Skeleton-in-Waiting

by Peter Dickinson

  One of the men there bent to pick something from the ground. His movement left a gap through which Louise could glimpse the prisoner for a moment. It wasn’t a boy, it was a woman. Her cap had fallen off, letting her dark hair hang down. Louise still couldn’t see her face as her head was bowed over the tool-case which she was now clutching with one arm against her chest. A man had gripped it by the handle and was trying to take it from her grasp. The first man rose, hiding her again, but in that couple of seconds Louise had recognised from the despairing and protective pose that the woman was Janine.

  3

  I want to go home. I know I can’t, but …”

  “You’ve had a rougher time than you realise, darling.”

  “I’m all right. I was all right the moment Davy woke up and started yelling for his supper.”

  “They still don’t know what he’d been given, or how much. They’re expecting the lab reports around midnight.”

  “He’s all right. I could hear it in the way he yelled. I just know. He’s going to be black and blue, though they’d done the best they could about padding the tool-case and drilling air-holes. Will you make sure they let us have it in the end? I want to be able to show him one day. I don’t like the idea of him not knowing.”

  “You’re talking too much, darling. Take it easy.”

  “I want to talk. I want to know. Those other men—dressed like motor-bike couriers—where did they come from? How did they get there so fast?”

  “I gather they were part of your escort. You’d told Inspector Yale you wanted just John and another car for this kind of visit. She consulted her superiors and they decided to overrule you.”

  “Without telling me?”

  “I’m afraid she turns out to have been right this time.”

  “Oh, hell … Where’s my pad? Just make a note for me to thank her … Have they told you anything about Janine?”

  “I haven’t seen her. So far all they know, at least all they’re letting on, is that she was kidnapped this morning on her way to visit that aunt in Clapham. It’s assumed they followed her there. They needed her to look after Davy. Once they’d got him, of course, they could make her do anything they wanted.”

  “I keep trying to think who knew I was going to see Aunt Bea today. I hadn’t told anyone, practically—you, Father, Security, Aunt Bea—she’d have told Mrs Walsh, I suppose …”

  “The idea at the moment seems to be that your attackers got themselves taken on at the building-works and used their access across the roofs to terrorise Mrs Walsh into cooperating with them.”

  “No.”

  “This would account for her sudden apparent change of heart about releasing your grandmother’s papers, and also for the presence of poor Alex Romanov’s body. He must have been there, attempting to negotiate with Mrs Walsh, when they first broke in, and they killed him to show her that they meant business.”

  “Nobody terrorised Mrs Walsh. It wasn’t possible.”

  “Um.”

  “And all those mothballs!”

  “Take it easy, darling.”

  “It’s the worst thing, still. I don’t know why. I keep seeing it when I close my eyes, over and over. Me up there on the table, waiting to get through the window, and then looking down and seeing him in the trunk with his head sticking out of this white stuff. Everything else I could understand—it was bad, frightful, but I understood it. That was just pure ghastly. Meaningless. Like tearing a scab off the world and seeing what’s underneath is madness.”

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “I want to talk to Janine. With no one listening.”

  “I’ll see what can be done.”

  JUNE 1988

  1

  The garden party was Soppy’s first official public appearance since coming out of the clinic. Louise caught only occasional glimpses of her. The form for Garden Parties, assuming tolerable weather, was that the guests trooped through to the lawns and assembled, just over a thousand of them, and stood around for a while, half-listening to the band, chatting to chance-met friends, criticising the colour-clashes in the formal bedding—Mother, after years of careful diplomacy, had realised at last that the only choice she had was between sacking Mr Farren or going along with him—until the Family emerged, separated and began to move through the crowd. Piers, on the couple of occasions he’d come, had claimed to be fascinated by the dynamics of this process. The guests were a random mass, culled from the length and breadth of Britain for disparate reasons, social, charitable, political, inexplicable. They had no joint will but only, most of them, the individual hope of being presented to a member of the Family and exchanging a banal sentence or two. But they behaved as though it was a game with definite rules which they all almost at once understood and obeyed.

  As Louise progressed across the grass a pathway opened before her, about a yard wide, lined by guests waiting for their chance of a greeting. The pathway stretched only a few paces ahead but it was always there, stopping when she stopped to talk and wriggling on another couple of yards as she moved on again. Sometimes, just as randomly, it forked and a decision had to be made, the unused path closing as soon as it became clear that she was going to take the other one. Louise’s lady-in-waiting and equerry moved with her, usually a pace behind, but edging ahead when they had spotted one of the faces on their lists so that they could be ready to present the selected citizen to her. One trap was that everybody in the crowd knew who you were and looked at you with the natural gleam of recognition to which you instinctively felt urged to respond. According to Piers there was a specialised bit of brain which did nothing but remember faces; he said Louise’s must be hyperdeveloped, but even so she was sometimes tricked by the response-instinct. Usually, though, she could rely on herself to pick out some anxious smiler, nod, give the brain a half-second to do its trick, and then say, “Hello, Matron. I’m so glad you could come because I’ve been longing to know how that baby got on, the little Asian girl you were fitting for a new foot.” It was a bit of an ego-trip, to be honest, the ability to do that after an eight-month gap and see the pleasure on the woman’s face and feel the ripple of approval round her. The others could do it too—it was part of the job—but Louise seemed to have inherited Mother’s natural knack whereas Albert, like Father, had had to train himself.

  There were moments when two paths crossed. You would smile at Albert or whoever but then turn and talk to a guest while your attendants, with glances and minimal gestures, would organise separating paths to carry the royal wanderers apart. Like particles colliding in a cloud-chamber, Piers said. Louise glimpsed Soppy at two or three such encounters, looking perfectly stunning, everyone’s dream princess, in a wide-brimmed black hat and bell-skirted electric-blue dress with a high collar. She was still bung full of drugs but looked the picture of health, smiling and pink, but not saying much to anyone beyond “hello”. She had a slight stammer these days, even alone, with people she knew well. Albert was extremely protective of her and insisted she was getting better.

  After the wandering-through-crowd process you sat down to tea at your unofficially official table and chosen guests were brought to sit with you for a few minutes each. These might be anyone from people you yourself had asked to see to the unlucky daughters of skilled mums who’d managed to importune your equerry. Even meeting these last might not be pointless. For instance, at the previous Garden Party Louise had found a girl who had done a stint in the field with Wells for the Sahel and had learnt that the Director she had thought so unspeakable at that City luncheon was extremely popular with his staff. This afternoon she got a different sort of view from the underside—a student from Piers’s university, reading Spanish but deep into student politics and full of good gossip to tell Piers.

  As the sitting-down episode ended you did a quick check with your minders to see if anyone who mattered had been missed and then there was another ha
lf hour of crowd-wandering, different because the guests tended to have separated into clumps, and then Mr Slocombe would ring a handbell and bellow for everyone to be upstanding and the band would play “God Save the King”. The Family would re-form as a unit, move off to the doors of the Yellow Drawing-room, turn on the step, wave, wait for the muttered, understated cheer, barely audible against the burr of traffic up Buckingham Palace Road, and vanish into the temporary and partial privacy­ of the Blue Boudoir for a stiff drink. Ladies-in-waiting and equerries­ would arrive a few minutes later, peering at semi-decipherable­ notes they had scribbled about the various royal encounters. Father’s idea was that it saved time in the long run if you sorted out anything quick and easy while it was still in the top drawer of memory.

  Louise saw Albert massaging the knuckles of the hand Soppy had been holding, his eyes on the door. She raised her eyebrows into a query. He made a thumbs-up. When Soppy came in she stood at the door and checked where he was but then, with a visible mild effort, looked round the rest of the room and came across to Louise.

  “No Piers?”

  “Working. How are you? You look terrific.”

  “Better, they keep telling me. Bloody drugs bung my guts up, so they give me a foul pink powder to open them out, but I’m never sure when. How’s Davy d-doing?”

  “Fine, only he’s bolshie about crawling. He prefers to shove himself around on his bum.”

  “Like a dog with worms. Going to have another one?”

  “I thought I’d try and aim for August, when there’s more room in the diaries. That’s what I did last time, but of course I missed.”

  “I want to, and my trick-cyclist says it might help. Kill or cure. Do you think it’d be f-fair on the brat? With a mum like me? Tell me the truth, darling. Nothing else is any use.”

  It wasn’t an easy question. Even before her breakdown Soppy had seemed an oddly brusque and casual mother. Both kids were rather quiet and cautious, though not to an extent you could call disturbed. According to Albert they had minded the sudden sacking of their nanny last autumn much more than Soppy’s absence in hospital.

  “I suppose it depends,” said Louise. “If you want it just to help you get well, then I don’t think it is fair. If you want it so that it can be itself, for its own sake, then it is.”

  “Won’t find that out till I’ve had it. No, thanks.”

  The last two words were spoken to a maid who’d come by with a tray of chipolatas.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Louise.

  “Only at meals. Point is, I’ve got to show ’em I can. Show myself too. When I came out of the nut-house I got a lock put on the fridges and gave Mrs Alphege the key, but it was a bit like wearing a chastity belt, so I said don’t bother. I allow myself third helpings on Sundays.”

  “I saw you playing polo on the box.”

  “Could have been worse. More hacks than spectators and I played like a dead haddock for the first couple of chukkas, but then I got my eye in and started hitting the odd ball. I’m getting on pretty well with Bertie these days, you know. I really need him. Him and no one else.”

  “I noticed you looking a bit lovey-dovey.”

  “Only I wish people wouldn’t keep forgiving me the whole time.”

  “There isn’t much to forgive.”

  “Wish I thought so. Don’t go. Something I wanted to ask you.”

  The various teams were coming in, but Soppy had gripped Louise by the wrist. Her fingers were like steel.

  “It’s about forgiving. That nurse of yours—Bert says you wanted to have her back.”

  “Not really. Well, I mean, yes, part of me wanted to try and pretend that none of that had ever happened. She was so exactly my idea of what a nanny should be—only she wasn’t. Another part of me was furious with her, and terrified about what might have happened. Now I’m just mainly sorry for her, and the mess she’s in.”

  “They going to put her in prison?”

  “Well, she’ll have to be tried. The trouble is that her best defence is going to be telling the court what really happened …”

  “That’s what I want to know. I’ve got a sort of feeling for her. I mean we both landed everyone in the shit just about the same time. She wasn’t off her trolley, like me though, was she?”

  “No. She was just trying to be loyal in too many directions at once. It’s like whoever-it-was said about Northern Ireland—there wasn’t enough loyalty to go round. She’d grown up as an only. Her parents ran a corner-shop in Ormskirk, too busy to have much time for her. She used to play with a kid across the street, a boy called Ian. He was bright, got scholarships, finished up on some kind of exchange at Bremen University, fell in with one of those crazy anarchist cells and got hooked. He told Janine all about it—they used to meet up still whenever they got the chance, in fact they were just like brother and sister, only he didn’t show up on her vetting. We don’t know how he linked in with the Gorman lot—there aren’t supposed to be that many connections between the Red Brigades and the Irish thugs. One theory is that he actually went and made the approach himself when Janine got her job. Anyway, he turned up in London and suggested a meeting on her day out, which was perfectly natural, but then he started being a bit too inquisitive about her job, which wasn’t—before he’d always taken the line that we were an obscene farce. When she challenged him he told her that there were some political prisoners he wanted to help, and he was hoping she could tell him some kind of state secret he could use to bargain with. She said she wasn’t interested, and changed the subject. He made her promise to say nothing about it, which she did. But the next time he rang she told him she’d worked out that the political prisoners he’d been talking about had been the Chester bombers and she was going to tell Security. He said that if she did that Gorman would have him killed for talking to her without their permission, and quite likely her too. He managed to frighten her enough to make her keep quiet a little longer.”

  “He was ringing her at Quercy, through your exchange?”

  “No. She had an aunt in Clapham she used to visit on her day off. She’d given him that number. Next time he called he managed to persuade her that if she helped him to discover some kind of family secret he could use it wouldn’t only remove the threat to his life and hers, it would also mean the Family itself wouldn’t be so much of a target. I’m not sure she really believed him—she says she did—they’d had a relationship of total trust so far, she thought—but I think she was just stringing him along and hoping that if she didn’t do anything the whole problem would go away. There wasn’t that much chance of her finding anything useful in any case. But just so as she could have the odd titbit to keep him happy with she’d started listening to Piers and me having our goodnight chats. We always do. It helps me go to sleep. We’ve got a fancy kind of baby-alarm—a friend of Piers invented it—it does all sorts of extra tricks you never really need. Anyway, that’s how she learnt about Granny’s letters, and Aunt Bea having all the papers at Hampton Court, and so on. Ian had managed to persuade her, she says, that he wasn’t interested in violence either, and he pretended to get very excited about the papers, but of course all he really wanted to know was when was I going to visit Aunt Bea, and if possible when I’d be taking Davy with me. Then when you did your bolt things got urgent, both sides, but by then they’d got themselves jobs on the Hampton Court site, and sussed the flats out, and all they had to do was pick Janine up on her way to the Clapham aunt … I wish you’d seen the way she was holding Davy when she got out of the truck. She’d got a broken arm too. You’d know why I can’t help wanting to have her back …”

  “Poor kid. Poor stupid kid. People keep trying to tell me it wasn’t my fault, coming apart like that. But Piers is wrong, you know. There was always a real me somewhere. I’m just as much to blame as your girl.”

  “Nonsense. You weren’t breaking any laws, for a start.”
>
  “Doesn’t make any difference. Love to old Piers, darling. Wish I’d have taken his line from the start.”

  Soppy smiled like the happiest person in the world and turned away. They’d never have let her, thought Louise. Piers can, because he’s a man, but princesses are there for the public to screw in their dreams. She watched Soppy sidle her way through the now crowded room towards Albert. Louise had done most of her sorting-out at the tea-table, so was finished before the others. Sir Savile noticed her standing alone and came over.

  “You laid on a decent day for us this time, Sir Sam.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. We endeavour to give satisfaction.”

  “That sounds like the punch-line to one of Uncle Ted’s stories.”

  “It used to be what the bishop said to the actress. I have no idea who the participants might be these days. Ahem. Something a little unforeseen has occurred, in which I thought you might be interested. You remember that unpleasant business with the Dowager Princess’s papers?”

  “What do you mean remember?”

  “We have received a letter from a woman, claiming to be Mrs Walsh’s daughter.”

  “She can’t be. The daughter was Down’s syndrome, or something of that kind.”

  “The letter is from a professional scribe in Dushanbe.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Capital of Tadzhikstan, apparently. Southern USSR—right down beyond Tashkent.”

  “Oh, yes, of course!”

  Sir Savile raised an eyebrow and waited.

  “Go on,” said Louise. “What does the letter say?”

  “It is in English of a sort, and sufficiently peculiar not to appear simply a hoax or confidence trick. Apparently Mrs Walsh paid the woman an allowance, which has naturally now ceased to arrive. She wants HM to put that right. There is an implication that failing satisfaction she has secrets of some kind to reveal. She believes that we can arrange for her to be given travel documents so that she can come and talk to HM. There was no estate, I think, apart from a piece of jewellery.”