Your Royal Hostage (18 page)

'Palace mees-tery! So
ridiculous. Why always this Palace, this Princess? The British are crazy about these things.' The voice today was husky as ever, but for once the effect was more cross than thrilling. The morning was never the best time for Mirabella Prey, who was woken at eight a.m. in her hotel suite by the
Evening Exclusive
(sometimes lovingly known as the Even-more Clueless), demanding her comment on the events of the previous night in general, and Little Mary's column in particular. Since Mirabella had recently taken much trouble to speak beguilingly to Little Mary, she was disconcerted to read a version of events in her column in which she featured most unflatteringly as Iago not Desdemona; worse still she was omitted altogether from the headline. Then other members of the Press began to ring too.

'Dulling,' purred Mirabella to one of her favourites. 'How silly this paper is: to you I am telling the true story. It is Theodoros who is loving the opera -' Then Mirabella talked at length about her new Greek-ish friend.

It was earlier that same morning that Pompey and Vaillant at Central Squad, still doggedly pursuing the solution to their own Palace Mystery (Death at the Palace Press Conference might have been a suitable title for that) had received a new and important piece of evidence. Thus the headline in the morning paper's gossip column passed more or less unnoticed, except for a brief appreciative chuckle from Pompey; which Vaillant thought it tactful to ignore.

'She was threatening him,' said a new witness who had come forward in answer to repeated police appeals. 'The foreign-looking chap, the one in your photograph. I was at this Underground station, I shall never forget it, I sat down on the bench with them, gave me quite a fright. Very intense she was; I would say she had burning eyes, to be exact.' The witness, who was in fact a man who had been at the time on his way to a creative writing school in Oxford Street, paused expectantly as though in search of commendation. 'Burning eyes and dark hair,' repeated the witness more lamely, before continuing:

' "I'll kill you," she said. "See if I don't. You think I won't but I will. I'm quite capable of it whatever you think." Or words to that effect.'

'We'd like to get the exact wo
rds, sir, if possible,' was Pomp
ey's patient response. 'And a more detailed physical description. You see, burning eyes might mean a number of different things to different people.'

In the shocked Eaton Square household, or what was left of it, Prince Ferdinand having been removed to Cumberland Palace for safety, 'burning eyes' might also have been a suitable description to apply to Mrs Taplow's expression as she sat facing her husband. Taplow's head was bowed on his arms; the large man was weeping uncontrollably, without pretence. In part these were the tears of sheer exhaustion: Taplow's ordeal, begun so shockingly with the instructions given to him outside the Opera, had continued most of the night with the organization of the Prince's belongings, and other duties. It had started again very early in the morning when Taplow, red-eyed from lack of sleep, had decided to communicate certain facts to the police.

But there was a further hopelessness, beyond mere exhaustion, about Taplow, as he sat there weeping in front of his wife; her fiery gaze suggesting that she might pounce and devour him the moment he raised his head, like one of Mirabella Prey's favourite pumas. It was as though he wept not only for the frightful present but for decades of humiliating memories.

'I shall never forgive you for this, Kenneth, no matter what happens.' Mrs Taplow's voice was the more menacing for remaining low as though they might be overheard.

Taplow mumbled something.

'What's that, Kenneth?'

'Your
fault,
Lizzie,' and then more strongly: 'Your
fault.
All the dressing-up, encouraging him to be different. You dressed him up as a girl. That's where it started.'

'Seeing as he didn't have a man for a father,' his wife hissed back.

One way and another, neither Ta
plow had time to look at the morn
ing paper. But a very senior policeman did, and exploded, as though in relief, to have something inanimate but actual to crush in his hand.

'Palace mystery
indeed! Carefully planned from the beginning, the whole thing. So why was it a mystery to us? We knew about the threats to the wedding itself, so why didn't we know about all this?' He threw the paper aside and began ticking off on his fingers: 'Terrific timing throughout. The demo at the exact moment that singer was taking his bow. One smoke bomb set off up there to cause the maximum trouble and direct all the attention to that upper level, as distant as possible from the Royal Box. The next one set off in the box next door timed for the precise moment of the grab, so that the getaway is covered by the second wave of chaos.'

'Someone knew their opera form all right!' (Chicken would have been proud to hear him.) 'Seats, no, boxes paid for in cash. The Indian women who unrolled the banner and set off the first smoke bomb must have been in the plot. If they
were
Indians, which we doubt. Easy to escape down the stairs from the balcony level and saris only too easily disposed of. There's a pretty unused Ladies right there behind the balcony boxes.'

His expression darkened to one of ferocity as he continued to tick off: 'And while we're on the subject of foreign dress, HRH bound, gagged, possibly drugged, we're not sure, and bundled into some Arab robe, yashmak, chador, whatever, face hidden,
nose
hidden in one of these sinister black jobs, and supported, carried rather, down the stairs and out of the Royal Box private entrance, deserted on the night of a Gala, out to a waiting car by two solicitous Arabs, supporting her! Important sheikhs,' he almost shouted. 'A car with a chauffeur, a chauffeur in cap, ready there waiting. Planned to the minute.'

The very senior policeman looked round as though for something else to crush. 'How's Fitzgerald?' he concluded, the anger draining from his voice.

It was only a short while later that his most trusted assistant returned and said: 'The good news is: we think we know where 
they're holding her. The bad news is that we've received their demands. And this time, with Fitzgerald in mind, we know they're serious.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Violence

'I've lost one of my new Russian earrings, Ferdel will be so cross.' For the first time since her abduction, Princess Amy's face crumpled and she began to cry. Dishevelled, the blonde ringlets now a wreck of the formal lacquered hair style, her face dirty, and still the Rasputin sapphires gleaming at her throat and weighing down her creased white dress at the breast, Princess Amy looked like Cinderella just after midnight struck. Already the finery was disintegrating; rags and ashes would soon follow.

'Don't worry, it will be found, people always find things like that. Besides, we are not interested in your jewels. Only in you.' Through her brown nylon-stocking mask, Pussy's voice sounded muffled and horrible. The effect on Princess Amy was to stop her new-found tears abruptly: at the same moment involuntarily she wrinkled her nose in disgust. It was actually the strong smell of Pussy's lavender water which disgusted her, reminding her of a tormenting governess in childhood.

'You're supposed to make friends with your captors,' thought Princess Amy. 'I've read about it, and there was that cousin of Ferdel's in Italy, that boy, he did it and it worked. But I'll never be able to make friends with
you.
You're really cruel under that awful mask. I know it.'

Amy, carried down the special stairs and out of the side entrance used for private visits to the Royal Box in Arab woman's clothing, had not been drugged, as the senior policeman suspected. She had been gagged, her disgu
ise hiding the gag. Beagle, who
did the gagging (as he also bound the other inhabitants of the box including the Royal Box Steward who had been serving the party) did it expertly. It was something he told the cell that he had learned from some kind of military anti-terrorist manual borrowed from a friend. Wherever he had learnt it, it seemed to work.

'She is sick,' was Beagle's reply to a reaction of surprise from the attendant at the bottom of the stairs. 'It is the smoke,' he muttered, rather than spoke, in some vaguely foreign accent, his face stained, shrouded under his own Arab headdress, robes flowing. 'We must go to the car.'

Both Fo
x and Beagle were carrying loaded pistols: but only Fox knew that they were loaded since at meetings Fox had carefully promised a couple of
unloaded 9
mm. Berettas, looking absolutely for real, via theatrical contacts for supplying such, made at Leaviss. He had already successfully supplied something similar to Beagle on the occasion of the photographic foray; but Beagle's pistol had had a solid barrel. For the climactic, night of the abduction, however, Fox had obtained pistols used for firing blanks - and replaced the blanks.

Nevertheless Fox stoutly maintained
that his decision to load them
with real bullets was absolutely the right one. He also defended his shooting of the Princess's detective, who had flung himself forward as the 'Arabs' produced their weapons, even in the face of Monkey's appalled reaction.

'That was violence, Fox. We agreed that simulated weapons should be taken: that it would be enough to frighten them.'

Yet Fox was almost blithely impenitent. He merely pointed out that the detective's precipitate action would have in fact scuppered the whole plan if Fox's weapon had not been loaded. He seemed to think the detective had been quite unreasonable in his behaviour. Fox argued this on the grounds that it had been decided in advance that the sight of a Beretta pointed at the Princess's temple would immobilize him, as indeed it had immobilized the other occupants of the box - Prince Ferdinand, Major Smylie-Porter and the flunkey; Lamb had immobilized
Ione
Quentin by her own method of flinging herself into her arms and hugging her as if for protection.

Fox even regarded himself as a bit of a hero. Monkey on the other hand thought there was something positively frightening about the way that Fox, a young man apparently dedicated to a life of non-violence, shrugged off what Monkey himself considered to be a serious crime against a fellow human being: Innoright was after all specific in
not
condemning the whole of humanity in favour of the animal kingdom.

At this point - in the car - they had no idea whether the man had lived or died: probably the latter, judging from what Beagle had told Monkey briefly in the getaway car.

Monkey, dark uniform cap hiding his high forehead and receding hairline, scarf round his neck to conceal the white tie, had been satisfied that he looked the image of some rich Arab's chauffeur, at the wheel of a large, dark-blue Mercedes with elegant darkened glass windows; leaving the opera discreetly early. Monkey had brought the car up from where Chicken had parked it earlier in the evening. This chauffeur waited ready just at the side entrance for a quick, a very quick departure; it was something Monkey, with his awareness of such procedures, had arranged in advance, knowing that the police presence would be concentrated on the front entrance from which the royal party was scheduled to leave.

Fox had hired the car from a company who leased out such things for films (although it was currently showing false number plates). In the meantime the whole operation of the getaway had needed and received immaculate timing, where possible rehearsed, where not, estimated, discussed and re-estimated.

Monkey thought fleetingly that where violence was concerned, you could never really judge a character in advance until the pressure came. Out of Beagle and Fox, two young men who had little in common but their age, he would have backed Beagle any day over Fox to pull the trigger. Was it Beagle who had killed Tom? Monkey had always secretly dreaded that it might prove to be so. Or was perhaps Beagle's vaunted air of violence a mere carapace for a softer nature? They would soon find out. (In any case, there was a flaw in Monkey's reasoning about Beagle: it was 
Beagle who did not know that the guns were loaded whereas Fox, who had procured them, did.)

That had been Monkey's real mistake; underestimating not only Fox's streak of viciousness but also his independence. If only people would carry out orders! ... Coolly - he prided himself on his driving - Monkey drew the Mercedes with its false number plates into the little yard at the back of Beagle's lair. The distance from the Opera House was so short that the whole journey had taken a matter of minutes even though Monkey had driven fast, but not too fast, to avoid giving the impression of escape.

Chicken and Pussy were waiting. As Fox and Beagle, Arab costumes discarded, carried the wrapped body of the Princess through the narrow back entrance (she was surprisingly heavy for such a small person, thought Fox, panting). Monkey moved over into the passenger seat of the car. Chicken got swiftly into the driver's seat. As well as long white gloves, she was now wearing a fake tiara and diamond earrings supplied, had they known it, by Leaviss; but the opulent fur jacket which she wore was real. It had belonged to Monkey's wife Cynthia and he had given it to her long before he appreciated the cruelty and violence involved in the fur trade. He liked to think that she too would have wanted to abandon it had she lived; as it was, this last ceremonial and sacrificial use of the jacket in the cause was to Monkey's way of thinking, absolutely appropriate.

Monkey removed his cap and scarf, to reveal his white tie and tail-coat once more. Pussy removed the false number plates. In a small street off the Law Courts, deserted at this hour. Monkey and Chicken abandoned the hired Mercedes (and the Arab robes in the boot) for Monkey's own car, an ancient but highly polished Rolls, which he had left there before the Gala. Monkey and Chicken together, he with his medals, she with her tiara, now conveyed (he felt) the perfect image of a prosperous opera-goer and his wife; the latter driving as being the more sober of the two following the necessary refreshments in the interval to make opera at least palatable to a tired businessman.