About the same moment, another white card from the producer had reached Jemima's side of the table, with something similar in front of Rick, keep going read Jemima's card, continuing optimistically this must be planned. Rick's card read: ask re palace blood demo.
'Your Royal Highness,' began Rick excitedly, democracy thrown to the winds in the new and invigorating atmosphere of a scoop: 'Now regarding your very warm and human feelings concerning animal rights, there was, was there not, a demonstration not so long ago -'
But by this time, Prince Ferdinand, leaning forward, had picked up his fiancée's small white hand with its gleaming aquamarine ring, and was giving it a distinctly continental kiss: 'I love you for your compassion for all wild things,' said the Prince seriously. 'You will love your new country where there is so much work to be done in this direction.' His eyes met hers, a shot which subsequently fascinated all those who pored over it at tus later. Was it a look of princely command to which she responded? Was the whole thing set up to avoid the tiresome nuisance of those banned photographs marring the wedding? How had Prince Ferdel persuaded Princess Amy to do, in effect, his dirty work for him? Since the photographs involved him not her. All these questions remained unanswered at tus.
But that was later. At the time the tus team allowed themselves to be dismissed courteously, more or less as arranged, with a few final platitudes about 'wishing you both every happiness', a few final curtseys from Jemima and Susanna Blanding, and a final bow from Rick (he reckoned they'd earned it). Only Curt and the American producer remaining sternly unbowed and uncurtseyed; but then since Curt had taken no active part whatsoever in the entire proceedings, his lack of gesture at least was not necessarily to be interpreted in any positive fashion.
Nevertheless the unvoiced tension, at least on the part of Rick and Jemima, as they drove away from the Palace, was considerable. As was the surprise and the excitement.
'There's that man with the funny-looking dog again, the one that nearly got itself killed,' remarked Jemima by way of light relief.
It was true: Fox and Noel, who had in fact been circling the Palace anxiously during the duration of the interview, had come to rest once more at their previous observation post by the Palace drive. Noel was manifestly exhausted: to tell the truth, the dog, unlike his master, was not a great walker and would in dog terms probably have agreed with Rick Vancy's irritable remarks that dogs should be banned from urban conurbations, since that meant master-led long city walks instead of more leisurely solitary country rambles. But Fox's excitement at the prospect of the revolutionary programme which was being enunciated within the white walls of the Palace, had meant he had been unable to keep himself - and Noel - away.
Somewhere in the distance the bark of sea-lions from the Zoo caused Jemima to think of Louis MacNeice and murmur poetically: 'Smell of French bread in Charlotte Square.' This in turn caused Susanna Blanding to say: 'I'm terribly hungry. That, or I must have a cigarette,' and Rick to suggest that they talked the whole thing through at Le Caprice. (Curt, with his enviable capacity for relaxation, had fallen asleep again.)
'Isn't that dynamite we have there with all that animals lib talk from her!’ he remarked as he dialled the Caprice number on the car phone. 'Connections to the French lady only too easy to establish. Say, maybe he gets turned on by animals —'
'Maybe so, but it bothers me,' confessed Jemima. 'Why did the Palace - predictably — say no statement from them along the Innoright lines, we don't give in to blackmail etc. etc.? And then she made it. Whose plot was it, his, theirs - or hers?'
'Or those courtiers,' suggested Rick, 'those background figures, royal anchors, I guess.'
'Not Ione Quentin!' exclaimed Susanna in a shocked voice from the back seat. 'She's an absolute pillar. So's Major Pat. Still, you never know with the Palace. They can be awfully wily.'
'If it was her idea,' pursued Jemima. 'Why? That's what I want to know. Why do it?'
A few hours later when the programme 'Prince and Princess of Hearts' was being shown nationwide on British television, members of the Innoright cell who were watching it together, would echo the words of Jemima Shore more or less exactly.
'Why?' cried Lamb. 'When they said they wouldn't.'
'She said it - well, more or less,' Fox sounded bemused.
'She did not.' That was Pussy, four square.
The rest of the country turned their sets off with contented clicks.
'Listen to that, Kenneth,' said Mrs Taplow to her husband as they sat in their Eaton Square kitchen. 'HRH has turned out very nicely after all, I couldn't have put it better myself about loving animals.'
'Couldn't you, Lizzie? Are you sure?'
Mrs Taplow gave him a sharp look, then addressed herself once more to polishing the Prince's already exquisitely shiny leather shoes.
'You'd better get on with that, Kenneth,' she said after a moment; she spoke equably enough. 'Otherwise it will never be ready.' She pointed to some embroidery on the table: a royal crest was in the process of being created from silk and beads; it had the air of an intended wedding present. Taplow sighed but he obeyed her and picked up the embroidery; once he was immersed in its intricate design, however, his expression relaxed.
The Innoright members had no soothing tasks to which to turn.
'What do we do now?' Chicken turned to Monkey who was still gazing stolidly at the blank television screen.
'We go on with the Underground Plan,' replied Monkey sombrely. 'We don't release the photographs but we go on with the Plan. Mark Two. That wasn't the statement we asked for, the reasoned statement, that was just an outburst from an hysterical girl.'
'Grab her,' said Beagle with a laugh. 'Grab her all the same. She deserves it.' He laughed again. I deserve it.'
Lamb, who tended to feel cold since her illness, experienced a special chill within her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
St Francis
'You're not really expecting anything to happen?' enquired Jemima of Pompey over their respective 'jars' (white wine and whisky) in Jemima's secluded top-floor flat overlooking Holland Park. Pompey had dropped in for an early drink on the way back from work to Mrs Pompey: his pretext being that Jemima needed a little off-the-record background briefing on security arrangements for the wedding.
'From our point of view something has happened,' pointed out Pompey: but his relaxed tone was not one that Detective Sergeant Vaillant, for example, would have recognized. 'A man was killed and we're not much nearer solving the case,' he added. 'One or two things have come up of course:, there's a man with a dog. At the Republican, with the bloody dog that afternoon except they wouldn't let him in without a fuss. Said he was a humble fan of Princess Amy, always tried to follow her public appearances from The Times, nothing wrong with that, was there?'
'And was there? A good many people are like that.'
'True. But this man had once been a member of Innoright, resigned when there was some fuss about the very same unwelcome dog. We had some leads on him; small, of restricted growth I should say, works on and off for Leaviss' - he mentioned the name of one of the leading theatrical costumiers — 'non-violent, or so we believe, but loves to distribute anti-vivisection posters in the most awkward places. Could well have been intending to do so at the Republican if the dog hadn't scuppered his plan.'
'The dagger - paper-knife - is odd, Pompey. It didn't have to be someone at the Press Conference, did it? Quite a few of them of course.'
'Quite a few paper-knives, too. And anyone could have helped themselves to the kit, including paper-knife, after the conference began. Knives and kits not picked up remained at the checking-in desk. By then empty. Your Americans must all have had knives.'
'I'm currently using mine. Useful for dealing with royal memoranda from our industrious English researcher.' Jemima picked it up from the table in front of her and felt the point. 'Yes, bit of a mistake in manufacture, that. Very sharp indeed. Rick has presented his to the aforesaid industrious researcher, who
claims to have buried hers somewhere in her historical files. Curt, the silent American, uses his to pick his teeth; when he's awake, that is.'
Jemima, discussing the new details of the case, thought how she had developed an excellent if unacknowledged working relationship with Pompey since their first association (over a television appeal for a missing child).
Jemima was tacitly allowed to give vent to her natural inquisitiveness by discussing those details of a case that Pompey found it discreet to reveal over a 'jar' (as a matter of fact not a few). Pompey on the other hand was a man on whom life with the hard-working albeit whimsical Vaillant sometimes palled. Besides, as he put it, the necessarily hothouse atmosphere of the incident room could also produce 'a wood for the trees' situation. In these moods he welcomed Jemima's proffered jars'; including contact with her aforesaid inquisitiveness.
It was true that Jemima's famous 'woman's instinct' was the subject of many traditional jokes between them in which Pompey gave way to heavy gallantry while defending the superior role of patient relentless investigation in the solution of a murder case. Jemima for her part generously allowed Pompey to term it a 'woman's instinct' from long usage (furthermore it did not do to argue overmuch with a contact). Nevertheless she contended strongly that the famous instinct was in fact no more than the thought process of a reasonable human being - not necessarily female.
'What about his own private life? Nothing there? Although I agree it's odd that whoever killed him should choose such a bizarre occasion as a Royal Press Conference if there was no connection. Odd or cunning.'
'Lamentably respectable,' replied Pompey. 'Unmarried. Not gay but no regular girlfriend. Several he took out confirm that.'
'That's too respectable,' said Jemima firmly.
'He took out that woman who's working for you once or twice, the writer who goes on history quizzes on the telly; Mrs Pompey likes her. Nothing in it, however.' In case Pompey should have seemed to imply that Mrs Pompey's taste had corrupted his official judgement, he added quickly: 'We checked it out. Talked to her.'
'She didn't tell me,' thought Jemima. 'But then, why should she? Besides, Susanna Blanding's attention at present is equally divided between the Cumberland family tree and Rick Vancy.'
'Then the woman Moscowitz - remember I told you about her? Going to sleep in the lounge with dead-as-a-doornail Schwarz-Albert lying there all along? We've checked her out, naturally. Seems her daughter was a well-known model who died in a rather hideous car crash. Caro Moss. Very beautiful, rather weird. Decapitated.'
'Ugh. I remember the case.' Jemima also remembered Caro Moss from the famous advertisements for health foods: an exquisite giraffe-like girl gazing up at a real-life giraffe munching leaves from a tree: 'Since I can't reach a tree,' ran the wistful faintly accented voice-over.
'Mother made a scene at the inquest, and again when the male driver was not sentenced to prison, only a fine.'
'One can hardly blame her,' Jemima reflected. 'No chance that Schwarz-Albert was the driver of the car and Mrs M the lurking figure of vengeance from the past, as in an Agatha Christie?'
'No chance at all,' replied Pompey coldly, who, unlike Jemima, did not retain a strong worship of Agatha Christie. 'Naturally we checked that out. Caro Moss's slaughterer - manslaughterer - is alive and well elsewhere.' He added with a return to joviality: 'So what does your woman's instinct say?'
'My perfectly good reasoning powers,' riposted Jemima, 'suggest that it isn't a coincidence your chap was killed at the Republican and at the conference. Someone took a risk - because it was a risk worth taking. Or because they didn't have another good opportunity. Yes, that must be it.'
Seeing that Pompey's brows were still drawn together at the mention of Agatha Christie, Jemima decided to return to the subject of the Royal Wedding. 'My question meant: are you - or they - expecting something to happen at the wedding itself?'
Since Pompey did not choose to answer, Jemima pressed on: 'Did you see the story in the Exclusive?: a city prepares. Plus a lot of stuff about offices along the route being secretly commandeered. Either for some secret hidden marksmen. Or to prevent terrorists getting there first, it wasn't quite clear which. Some maps and photographs of likely angles. Explanations of how specially vulnerable this route is because it isn't the usual one from Clarence House or Buckingham Palace. The bride has to come from Regent's Park and they both go to the Palace for the wedding breakfast. Then Westminster Cathedral is bang in the middle of Victoria Street. A busy place. Lots of offices. Not cut off at the end like Westminster Abbey.'
'a city prepares indeed! It certainly loses nothing in the telling,' was Pompey's comment. 'That sort of thing only encourages the buggers of course: gives them some bright ideas about
the weak links along the route, I always think. But what can you expect? In spite of their reputation Special Branch adore publicity.
Always sneakily talking to the Press'
Pompey seemed fortunately unaware just with whom he was sitting at the time of this less than generous comment concerning his colleagues.
'Am I naive in assuming the ira are not interested since this is a Catholic wedding?' queried Jemima.
'It seems that Royal Weddings in general leave them cold,' grunted Pompey. Was he showing signs of sharing the feelings of the ira on this issue if no other?
'I seem to remember that they made a statement to that effect at the time of Prince Andrew's bash. Unlike the rest of the world who get keener and keener. Has Mrs Pompey -'
'She has, God bless her. Red, white, and blue begonias. I planted them out at eleven o'clock last night. Ouch.' He winced.
'I went along the route today on a recce. And to the Cathedral with my American pals. Saw some very fine begonias on the way." But Pompey only winced again as if in sympathy with fellow planters throughout London.
'a city prepares. More than one way of preparing,' was all he said.
Jemima had been well aware that it was necessary for her to follow the royal route if she was to be able to provide us audiences, sleepily awakening to this archaic British ceremony, with enough entrancing anecdotes to make it worth their while, tus had provided a cheerful English driver named Harry but Jemima chose to sit in the back seat with Susanna Blanding. The latter sat with her head bowed over a clipboard, occasionally looking out of the window in order to reconcile passing buildings with her notes. Rick sat in the front seat (there was no sign of Curt, whose absence Rick explained rather vaguely along the lines of, 'I guess the guy slept late').
Unfortunately the comments of cheerful Harry - with which he had been enlightening tourists for years, so he told them -were somewhat at variance with those of Susanna. Nor did she accept the variance tamely. Rick had asked her not to smoke in the car, a prohibition which she had accepted but which undoubtedly increased her professional irritability.
'Queen Elizabeth ii was not born at Number One London,' she explained indignantly at one point. 'Number One London is Apsley House, home of the Duke of Wellington as I would have thought absolutely anyone knew.' Susanna scowled at the driver's back.
'You win some, you lose some,' was all Harry said in reply, infuriatingly jovial. 'Any of you ladies like to know the origin of the Wellington Boot?'
Rick in the front seat moved restlessly: there was no telephone in the car, an administrative error he was determined should not be repeated.
'A lot of flat roofs round here,' he said suddenly. 'Susy sweetheart,' Rick turned round and gazed tenderly into her earnest face. 'Could you hold on that historical stuff for the time being? We have a security situation here that I'd like to talk through with Jemima.'
'Of course, Rick.' Susanna subsided. This confirmed Jemima's fear that Rick's handsome face and agreeable tones were making Susanna's heart beat significantly faster; it was noticeable that Susanna pardoned in Rick an almost total lack of interest in British history which she would have found unforgivable in anyone else.
'For instance, do you have some good assas
sination stuff there?' Since he was still looking at Susanna, it was she who answered, albeit hesitantly.
'Do you want historical assassinations? I can do you William the Silent. The Duke of Guise. That sort of thing. I'm afraid they do tend to be men, by the way. Unfortunately women weren't often assassinated in those underprivileged days.' As Jemima wryly noticed the principles of sexual equality being applied even in this unlikely area, Susanna continued more brightly: 'There was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, of course - now she was assassinated. That was a good one. And it so happens that Prince Ferdinand himself is descended —'