Your Royal Hostage (10 page)

'He was killed
there?’
Fox was still incredulous. 'At the Royal Press Conference, the one we saw on
tv?
But I watched that — '

'Not there. In the hotel lounge outside. Somebody went and stabbed him, cool as you please. The lounge had been full of people, was currently empty because of the conference, empty save for Tom - Tom and his murderer.'

'
Go on,' said Monkey slowly. 'The
y've a right to hear the rest of the story.'

'Afterwards the police questioned everyone - everyone at the conference, I suppose. Must have taken a bit of time. Not the Prince and Princess, I dare say. Everyone else. Anyway they questioned me, because we were mates, as I told you.'

'Who, who killed him?' began Lamb rather tremulously.

' Why
was he killed?' exclaimed Chicken at the same time much more strongly, making Lamb realize that her question could be construed as being nothing more than inane, whereas Chicken as usual was able to make an intelligent case for her intervention. 'When you know why, you know who, as they say in all the best detective stories.'

'On that subject, Chick, you might feel like being in touch with the police,' remarked Beagle, staring at Chicken. 'If you're that interested. I'm sure they would be interested. To meet you.'

Chicken stared back, but Lamb had the impression that she was just slightly ruffled. Fox burst in, breaking the moment of tension: 'I hope you won't dream of any such
thing, Chicken. We don't
want him connected to us now in any way. Now that he's safely dead.'

'Safely dead,' observed Pussy. 'Now that's an odd way of putting it.' Nobody seemed to pay her any attention.

'It could be dangerous, well, dangerous for the Plan,' pursued Fox. 'A dangerous connection.'

'He is connected to us. He was connected to us when he was alive and he's connected to us now he's dead.' Beagle's smile had faded. He sounded quite savage.

'What are" you trying to say?' demanded Fox.

Beagle looked at Monkey. Monkey nodded once more.

'I am trying to say that Tom was a spy, a nark, an informer.' Beagle spoke with increasing passion. 'I'm glad he's dead in a manner of speaking because he would probably have ended by betraying the whole fucking Plan. In another way, I'm furious he's dead because it's brought all of us, and the Plan, into danger. From this, chaps, you may gather definitively that I did not kill him. In case you're getting any funny ideas.'

Monkey lifted an eyebrow, preparatory to making one of his more sonorous statements. 'From what Beagle tells me, we may have to change the Underground Plan. Tom knew far too much -well, he knew a great deal, if not everything. We'll have to rethink.'

'At least let's be positive!' cried Chicken encouragingly. 'The photographic coup, now that's going to help our cause a great deal. It'll be quite exciting watching the interview, won't it, and seeing them making the first really strong statement on behalf of the innocent that this Royal Family has ever made. I honestly don't count Prince Charles and the underprivileged, I mean a man who goes hunting..."

'Can they now refuse?' enquired Lamb. Her voice to her own ears was anxious; but then anxiety on this particular subject was comprehensible.

'We've made them an offer they can't refuse, in the words of the movie,' replied Monkey. 'This is the text.' He pointed to it. 'And the presenter, Jemima Whats-it, is ready to receive it.'

'So easy,' murmured Fox. 'If we can
do this with mere photo
graphs, what can't we do with our little Royal Madam herself.'

Pussy smiled ruminatively, as though at some image in her mind, not necessarily a pleasant one.

'You know the new Underground Plan,' began Lamb slowly. Tom was dead. She knew that she must now eliminate all the familiar feelings of anxiety, it was vital to proceed calmly, this was how she was justifying her whole existence, wasn't it?

'I have an idea,' went o
n Lamb. 'A new idea which might
work
.

She explained, her confidence growing as she spoke.

'I could help on that,' said Beagle. 'Fox, you could help me.'

'I could help you both,' contributed Chicken firmly. 'It's my special interest, you see.'

So they plotted, as the seals continued to gaze mutely down on the various and varied faces of the people who had constituted themselves their human saviours.

CHAPTER
TEN

Speaking Up For Animals

The terrible screaming which filled Cumberland Palace would, thought
Ione
Quentin, remain in her ears long after many sounds more generally associated with royal life (the noise of the bands, the noise of the crowds laughing and murmuring and clapping, the noise of the ceremonial horses clattering in the early morning) were forgotten.

'Ma'am, it'll be all right. They'll take care of it.'

Princess Amy gave another scream which sounded something like: 'They won't, they won't, they won't,' though the connection was not clear. One word, 'animals', could be discerned, and then the words became incomprehensible and finally turned into sobs. When the sobs were diminishing,
Ione
risked another gentle touch to the royal shoulder. Princess Amy raised herself on one elbow and gazed at her lady-in-waiting. Tears - aided by screams -
had washed away most of her make-up: but the long eyelashes surrounding the enormous eyes which were her best feature were spiky-black with a mixture of tears and mascara. The full pouting mouth for once made Princess Amy look more like an injured child than a sulky young woman.

Unbidden and irreverent thoughts came to
Ione
Quentin's mind: one of these unbidden
thoughts concerned Prince Ferdi
nand,
Ione
thought it was a pity the Prince could not glimpse his fiancee now.
Ione
, whose language, at least to herself, could be surprisingly robust, thought: for once P.A. looks positively fuckable. If P.F. saw her now, h
e might not waste quite so much
energy in other directions....

Ione
Quentin hurriedly pulled herself up and concentrated on the matter in hand. She put her arms round Amy's shoulders and Amy tu
rned and buried her face in Ione
's neat cream-coloured silk shirt, the shirt she wore so often (or something identical) that it was like a uniform. The feeling of Amy snuffling into the shirt, wet and still gasping or sobbing mildly, reminded
Ione
briefly of a pug puppy they had had as a child. Was that the pug Lydia had adored, the baby pug with a hernia who had to be put down? Another profitless line of thought. The sobs had turned to mere shudders of the frame held against hers. The worst was over.

Wait, thought
Ione
, what am I saying? The worst is only just beginning.

If the worst was just beginning, nevertheless
Ione
Que
ntin's arm round the weeping Princess Amy represented the last link in a long chain of shock, horror and disbelief since Innoright - or its representative — had rung Jemima Shore and requested certain public statements from the royal couple. Otherwise certain photographs would be released to the continental and American Press, and shown at least to the British Press.

'As if they'd dream of printing such filth!' one important person at another even more important palace had exclaimed, apprised of the emergency.

'Oh, I don't know,' murmured Major Pat Smylie-Porter, taking another long look at Mirabella's sinuous naked frame. 'Things ain't what they used to be where the Press is concerned, we all know that. Her without him perhaps. A Page Two picture.'

'Don't you mean Page Three?' rapped back the important person irritably. 'And anyway the wretched woman is hardly built for that kind of thing, our own horse would be -' He stopped to find Major Pat gazing blandly back at him.

On the other hand there was nothing bland about Rick Vancy, his usual calm tinged with manifest disgust at the idea of
tus's
sacrosanct exclusive interview being tampered with by some 'unfocused friends of the animal kingdom,' as he termed Innoright. To Jemima Shore, he remarked over lunch at Le Caprice: 'They have to find these gross people and they have to find them fast. Or find the photographs, and the negatives,
all
the negatives. We have to deacce
ssify them, co
rrection, your police have to de
accessify them. What are your police doing?'

'Maybe we should send for the
cia
,' suggested Jemima Shore sweetly.

'For Chrissake, those bunglers,' began Rick Vancy, before realizing that he had once again failed to identify a British joke; he really had to work- on the whole subject of British jokes, thought Rick Vancy wearily, once this crazy business was over. A fun programme indeed! Even the animals were getting in on the act, it appeared, and that was not turning out to be much fun either.

From long experience, Rick Vancy knew himself to be a man of naturally liberal stance on every issue, without being so wildly liberal that
tus
became greatly alarmed: it was good for them to be just
a
little alarmed, at least from time to time. For example, Rick Vancy was critical of the us government on Nicaragua
('a
revolution with
no
right to survive?') and stern towards the British government on Northern Ireland
('a
colony with
any
right to survive?'). In a seemingly relaxed fashion. Rick Vancy, with his moral eyes half shut, could sense the public mood at its most liberal and push his own position just
a
little bit further in order to adopt that hard-hitting stance upon which his admirers counted.

But animals! The ecology was one thing: that could be political to put it mildly and generally was, but animal rights pure and simple! Animal rights when there was nuclear energy for or against, chemical warfare for or against, on another level Afghanistan for or against the Russian presence, Cambodia for or against the Vietnamese presence, or just the Middle East for or against, if you could put it like that, and after many years of sage reporting, Rick Vancy thought that you almost could. Either you cared or you didn't care, but you went there and reported anyway, with luck returning. And as a matter of fact. Rick Vancy did care.

With all this to be considered, Rick Vancy felt he might pass a lifetime of activity without gett
ing around to animal rights for
or against
.

Not that Rick himself wasn't an animal lover; two
English sheepdogs had graced the first Vancy marriage to
a 
Norwegian (the one that was sometimes supposed to have involved an Englishwoman, maybe on the strength of the dogs). Another live-in relationship sans marriage which
had
involved an Englishwoman had also encompassed a relationship with a rat. Yes, a rat, Goddammit,
a
tame or tame-ish domestic rat, the marks of whose bites were still with him long after the scars left by crazy English Tammy, herself
a
bit of
a
biter, had faded. And Goddammit once more, Rick had been fond of that rat! He shared memories with that rat.

Some of this Rick thought of expressing to Jemima, irked, he had to admit, that their relationship remained friendly and nothing more. Frankly, this was not what he had been led to expect in New York. Lunch at Le Caprice was all very well: in fact it was very agreeable. And Rick Vancy had noted with quiet satisfaction the moment when the corner table had become his table and stopped being inevitably Jemima's. So that Jemima, giving
a
last-minute lunch to her old friend Jamie Grand, the powerful presenter of the new arts programme
Literature Now,
had had to bow ruefully in Rick's direction, seeing him already installed there.

On the other hand, thought Ric
k, however socially gratifying,
this had probably not helped hi
s cause with Jemima. Rick had a
sudden inspiration. Would an account of some of Tammy's odde
r
practices, with or without the
rat, turn Jemima on? Maybe all
Englishwomen of roughly Ta
mmy's age and background shared
the same odd predilection for domestic rats in intimate situations. Maybe the rat was the key
.

'Hey, did you ever know a woman who owned a rat, called Tammy?' he began. 'The woman I mean, not the rat.' Since Jemima continued to look politely blank, he added: 'The woman was called Tammy. No, forget it. Listen, these people are sick. Isn't that right? All the causes in the world, all the dying babies in Ethiopia, all the dying babies in the Sudan —'

'All the dying
girl
babies,' put in Jemima who suddenly remembered she had completed a programme on female infanticide (tentative title: 'Death is
a
Chauvinist') shortly before leaving Megalith, and wondered what on earth had happened to it.

'Exactly. All the damn babies. And these guys go for animal rights. To me that's crazy. It's either crazy or it's sick. And given what they're asking us to do, it's sick. Come on, Jemima, give. These are your Brits for Chrissake. Do they just hate society? Is that it? Or just hate us humble humans without getting as far as a dangerously complicated concept like society?'

'I'm not sure about this lot,' said Jemima honestly, bringing her mind re
luctantly back from the fate of
Death is a Chauvinist' (a private call
to Cherry perhaps?). 'There are
some very obviously violent ones around, animal liberationists, you read about them in the newspapers, horrifying manifestoes, threatening to burn, wreck, kill, whatever. Up till recently they tended to threaten but on the whole not perform. Or not perform particularly drastically. Then there was that incident in Westminster Square. You must have read about that. Ghastly! Carnage, that's the only word. The word everybody used and for once the right word. The fact that only, repeat only, horses were actually killed made it worse somehow.'

Rick looked at her quizzically. 'Better to have we horrid or humble humans knocked off than horses?'

'Docs one have to choose?' countered Jemima. 'No, no, I mean that it's surely specially frightful that people would kill or rather in most cases hideously maim - so they had to be destroyed - the very species they were allegedly trying to help.'

'The old terrorist situation. The innocent tend to suffer along with the guilty. And I guess you have to locate these guys somewhere in the terrorist pantheon.'

'Innoright itself hasn't so far committed an act of terrorism as such,' Jemima pointed out. 'And I should add that according to my pal Pompey - the policeman - Innoright doesn't exactly have a
violent
reputation. More crazy than sick, to accept your distinction.'

‘
Oddballs?'

'What they're asking is not all that odd. If you believe what they believe. Not that we're going to give it to them,' added Jemima hastily, in case Rick Vancy's suspicions about the general British softness on the subject of the fate of animals as opposed to the fate of the human race in general should be confirmed. 'It's the principle of speaking up for animals. They feci no one does it, or no one of sufficient importance in the public mind. The Prince and Princess will do it, put it on the map for good. That's all.'

She was eating fish as usual, having politely described herself as 'almost a vegetarian' when she first met Rick (today:
salade tiè
de a lotte).
Rick on the other hand as he invariably did was eating chopped steak. And now that he knew Jemima better, he had slipped into drinking what she privately termed the Puritan champagne - Perrier water. I may be 'almost a vegetarian' thought Jemima, but he's 'almost a teetotaller' without liking to admit it. She herself was drinking white wine. To be frank, had it not been for Rick's sneaky abstemiousness, she would normally have diluted it with some of the Puritan champagne; as it was, she felt she must stand up for the rights of Sancerre to be drunk unadulterated.