Death and the Princess by Robert Barnard Page B

his trouser pocket. He used to note down things he saw, and sometimes just phrases that came into his head — might be when we were all sitting round the table at tea. And I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t one.’
    ‘What about in his flat?’
    She thought hard. ‘Well, I’d rather forgotten by the time we went over his flat. It was sort of . . . distressing, and it went out of my mind. There were lots of papers: versions of stories we’d seen in the Birmingham Standard. And there were two notebooks — but I remember they were full ones, weren’t they, Ern, because we went over them afterwards. Most of the things in them had been crossed through, after he’d used them. That was his method, to prevent him using the same phrases twice.’
    ‘Do you still have them?’
    ‘Oh yes, we’ve thrown nothing away. Get them, Ern, will you? . . . They’re in his room . . . We call it his room, still. There’s one other thing, Mr — ’
    ‘Trethowan.’
    ‘Mr Trethowan. With his things from Knightley, there was a half-bottle of whisky. Unopened. Now that struck me as odd. He’d obviously brought it for the evening — you know these young people, never can be without it, I don’t know why. Now, why would he go and order a bottle of wine from the hotel?’
    ‘He didn’t order one.’
    ‘Yes, so I gathered. Well, why would he go out and buy one? As I say, I don’t cotton on to the younger generation, not to their habits, but I can’t see him taking a half-bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine with him when he goes for a night out with a lass. Can you?’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’
    ‘I’ve got the notebooks,’ said Ern Tredgold, coming back into the dowdy little sitting-room, ‘and I thought you might like these: they were in his flat — seems like they’re the articles he was working on when he died.’
    I took the sheaf of papers he had in his hand, and the two fat, thumbed little notebooks, suitable for slipping into trouser pockets. I stood up to go.
    ‘I hope they’ll be of help,’ said Ern Tredgold; and then, rather hesitantly, ‘We would both like to be of help, Mother and I. It isn’t that I wanted to throw cold water on it. I know Mother will be upset, but still we’d both rather know how he died, if there was anything wrong in it.’
    ‘Of course we want to know,’ said Elsie Tredgold, more robustly. ‘The trouble with you is, you’d rather let sleeping dogs lie, even when it’s your own son as has been killed.’
    ‘It’s just that I haven’t wanted you upset, Mother . . .’
    ‘I’d be more upset being in doubt . . .’ She opened the door for me, and I edged my way out into the dim winter sunshine. ‘You will get to the bottom of it, won’t you, Mr Trethowan? We love all our children, naturally, but he was — well, he was the pride of them. He was so bright,and sharp as a razor, and that cheerful with it. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t have done. He could have been editor of The Times!’
    A mother might have wished a safer long-term prospect on her son than that, but I took her point. I had every reason to think Bill Tredgold had been a first-rate reporter.
    I won’t inflict on you in detail my conversation with Carol Crossley’s family, or her flatmate. The family was the sort that washes its hands so enthusiastically of its young when they reach maturity that you wonder why they had kids in the first place. They hadn’t seen Carol for three months or more before she died, and they did not seem to have expected to. For what it was worth, they agreed with her flatmate that she had no discernible enemies. I got the impression of a nineteen-year-old shorthand typist, with no very strong personality and a rather aimless existence. I found it almost impossible to believe that she — in her own person, rather than as the Princess surrogate — was the intended victim. She did, however, look a little like Helena, but mainly in the sort of way