David Dickinson - Death and the Jubilee

Four hundred yards away the manager of the King George the Fourth thought he was in the middle of a nightmare. Albert Hudson had served in the King George for nearly fifty years. Quite soon he would be able to retire with his wife to the little cottage he had bought near Ringmer, well away from the sea and well away from the ghastly tourists and what he saw as the crass vulgarity of modern Brighton. All afternoon people saying they were policemen had been skulking round his hotel. His hotel. Later on there was another collection of interlopers who said they were firemen. The worst week of his professional life up till now had been when two Indian Maharajahs had come to stay for a week; both with large retinues, mostly female, mostly from Paris. The two Indians had fallen out over one of the young women. The young women began fighting among themselves. It had been terrible. Now here he was in a meeting with a whole roomful of doubtful-looking people. There was a smart man who claimed to be the Chief Constable of Sussex. Albert Hudson thought he might have seen him somewhere before. There was a cricketer who said he was a Chief Inspector. There was a tramp who looked as if he should have been locked up. There was a man in a fisherman’s jersey who pretended to be in charge. There was a very young-looking man who kept on drawing things. Hudson thought they were fire engines. There was another man who said he was a fireman and a mild-looking man at the end of the table who said he came from the Prime Minister’s office.

Albert Hudson decided that he would defend the honour and possibly the fittings and the fabric of his hotel to his last breath.

‘Forgive me if I have misunderstood you, gentlemen. Please forgive me. Am I right in thinking that you are proposing to burn down my hotel?’

Powerscourt sighed. His mind was four hundred yards away, on the Brighton sea front, listening to the noises.

The Chief Constable intervened in what his family privately referred to as his Reading the Riot Act voice.

‘My dear Hudson,’ he began, rubbing his hands together, ‘this must all have come as rather a shock. We are not proposing to burn down your hotel. We are proposing to create an incendiary incident, mostly based on smoke rather than fire, in order to force a pair of villains who are holding Lord Powerscourt’s wife hostage on the sixth floor to come out. This has to be done as quickly as possible, or they will kill her. Perhaps Lord Powerscourt would care to show you the note they left in his house in London a couple of days ago.’

Powerscourt felt in his pocket. ‘You do not need to know anything about Harrison’s Bank,’ he said. ‘That must be regarded as confidential. But you can see what they will do to my wife.’ He handed over the note. Albert Hudson turned pale as he read the last two sentences.

The third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony begins with a melancholy sound like a hymn. Then it moves off into a different world.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had proposed to Lady Lucy Hamilton during a performance of this very symphony at the Albert Hall in London five years before. Powerscourt remembered scribbling his proposal on a scrap of newspaper, not daring to speak in case God or Beethoven sent a thunderbolt.

The conductor was pleased with his orchestra. Maybe this would mark a turning point in his career after all. The diners in the King George the Fourth paused over the Sole Meuniere or Lobster Thermidor as the music went on. Perhaps the man in the fisherman’s jersey had been right, the conductor thought. It was good for their souls.

Up on the sixth floor Lady Lucy was straining to listen. She knew this was not something the orchestra normally played. This wasn’t a waltz or a jolly piece of Handel. She strained in her seat towards the window. Her guardian of the moment was reading a foreign newspaper.

Powerscourt too was straining his ears towards the sea front. He knew the music should be well under way by now. He hoped Lucy could hear it.

Then Lucy knew. She knew the music. She knew when she had first heard it with Francis. She knew it was a message. She knew who it was from. She remembered that she had been crying softly in the Albert Hall when she had first heard this movement. She had cried till the end. I mustn’t cry now, or they’ll know something has happened, she said to herself. She wanted to sing, to shout, to perform once more her own Ode to Joy as she had wanted to in that darkened box opposite Kensington Gardens those five years ago when Francis asked her to marry him.

Francis has found me, she whispered to herself, blinking back the tears once more. Francis has found me. Francis is coming.

With a supreme effort of will, Lady Lucy Powerscourt turned slightly in her chair and pretended to fall asleep.

Francis is coming. Francis is coming.

‘What about my directors? What about my shareholders?’ said Albert Hudson, manager of the King George the Fourth, defiantly. ‘You are going to cause enormous damage to my hotel if you proceed with this madcap scheme. Who is going to pay for the repairs?’

As he looked round the room Albert Hudson thought this should have been his trump card. But he sensed that he was going to be proved wrong.

The man in the fisherman’s jersey spoke to him very gently. ‘All that has been taken care of, Mr Hudson. Mr McDonnell here has come specially from London. He is the private secretary to the Prime Minister.’

McDonnell too was gentle, trying to ease the pain of the old man whose hotel was to be sacrificed to the flames and the national interest.

‘I have a letter here from the Prime Minister, Mr Hudson. He says that Her Majesty’s Government will pay for any necessary repairs to any hotels in Brighton that follow any operations mounted by Lord Francis Powerscourt and the Chief Constable of Sussex. Here, you may read it.’

This was the result of Powerscourt’s one word telegraph to Whitehall. He had explained the likely position in an earlier message. ‘Schomberg’ simply asked for McDonnell to come in person.

Hudson stared hard at the notepaper, as if he suspected that it might be a forgery.

‘I too have had a message from the Prime Minister.’ The Chief Constable was moving in for the kill. ‘It gives me powers to take over any hotels I think fit in the Brighton area for the next forty-eight hours. Of course, I have no wish to use these powers. Co-operation will be much more satisfactory than coercion. If we can all work together then the final outcome is much more likely to succeed.’

Powerscourt wondered briefly what a hotel run by the police force would be like. Lots of minor rules and regulations, he suspected. Proper dress to be worn at all times. Drunkenness punished by a quick visit to the cells. Meals served exactly on time.

Albert Hudson looked round the room once more. Joe Hardy thought he might burst into tears, so sad had his face become as he thought of the flames and the smoke ruining the building he had tended for nearly fifty years.

‘Very good, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘With great reluctance, great reluctance, I place the King George the Fourth at your disposal. If anything should go wrong with this operation I shall tell my directors that the blame cannot be laid at my door. I presume that I may evacuate all my guests in the course of this evening.’

The Chief Constable looked at Powerscourt.

‘I’m afraid that would not fit in with our plans, Mr Hudson.’ Powerscourt spoke in his most emollient voice. He was wondering if Lucy had got the message, sent up to her through the windows of the hotel. ‘Most of this fire will take place on the upper floors of the west wing. The people we are concerned with are in Rooms 607 and 608 on the top floor, as you know. Mr Hardy here is a fire expert from London. He and Chief Fire Officer Matthews beside him from your local brigade will work out later this evening exactly how they intend to achieve the conflagration. But it is very important that the rest of the guests are evacuated at the time of the fire. It will make things look more convincing. With any luck – from our point of view, that is – there will be a certain amount of confusion. Maybe some of the women will scream. Maybe some of the children will cry. That is regrettable but it helps our purpose. These noises will carry up to the sixth floor. I hope they will help convince the two villains holding my wife that they have no alternative but to evacuate their rooms. Otherwise, they must feel, they will be burnt to a cinder.’