Rogue's Gallery (6 page)

Dad had a long and happy retirement. When he died of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-seven I was just fifty. He lay in the hospital bed, trying to conceal his pain, often thanking me for all I'd done for him, as he put it. One day he said:

‘It turned out all right, lad, didn't it?'

‘Our lives? Course they did, Dad.'

‘No, I mean … the business with your mother.'

The nearest occupied bed in the hospital was some way away. I swallowed.

‘Mother? What did you know about that?'

‘'Appen more than you knew. I checked on the night she disappeared that there was still the case she packed should anyone be rushed off to hospital. It was where it always was, in that old wardrobe on the landing. And I checked next day as well and it were gone. And I knew that the spade you put away in the shed had earth on it, though
I hadn't used it at all the day before. And I was bound to see where the earth had been turned over.' He took my hand, shook it, and then kissed it. ‘You did a good job, David. The best thing you ever did. Don't let anyone tell you different.'

I nodded. When I thought about it, I decided the final tally concerning what I had done was not too bad: five children growing up to be fine adults, a man rescued from a hideous marriage. If I was the exception, it was because I was the one who did it. I was and am a special case. All the time I was nursing Dad I was having funny visions of bars growing inside the windows of our house, felt that the open prison I had lived in up to then was turning into a high-security one. Dad's death when it came would not release me, nor did it. I had no friends, though the family who were still around in the neighbourhood were friends, and those are the best kind.

Now I am retired, and I work in the garden, though not
there
, and listen to the radio, watch a bit of television. I like to know about other people's lives. But I like to know about them from afar: I have grown so used to my house, and sometimes it seems to me that I have always been old in it. And now I know I have come to love it. Here is enshrined everything I have achieved. I am a prisoner who has come to love his cell. Nothing is left of the David who might have been. I am watching from outside, as if I was dead. I killed our mother, and she in her turn has killed me.

When he emerged from the grand audience chamber the prince was in a right pet.

‘It makes me absolutely sick!' he muttered. ‘Sick to the pit of my stomach. Did you hear that, Pat? The odious endearments to his new wife. My mother! The King my father not two months dead, and my mother is now my aunt and he is now my stepfather! Did you hear him calling me “son”?'

‘I did, and I heard your reply, Hammy.'

A smile of satisfaction lightened his petulant face.

‘Did you? Pretty neat, I thought it.'

And totally unwise, like everything he did. After a great deal of ‘son' talk had made him more and more tetchy, his mother had commented on the cloudiness of his brow.

‘On the contrary, I've had too much “son”,' he said. Quick, I suppose, but not the way to behave in the new
King's court. Claudius is a soldier, and not to be played with.

Hammy was peeved. Naturally he was peeved. The moment his father, the old king, died, his uncle called a snap election, won it, and was crowned before Hammy could get back to the Danish capital. He was studying, as I was, at the University of Wittenburg, where he was a very ineffectual president of the Student Union. I was his deputy, and I did all the work and took all the decisions, with typical Irish efficiency. He spent most of his time in amateur dramatics – the traditional resort of the totally unserious student – which was how he acquired the diminutive of his name. I read whatever books were available in English or Latin, and financed my studies as Diplomatic and Foreign Affairs Correspondent of the
London Sunne.

‘The man is a brute!' exclaimed Hammy. ‘If only I'd been here to stand against him. As it was, the Danish aristocracy was bound to elect a man of that type. They're still Vikings at heart.'

I wasn't inclined to deny, after a mere week or two of observations, that King Claudius was a thug, albeit a thug with an expensive education. Still, Hammy was deluding himself if he thought that, even if he had been on the spot, there had been any hope of his winning a disputed election. He made no decision as president of the Students' Union that he did not reverse or rescind on the morning after. Of such stuff are kings not made.

My column in the
London Sunne
was much less diplomatic and discreet than it had been under my predecessor. I was turning it into a high-class gossip
column, with a strong line in royal scandals. My proprietor (an eccentric thousandaire whose place of origin is as yet undiscovered) had written to praise what he called my ‘looning down' of the feature, and said he had made this a model for the work of all his other scribblers. It was for this reason, scenting scandal and blood, that I had followed Hammy to Denmark. Denmark was obviously a place where news was being made. But more than that: if Hammy had a future there, I had no objection to being his right-hand man. Nor, for that matter, if Hammy was out of the picture, to being the right hand of his uncle Claudius, though the fact that he had been heard to refer to me as an ‘economic migrant' did not bode well for any future cooperation.

I had not been pleased, on my arrival, to find another Irishman already in place. His title was Deputy Armourer to the Royal Guard, but I suspected he supplemented this by spying for the English Queen's council or by scribbling for one of the
London Sunne'
s miserable competitors. I was even less pleased to see this fellow approach as Hammy spoke.

‘Hello O'Ratio,' I said glumly. He gave me the most imperceptible of nods and turned at once to my companion.

‘Strange news, Your Royal Highness.'

‘Call me Hamlet,' said the prince. ‘What news?'

‘In confidence—' he drew the prince aside and continued in sibilant whispers that my newshound ears had no difficulty picking up ‘—the palace guards are in turmoil. They say they have seen your father.'

‘My father? Impossible. They kept him on ice till I came home so I could be sure he was dead. Considerate, wasn't it?'

‘His ghost. It's been seen patrolling the battlements. It was definitely seen by Barnard and Marcel.'

‘Barnard!' I said scornfully. ‘A credulous, dull-witted fellow, and Marcel is hardly better.'

‘You weren't supposed to be listening!' O'Ratio said bitterly, turning and glaring at me.

‘Well, if you will talk like a camp hairdresser who's been had by all the NCO's,' I replied …

That was a bit unfair. It was true O'Ratio was never to be seen in the red lantern district down by the Elsinore docks, but I had no evidence he was a pansy by nature. His friendship with Hamlet, however, was compounded of starry-eyed royalty-worship and the sort of sentimental gush that the companions of reasonably attractive young men seem to go in for. O'Ratio was a typical penniless Irish soldier of fortune, attaching himself to anyone who offered. Not surprising if he found buggery more enticing than beggary. Hammy's bedroom tastes I had had several indications of in Wittenburg.

‘The ghost,' continued O'Ratio, ‘has indicated a desire to talk to Your Royal Highness.'

‘And by what feat of dumb crambo did the ghost convey this to a pair of dimwits like Barnard and Marcel?' I asked.

‘A being from the Other Side has ways and means,' said O'Ratio.

‘Quite,' said Hammy, serious. ‘There are more things
in heaven and earth, Pat, than a cynical worldling like you could imagine.'

And he wandered off with O'Ratio, talking low and serious. ‘I'm gonna put that white sheet on again,' I carolled, though only mentally. When I thought about it the last person I'd seen in a white sheet was Hamlet himself, playing the ghost of Julius Caesar at Wittenburg in a translation of the play by William Shaksberd (rumoured to be a pseudonym of the essayist Francis Bacon). He'd got the part because his ambitions for a crown were well-known.

I was pretty sure of what was going to happen next. Hammy was going to go up on to the battlements and the ghost would appear (in the white-sheeted person of O'Ratio or one of his soldierly mates), and take Hamlet aside and tell him he'd been murdered.

How did I know this? Because O'Ratio was one of those hangers-on of royalty who finds out what the royal personage most wants to hear, then tells him it.

I was confirmed in this view two days later when Hammy came to me all ineffectually excited and told me he'd had an encounter with the ghost of his father.

‘He took me apart from the others,' he said solemnly, his language becoming suitably elevated, ‘and imparted a matter of great moment.'

‘Oh?' I said. ‘The colour of the fourth horse of the Apocalypse?'

‘My sire was murdered by his brother,' said Hammy, ignoring me. ‘Claudius poured poison in his ear while he slept.'

‘How does he know if he was asleep?'

‘He has passed through to that state where knowledge is not limited as it is limited by our worldly state, Pat.'

‘Ah,' I said. I wished he wouldn't call me Pat. Royalty should not be matey. And he should give me my title: Earl of Duntoomey, in the County of Killarney. I had no seat, no money, no post at court, but I was descended from the second last king of Ireland, on both sides of the blanket, and I wished he would use my title, to distinguish me from that direct descendent of an itinerant Irish mathematician, O'Ratio.

I was meditating how to take this matter of the supposed ghost further when we were fortunately interrupted by Ophelia, the daughter of the new king's first minister. She had been making a great nuisance of herself since Hammy's return to court. And so had her poisonous rat-pack jerk of a brother on her behalf.

‘Hamlet, what ails you? What does this change towards me mean?'

‘Nothing, madam, except that I have seen a wider world.'

‘Before you went we had something together—'

‘Nothing, madam. Nothing whatever. If you had something it was entirely in your imagination. A royal does not marry into the political class. It would destroy all our credibility.'

‘But you said—'

‘I said nothing. Go and find some religious order, preferably a closed one, and shut your disappointments away with others of your self-deluded kind.'

Ophelia dashed off weeping. I had little sympathy. I had every reason to doubt that Hammy had ever given cause to
hope to any member of her sex. But she had given me time to think.

‘Did you know there's a travelling theatre company in town?' I asked.

‘Really?' said Hammy, perking up. ‘Do they have any parts unfilled?'

‘Nothing suitable for your rank and talents,' I said hurriedly. ‘They are performing
The Mousetrap.
'

‘That old thing. Everyone's seen it.'

‘I doubt whether your Uncle Claudius is a great playgoer,' I said. Hammy raised his eyebrows enquiringly. ‘Do you remember that bit towards the end acted in dumb show?' I asked him.

That was a cliché of that branch of the revenge tragedy commonly called the whodiddit. The audience was shown the truth of what had happened by having the murder silently re-enacted.

‘The murderer comes in while – right!' said Hammy – ‘while the victim is asleep.'

‘Exactly. And poisons the glass of aquavit that the victim always keeps at his bedside.'

‘Ah – pity …'

‘What if you, Hammy, commanded a royal performance here at Elsinore. They're only crap actors. They'll be happy with a few ducats and a square meal. In return for all the publicity they'll get, you could persuade the manager—'

‘Yes?'

‘—that instead of the dumb-show murder suggested by Mr A.C., the play's perpetrator, the poison will not be put into an aquavit glass—'

‘But in his ear!' Light was breaking, but slow as sun on an Irish winter morning. ‘But – what then?'

‘Then your eyes will be on the King. If that's how he murdered your father, his guilt will be clear to you and to the whole court.'

And if he didn't, it won't, I thought. I had no doubt that this was a story fed to Hamlet by O'Ratio and his mates, to spur Hamlet on to action, and to get themselves cushy places at court once he had gained Claudius's crown. Nice work if you can get it. Only I was determined that if anyone got it, it was going to be me.

Hamlet was in his element. He loved having actors around him, particularly bad ones. He lectured them, told them how scenes should be played, how the verse was to be spoken. They listened respectfully, and tittered behind his back, though in truth he was no worse an actor than they were.

The afternoon of the command performance came. The court assembled in the palace ballroom, where an improvised stage had been erected. The King and Queen arrived last, she with all the dignity that could be mustered by one who had married her husband's brother a month after her husband's death, he with a pretence of being a regular attender at cultural events of every kind. His steward, though, had put a bottle of aquavit (double strength Royal Danish Breweries brand, ‘for added effectiveness against the grippe and the clappe') by his throne, and a large glass. He knew his man.

King Claudius just about kept awake during the play, taking copious draughts of his tipple, and even offering it
jokingly to his wife, who equally jokingly slapped his hand, then sipped. At last the dumb show began. Hamlet was watching. I was watching. What I was expecting to see was nothing – business as usual. I was surprised then to observe the King shifting uneasily on his throne at the sight of the king in the play sleeping alone on a bed. Then the figure of the murderer came in. He approached the bed. He bent over the sleeping man. He took from his pocket a phial, and he brought it down towards the sleeping man's ear—

‘Bloody awful play!' bellowed the King, throwing his glass at the stage. ‘Ordure, pigs manure, horse droppings! I hate all poets and playwrights. Stop the rubbish. Come on, Gertrude. I'm not watching any more of this.'

Well, of course that was the end of the cultural entertainment. The court streamed out after the royal pair, Hammy came over and shook my hand in gratitude, and I noticed Ophelia in the melée slipping over and appropriating the royal bottle of state monopoly gut-rot. Me, I went off to my room in the west tower and began to pen my weekly article for the
London Sunne.
‘Danish Court in Disarray' I headed it. It began: ‘Last night tensions threatened to erupt in the royal House of Oldenborg. The new Danish King attended a performance of that old chestnut
The Mousetrap,
organised by his nephew, the son of the late King who died only two months ago. When the king angrily disrupted the performance during the dumb-show, rumours began to fly around the court concerning the manner of the late King's death, which occurred while his son was studying at the prestigious University of Wittenburg. With the state machine in chaos and rumours of a possible Norwegian invasion
proliferating, the international order seems threatened by a sordid family row with criminal overtones. A central figure is luscious Queen Gertrude, wife and mother of the two rival princes …' And so on. I signed it The Danish Bacon.

But while I was penning the sort of rubbish that my under-educated British reading public loved, my mind was active. So the King was murdered – and murdered in his sleep by having poison poured into his ear. Hammy was right. But he was right not by reason of any supposed revelation by a ghost (I am a man of the Renaissance, not some medieval superstition-monger) but because somehow O'Ratio or one of the guards had become cognisant of the secret – perhaps suspecting Prince Claudius, as he then was, and following him at night. So far I had done rather well in capitalising on O'Ratio's inept plotting. That's what I had to keep on doing. If there was going to be a new King Hamlet, the man who did the real work, as in the affairs of the Student Union of Wittenburg, was going to be me.