Tom Cain - The accident man

To Wake, the accumulation of power and influence was a matter of duty as well as a personal pleasure. He believed that people like him, the ones who truly understood the world, were obliged to save its people from the consequences of their own stupidity. Left to their own devices, the masses made distressingly poor decisions. They elected genocidal maniacs like Hitler. They swore allegiance to tyrannical despots like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. It was really best for everyone if running the planet was left to the experts.

He rose from his desk to greet his visitor. Wake had taken great care to cultivate his appearance, from the artfully unkempt mane of silver hair that he swept back over his ears to the custom-made tweed jackets, soft cotton shirts, and corduroy trousers that signified both his affluence and his status as a free thinker. By contrast, Jack Grantham's drab suit demonstrated that even as a senior officer of MI6 he was, in the end, just another civil servant. Still, it would be unwise to underestimate him. Grantham did not possess the usual flabby pallor of a desk-bound bureaucrat, and there was a look of measured, skeptical assessment in his gray eyes.

He had the air, Wake decided, of a man who had come a long way, but still had farther to go. His energies had not yet been depleted by the unrelenting grind of the Whitehall machine, and there was a toughness about him that was as much mental as physical. He would not be fobbed off by easy options or the countless excuses that officialdom found for inaction. Wake had been keeping an eye on Grantham's career for some time. He was curious to see whether his abilities matched his growing reputation.

They exchanged a cordial handshake.

"Jack, my boy, how very good to see you."

Grantham responded with a single sharp nod of acknowledgment.

"So, how are things down at Vauxhall Cross?" Wake asked, settling back down behind his desk and waving in the direction of a chair to let his guest know that he could sit too.

"Things could be better," Grantham replied. "That crash in Paris has stirred things up."

"I daresay it has. No doubt there will be claims that it could have been prevented, but I can't see that you have any need to be concerned. After all, it was simply an accident. A ghastly, tragic accident, of course, but nothing to worry the secret intelligence service."

"That depends. We think this might have been a hit. So we're wondering who might have wanted to kill the princess, or her companion, and why?"

"What does that have to do with me?" Wake leaned forward a fraction. His interest had been piqued.

"Well, you've studied every threat to our national security for the past forty years. You've known our leaders and half our enemies' leaders too. You've been in the room when people have discussed and even planned operations off the books. So you tell me. Why would anyone want to kill the Princess of Wales?"

"Well, now, that's an intriguing question," said Wake, relaxing back into his chair. "I imagine you're not the only one asking it. Has the media raised the prospect of foul play?"

The MI6 man shook his head. "Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. Some of the wilder conspiracy-theory Web sites are claiming the princess was pregnant. The boyfriend's father swears that the Duke of Edinburgh has been plotting against him. And the princess herself apparently believed the Prince of Wales would have her killed in a car crash. We think she put it all down on tape. God help us if that ever sees the light of day."

Wake sighed. "The poor girl, she always had such a desperate need for love, such a strong sense of persecution. Not surprising, I suppose. The parents' divorce was particularly messy. So, was she pregnant?"

"We don't know. We don't think so."

"Never mind. It's not important. The princess was no longer a member of the royal family, so even if she had given birth, her future children would have had no constitutional significance. Nor do I believe for one second that any member of the royal family would have anything whatever to do with an assassination, under any circumstances. The very idea is absurd."

Grantham paused for a second before he spoke again. When he did, his words were impeccably polite, his voice was quiet, yet with a steely tone. "I'm not suggesting that the palace had any direct involvement, but there may have been others who believed they were acting in the monarchy's or the country's best interests. Let's just suppose-hypothetically-that such people existed. What would be their motive for committing such a crime?"

Wake picked up a pen from the desk in front of him and tapped it a couple of times on the walnut surface, gathering his thoughts. Then he began to speak.

"I went for a walk yesterday evening, up to the palace. It was quite extraordinary. Huge crowds were gathered in front of the gates, and there was an anger about them, a feverish intensity quite unlike anything I have ever known in this country. They were hurt, bereft, and they wanted someone to blame. It would only have taken one man on a soapbox to whip them into a frenzy, and I swear they would have stormed the gates."

Grantham seemed about to interrupt, but Wake held up a hand. "Let me continue. I walked down Constitution Hill, through Hyde Park, and into Kensington Gardens. On the grass in front of Kensington Palace, below the princess's apartment, there is a mass, a veritable sea of flowers. Some are magnificent bouquets, some just pathetic little bunches of wilting blooms, but all of them are laid there in tribute. And every minute that passes, more people are bringing more flowers, more messages, more candles. They are talking to one another, weeping, complete strangers collapsing into one another's arms.

"This is something entirely new. All the reserve that has long characterized our nation, all that stiff upper lip and muddling through, has been replaced by an almost wanton hysteria. And yet at the same time it's actually quite primitive, a return to the cult of the goddess, the mother. Clearly the princess symbolized something extraordinarily powerful. So I can't help but ask myself: If this is the influence she could exert after death, what might have happened had she lived?

"Yesterday the prime minister called her the People's Princess. It was a trite little phrase, but telling all the same. She did indeed have a remarkable hold over the people, and every interview she gave, every picture for which she posed merely underlined how much more affection and sympathy she commanded than her former husband.

"Of course, that's natural. People will always sympathize with a wronged wife, particularly if she is beautiful and vulnerable. In normal circumstances, that really doesn't matter. But these are far from normal circumstances. The former husband is also the future king of England, and it would be impossible for him to rule effectively, perhaps even to ascend the throne at all, if there was another, competing court surrounding his former wife. Everything he did would be judged by the degree to which she was seen to approve or disapprove. It would be intolerable.

"Monarchies are by nature monopolistic. They cannot allow competition. So I can, in theory, see why a group or an individual concerned with the preservation of the monarchy might deem it necessary to remove such a threat to the Crown."

Grantham shrugged. "But you just said yourself, the death of the princess has plunged the monarchy into crisis. If she really has been killed by some kind of fanatical royalist, then they've got the wrong result."

"Not necessarily. Only one full day has passed since the crash, so it's far too early to tell how its aftereffects will play out. A while from now, things might look very different.

"As matters stand, the Prince of Wales cannot possibly marry Mrs. Parker Bowles, still less make her his queen. The monarchy is at such a low ebb, one can barely imagine it surviving to Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee in five years' time, still less celebrating such an event. But however hysterical they may be now, people will forget the princess eventually. If she fades from their hearts, if the prince is forgiven, if the family survives, well, a dispassionate observer might say that the killing-if such it was-had served its purpose."