King and Joker

by Peter Dickinson

  “Take it easy, Lulu,” said Father, kneeling beside her. “It’s poor McGivan. Don’t look again. Only somebody’s been fooling around with his moustache. You’d do much better to lie down again till the stretcher comes.”

  “No!”

  “OK. Well, take it easy. Hold my arm. There. Good girl.”

  Louise leaned on him as she stood, shaking her head to clear the last of the mists.

  “I’m all right,” she said, though the floor still seemed to slither a little under her feet. “I’m so sorry. I spoilt your speech, Mother. I … I couldn’t help it. What … happened to McGivan?”

  “Don’t know, yet. Ah, here’s the stretcher …”

  “I can walk. I really can. Please. If somebody … Bert or Nonny …”

  (You couldn’t ask for Mother. She’d have to go back to the guests and put on a show.)

  “Sure? Well, OK. No, don’t go, Durnley. Will you stay here with McGivan and see that nobody touches anything? Snape, will you find the Prince in the ball-room and ask him to come back here? Bella, you stay with Lulu till Bert comes. We’re going to have to tell the guests that they’ll have to stay till the police take over, at least. It’ll look better if we’re both out there together—provided you feel up to it, that is.”

  “Of course,” said Mother. “You huill tell Nonny that Lulu is all right, Vick?”

  He grunted and slid between the curtains. Mother looked more sad than frightened. She bent to whisper so that Durnley, the stretcherman, couldn’t hear.

  “Hue couldn’t both come,” she whispered.

  Louise nodded. Of course, they were on show, and Mother had to be the only mother. She clasped her slim, chill hand and squeezed it to show that she understood and wasn’t judging Nonny for not being there. In a very few moments Albert came back through the curtains. Louise put her arm round his shoulders and let herself be led away through the robing-room, wearing her public face, serious, for use at funerals. As they passed the main entrance to the ball-room they heard Lambert’s mellow bellow.

  “Your Excellencies, your Grace, my …”

  “That’s all right, Lambert,” interrupted Father’s voice. “Ladies and Gentlemen, first let me assure you that nobody is in any danger at all. But I’m extremely sorry to say…”

  The words faded out of hearing. The corridor seemed full of servants, each making a crude pretence, while Louise and Albert went by, to have some duty that brought them there. They didn’t find themselves alone till they were on the stairs.

  “Bert, was he dead?” whispered Louise.

  “’Fraid so,” said Albert. “I mean Father checked on you, looked at him for a couple of seconds, made a no-go face and came back to you.”

  “How did you find us?”

  He stared at her.

  “Jesus, Lulu, when everyone’s listening to a speech and then they hear this scream …”

  “Scream? Me?”

  Now, vaguely, she remembered something wrenching at her throat, but not any noise.

  “My first thought was that the joker had struck again,” he said. “Putting a tape of Bride of Dracula up there, timed to go off during the speeches.”

  “Bert, I saw him!”

  “I know you did, poor kid. Don’t think about it.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I saw him earlier, up in the Nurseries. He’d been … talking to Kinunu.”

  “Oh. OK, I’ll tell Father. I suppose it might be important. Get it clear in your mind, Lulu, but don’t worry about it. You must have had the hell of a shock. I did too, though I’d only just seen Father go through the curtains. McGivan did look damned like him, for once.”

  “Bert! Do you remember what Nonny said?”

  “No. About McGivan?”

  “Yes. After Father’d first shown him to us. Mother said he’d never be mistaken for Father, and then Nonny said he might do for a lying-in-state.”

  Without any warning she found herself crying. All along the Middle Corridor the slow sobs came, not wrenching or painful but not easing either. Only a couple of hours ago McGivan had been deep in his snuffling ecstasies in Kinunu’s arms; only a couple of hours ago he’d been standing by Kinunu’s bed with his trousers round his ankles, as full of shame as a dog caught rolling in a cow-pat, but alive, alive. The suddenness of the change filled Louise with darkness. Not really having liked him made it no better. You could cope with somebody dying, even if you loved them, provided they were ready for it.

  “Bert!”

  “We’re nearly there, kid. Take it easy.”

  “I forgot. Tell Father that Durdy wasn’t very well, I thought. I asked Kinunu to send for Doctor Simm if there was anything wrong, but I’m not sure she understood.”

  “OK. If Father can’t make it I’ll go up and check, soon as I can. Here you are. Sure you’ll be all right? Would you like me to tell Pilfer to bring your supper up here?”

  “Oh, yes please. Thank you, Bert. I’m all right now. Don’t forget to tell Father about Durdy.”

  He’d done his best, but it was merciful to be alone, so much so that it took a definite act of will not to lock the door. When Louise went to her bathroom to wash her face she found that apart from a streak of her new anti-Nonny eye-shadow she mightn’t have been crying at all. Angrily she wiped away the smear, scrubbing at it as if she was trying to remove the unreal, skin-deep calm as well. If ever she wanted to show grief she would have to act it, and even then there would be no real connection between the desolation inside and the grimaces on the surface. Oh, hell!

  She went back to her room and crouched by the bookshelves, looking for something to fill her mind and stop her thinking about McGivan. McGivan and Kinunu, making love. Kinunu giggling and whispering “Yethyeth” and teasing, and McGivan snuffling like a badger digging into an ants’ nest. How extraordinary people were. You’d never have guessed that McGivan would have got that far with her. Perhaps Kinunu had simply teased him into it. And all the while the blue square of the monitor had stared down at the bed and the room had been full of the voices of Durdy and Louise, talking next door.

  Louise actually had her hand on The Two Towers when the idea came to her. She froze, then slowly dragged the book clear. McGivan had heard every word. He had heard about her own birth. Father bad talked to Durdy about it before then. He knew. He knew about Father’s struggles on the loo, too. And of course he knew about Fatty Toad and Sir Sam’s trousers. McGivan had been the joker. And somebody had killed him because of that.

  She leafed through the book in her hand to the chapter called “The Voice of Saruman”. “Behold, I am not Gandalf the Grey, whom you betrayed. I am Gandalf the White, who has returned from death.” BASTARD!

  He’d even have known that this was her favourite book, because she often talked to Durdy about it. She stared at the red scrawl, unshaken. She hadn’t destroyed the book because it was a present from Albert. Could they prove it was McGivan’s writing? A scrawl, probably left-Handed, with a coarse felt pen?

  A knock at the door. Pilfer, very grave with the supper tray, not saying a word but managing to lay out the cloth and cutlery in a hushed and sympathetic manner. (Albert said Pilfer’s father must have been an undertaker. That was why Pilfer wore black gloves, Albert said—his father had got a reduction on the price of mourners’ gloves by buying them in quantity, and Pilfer had inherited several gross.) Louise thanked Pilfer and sat down to eat, surprised by her sudden hunger. Poor McGivan. Poor, dotty McGivan. At least he must have had some fun out of his jokes. And Kinunu.

  She’d finished the soup and was halfway through one of a pair of chops, dressed with a brandy-and-cream sauce, when Father’s head poked round the door.

  “How are you feeling? Nothing wrong with your appetite, at least.”

  He always grumbled like that when a member of the Family was tactless enough to fall sick.

&nbs
p; “I’m all right. But listen, Father …”

  The head poking round the jamb made a sharp frown, but cleared as the door opened wide. A stranger followed Father into the room, a softly handsome slim man, about Father’s age but with a full crop of black hair, slicked hard to either side of the parting. He had that look of almost machine-made politeness which Louise was so used to in diplomats, top civil servants and Palace officials—except that Sir Sam would probably have taken him aside and very very tactfully given him the name of a better tailor.

  “This is Detective Superintendent d’Arcy,” said Father. “My daughter. Lulu, what’s this about your having seen McGivan in the Nurseries?”

  “That’s right. I’d been talking to Durdy …”

  “That’s my old nurse, Superintendent. She’s bedridden.”

  “… and when I came out he was outside, er, I mean in the Night Nursery. He’d been talking with Kinunu,”

  “And that’s my nurse’s nurse. Yes, Lulu, what time was this?”

  “Just after six.”

  “Sure of that?” said Father.

  “Six!” said the Superintendent at the same moment.

  “Yes, the cuckoo clock had just struck.”

  “You can’t rely on that,” said Father. “It’s never been the same since old Haakon swore he could make it tick less noisily. Did you check the time any other way?”

  “Er … no, I don’t think so. Next time I looked at a clock was when I was doing my homework. It was about half past six. I remember I thought my French hadn’t taken me as long as I thought it had. Oh! You met Sir Sam outside the Library just then. He’d been in to look for you.”

  “That’s right, Superintendent,” said Father. “It must have been about half past six.”

  “But the clock in the Nursery is not reliable, er, Sir?”

  “I’m going up there now. I’ll look at it. Lulu, Bert said you thought Durdy was off colour.”

  “She seemed so tired and wandery. I wasn’t sure Kinunu would check her properly. That’s all.”

  “Right. I’ll nip up there now. That is provided you don’t want me to stay, Superintendent.”

  He nodded and was going before Mr d’Arcy could clear his throat.

  “Please sit down,” said Louise. “D’you mind if I finish my supper?”

  The second chop was congealing and the sauce had become a slobbery goo, but she thought that having to pause to eat might help her think without seeming to think. Mr d’Arcy got out a notebook and stared at it. Louise chewed a tiny corner of chop and waited. Suddenly he looked up.

  “Now, Your Highness,” he said. “This won’t take long. It’s not frightening. I’ve a daughter just your age, and I wouldn’t have her frightened for the world.”

  His voice was deferential, but like his suit it wasn’t quite right—a bit too much here, a bit too little there. Uncomfortable for him.

  “It’s all right, I’m not frightened,” said Louise, also not getting it right, not because of the remains of chop in her mouth but because she was suddenly very frightened indeed. If McGivan had been killed because he was the joker, then all the jokes would come out, including the rape of her own room, and the reason for it.

  “Did somebody kill him?” she whispered.

  “It looks that way, Your Highness. At the moment we’re working on the theory that he stumbled on a terrorist group who were planning to disrupt the reception. They killed him and then ran off. There’s a lot of work to be done on how they got in and out, of course. But the first essential is to establish the movements of the deceased. That’s why I was surprised when you said you had seen him at six this evening. His Majesty had made a rough estimate of time of death a good half hour earlier than that. Of course His Majesty is not a pathologist, and we’ll have to wait for our own doctor’s report. At the other end of the time-scale, Sergeant Theale checked the, er, robing-room and the thrones at approximately twenty past five and saw nothing. So the question of the exact time when you saw the deceased is most important. However, I think we had better start by your telling me how you found the body, and we’ll leave what happened in the Nursery until His Majesty returns and tells us whether the clock is right. Are you sure you feel up to this, Your Highness?”

  Deliberately Louise had been niggling a scrap of meat from the bone while he spoke, to hide the altered tension in her mind. Sir Sam’s Venezuelan terrorists! That was frightening, but in a quite different way, a way she could cope with. She put on a public face and turned towards him.

  “It’s all right,” she said, “ask anything you want.”

  Even at a grisly moment like this the story princess had her uses. Louise could see how she bowled Mr d’Arcy over as she answered each of his careful questions. He took detailed notes which gave her plenty of time to think. The robing-room. Its locked cupboards. Its light off. The door to the dais shut. All that.

  “Yes, I know,” she said earnestly. “I felt pretty stupid sneaking about like that. I wasn’t asked to the reception and I wasn’t really dressed for it, you see. But I wanted to listen to my Mother’s speech. I can talk Spanish, but I’ve never made a speech in Spanish, and I’m bound to have to one day, so I thought it might be useful. I could have arranged to listen in a more sensible way, but I only thought of it while I was doing my homework, you see?”

  “Ah, homework. Now, my daughter Eileen … erhump! And at what stage did you see the deceased? It must have been pretty dark behind those curtains.”

  “Pitch, at first. I felt my way and sat on my Mother’s throne. I think I shut my eyes. Then when the speech started I happened to look round … No, I stretched out and touched his hand. That came first. Then of course I looked. I suppose my eyes had got used to the dark, but even then I could only just see … just see …”

  “Take it easy. Take it easy. It’s all over now.”

  “I’m all right. I thought it was my father. I could just see his moustache, you see, and McGivan usually wore his twisted into points …”

  Mr d’Arcy turned a grunt into a sigh.

  “If I could understand why a terrorist organisation should go mucking around with dead men’s moustaches I’d be a happier man,” he said.

  Sitting with his back to the door he hadn’t noticed the face peering round it, identical to the one he was fretting about.

  “They thought they’d got me, I daresay,” said Father. The Superintendent jumped, sank back into his chair, and then remembered he was supposed to rise anyway. Louise could see how he longed to swear his surprise away and had to bite the words back.

  “Good Lord,” he eventually managed to say. “That would account for their disappearance, and the apparent absence of bombs. Good Lord. I should have thought of that. But in that case Constable McGivan’s moustache …”

  “No problem,” said Father. “He was a Rightful King. Sorry, Superintendent—I mean there are about twenty or so pretenders to my throne and poor McGivan was one of them. He wasn’t exactly unbalanced, but leave him alone in the throne room and he’d be quite capable of combing down his moustache and pretending to be me for a bit.”

  “Good Lord,” said Mr d’Arcy. He relieved his feelings by making a note.

  “The Nursery clock’s twenty-five minutes fast,” said Father, sounding pleased about it.

  “Ah, that’s more like it,” said Mr d’Arcy. “Glad it wasn’t any more.”

  “What do you mean?” said Father.

  “Well, Sir, whoever did this job must have had inside help. Five thirty was the time at which a number of people involved in the reception reported for duty. The Palace security staff, for instance—until five thirty they’d been split up to check the premises, but then they assembled for a briefing on the guests. That was when McGivan’s absence was first noticed.”

  Father looked as though he was going to argue about something, but changed his
mind and swung suddenly to Louise.

  “Durdy’s OK,” he said. “A bit fretful—if I believed in telepathy I’d say she’d sensed that something like this was going to happen. I put her to sleep. Have you finished in here, Superintendent?”

  “Not yet, sir. I want to ask Her Royal Highness about her meeting with Sergeant McGivan in the Nursery, now we’ve got a better check on the time.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Father.

  There wasn’t much to it once Louise had decided to carry on with the lie she’d half begun. She’d heard the clock strike, thought it was later than it really was, and rushed off to start her homework and tell Kinunu to give Miss Durdon her green pill. McGivan had been talking to Kinunu in the Night Nursery but they’d stopped when she came in. She didn’t know how long McGivan had stayed after that. He’d seemed normal—a bit shy perhaps, but he was often like that.”

  “You’ll want to talk to Kinunu next,” said Father when Mr d’Arcy looked up from his notebook.

  “I gather there’s a language problem, Sir.”

  “Yes. She’s only got a smattering of English. She gets along in Malay, but her own language is a hill dialect. There’s a woman who lives out beyond Maidenhead who’s come up a couple of times to interpret for us, a retired missionary—could it wait till the morning?”

  “I think so, Sir.”

  “Fine. Of course if Kinunu knows anything you’ve got to get it out of her, Superintendent, but you’ll have to handle her very gently. This is the one place in the country where we really can’t afford to seem to be picking on a coloured girl.”

  “I quite understand, Sir,” said Mr d’Arcy a little stiffly.

  They began to move towards the door.

  “Father,” said Louise in a feeble voice. “I’m feeling a bit … I mean could you …”

  He turned and glared at her.

  “You’ll have to find your own way down, Superintendent,” he said. “I’ll just check this out—she’s had a pretty traumatic evening. If you see Sir Savile tell him I’ll be down in ten minutes.”