Who Guards a Prince? Read online

  Who Guards a Prince?

  Reginald Hill

  Who guards a Prince must other Oaths unspeak,

  Reck not of Friend, on Foe no Vengeance wreak.

  Who guards a Prince must pawn his proper Life,

  Orphan his Children, and Widow make of Wife.

  These Debts denied, what then is his Reward?

  Who guards a Prince, and fails, himself shall find no Guard.

  —Morland’s Mottoes

  These signs and tokens are of no small value; they speak a universal language and act as a passport to the attention and support of the initiated in all parts of the world. They cannot be lost so long as memory retains its power….

  The great effects which they have produced are established by the most incontestable facts of history. They have stayed the uplifted hand of the destroyer; they have softened the asperities of the tyrant; they have mitigated the horrors of captivity; they have subdued the rancours of malevolence….

  On the field of battle, in the solitude of the uncultivated forests, or in the busy haunts of the crowded city, they have made men of the most hostile feeling, and the most distant religions, and the most diversified conditions, rush to the aid of each other….

  —Benjamin Franklin

  PART ONE

  SIGNS AND TOKENS

  CHAPTER 1

  “These several points I solemnly swear to observe without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind…”

  The Entered Apprentice felt ridiculous and he felt frightened.

  He felt ridiculous because his left trouser leg was rolled up above the knee, his left breast was bared and he was wearing a slipper on his right foot.

  He felt frightened because he had a noose round his neck, a blindfold round his eyes and a dagger at his throat.

  The ceremony ground interminably on, till at last he heard the Preceptor’s voice say, “Having been kept for a considerable time in a state of darkness, what in your present situation is the predominant wish of your heart?”

  His voice was hoarse as he croaked, “Light.” “Let that blessing be restored to the candidate.”

  There was a single clap from several hands and, with a disproportionate sense of relief, he felt the blindfold being removed.

  Once restored to normal vision, his sense of fear rapidly faded, but his sense of the ridiculous remained and he found himself looking for irony in the congratulations of his fellows, but finding none.

  Last was the Tyler who had entered the room as quietly as ever.

  “Is that it then?” said the Entered Apprentice.

  The Tyler did not answer but looked at the Preceptor, who had joined them.

  “Yes, it does all seem a little absurd, doesn’t it?” murmured the Preceptor, “I quite agree with what I see you are thinking.

  “Form without substance is as pointless as, say, substance without form.”

  “No, no. Not at all,” said the Entered Apprentice, fearful of being thought critical.

  The Preceptor smiled and said, “Now, don’t disappoint me. And we’ll try not to disappoint you. Look, there’s a bit of business you can help the Tyler with, if you would.”

  “But of course.”

  “Excellent,” said the Preceptor. “I must be off in a minute. One of those television chat shows. So tedious, but I don’t like to refuse. Step next door and the Tyler will put you into the picture. I’ll just say my goodbyes and be on my way. Once again, welcome to our company.”

  “I’m really honored to have been invited to join,” said the Entered Apprentice stiltedly.

  “Yes, I believe you are,” said the Preceptor. “And I think I can honestly say that few of our members live to regret it. Goodbye now. And good luck.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The tide was at the ebb.

  It was the moment of the held breath and the stopped clock, in popular mythology the most likely time for the ill and the aged to release their hold on life and slip quietly away.

  Dr Wainwright didn’t believe the myth. Twenty years of general practice had taught him there was only one common denominator in his patients’ times of death. They were usually bloody inconvenient.

  But even his medical cynicism was not proof against the magic of the moment. Landward, the sea-front buildings were a black frieze against a smudgy pink sky. On the beach the last rays of the setting sun glanced palely off the wet sand. Stretching out before him to a shadowy and mysterious horizon, the sea lay perfectly still, gathering its strength for a renewed assault on the land.

  The only movement and sound came from a small figure close by the water’s edge. This was Lucy, his five-year-old daughter, and she was part of the magic. She was attacking the wet sand vigorously with her little spade, piling up one of the irregular mounds she called her castles. In a few moments the tide would turn and wash it away. Lucy would be distressed. But no amount of persuasion could get her to build further away from the water’s edge.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” she called shrilly. “I’ve caught a fish.”

  As if the girl’s voice had broken a spell, a breeze sprang up in the darkening air and crazed the glassy surface of the sea.

  The tide had turned.

  “What have you got then?” asked Wainwright, moving forward. “A shark, is it? Or a whale?”

  He bent down over the little girl, expecting a piece of seaweed or at most the shell of a crab.

  But what she was holding up to him was more solid than that and had something of the shape of a fish though not the look of one.

  “It was in the hole,” said Lucy proudly. “I dug it up.”

  Wainwright took the object from his daughter’s little hand. It felt soft but tough. He held it close to his eyes in the darkling air and let out a quiet exclamation. Bending forward, he immersed it in the sea and agitated it to remove the clinging film of sand.

  Then he examined it again.

  “What is it, Daddy? What kind is it?” asked Lucy impatiently.

  “I’m not sure, darling,” he answered, taking out his pocket handkerchief and wrapping it carefully round the object. He looked down at the hole from which it had come. Already the returning sea had filled it with water. Another couple of surges and it would disappear completely.

  “Daddy, the water’s going over my castle!” protested Lucy, her attention suddenly diverted. She began to try to shovel the sea backwards with her spade till Wainwright bent down and took it from her hand.

  “I tell you what, dear,” he said, thrusting the spade into the sand till only the handle and a couple of inches of shaft remained visible. “If we mark the spot like this, we can come back and repair your castle later.”

  Now he picked a mark in the black silhouette of seafront buildings, a high gable with a crooked chimney stack, and taking his daughter by the hand he set off towards it.

  Lucy, not at all convinced of the wisdom of abandoning her spade, hung back, looking behind her. As the tide surged over the handle she cried out anxiously, and when her father showed no sign of slowing down she began to sob. But for once her tears had none of their usual softening effect and after a while she saved her energy and dried her eyes.

  Wainwright hardly noticed. It took a great deal to distract his attention from his daughter, especially in distress. But what he was carrying in his pocket was distraction more than enough.

  It was a tongue.

  It was a human tongue.

  And it had been torn with brute force from its owner’s mouth.

  CHAPTER 3

  Four miles inland the same breeze which sprang up on the turning tide sent fine white ash drifting over Detective-Inspector Douglas McHarg’s sturdy brogues.

  He didn’t notice, but Chief Fire Officer
Potter, who stood alongside him, coughed ostentatiously, though the ash got nowhere near his face. “Have you seen enough, Inspector?” he asked in irritation. “We’ve been here an hour and soon it’s going to be too dark to see anything.”

  The two men were standing in the burnt-out shell of a small cottage which had once housed the family of the miller who owned the old watermill against which it abutted. Derelict till the affluent late ’fifties, it had been refurbished as a country retreat, exchanging hands at progressively larger prices till it had been bought three years earlier by James Morrison, a freelance journalist, in one of his not too frequent periods of affluence.

  Now, for Morrison, affluence and austerity alike were over. The white film on McHarg’s shoes probably contained a fair percentage of what was left of the man.

  The fire had started in the small living-room. Morrison, as was his wont, had been drinking long and hard in the local pub about a mile away—probably well after hours though naturally the landlord wasn’t admitting this. He had returned home and continued the session privately, or so they surmised from the dissolved shards of what was probably a whisky bottle near the calcined bones of what was probably Jim Morrison.

  “A cigarette end on a cushion stuffed with polyurethane foam,” CFO Potter explained once more. “Him too bottled to notice; and once it started smoldering you’d get enough hydrogen cyanide to put him out in next to no time. After that, once the fire got hold, well, this place was timberframed, with a thatched roof. An incendiary bomb in other words, just waiting for a drunk with matches.”

  “We’re standing on that drunk with matches,” grunted McHarg.

  “All right!” exploded Potter. “So we are. I’m sorry for the poor devil. But why have you dragged me out here again?”

  McHarg didn’t answer. He couldn’t because he didn’t know. But something about the memory of that morning, with the dawn chorus starting up all around regardless of, or perhaps deceived by, the heap of glowing embers still too hot to permit a close approach, had stuck with him all day and made him impulsively invite the Chief Fire Officer to confirm his report on the spot.

  From the millhouse whose yard-thick stone walls had easily resisted the onslaughts of the flames, Police Constable Ian Arrowsmith, who’d spent most of the day fending off rustic sightseers, was watching the scene. With him was Ken Daly, a fireman who had driven Potter here.

  “Come on!” muttered Daly impatiently as he watched the two figures in the gloaming. “Get a bloody move on! I’m off duty in half an hour.”

  Arrowsmith chuckled.

  “Your boss won’t leave here till HM’s good and finished,” he said. “So you’d best settle down and be patient.”

  “Inspector McHarg, you mean?” said Daly. “Why HM?”

  “His Majesty,” said Arrowsmith. “Not that anyone ever says that to his face. He used to be on the royal squad up at the Yard, evidently.”

  “Queen’s bodyguard, you mean?” asked Daly, interested.

  “No. One of the Princes, young Arthur, I think. Something happened. God knows what. One story says he told the Prince or someone important to fuck off. Or mebbe they just missed some of the Crown Jewels! Whatever, he ended up down here in the sticks a couple of years ago. And he doesn’t look likely to go higher than Inspector. But he still acts like he’s bloody king. So, HM. It fits.”

  “I wonder what he’s dragged old Potter back here for?” said Daly.

  Arrowsmith shrugged his ignorance and changed the subject.

  “Bloody marvelous, this thing,” he said pointing to the water-wheel which stood still against the pressure of the racing stream. “It’s linked up to a small generator, you know. No candles needed here if there was a power cut. Must be nice to have money.”

  “The poor bastard doesn’t need candles now, not for light anyway,” said Daly. “Why isn’t it moving?”

  “Your lot knocked it off this morning. I mean, there wasn’t much point in generating electricity, was there? That’s what holds it, that locking bar.”

  “This?” said Daly, taking hold of a long metal lever. He eased it towards him, just to test the resistance. It was so well oiled and maintained, there was hardly any. With a series of clicks on the locking ratchet, the great shaft was freed and, slowly at first but with gathering speed, the wheel began to turn.

  Attracted by the noise, Chief Fire Officer Potter turned towards the millhouse and bawled, “Daly! What’re you playing at? Turn that blasted thing off.”

  “No,” said McHarg. “Wait.”

  He too turned to watch the rise and fall of the wheel silhouetted vaguely against the darkening sky. For perhaps a minute he watched and listened to the rhythmical splash of water against paddles, the gurgle of the stream and the more intermittent and irregular creaks and groans as the ancient timbers protested their never-ending task.

  After a while McHarg smiled.

  “Thank you, Mr Potter,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He strode towards his car, kicking up a cloud of ash, making Potter cough again, genuinely this time.

  “Stupid bastard!” he muttered, including comprehensively Inspector McHarg, James Morrison, and himself for putting up with this uncommunicative, opinionated policeman.

  He’d have found a lot of support for his antipathy, both in and out of the force. But when McHarg got back to the central police station in Sanderton, he found himself greeted with more than customary enthusiasm.

  “Mr McHarg, sir,” said the desk sergeant, nodding towards the interview room from which the sound of voices came. “I think DC Brownlow would welcome a bit of assistance.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing really. Well, it’s one of our local GPs, you may know him, Wainwright. Something about digging up something on the beach. He says it’s a man’s tongue.”

  CHAPTER 4

  His Royal Highness Prince Arthur, Duke of Wenlock, Colonel-in-Chief of the Welsh Light Infantry, and Laird of Gulvain, had been schooled by experts to keep his feelings to himself.

  Even when his visit to East Anglia to open a new electricity generating plant fell so far behind schedule that the girls’ pipe-band assembled to enrich his departure was almost invisible, though far from inaudible, in the fenny mists of evening, his young features showed no sign of impatience or boredom.

  His personal detective, Inspector Dewhurst, showed much more concern at this unscheduled twilight, but the Prince ignored him till his equerry, Captain Edward Jopley, murmured a reminder that he was dining at Windsor along with the Canadian Commissioner. Only then, with every sign of genuine reluctance, did he climb into the waiting limousine. Captain Jopley got in beside him. And finally Dewhurst, never taking his eyes off the applauding spectators, slipped into the front passenger seat and said tersely, “Drive!”

  The car slid away, preceded and pursued by police outriders.

  And now, only now, when the last child with the last Union Jack on the last pavement had been left behind and the flat, dark fields lying alongside the arterial road were flowing past, did the Prince permit himself the luxury of a yawn.

  “Mr Dewhurst looked a trifle ruffled at the end, I felt,” he said, having first made sure that the soundproofing glass panel was properly closed.

  “Just worried about security, sir,” said Jopley. “It got dark awfully quickly. It is his job, after all.”

  “Of course it is, my dear chap. And very well he does it, too. But he’s not exactly the laughing policeman, is he? You know, I sometimes miss old McHarg. Do you remember McHarg, Edward?”

  “Indeed, sir. Not a great humorist either, I wouldn’t have said. And at least Dewhurst’s polite.”

  “True,” said the Prince. “About Dewhurst, I mean. But believe me, you could have some laughs with McHarg. Not polite, though. No, if he’d been as worried as poor Dewhurst about being behind our schedule, he’d have chucked me into the car an hour ago and if I’d complained he’d have told me it was nothing to do with me, but his artistic Sc
ottish soul couldn’t bear those girl pipers a minute longer!”

  He chuckled reminiscently, a young man very much at ease with life. Jopley raised a wan smile which did not go unnoticed.

  Prince Arthur regarded his equerry shrewdly. Edward Jopley was just turned thirty, a slim, upright man, meticulous about his personal appearance whether in or out of uniform. Now there was a slight but uncharacteristic slackening about his posture and a couple of strands of black hair had strayed unchecked across his brow.

  “Edward,” said the Prince, “are you all right? You’re looking a bit peaky. I noticed earlier.”

  Jopley made a conscious effort to pull himself together and said, “No, really, I’m fine.”

  But the Prince was not a man who took merely a token interest in those around him. Jopley had his job because he was unobtrusively efficient, extremely prudent, and the Prince liked and trusted him without ever feeling he could make such a close friend of him that their job relationship could be threatened. Now he applied his mind to the problem of the equerry’s trouble with genuine concern.

  “God, how crass of me,” he said suddenly. “This news at lunchtime. Of course.”

  They had caught the one o’clock news as they motored (late) from the generating plant to the civic luncheon. The Prince always liked to listen to the news ever since he’d made a jokey speech to a group of miners who had just heard (which he hadn’t) of new proposals to close pits in their area.

  “Edward, I’m sorry. That journalist, Morrison, the one who died, you were at school with him, weren’t you? I remember your mentioning it once when you asked if he could travel on our plane. How awful for you. I’m sorry.”

  Jopley nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “We weren’t very close, but I have to admit it was a shock.”

  “A dreadful way to go. And hearing about it like that. I remember him vaguely. He seemed a very nice man. And bright too. Extremely original talent. I read some of his articles.”