Read Online Honourable Intentions by Gavin Lyall - Free Book Online

the lad himself says is just hearsay. In the long run, it’s what his mother says that matters.”
    “She wrote the letter ye told me ’bout, didn’t she?”
    Ranklin nodded but said nothing. He had the pages of the résumé spread beside his plate and had been skimming through O’Gilroy’s schoolroom copperplate script. There was no doubt about the excitement the fire had triggered. Whether the police originally took their tone from the journals or vice versa, they were now feeding off each other in spiralling hysteria. Anarchist outrages obviously sold newspapers this season.
    The only calming note came from the
Sûreté Générale,
but one editorial suggested this was just sour grapes. In effect, although presumably not intention, Paris had two competing police forces: the
Préfecture
and the
Sûreté,
and when it came to catching anarchists, real or alleged, alive or dead, the competition was no-holds-barred.
    “Did you form an opinion on the case?” he asked.
    “Jest from the newspapers. And guessing, mebbe.”
    “We’re not lawyers; let’s have it.”
    “Then sure enough the boy could’ve done it – and he could’ve shot the President and cabinet jest as easy. I mean he’s a real anarchist, drunk on the stuff like he’s never tasted that bottle before. Left a good job on an ocean liner –” Ranklin hadn’t noticed that that detail, so carefully kept out of the Bow Street court by Noah Quinton, was available to any Parisian reader. The law, he reflected, was like a fixed telescope: it magnified what it saw, but it missed an awful lot; “– to work in a stinking shebeen. I mean a real hell’s kitchen of a place.”
    “You’ve seen this
Deux Chevaliers
café? Been into it?”
    “Went down there this lunchtime. But not in. Yer not paying me enough to get meself knifed for a police spy.” He sounded offended to have found a place too disreputable even for himself; after all, among the toffs of the Bureau, his forte was knowing the underside of life.
    “Did you look at the police station where—?”
    “I did.”
    Ranklin thought. Then he gathered together O’Gilroy’s notes and handed them back. “Here, you make a report to the Commander tomorrow. Give him the full
à la carte
and he should invite you to join our charmed circle and we can do this properly.”
    O’Gilroy put on his lopsided smile that, once you knew him, could have so many variants; this time it was rueful cynicism. “Nice of ye to say so . . . Only I wisht it was a real job and not hauling the King’s wild oats out of a fire.”

5
    Major Alfred St Claire looked
correct,
but also as if he hadn’t been born that way. You could well imagine his stocky, broad-shouldered figure leaning on a farm gate and being knowledgeable about turnips. Instead, a service career and then the Royal Household had smoothed him. His dark hair was now sleek, his long face pink and shiny, even his wide cavalry moustache (he hadn’t actually been in the cavalry; he was nominally a Marine) looked sleekly dashing.
    And by now he had a courtier’s or woman’s ability to wear anything and make it seem natural. On him, a frock coat wasn’t awkward or old-fashioned; indeed, it made Ranklin in his severe dark lounge suit feel like a tradesman. Perhaps he should have worn uniform, like the Commander, only that wouldn’t have been correct because he had thankfully got rid of the regulation moustache which, on him, refused to grow to more than a schoolboy wisp. And the Palace was, after all, the fountain-head of correctness.
    With old-fashioned courtesy, St Claire did his best to make them feel at home, coming out from behind his writing-desk and joining them in the elegantly uncomfortable chairs crowded around the tiny fireplace. The room was small, with a view over the inside courtyard, and true to the Palace’s reputation, cold even when it was unseasonably warm outside.
    When the Commander had been given permission to smoke and stuck his pipe in