‘Well done. You were very good.’
‘Yes, I was, wasn’t I?’ She smote him playfully in the ribs. His yelp drew a disapproving look from a doorkeeper.
‘So what do you think?’
‘I think you’ve broken a bone. Otherwise, I think that undoubtedly our side won the moral and intellectual argument. Did you spot any unexpected defectors from the “Content” group?’
‘Two,’ she said. ‘I kept a sharp eye on old Basil Hawthorne, one of my exministers, whose instincts would be those of cockney-Labour, but I think he was swayed by Sid. He certainly nodded at him enthusiastically. And me. He definitely didn’t say “Content”. Nor did old Joe Taylor, that vegetarian Tory. Though I think he was asleep.’
‘He wasn’t alone in that. So was Reggie.’
Beesley emerged at the front of a throng of chattering peers a moment later and engaged in a rapid exchange with one of the doorkeepers. They both returned to the chamber.
‘Something’s up,’ said the baroness, ‘we’d better go back in.’
‘Gently, Jack, gently,’ whispered Amiss. ‘Don’t crash through them. You’re not dealing with demonstrators now.’
She moderated her charge and did her best to insinuate herself through the milling peers rather than run them down. By the time they got through to a view of the chamber, it was almost deserted, save for the alarming combination of a clutch of doorkeepers and Tommy Beesley feeling the pulses of several recumbent bodies. Amiss and the baroness glanced at each other in shared apprehension and—running—joined them.
‘What’s going on, Tommy?’
He turned and looked at her, ashen-faced.
‘They’re all dead. Reggie, Robbie, Connie and the others. Dead.’
‘My God.’ She wheeled on the nearest doorkeeper. ‘Get the police.’
‘Oh, my lady, do you really think that necessary? Could it not be a frightful coincidence of natural death?’
Her glare looked sufficiently powerful to bring about death by shrivelling. ‘Very good, my lady,’ he muttered, and left the room at a speed—for once—more urgent than dignified.
***
The telephone rang at 8.00, startling Amiss out of a nightmare in which he was being strangled by a hairy demonstrator wielding an ermine noose. The culprit turned out to be a sheet that his night-time thrashings had succeeded in winding around his neck. By the time he had disentangled himself and scrambled out of bed, the ringing had stopped. He swore and stumbled back to bed. Within a minute the ringing started again.
‘Good morning.’
‘It doesn’t feel like morning, Ellis. I didn’t get to bed till five o’clock.’
‘I know it was a rough night, Robert, but what kept you up so late? You sound close to death yourself, if you’ll excuse my saying so.’
‘I admit it wasn’t the best of ideas to go back with Jack to Myles Cavendish’s after the hoo-haa had died down, but I always remember too late that whisky exacerbates shock rather than moderating it. Hold on a minute. I’m freezing.’ Amiss darted back to his bedroom, pulled on a dressing gown, grabbed a rug from the bed and put it round him before he picked up the phone again. ‘OK. What do you want to know?’
‘Mostly I wanted to know how you are.’
‘Incredulous. Shattered. Horrified. What you’d expect. But thanks for asking.’
‘Also, I thought you’d like to know Jim and I are on this case.’
‘What? Why? Surely it’s got to do with the antiterrorist lot rather than the Murder Squad?’
‘It’s all hands on deck. The Antiterrorist Squad are overwhelmed. Between being run down after the Northern Ireland ceasefire and having a scare blow up on the Islamic Fundamentalist front last week, they’re so short-handed they’ve agreed enthusiastically to having Jim, me, and anyone else he can spare come on board.’
‘Well, thank God for that.’
‘Of course, it will all be done under their auspices and they’ll get the credit, but at least we get part of the action. And we can maintain a low profile and stay out of the way of the press, thank heaven.’
‘Well, bugger the internal politics of the Met, Ellis. This is terrifying stuff.’
‘So I gather. Is it OK if we come round to see you in half an hour or so to get some colour?’
‘If you bring breakfast.’
‘Done.’
By the time he answered the door to Pooley—well laden with carrier bags—and their friend Detective Chief Superintendent James Milton, Amiss was showered, dressed, halfway through his first cup of coffee and almost clear-headed. Milton put an arm half around his shoulders in the awkward manner of a sympathetic middle-aged man from a macho culture.
‘Poor old Robert.’
‘Thanks, Jim, but I’m all right.’
‘At least it wasn’t gory.’
‘What a Pollyanna you are.’
‘Come on. Let’s go into the kitchen and tell us all about it while Ellis plays Mum.’
They sat at the kitchen table while Pooley competently dispensed orange juice, coffee, croissants, butter, and jam. Amiss drank all his orange juice in one go and held out his glass for more. ‘So what happened to all those poor old sods?’
‘Mechanical failure.’
‘Don’t tell me. Someone jammed their pacemakers.’
Milton put down his coffee and gazed at Amiss in astonishment. ‘How did you work that out? I thought you were scientifically illiterate. We’ve only had that confirmed this morning.’
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Myles Cavendish, DSO, MC, ex-SAS, and presently some kind of hush-hush consultant on terrorism and intimate friend of the Baroness Troutbeck worked it out double quick. His reasoning was based on the impossibility of eight people dying simultaneously of natural causes, the peaceful nature of their deaths and the fact that nerve gas was a non-starter as the bodies were mostly well separated. When he asked about their health, Jack knew four of them had bad hearts and—in response to his prompting—remembered two definitely had pacemakers. Myles wasn’t sure how it had been done but he was sure it was possible. He proffered some theories, but I’d had so much whisky by then that I’m damned if I can remember them. What did the pathologist say?’
‘That he’d performed four postmortems and all had stopped pacemakers. And since then we’ve been told the other four had pacemakers too. It looks pretty open and shut. The antiterrorist boys are getting down to the how. I’m concentrating on the why and the who.’
‘And the which.’
‘Sorry, Ellis. I don’t quite follow that. I’m feeling a bit dim this morning.’ Amiss took another draught of coffee.
‘Well, we don’t know if the intention was to murder one, some or all of them.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. It’s a bit hard to imagine somebody with a grudge particularly directed against people with pacemakers unless, of course, there’s a Pacemakers Liberation Front. I guess the most likely scenario is that the Animal Avengers were having a second crack at Reggie Poulteney and the other poor bastards just happened to cop it along with him.’
‘Second crack?’ Milton was puzzled.
‘Of course, that wasn’t on your territory. Pour me out some more coffee, Ellis, and I’ll try to give you a coherent story.’
***
‘So what’s your hunch? Do you think these Avengers might be behind everything?’
‘How would I know?’ said Milton. ‘My instinct would be that it’s too much of a leap from behaving like a lot of yahoos and writing childish letters to committing mass murder. But of course if they were responsible for the letter bombs they might be capable of anything.’
‘But you don’t know if they are.’
‘Too true. Paul Jarrett, my pal on the antiterrorist side, tells me there are at least a couple of dozen animal activist groups, maybe half of which are in the thick of civil disobedience and around half a dozen of whom he thinks are capable of serious violence. His money was on the Animal Liberation Army. He’d never heard of the Animal Avengers till their threatening letter to the peers.’
‘I still think the murderer is more likely to have been after an individual,’ said Pooley. ‘Just like in Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders. Maybe Poulteney’s daughter-in-law hired a hitman.’
‘You can’t seriously think that. I’m no defender of Vanessa Bovington-Petty, and I could just about imagine her having the guts to try to murder Daddy-in-law in an indirect way which couldn’t be traced back to her, but I’m damned if I could seriously see a disaffected Sloane being behind wholesale murder. It’s much too far-fetched. What do you think, Jim?’
‘Life isn’t like Agatha Christie.’ Milton sighed. ‘Or not any more, anyway. We live in a world where terrorists have launched devastating attacks on the City of London, the New York Trade Centre, the Tokyo underground, and Oklahoma City, just to pick four at random.’
‘The IRA, Islamic Fundamentalists, Doomsday cultists and antigovernment fanatics,’ said Pooley. ‘I suppose since foreigners always thought the English were mad about animals it would be appropriate if it is their defenders who make our contribution to terrorism.’
‘Dammit, as Jack frequently points out, we’re animals too.’ Amiss sipped his coffee gloomily. ‘I know it’s a failure of imagination, but I find it difficult to understand how people who call themselves defenders of the rights of some can be so cavalier with the rights of others.’
‘Mad people find causes that enable them to cloak their madness with virtue,’ said Milton. ‘Now, enough of all this philosophizing. Ellis and I have to get back to the Yard to catch up and plan our course of action. What are you going to do?’
‘See what the newspapers have made of it and meet Jack for lunch. You can leave messages there for her, and they’ll get to me.’
‘Robert.’ Milton looked serious.
‘I know. Be careful.’
‘I mean it. If these really are pro-animal terrorists, you’re right up there in the line of fire beside your pal Troutbeck.’
‘Well, there isn’t much chance of persuading her to take care. Myles read her the riot act last night and she kept explaining she’d be fine. Trouble is, she thinks she’s invincible.’
‘Well, you’re not.’
‘I’ll watch out. I promise. Besides, I should be safe enough today. Jack rang earlier to say that she thought the Lords might be a bit depressing, so she’d told Beesley to take us to the Cavalry Club. I should think the inhabitants of that place would see off any troublemakers in short order.’