‘You’re a Fielding,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘That’s what Gerald has just seen. That something... Bobby told me you didn’t realise...’ She broke off in some confusion. She never in normal circumstances spoke to me in that way. ‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said, with a visible return to composure, ‘to do what you could to prevent any “accidents”. To think of what might happen, to warn us, advise us. We need someone like you, who can imagine...’
She stopped. I knew exactly what she meant, but I said, ‘Have you thought of enlisting the police?’
She nodded silently, and from behind me Gerald Greening said, ‘I telephoned them immediately Princess Casilia described to me what had happened. They said they had noted what I’d told them.’
‘No actual action?’ I suggested.
‘They say they are stretched with crimes that have actually happened, but they would put this house on their surveillance list.’
‘And you went pretty high up, of course?’
‘As high as I could get this evening.’
There was no possible way, I reflected, to guard anyone perpetually against assassination, but I doubted if Henry Nanterre meant to go that far, if only because he wouldn’t necessarily gain from it. Much more likely that he thought he could put the frighteners quite easily on a paralysed old man and an unworldly woman, and was currently underestimating both the princess’s courage and her husband’s inflexible honour. To a man with few scruples, the moral opposition he expected might have seemed a temporary dislodgeable obstinacy, not an immovably embedded barrier.
I doubted if he were actually at that moment planning accidents: he would be expecting the threats to be enough. How soon, I wondered, would he find out that they weren’t?
I said to the princess, ‘Did Nanterre give you any time scale? Did he say when and where he expected Monsieur to sign the form?’
‘I shall not sign it,’ Roland de Brescou murmured.
‘No, Monsieur, but Henri Nanterre doesn’t know that yet.’
‘He said,’ the princess answered weakly, ‘that a notary would have to witness my husband signing. He said he would arrange it, and he would tell us when.’
‘A notary? A French lawyer?’
‘I don’t know. He was speaking in English to my friends, but when they’d gone he started in French, and I told him to speak English. I do speak French, of course, but I prefer English, which is second nature to me, as you know.’
I nodded. Danielle had told me that as neither the princess nor her husband preferred to chat in the other’s native tongue, they both looked upon English as their chief language, and chose to live in England for that reason.
‘What do you suppose Nanterre will do,’ I asked Greening, ‘when he discovers four people have to sign the application form now, not just Monsieur?’
He stared at me with shiny eyes. Contact lenses, I thought inconsequentially. ‘Consequences,’ he said, ‘are your particular field, as I understand it.’
‘It depends then,’ I said, ‘on how rich he is, how greedy, how power-hungry, how determined and how criminal.’
‘Oh dear,’ the princess said faintly, ‘how very horrid this all is.’
I agreed with her. At least as much as she, I would have preferred to be out on a windy racetrack where the rogues had four legs and merely bit.
‘There’s a simple way,’ I said to him, ‘to keep all your family safe and to preserve your good name.’
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘How?’
‘Change the name of the company and sell your share.’
He blinked. The princess put a hand to her mouth, and I couldn’t see Greening’s reaction, as he was behind me.
‘Unfortunately,’ Roland de Brescou said eventually, ‘I cannot do either without Henri Nanterre’s agreement. The original partnership was set up in that way.’ He paused. ‘It is of course possible that he would agree to such changes if he could set up a consortium to acquire the whole, with himself to be at its head with a majority vote. He could then, if he wished, manufacture guns.’
‘It does seem a positive solution,’ Gerald Greening said judiciously from the rear. ‘You would be free of trouble, Monsieur. You would have capitalised. Yes... certainly a proposal to be considered.’
Roland de Brescou studied my face. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would you personally follow that course?’
Would I, I thought. Would I, if I were old and paralysed? Would I if I knew the result would be a load of new guns in a world already awash with them? If I knew I was backing away from my principles? If I cared for my family’s safety?
‘I don’t know, Monsieur,’ I said.
He smiled faintly and turned his head towards the princess. ‘And you, my dear? Would you?’
Whatever answer she would have given him was interrupted by the buzz of the house’s intercom system, a recent installation that saved everyone a lot of walking. The princess picked up the handset, pressed a button, and said ‘Yes?’ She listened. ‘Just a minute.’ She looked at her husband, saying, ‘Are you expecting visitors? Dawson says two men have called, saying they have an appointment. He’s shown them into the library.’
Roland de Brescou was shaking his head doubtfully when there was an audible squawk from the handset. ‘What?’ asked the princess, returning it to her ear. ‘What did you say, Dawson?’ She listened but seemed to hear nothing. ‘He’s gone,’ she said, puzzled. ‘What do you suppose has happened?’
‘I’ll go and see, if you like,’ I said.
‘Yes, Kit, please do.’
I rose and went as far as the door, but before I could touch it, it opened abruptly to reveal two men walking purposefully in. One unmistakably was Henri Nanterre: the other, a pace behind, a pale sharp-faced young man in a narrow black suit, carrying a briefcase.
Dawson, out of breath, appeared with a rush behind them, mouth open in horror at the unceremonious breaking of his defences.
‘Madam,’ he was saying helplessly, ‘they simply ran past me...’
Henri Nanterre rudely shut the door on his explanations and turned to face the roomful of people. He seemed disconcerted to find Gerald Greening there, and he took a second sharp look at me, remembering where he’d seen me before and not particularly liking that, either. I guessed that he had come expecting only the princess and her husband, reckoning he had softened them both up enough for his purpose.
His beaky nose looked somewhat diminished against the darker walls, nor did his aggression seem as concentrated as it had been in the smaller box, but he was still forceful, both in his loud voice and in the total rejection of the good manners he should have inherited.
He clicked his fingers to his companion, who removed a single beige-coloured sheet of paper from the briefcase and handed it to him, and then he said something long and clearly objectionable to Roland de Brescou in French. His target leaned backwards in his wheelchair as if to retreat from unpleasantness, and into the first available pause said testily, ‘Speak English.’
Henri Nanterre waved the paper and poured out another lengthy burst of French, drowning de Brescou’s attempts to interrupt him. The princess made a helpless gesture with her hand to me, indicating that that was exactly what had happened to her also.
‘Nanterre!’ Gerald Greening said peremptorily, and got a glance but no pause in the tirade. I went back to the armchair I’d occupied before and sat down there, crossing my legs and swinging my foot. The motion irritated Nanterre into breaking off and saying something to me which might have been ‘Et qui êtes vous?’, though I couldn’t be sure. My sketchy French had mostly been learned on the racecourses of Auteuil and Cagnes-sur-Mer, and chiefly consisted of words like courants (runners), hates (fences) and piste (track).