Your Royal Hostage (4 page)

'I was quoting the paper, Kenneth,' Mrs Taplow narrowed her eyes and inspected her handiwork. 'She loves him, that's all. She has a foreign way of putting it.'

'She loves him, does she? God knows why.'

'He's got what it takes. I'm quoting the papers again, Kenneth.' There was something disagreeably coy about her expression. 'Did you read the
Sunday Exclusive?
What
she
said, Mirabella. "All night passion"; that was the story.' Mrs Taplow picked up another fork and jabbed it gently but firmly into the green baize cloth. 'Again and again and again. That's what she said.' Mrs Taplow jabbed the fork in time with her words. Taplow looked away.

'I'm thinking of the security angle, Lizzie, you do appreciate that,' he said after a while, fingering the letter. 'Gossip has never interested me, I can say that with my hand on my heart. You should know that, Lizzie: gossip writers and sneak photographers, I've no time for them.' He paused. 'But security, yes. We have a responsibility here. I've been asked,
we've
been asked, to report anything odd. They're jittery about this wedding, it's obvious. So we have to report anything odd.'

'Is it odd for a woman scorned to write that kind of letter?'

'Well, what do you think, Lizzie?' Taplow abandoned the letter and looked directly at his wife.

'I've never been a woman scorned, Kenneth,' replied Mrs Taplow equably, 'so I wouldn't have the least idea.'

'Well then, look at this now - all this about blood for example. Isn't that odd? If it's not odd, I tell you I certainly find it quite disgusting.'

Mrs Taplow put down her cloth and took the letter. She adjusted the small spectacles on her nose, which had hung round her neck on a cord, low enough to give the impression of a chatelaine's keys.

'This blood to which you're referring is the blood of animals,' she said at last; she sounded very patient. 'Not his blood, Kenneth, but the blood of innocent animals. Innocent animals which have already been slaughtered. She, Mirabella, is not threatening to shed our Prince's blood. It's a matter of fact, Kenneth, that she is not.'

'It is a matter of fact, Lizzie, as you put it, that she is threatening to come and daub him, and anybody near him, including HRH. with buckets of animals' blood, innocent animals' blood or not, that is disgusting, Lizzie, which-we have discussed before — in a certain connection -' He stopped.

'It hasn't happened yet.' Ignoring his last remark, Mrs Taplow spoke with an air of unshaken patience.

'I'm telling the police. Before it happens. Yes, I know what that will mean, Lizzie. Believe me, I do. Detectives all over the place. It's bad enough when HRH pays us one of her little visits. I am well aware of all that, Lizzie. And when I drive him, that detective always sitting in the front, making small talk as if it was
normal
him sitting there!' Taplow snorted. 'But then again, they might move him. Have you thought of that?'

'Move him?' For the first time Mrs Taplow sounded a little surprised.

'Move him to
cp.
There's masses of room at the Palace since the old Duke died. Self-contained flat, etc., etc. No suggestion of impropriety, naturally. The detective who spoke to me was in two minds about the whole thing anyway; thought our Prince might well be better off all along at
cp.'

'And how will you explain the fact that you read his letters?'

'I'm going to tell the truth,' replied Taplow loftily. 'Find me that number, Lizzie. I don't trust these professional animal lovers, I don't trust them one inch. A violent lot. Are you going to disagree?'

'And what is that supposed to mean, Kenneth?' enquired Mrs Taplow, her composure restored.

'I was thinking of the Trooping the Colour. And the Opening of Parliament last year. Was that or was it not violent? Talk about blood - there was enough blood about then, the horses' blood, innocent horses, Lizzie.'

'If you're referring to Innoright, Kenneth, as I believe you arc, Innoright had nothing whatsoever to do with the Opening of Parliament incident. You know perfectly well that Innoright is non-violent.' Mrs Taplow, with deliberation, drew out a small poster from the drawer beneath the table, on which the word 
'innoright
' in red was clearly visible. A variety of animals' faces peered out of the letters, amongst which a tiger and a monkey could be distinguished.

'"Innoright abhors all violence." Do you hear that, Kenneth? And here it is again: "Innoright specifically docs not seek to correct the violence which humanity shows towards innocent animals by violent means towards humanity itself, in so far as humanity itself is innocent." '

'Whatever that means, which to me, frankly, is somewhat obscure, give me the number. I'm ringing the police. We are here to serve, Lizzie.'

'We have paid the price for that,' murmured his wife.

But before Taplow could touch the receiver, the telephone began to ring. In spite of the perturbation of moments before, Taplow's voice was automatically grave and gentle as he answered it. 'Yes, Ma'am, I'll put you through to His Highness straight away.' Taplow turned to his wife with a raised eyebrow.

'Trouble?*

'HRH sounded quite hysterical. Unlike her. Maybe
she
got a letter.'

What Princess Amy was in the process of repeating frenziedly to Prince Ferdinand on the telephone was not however on the subject of letters.

'It's disgusting,' she was saying over and over again. 'Disgusting, Ferdel, I can't tell you how disgusting it is.'

'My poor little darling,' began Fcrdel once or twice. 'Poor little Amy.'

'No, but it's disgusting. Blood everywhere. Animals' blood! Ugh! It stinks. It's like living in a slaughterhouse.'

'But your guards, my darling, the police, all those detectives -'

'They did it at night from the park side. It wasn't found till Mama set off in her helicopter this morning. They managed to stop her seeing it, thank heaven. They're whitewashing it now.'

'Amy, what does it say?"

'What does it matter what it says?' Amy almost shrieked down the telephone. 'It's just so disgusting. Oh, it's that thing for animals. No, not the usual one, this is another one,
I
NNO
-some-
thing or other.'

'Ah,' Ferdel breathed a long sigh, which might almost sound like relief.

'Anyway what's it to do with me? I love animals,' Amy went on. She added quite sharply: 'She's not the only one who loves animals you know.' It was the only reference made by either of them to the entry in the morning's gossip column.

It was left to a Chief Superintendent from the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department (generally known as the
rdpd
) to inform Prince Ferdinand later in the day that Innoright's bloody message on the Palace wall had actually read, in a grim parody of the
amy means i love you
button:
amy means
trouble - and so do we.

CHAPTER FOUR

Underground Plan

The heavy-set man - perhaps something in the City?
- who got on the Tube at Hampst
ead, waited for several stops before he took the evening paper from beneath his arm and glanced casually at the headline. The letters were black and enormous:
palace outrage
, and then
princess in danger?

'Dreadful!' exclaimed the pleasant-looking woman sitting next to him. She nudged her companion and pointed to the paper's headline, now virtually in her face since the heavy-set man had opened the paper somewhere at the start and was reading it. The respectable-looking woman sounded pleasurably indignant.

'Tch,' went her companion, also a woman, also middle aged.

The train stopped at Old Street. Some people got out - one woman from the opposite end of the carriage - but the train as a whole was not full. It was that short lull in mid-afternoon before the office workers started scurrying home in their hordes, and after the comparative intensity of the lunchtime movements.

Once the train started again, Monkey turned to the City pages at the back of the evening paper. The meeting had begun, which meant that Chicken and Pussy no longer enjoyed their privilege of talking to each other as though they were friends (in reality Chicken and Pussy had never met until Innoright brought them together and never now met outside 'working hours' for reasons of security).

Tom, who was lounging by the doors, sat down in the empty seat next to Monkey. Beagle, already seated by the small door at 
the end of the carriage, moved up until he was next to Lamb, who was on the other side of Monkey. Fox came next. Before he moved, Fox had gazed anxiously out of the window at the departing platform, as though worried whether he had missed his proper stop; he also consulted a small paper map of the Underground and then looked up at the map on the upper side of the carriage, as though comparing the two. Fox sat down with an air of relief.

It was all standard practice. The routine had been laid down several months earlier when this p
articular cell of the main Inno
right Group had been founded - by Monkey, who had hand-picked the members from Innoright protest meetings, studying their record cards for suitable biographical details. In view of the nature of The Plan he wanted a special mixture of daring, practicality and imagination: plus true commitment to the cause that held them together. In theory, of course, any member of Innoright should possess such commitment. But in practice Monkey (a founder of Innoright to which he had privately devoted much of his City-made fortune) discovered that members differed radically in their particular angle of interest; this meant that they also differed radically in what they were prepared to do for Innoright.

Members who were particularly horrified by vivisection for example could not easily be induced to lobby food shops, regarding them as very much secondary objects of attack so long as laboratory conditions remained iniquitous. Other members believed with equal passion that the animals used for scientific research were at least living in conditions over which some control
was exerted by law, whereas the lives of battery hens But the
six people Monkey had picked to be part of his team were all of them more persuaded by the general nature of Innoright's philosophy than by any particular part of it. The innocent should never suffer at the hands of the guilty, guilty in the first place because of their torture of the innocent. In that cause, Monkey's team, he was convinced, would do anything, anything that might be asked of them by Innoright, as represented by Monkey. It was an awe-inspiring thought. It was a good thought. Monkey liked being in control of things.

Because Monkey was in control, it was Monkey who had laid down the necessity for a constantly changing meeting-place so that they could not afterwards be easily identified as knowing each other. To avoid suspicion.

' "Afterwards"?' asked Lamb, 'What do you mean by "afterwards"? I thought we were going to declare ourselves. That was the whole point.'

'Finally, yes. But you don't imagine, my dear Miss Lamb, that there will be no
hue and cry.'
Monkey had a way of putting words in italics with his resonant voice. He looked round and raised an eyebrow. 'We want no eager landlady coming forward with information about our constant meetings, no one afterwards to connect the seven of us. After all, we are sufficiently disparate, are we not, for such a connection not to be immediately suspected.'

They were certainly disparate, in Monkey's phrase. Although the second thing those members picked by Monkey had in common was a certain convenient flexibility of employment, if not actual lack of it, the reasons for this varying considerably with the members' different ages and classes.

The cell had held its first rendezvous at the National Portrait Gallery, gathering on Monkey's instructions by a huge royal portrait (that appealed to his sense of humour). He chose the study of King George
VI,
Queen Elizabeth and the two young Princesses over a family breakfast table, hung at the head of a staircase, garishly coloured, impossible to miss. On Monkey's instructions also, at this first encounter they divided into plausible groups; that is to say, Lamb, who might have been Monkey's docile daughter, stood close by him; while Chicken and Pussy chatted animatedly to each other.

'Look at Princess Margaret Rose! What a little poppet! To think that now her own children ...' The words flowed happily.

Beagle, in baggy grey cotton trousers (in spite of the spring cold), loose whitish T-shirt, camouflage jacket, trainer shoes without socks, lounged alone. The trouble with Beagle was that he looked not so much implausible as subtly menacing in the context of the National Portrait Gallery. He even attracted the attention of one of the uniformed attendants who spoke to him.

'I'm unemployed, right? And it's free here, right? Any other questions?' was Beagle's response.

'You're asked not to touch the frames of the pictures,' said the attendant pleasantly. 'That's right,' said a young man with a rather high voice standing next to Beagle, self-importantly. 'There's a lot of history here, you know, and it belongs to everyone.' It was Fox. Beagle glared at him. Lamb, close to Monkey, felt the older man stir angrily.

'Just what we don't want to happen,' he muttered, 'calling attention to us. Beagle mustn't do that. And what Fox said was unnecessary.'

It was then that Lamb came up with the idea of rendezvousing on the Tube, 'where you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it,' as she put it and then blushed (although Lamb rarely blushed). She blushed because Beagle looked at her, a hard slightly mocking look. Afterwards Beagle told Lamb that was when he first decided to have her.

'You were so sweet and innocent, Lambkin, so polite. One of these days, Beagle to have a taste of Lamb. That was the resolution.'

At the time Lamb corrected her statement to 'where everybody meets everybody'. And so - after an appreciative hum, hum, a raising of the upper lip and eyebrow from Monkey, the Underground Plan was born.

It proved strangely easy to carry out, given that Lamb's original unguarded remark — 'you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it' - was undeniably true about the London Underground system; even if opinions might vary as to who 'absolutely anybody' was. The seven members of the cell were all of them physically common or unremarkable types - which was in fact the third principle on which Monkey had selected them originally.

Beagle for example was, to the outward eye, an apparent loafer of vaguely aggressive demeanour; a prejudiced observer might put him down as unemployed 'and happy with it; the sort who doesn't even want to work.' But there were after all many such travelling by Tube. In essence, Beagle's medium height, his neat features, lightish-brown hair, lightly tanned skin all combined to make him unremarkable: a common type. It was Lamb who knew that the body beneath the T-shirt and baggy trousers was hard, muscular — and scarred.

Pussy on the other hand had an air of silent self-righteousness, the air of one waiting for someone to light up a cigarette in order to ask them to extinguish it, which made her a common enough type too. She was also the mistress of the uninteresting-looking plastic shopping-bag, providing herself with an extraordinary variety of them as the weeks passed; what the logos of the bags had in common was that you could not possibly want to know more about the contents of any bag emblazoned with them. Pussy, although fat, was not so fat that you would remember her for exceptional obesity; just heavy, in the way that some women over a certain age are inclined to spread in the hips and bosom so that the waist is gradually eliminated.

In the same way, Fox, although on the short side, was certainly no dwarf; his lack of height was not even particularly noticeable unless he was standing side by side with a girl, say, Lamb. Slender as Lamb was, she topped Fox by an inch or two. The most noticeable thing about Fox originally had been his habit of bringing his mongrel dog, an aged bulldoggish sort of animal, to Innoright meetings. The hairless dog, with its crushed apologetic face, had made an odd contrast with the neatly dressed young man.

The dog, called Noel - 'for Coward, because as a result of my training, he doesn't get into fights' - had caused some dissension at early Innoright meetings; his continued presence being in the end responsible for the Innoright rule that meetings were, 'without prejudice', for human beings only. This was because some Innoright members had strong views on domestic pets - 'no better than Negro slaves on plantations' - and others equally strong views in the opposite direction. Monkey, while assuring Fox that Noel's presence at meetings had been perfectly acceptable to him personally, had delicately persuaded him to leave Noel behind for the cell meetings also, on grounds of Noel's noticeability.

Tom was vaguely foreign looking - but the foreignness was sufficiently unspecific for him to merge into the vast confluence of youngish foreign looking men on the Underground who might be students or at least carrying students' cards. His complexion was darkish — but it was olive-dark, not brown, and might even be the product of a recent holiday in the sun. Spanish or Portuguese blood? Possibly. Not Asian, at least probably not Asian: Tom was tall. Iranian or an Arab of some sort? Could be. Something Middle Eastern was certainly plausible. In general Tom might have been the kind of actor who plays foreign parts on television, minor characters in established series, never more than half seen or half remembered by the general public. It was the fact that Tom could vary the racial impression which he gave, which had persuaded Monkey to enrol him when he was produced by Beagle (Monkey had had to reject the idea of recruiting a handsome black from East Ham, of Nigerian descent, a founder member of Innoright, because his ethnic origin was too easily identifiable).

As for Monkey, Chicken, Lamb, their particular types, the City gent, the neatly if drably dressed woman of a certain age, the nice girl in her thoroughly Sloane-Ranger clothes, these types reproduced themselves endlessly around them.

'Nothing exceptional about us.' It was Monkey's theme song.

'Except what we're going to do, darling,' murmured Tom.

'No connections between us.' It was Monkey's other constantly reiterated cry.

'Except that we're all members of Innoright.' This time Tom spoke louder.

'Correction. We all
were
members of Innoright. Beagle resigned in protest against current policy, on my instructions. As a matter of fact, Lamb never joined, only went to a couple of meetings and met Beagle. I'm a member, so is Pussy.'

'I was a very early member, a founder member, I think you'll find, unlike Pussy,' put in Chicken in her comfortably firm voice, the voice of the teacher who will not be overlooked in the midst of the class. 'I have consistently voted
against
the amalgamation of Innoright with other groups on the grounds that -'

'Absolutely, my dear Miss, or should I say Mrs, Chicken?'

Monkey interrupted her hurriedly, this was no time for that hoary old Innoright issue concerning its links with other groups.

'Absolutely. And Fox here was, like myself, a founder member. But he too has resigned. On my instructions.'

The treatment of Noel —' began Fox in a mutinous voice; he had been becoming visibly restive during Chicken's speech.

'Provided the perfect excuse,' finished Monkey neatly. 'So you see, Tom, no secrets about it, all carefully worked out, except we don't hand about our membership list in the first place. And you? It's news to me that you are a member.
Are
you a member? Under what name?'

'I vouch for Tom.' Beagle, leaping to Tom's defence again.

At recent meetings these frictions had been stronger than ever, as the date on which the Plan had to be carried out drew closer and could not of its very nature be postponed. And yet, as Lamb said privately to Beagle afterwards, these arguments, these niggling disagreements were ludicrous, really. She wi
shed she could tell Beagle her w
orry about Tom, the way he kept looking at her and other things. But she had to remember Tom was Beagle's friend.