The oldest parts of Holyroodhouse, in the James IV Tower, are kept till last in the guided tour. These are the apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots and her second husband, Lord Darnley, and it is impossible to enter them without a sense of excitement.
Darnley’s bedroom is downstairs and there is a little staircase that leads up to the Queen’s room. Next door is the supper room where David Rizzio, her Italian secretary, musician and companion, was murdered by Darnley, Patrick Lord Ruthven and other disaffected noblemen. On his body there were found between fifty and sixty dagger-wounds.
‘And there,’ said the guide dramatically, ‘is the very spot where it happened.’ Then, with a quick switch into the practised joke, ‘There’s no use looking for bloodstains. There’s only a brass plaque there and it’s a different floor. But everything else is just as it was.’
‘Everything?’ Charles queried facetiously. ‘Is it the same clock?’
‘What clock?’ asked the guide, confused for the first time on the tour.
‘Well, the clock…’ Charles turned slowly round the room. There was no clock. ‘Then what’s the ticking?’
He looked slowly down at his holdall, lowered it to the floor and, with great care, unzipped it. The other tourists watched with frozen fascination.
There was no question. He had seen enough newspaper pictures from Northern Ireland to recognise the untidy arrangement of a clock face and wires.
So had the rest of the party. In the panic and screams that followed as they all rushed for the narrow spiral staircase, he could hear the Laird’s voice, high with fear. ‘A bomb! He could have killed us all! A bomb!’
CHAPTER TWELVE
The dog leapt up, but gave no yell,
The wire was pulled, but woke no bell,
The ghastly knocker rose and fell,
But caused no riot;
The ways of death, we all know well,
Are very quiet.
Bombs in public places are police matters, and cannot be well investigated by half-hearted amateurs. Charles found it a great relief when the blue uniforms moved in. He felt he could have gone on snooping in the dark for ever; the police had the advantage that investigation was their business. And they got on with it very efficiently.
An Army bomb disposal expert saved Queen Mary’s historic apartments from destruction. As Charles sat waiting to be interviewed at the Edinburgh City Police Headquarters in Fettes Avenue, he wondered what would have happened if the device had gone off. The wholesale destruction of twenty-odd tourists and a guide might have put Rizzio’s murder in the shade. And it would have needed a hell of a big brass plaque.
He had assumed that the bomb had not reached its detonation time when it was discovered and received an ugly shock when the findings of the bomb disposal expert were communicated to him. It had been set for twenty minutes earlier. The minute hand on the clock had reached its brass contact screw fixed in the clock face; it was only luck that had prevented it going off. The device’s construction was amateur and the motion of Charles’ holdall appeared to have broken one of the inadequately soldered joints in the wiring. But for the cavalier, drunken way he had manhandled the bag, the bomb would have worked.
He found its failure small comfort. The intention was no less destructive. The bomb was an unsophisticated weed-killer and acid device, which might not have been too devastating in the open, but in an enclosed space like the supper room… He didn’t like to think about it. Particularly as he had been carrying the thing. Even in the unlikely event of his surviving the blast, he would have been typecast for the rest of his life as Long John Silver or Toulouse Lautrec.
When he talked to the police, he was amazed at how much they knew. The assumption that they had written off Willy Mariello’s death as an accident and were just waiting for this to be officially confirmed in the Procurator-Fiscal’s report proved to be naive. Ever since the stabbing they had been investigating and keeping an eye on the D.U.D.S. They knew about Martin’s dual identity and had been following his movements with particular interest.
It all made Charles feel crassly amateur. Not only because his own stumbling investigations seemed so pathetic, but also because it showed he had an outdated image of the police as thick village constables whose only function was to have rings run round them by the brilliant amateur sleuth. That was the way it was in most of the plays he had ever been in, and plays were about his closest contact with the police. What he had taken in this case to be their lethargic inactivity had been discreet investigation, gathering together sufficient evidence for an arrest.
And they reckoned the bomb was probably enough evidence. Certainly enough to justify a search of the flat in Nicholson Road.
There was no question in the police’s mind of investigating anyone but Martin. Like the Laird, they reckoned that his behaviour was suspicious and, unlike Charles, they were not held up by vague woolly liberal notions that the boy was misunderstood and must have other explanations for his actions. Charles felt as he had in Oxford when, after an elaborate midnight climb back into college over walls, across roofs, down drainpipes and through dons’ bedrooms, he had discovered that the main gate was open.
He also felt rather out of it, though at the centre of operations. At least on his own abortive investigations he could maintain the illusion of doing something important in his own right. Here at the police headquarters he was just a source of information, politely asked to wait, filed for reference when necessary. They were interested in what he knew, not what he thought.
So rather than stage-managing dramatic denouements himself, he found out at second hand what had happened. The search at Nicholson Street had provided plenty of evidence to convict Martin. It was a positive bomb factory, chemicals and components scattered around on tables without any attempt at concealment. There was also an unpleasant collection of knives and other weapons, including a meat cleaver. The boy’s fantasies of violence took a disturbingly tangible form.
What the police did not find at the flat was Martin Warburton himself. And, though they found a bottle of spirit gum substitute and a brush, there was no sign of his false beard or glasses. So it was possible that he was somewhere in Edinburgh in his disguise.
They tried the obvious places, which were Coates Gardens and the Masonic Hall, but he was not at either. Apparently he had left the theatre after a disagreement with Plug over some lighting effect. That was shortly before three, and nobody had seen him since.
The case had changed from a whodunnit to a manhunt.
Charles was thanked courteously for his co-operation by the police and asked to keep them informed of where he would be contactable if he left Edinburgh.
It was then about seven o’clock. Frances, he knew, had got a ticket for the Scottish Opera’s Alceste at the King’s Theatre. Denied her calming therapy for his shattered nerves, he saw no reason to change his plans of earlier in the day, and got drunk.
At the Police Headquarters James Milne and Charles had arranged to meet for coffee in the flat the next morning to talk through what had happened. Charles had found the truth of Dr Johnson’s dictum about the proximity of death concentrating a man’s mind wonderfully, and regained his flagging interest in the case.