boxers, and plodded to the door, acutely aware than the evening’s pleasures were already evaporating into history. The bell jangled again and as I reached for the handle, I wondered whether an unexpected ring at the door after midnight had ever, in the whole history of the world, been a herald of good news.
It was Jasper, giddily energetic, like a child high on tartrazine.
“I think it’s a mistake,” he said, stepping into my home uninvited.
I rubbed at my eyes. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.:
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The Prefects are being moved tonight.”
“That can’t be right. Mr. Dedlock was quite specific.”
“Misdirection. Either that or he’s changed his mind. You’d better get your clothes on.” Jasper was ignoring me. Abbey had emerged from the bedroom and stood blinking in the corridor’s electric light, her modesty shielded only by a set of artfully positioned towels.
Jasper smirked. “You must be Henry’s landlady.”
Abbey shot me a look made up in equal parts of bewilderment, irritation and accusation.
“So sorry to barge in like this,” Mr. Jasper went on. “Though I’ve actually been interrupted myself. Just in the middle of squiring young Barbara around town. Wonderful girl. So clean…” He smiled dreamily. “I’ll give you two a moment, shall I?”
I steered Abbey back into the bedroom, where I apologized profusely, dressed, thrust a comb through my hair and tried to prepare for a night out with Dedlock, with Hawker and with Boon.
“Could you distract him for a minute?” I asked once I was fully clothed. “Just get him talking. I need to make a private call.”
“Why?” Abbey asked. “Who the hell are you phoning?”
“Please. No questions.”
“One day, Henry, you’re going to have to tell me everything.”
“I promise. But for now…?”
Abbey plastered on a hostess smile and we went back together into the sitting room, where Jasper was flicking through a magazine and swigging briskly from a bottle of water. He tapped his watch.
“Two minutes,” I said. “Just got to go to the bathroom.”
As I left, I heard Abbey talking, trying her best to distract him. “Lovely to meet a colleague of Henry’s. Now tell me, ’cause I’ve always wondered… What is it you do exactly?”
I flushed the toilet and crouched beside the bowl, partly to disguise the sound of my voice, partly to fox any listening devices which might have been hidden nearby. It didn’t occur to me at the time to question how naturally I’d taken to such precautions.
I took out my mobile phone and dialed a number which must have rung a dozen times before it was answered.
“It’s Henry,” I hissed. “Sorry to wake you.”
Miss Morning sounded older now, as though she’d aged ten years since I’d left her. “I was not sleeping, Mr. Lamb. Just too afraid to answer.”
“They’re moving the Prefects tonight.”
No reply.
“Miss Morning? I said, they’re moving the Prefects tonight.”
A heavy sigh. “Then I assume you’ve made a will. I trust you’ve set your affairs in order I hope you’ve prepared yourself for the worst.”
He never slept with her, of course. As guarantors for the truth, we think it our duty to make that absolutely clear. Naturally, he would have liked to have done so, but we can assure you that he never laid so much as a finger on any part of her. In fact, unless something remarkable happens in the next few days, the miserable man will die a virgin.
At around the time that Mr. Jasper was standing on Henry’s doorstep, the heir to the throne of England awoke with a wretched headache, an urgent need to urinate and a terrible hunger gnawing at his soul.
He had no idea how he had ended up in bed, no recollection of staggering along the corridor, of peeling off his clothes and falling onto the mattress, no memory at all, in fact, since he was last in the ballroom, taking tea with Mr. Streater.
Streater. If the prince was certain of just one thing then it was this: he needed to see that man again. Only Streater would understand. Only Streater could make the world tolerable again. Only Streater could ease the craving, the black desire, the burning need.
The extremities of his body tingling with pins and needles, the prince swung himself out of bed and wrapped himself in his dressing gown. Every noise seemed too loud, every light intolerably bright. He used the telephone by his bed to make two calls — the first to Mr. Silverman, the second to his wife. Both, he was told, were unavailable.
In the end the prince had to wake an underbutler named Peter Thorogood to ask the only question which seemed to matter to him anymore.
“Where is Mr. Streater?”
Although Peter Thorogood thought that the prince appeared out of sorts, he politely pretended not to notice and simply directed him to the room which Streater had commandeered upon his arrival at Clarence House.
However, once the prince had left (Arthur was adamant that he did not wish to be escorted), Peter Thorogood telephoned his superior, a butler called Gilbert Copplestone, to inform him that the master was acting erratically, that his speech was garbled and his gait had become eccentric. Copplestone conveyed these fears to the head of the household, Mr. Hamish Turberville, who then telephoned the prince’s permanent secretary, Galloway Pratt, who called Kingsley Stratton, his contact at the palace, who spoke to his lover, a lady-in-waiting named Eloise Clow. Four hours later, the Queen herself had heard the news about the behavior of her only son. The message which she sent back was alarmingly simple.
Everything is proceeding according to plan.
As Arthur weaved his way down the corridors of Clarence House, he saw what had descended outside — a thick fog, a pea-souper — and it is a measure of his increasing instability that he pondered at length whether the weather was real or a trick of his mind.
It turned out that Mr. Streater was staying in an unusually unassuming wing of the house, halfway down a corridor of single rooms traditionally designated as quarters for chauffeurs and scullery staff. Exhaling asthmatically with relief, Arthur knocked at the door and waited.
When the sharp-faced man opened up, he was fully dressed and beaming. “All right, chief?”
“Let me in.”
Streater stepped back and watched the heir to the throne totter inside. The room was almost monastic — bare white walls, cheap furniture, a single bed with its duvet rumpled and distressed. There were no books, keepsakes or mementoes, nothing to suggest any life beyond the palace, with just one exception — a framed photograph of a young woman, a pretty brunette in skinny jeans.
Arthur all but tumbled onto the bed. “You know what I want.”
Legs splayed, immobile but somehow still swaggering, Streater sat opposite on the only chair in the room. “Do I though, chief? Do I really?”
“Is it true what you told me? About the deal? About my family?”
“Come on, you gotta know the answer to that.”
