King and Joker Page 15

  Mr d’Arcy was half way gone when the thought must have struck him that he was supposed to retire backwards from the royal presence. He got himself through the door somehow. Father turned to Louise with raised eyebrows.

  “D’you really feel ill?” he said. “I’m going to give you a sedative anyway. You have had a shock, though no one would know it to look at you.”

  “I’m all right. I get sudden waves as though I was dropping into a black hole, but they go quite quickly. But listen. It’s important. I didn’t know what to tell him until I’d talked to you. I didn’t find McGivan in the Night Nursery—I found him in Kinunu’s bedroom—they’d been making love.”

  “Good God!”

  “But that isn’t the really important thing. They’d had the monitor on in there all the time. McGivan could have heard everything I said to Durdy. And he could have listened before. He could have known about me, you see. That means he must have been the joker!”

  “Might have been, not must,” said Father.

  “So perhaps somebody killed him because of that,” said Louise.

  “Wait a bit. Let’s take one thing at a time. Tell me what really happened in the Night Nursery.”

  He managed to keep a straight face as he listened but his hand crept towards his moustache. Irritation at his inner amusement made her almost bark the last words at him.

  “… so don’t you see, he’d have known all about Nonny being my mother, and about your obsession with your loo.”

  He glared at her, then nodded.

  “Yes. OK. I’d had my eye on him before, as a matter of fact. D’you mind telling me why you didn’t tell d’Arcy the truth, straight out?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. I was a bit ashamed, I suppose … and I’d promised him I wouldn’t … and I suppose it’s almost instinctive not to come out with things like that except when we’re among ourselves … I wanted to ask you first. I could easily tell him if you think I ought to …”

  “Mmm. No doubt about that. You ought to. But I don’t want you to. You probably don’t realise quite how close Durdy is to death. She might go tomorrow or she might last another six months, but she’s teetering on the edge all the time. One of the things that keeps her here is the funny relationship she’s struck up with Kinunu. I don’t understand it at all, except apparently Kinunu reminds her of somebody she knew before any of us were born. She won’t talk about it. Now, if the police start badgering Kinunu about her sex-life there’s every chance she’ll crack up and have to go, and that would kill Durdy. You see …”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. Before the police see her I’ll try to explain to Kinunu what you’ve told them. The point is I don’t think any of this is relevant. I don’t see how it can have anything to do with McGivan’s death.”

  “Perhaps somebody else was in love with her. Perhaps they were jealous of McGivan.” He shook his head.

  “But you can’t know. You didn’t know about Kinunu and McGivan, even!”

  “I had an inkling. I didn’t realise they’d got that far … Look, Lulu, let’s leave it for a while, and see how they get on with the Venezuelan line …”

  “But if McGivan was the joker.”

  “I’m coming to that. We’ve got to step a bit careful there, too, you see. Your crucial bit of evidence won’t do, because it would mean telling d’Arcy about your birth, and I’m not having that. I’ll tell him about the frog in my bog—God, that I should see the day!—but that’s not so significant. I mean, a number of people could have known I have bother with my bowels without having to listen to Kinunu’s monitor … so we’ll lay it on the line about the jokes, except the one in this room. I’ll say that I was beginning to think McGivan might be the joker—I’ll explain that he was the only one of the security staff who wasn’t in the clear when the joker rang up about sending my mother those pianos. And we’ll leave it at that. OK?”

  “I suppose so,” said Louise.

  He had settled onto the edge of the bed while he was speaking and leaned forward, tense and solemn. Louise was conscious of pent urgency behind his low, hypnotic monotone. She’d been hoping that he would tell her to go straight to Mr d’Arcy and change her story to the truth, but now she saw that she was stuck with the lie she’d begun. At least he thought she’d done the right thing.

  “There’s another point,” he said. “Apart from d’Arcy I’m not going to tell anyone, not even Bella or Nonny, about McGivan and Kinunu or the possibility of his being the joker. Because we know about it you and I are going to have to watch our step, and lie when the questions come anywhere near the danger areas. I don’t want to drag them into the same mess. I don’t like it for you and I don’t like it for me, but at least we can let them off. Do you agree?”

  “Yes. Of course. I suppose if we could prove McGivan was the joker … I’ve still got the scribble in my book…couldn’t a hand-writing expert … ?”

  She opened the Tolkien and showed him the scrawl across the type. He looked at it for a while, then shook his head.

  “It’s the same thing all over again,” he said. “In fact it’s an exact parable of the bind we’re in., Don’t you see? Suppose we could prove McGivan wrote those letters—so far so good. But the letters make a word, and somebody’d be bound to ask what the word meant.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Let’s hope to God these Venezuelans …”

  “Do you believe in them, Father?”

  “I think they’re the main chance. No time to thresh all that out now. If McGivan was the joker, that’s only the sort of coincidence which really does sometimes happen. Now listen, Lulu, I want to know what the hell you were up to in the Throne Room.”

  “I wanted to listen to Mother’s speech.”

  “I don’t really buy that,” he said after a pause. “Oh, don’t be a fool, Lulu. A couple of days ago I told you a lot of my personal secrets because I thought it might make life a bit easier for you. Can’t you see that now I’m trying to protect you and a few other people, and to do that I must know as much as I can about what’s been going on? I’m on a real tightrope, Lulu. I can’t afford any more areas of uncertainty than I must.”

  “Sorry. It’s only that it sounds so silly when you say it out loud. I don’t even know if 1 can explain. You remember you told me about Nonny not wanting to be Queen, and you couldn’t understand it? I think it’s obvious. I feel just the same about princessing. Not all the time, but sometimes. Only of course I’m landed with it, and Nonny wasn’t. Well, now I’ve found out that there’s really an official me and an unofficial me I can treat them as two different people …”

  “You’re playing with fire, Lulu. Honestly. That’s how psychoses begin. Just think … no, we haven’t time now. I think we’d better have a long talk about that when the dust’s settled a bit. Go on.”

  “I think it’s all right. It’s only a game, Father. Oh, well, I call the official me the story princess, and she’d done my homework for me when the unofficial me was acting up rather—I haven’t got a name for her yet—so I thought I’d give the story princess a treat by letting her go and sit on Mother’s throne and pretend that all you behind the curtain were courtiers and so on. That’s all. Honestly, Father! Don’t look at me like that. It’s really only putting on a show, except that I’m putting it on for myself. I know what I’m doing!”

  He sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “Provided you promise to try and keep it at that level until we’ve had a chance to thrash the whole thing out. Now, anything else before I go?”

  “You said you’d got your eye on McGivan already. What did you mean?”

  “It started with that business about the pianos. Because I knew Theale at least was in the clear for that I got him to start eliminating anybody who couldn’t have been responsible for that or any of the other jokes. It’s
surprising how that sort of process cuts the suspects down. There were still about a dozen possibles left, and as I told you McGivan was one of them. Then, do you remember that night when I came back and found you and Nonny hopped to the eyeballs on my best Heidsieck? While I was watching you I started wondering what kind of nut could have done that to someone like you. It wasn’t quite in key with the other jokes …”

  “But it was!”

  “Only superficially. It was an outburst. The others were quirks. Now, I said, who would mind so much about your being what you are? Who might have a real bee in his bonnet about illegitimacy, and royal blood? When I thought about it I saw that the other jokes might be milder expressions of a grievance at not belonging … I mean, either they were aimed at unsettling the private workings of the Family—my bog, our breakfast—or at people who were allowed to play a rather grand part at functions. I think he might have had a practical motive too—you remember how he tried to frame Theale about my Mother’s Pianos? They’ve all got the jitters about losing their jobs in the reorganisation, so you see the jokes not only gave McGivan something to investigate, and prove his usefulness, but a reason for seeing that it was somebody else who got the sack.”

  “But it still could have been Sanderson, or anybody, couldn’t it?”

  “The reorganisation part, yes; but the other part no. Practical joking runs in the blood, Lulu. McGivan was my Father’s first cousin.”

  Chapter 11

  While Louise sank out of her private wulli-wa of shock into the soft dark of the sedative Father gave her, the Palace Press Office came to life. The Duty Press Officer called Commander Tank, and he summoned the rest of his staff from chess club and night club, from dismal bedsitter or raucous family abode. Cats went unbrushed, children unbathed, neighbours uncuckolded. Commander Tank always tended to treat any contact with the media, unless he had personally arranged it, as an armed invasion; now it was as though Hitler’s landing-fleet had been sighted in the Channel and he with his Few were all that stood against it. Of course he was overwhelmed, but he went down fighting, or at least shouting.

  At ten o’clock the Press Office issued a statement that the body of a Palace Security Officer had been discovered during the course of a reception for a South American Cultural Mission. The Police were working on the theory that in the course of his duties he had found a group of South American guerrillas planning to disrupt the reception and that they had killed him and then escaped. A tip-off had been received shortly before the reception, but His Majesty had personally given the orders that it should go ahead as planned.

  Even those scanty scraps would have been enough to fill every front page on the British breakfast table; but by midnight somebody had told somebody that Princess Louise had found the body. Commander Tank’s Few withdrew to hastily prepared positions, but in less than an hour they were being blasted from an exposed flank by reporters wanting to know whether it was true that the dead man was a double of King Victor, that Princess Louise had found him sitting in the dark on the King’s throne, and that the police were working on the theory that the assassins had believed that their victim was the King himself. By dawn they had no knowledge left to withhold and the Palace switchboard was flooded with calls from five continents.

  That was how it happened that Scotland Yard Traffic Control came through on Nonny’s private phone in the Breakfast Room to ask whether Princess Louise was going to school, as serious jams were building up in Church Street caused by crowds waiting to see her do so.

  “Tell them no,” snapped Father. “Can’t you see, Lulu …”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” said Louise. “You needn’t go on me. Honestly. At least it means I can go and see how Durdy is. I bet you’ve all forgotten her.”

  “She’s fine,” said Father. “I was up there first thing and she was still asleep. But every dial was right back to normal.”

  (Of course. He’d have been to try and tell Kinunu what to say. Poor Kinunu. Perhaps he’d been the first to tell her McGivan was dead.)

  “Nonny huill ring up the school and get them to send you some huork to do,” said Mother. “And you huill please not make that face at me, Lulu. You are behaving like a baby.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite fair, darling,” said Nonny. “Everybody feels like that. It’s a ripe tomato situation.”

  Father and Bert grunted agreement. In the Family slang a ripe tomato was anything which caused an unexpected or undignified jolt in the royal routine. Once, when Queen Mary had been visiting an East End soup kitchen, somebody had thrown a real tomato at her and caught her full on the toque. She had stalked on, smiling and gracious, as though the dribble of yellow pips and scarlet juice were part of her normal coiffure. When a ripe tomato occurred your instinctive reaction was to try to behave with the same inhuman calm. If circumstances permitted, you allowed somebody to wipe up the mess; if they didn’t you acted as though the tomato were an impolite fiction.

  Nonny was right. McGivan’s death was a ripe tomato of the most ghastly kind. Louise had known all along that she wouldn’t be allowed to go to school, but she’d woken full of a determination to behave as though this were an ordinary day, and herself an ordinary girl. Going to school was the most ordinary thing she could think of. She was confusedly aware that when somebody is murdered in a house where an ordinary girl lives she probably doesn’t go off to school next day, or react to the horror with ripe-tomato behaviour; but at the same time she felt that going to school would have been a definitive method of shutting the story princess away like a doll in a drawer. As it was, the story princess stared across the table at her from the front page of the paper Albert was reading. That particular paper had chosen the funeral face.

  “Has anybody found how these alleged assassins got in and out?” said Albert suddenly.

  “What do you mean ‘alleged’?” said Father.

  “I think they’re a load of codswallop,” said Albert. “The joker was planning something and it went wrong.”

  “Huat sort of something?” said Mother.

  “Well, for instance, get Father out of the reception somehow, switch on the spotlights, start the motor which draws the curtain and there, apparently, is Father sitting on his throne. Respectful silence. Nothing happens. Then somebody spots that he’s unconscious. Yes, that’s it! The joker only meant to lay him out and when he realised he’d killed him he panicked. That’s why there was no red cross.”

  “Have you told Mr d’Arcy about the joker, Vick?” asked Mother.

  “He was polite but not all that excited.”

  “Well, I think he ought to be gingered up,” said Albert.

  “So do I,” said Mother. “Can’t you … ?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” said Father. “It’s out of my hands. I’ve got a tricky relationship with poor d’Arcy.”

  “But couldn’t one of our own people …” said Nonny.

  “Theale’s working on the other jokes already, isn’t he?” said Albert.

  Father banged down his cup so violently that he spattered the table with coffee. For a moment it looked as though he was going to start one of his breakfast shouts which would certainly have relieved the tension. Usually these explosions were set off by a spark between his public and private selves, and to most of the family this must have seemed to be just what was happening—a burst of fury because he wanted to behave like a good citizen helping the police in their investigations, and now he was being asked to tell them what and how to investigate. But to Louise there was something else behind his fury and its unwonted suppression. Having decided not to tell the Family that he thought McGivan had probably been the joker, he’d be exasperated by a conversation in which he knew things he’d deliberately kept from Mother and Nonny. That had been a mistake, Louise thought. There wasn’t any real reason why he shouldn’t have told them about it, or about McGivan and Kinunu. “Spit it out,” Durdy would h
ave told him. Only he’d made it seem to matter so much last night …

  “Oh, all right!” he said suddenly. “If d’Arcy can spare Theale I’ll suggest he does a bit of work on this. And now will everybody please stop screaming at me and let me catch up with the newspapers!”

  He didn’t get much chance, because Sir Sam, looking very tired but neat and smooth as ever, turned up earlier than usual with a long list of alterations to the next fortnight’s Royal engagements. After all, if the assassins had had one go at His Majesty …

  As Louise slipped away she heard Mother and Father beginning to react with a classic display of ripe-tomato behaviour, niggling at every change and trying to restore the original schedule. Just like me, she thought. They’re snaking things ordinary again.

  But nothing was ordinary. McGivan’s death was like the first sign of a disease that was going to infect the whole Palace. At breakfast Pilfer had actually spoken without being spoken to, telling Father that one of his ham radio contacts in Honolulu had heard the news and tried to get him to talk to a local reporter. Now Louise found Sukie cleaning her bath with grim energy, muttering “Those dagoes—we’ll show ’em!” as though somehow spotless enamel would foil assassins’ vileness. Messengers moved down the forbidding corridors at a different pace, half-uncertain, as though the ancient machinery of the Palace routine had at last packed in and everything now had to be learned afresh. Sanderson was on the landing of the Private Stair, checking everybody who passed.

  And even in the cloister of the nurseries the disease had hold. Kinunu was crying. Louise found her loading the washing machine with tears running down her flat smooth cheeks. There was no mockery in her weeping. More than ever Louise wanted to hold her close and comfort her for her dead lover.

  “Oh, Kinunu, I’m so sorry,” she said, moving towards her as she did so.

  But just like a cat being choosey and unpredictable about who it will allow to touch it, Kinunu rejected her.

  “Tho thorry,” she whispered, then rushed into her bedroom and shut the door.