Skeleton-in-Waiting by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

got to expect us to be jumpy about Romanovs. Even leaving Granny out they’re an odd lot. There’ve been some terrific scandals.”
    â€œWould you say that an excessive sense of personal honour was an hereditary characteristic in them?”
    (Piers, as usual when bed-talk turned to the Family, was trying to distance himself by adopting the tone and phraseology of the sort of don who must have been pretty well extinct even in his student days.)
    â€œI don’t know. Granny was the only one I knew well. When it suited her, I suppose … Why?”
    â€œOne could conceive of Alex deciding that since your grandmother entrusted him with her letters partly in the hope that he would use them to continue her various feuds after her death, he might regard it as his duty to do so.”
    â€œAnd there’d be quite a bit of money in it, too. Anyway, could he? How much is a literary executor allowed to do? If the family don’t want it, I mean?”
    â€œIt would depend on the wording of the will, I imagine. In any case Sir Savile’s office will presumably exhume some pre-Reformation statute in Norman French which empowers your father to have any subjects disembowelled who attempt to publish his mother’s correspondence against his will.”
    â€œI can just see the headlines. That’s the whole point, darling. There’ll be almost more fuss if it gets out we’re trying to put the lid on things than if we let it all come out. And it doesn’t make any difference that Granny will have got it all wrong. Look at the poor old Dingwalls.”
    (When, on the announcement of Louise’s engagement to Piers, the hacks had discovered that on the groom’s side no family at all existed to be harried for childhood memories, incredible efforts had been made to excavate a hidden past. The search itself had become its own news. One line had been to hunt up doubles of the new celebrity, especially in the neighbourhood of Coventry. A foreman of an abattoir had been found living at Leamington Spa who had a definite resemblance, so his parents—the father had also been in the meat trade—had had to put up not only with several weeks’ ferocious scrutiny but with a series of “revelations”, all foundationless, about one or other of them having a secret in their past, once shameful but now in the eyes of the hacks glorious beyond belief.)
    â€œYou realise that if Alex is motivated as Sir Savile seems to fear, inviting him to supper may be interpreted by him as meaning that he has hooked his fish?”
    â€œHe has, hasn’t he? If he’s fishing. But if he is then someone’s going to have to talk to him somehow, and if he isn’t we’ll just have had a nice supper-party.”
    â€œSir Savile could send some pin-striped emissary.”
    â€œFather’s always dead against that, if he can help it. Next thing you know is Security have got in on the act and his phone’s being tapped and someone’s faked a burglary and gone through his papers, and then you’ve got questions in the House and there’s hell to pay. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have told Sir Sam in the first place.”
    â€œI’d have imagined Security had enough on their plates preventing us from living our own lives the way we want to.”
    â€œIt won’t last much longer, darling. It’s just another scare. They’ll find Gorman’s brother living it up under an assumed name in New Orleans, or something. It’ll blow over. They always do.”

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1987
    1
    â€œT hat you?”
    â€œâ€¦â€
    â€œNow listen carefully. I’ve got something, might do. Got a pencil and paper?”
    â€œâ€¦â€
    â€œThere’s someone called Alex Romanov—don’t know how you spell it but it’s the same as the Russian royal family used to be. Don’t know his address. The point is, he’s got hold of a lot of