, towards the fight. Instantly his place was taken by another man, also in leathers, also striking for a moment that same coiled-spring posture before rushing on. Louise glimpsed yellow lettering across his shoulders as he turned. Another shot filled the room, bringing back the momentary deafness. Before it cleared her eye was caught by a movement at the bottom of her field of vision. Legs going past the windows, workmen again, two of them, in an awkward scrambling run. The one in front carried a battered blue metal tool-case. As they went past the second window her chair was lifted bodily and set up-right. Hands began to work at her gag.
“Where’s HRH?”
(John’s voice, gasping and mumbled.)
“Here. Looks OK.” (Close behind her.)
“Don’t know about this one.” (Third voice.) “That one looks a goner. What happened?”
“She got a gun somewhere and shot him in the back.” (John.) “Gave me a chance to have a go at the other fucker.”
“There. You OK, ma’am?”
The gag slid free. Louise spat vomit.
“Davy!” she croaked. “Other room!”
She twisted her head to see John and one of the men rush out. The other man was kneeling, cutting her loose. She was aware of the movements and voices of more men beyond the door. Calls from the hallway—“Not here!” “Here!”
She was free, but almost fell as she rose.
“Hold it, ma’am. Steady.”
“No!”
She wrenched her arm free and ran to the lobby. It seemed full of police.
“Jesus!” called a voice. “Look at this!”
She pushed through. It was the room with the trunks in it, reeking of mothballs. The kitchen table was below the open window with a chair backed against it. Someone was already outside and John was on the table.
“That way!” she yelled. “Two of them! They’ve got him in a tool-case!”
John turned his head at her voice and did a thumbs-up sign. He scrambled through the window and another man climbed onto the table. She pushed through and shoved aside the man who was getting onto the chair.
“Wait! Hold it!” shouted someone.
“No!” she snapped. “I must!”
There was a moment’s pause. (Later she realised that they must all have been waiting for one of the others to grab her, but none of them had the nerve.) In the half-second while she waited for the man to climb clear she glanced down. Almost straight below her, against the wall, was a tin trunk with its lid open. It was filled with a glittering white mass, like snow. Mothballs. Protruding from the snow, eyes staring up, was the face of a man. It was Alex Romanov. He was wearing some kind of reddy-black beret. The vision was sudden, hideous, intense enough to intrude for its instant into this other pounding nightmare Louise was in. She shook it away and climbed out into the open. Immediately her legs began running, dream-slow, that terrible inefficient female wallow, holding up the men behind her.
The others were at the corner. John rounded it and stopped. He pointed and yelled. The next man signalled violently to someone below. The man beyond was talking into an intercom.
“Gone down on the hoist!” John shouted. “Just the two of them. Boy’s carrying a tool-case.”
“Look there!” said a voice from behind Louise.
She turned. The men behind her were running the other way now. She followed, gasping, reached the other corner. There was another man with an intercom, listening and passing on what he heard in a steady, detached voice.
“… builder’s truck, going towards visitors’ car-park …”
Louise looked out over the parapet at the lawns and drives that led to the main gate. The
re was no traffic on the bridge. Several police cars, blue lights blinking, blocked the gateway. The tall iron gates were being pushed shut. Two ambulances came wailing up and stopped behind the police cars. A dozen policemen were shepherding sightseers across the lawns towards the south-west corner of the Palace. A green truck shot into sight from the archway to the visitors’ car-park. It clearly came from the building-works, and had a couple of scaffold-planks lashed down from the cab roof to the tailgate. Only its speed was out of context. The rear wheels slithered on the corner. The truck almost spun, but straightened and roared straight at the gates. Policemen leapt clear. It must have been doing well over thirty as it crashed into the iron-work, mounted a little way, slewed and stuck.
For a heartbeat no one did anything. The pain in Louise’s throat told her she’d been screaming. The left-hand gate had lifted off its hinges under the impact and half fallen, with the nearside front wheel of the truck resting a little way up it. There was no movement from the cab, no sign. Men in combat gear emerged from behind the police cars, guns raised. A uniformed officer spoke through a loud hailer. Still nothing stirred by the truck. Covered by several guns a man approached it and tried the door-handle on the driver’s side, but the door seemed to have jammed. Suddenly, as he wrenched, it opened and the head and shoulders of a man flopped out. The policeman caught the body deftly and dragged it clear, speaking over his shoulder as he did so. Another policeman approached the cab with his pistol raised. He spoke, but then stood back, still with the pistol poised to fire. Blue-trousered legs eased themselves off the seat as the passenger slid across and down. A boy, the policeman had said, surprisingly young to judge by his stature. He was wearing a blue denim cap. He had turned as he reached the ground to lift something from the cab, so Louise couldn’t see his face, and then another half dozen police closed round and hid him completely.
“Better move back, ma’am,” said one of the men beside Louise. “Looks like they’ve spotted you down there.”
She glanced along the line of his gesture. The tourists were still being herded into the corner of the forecourt, but a number of them were taking their time, walking backwards with video cameras trained on the scene by the gate. Elsewhere in the gathering huddle Louise caught the familiar dark gleam of lenses trained on her. Automatically she moved out of shot to a point where she could still see between the crenellations what was happening round the truck.
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