John Gardner - Never send flowers

The police were there as well, of course, though it was several weeks before their forensic conclusions were passed down to other authorities.

It was perfectly clear that David Dragonpol had been determined to do away with the royal party at the expense of a large number of other innocent lives, though his mistake had been to incapacitate Ben's night watchers before he had set the trap and tethered it in the correct position-just under the surface in the direct path of the Mark Twain.

The trap, when all became clear, was an aluminium beer keg almost certainly filled with a deadly mixture of gasoline and Thermite a black powder of iron oxide mingled with aluminium granules. There had also been a simple remote-control device which would have proved very effective: an electrical detonator set into a small ball of plastique explosive.

If this revolting device had been exploded as the Mark Twain passed over it, the resultant fireball would have undoubtedly engulfed the paddle steamer. Very few people would have got out alive.

The gasoline would have ignited, and in turn this would have set off the Thermite.

Thermite burns rapidly with a temperature in excess of 4,0000 Fahrenheit and so fiercely that it was at one time used to cut and weld metal in shipyards.

Bond's one stray bullet had pierced the keg, so spilling the contents, while the flare had ignited the gasoline, incinerating Dragonpol in the water.

Happily, the fire did not spread on to Big Thunder Mountain or back to any of the other exhibits.

Later, the French police learned that Dragonpol had bribed a lorry driver to as the driver said `Look the other way." Undoubtedly, the keg had been brought into the theme park with a normal delivery. Within forty-eight hours, the Disney security people had put new restrictions on all goods entering the facility.

By eight that Sunday morning, nobody would have known that there had even been an incident, though one look at Bond would have suggested that he was the loser in a barroom brawl. The Disney emergency unit had patched him up, but there was no way short of make-up to hide the bruises.

Now he waited near the main entrance, surprised at the lack of police and local protection, which he had expected to be there in force ready to greet the royal party. So he was bewildered when he saw Ben, still in jeans and a T-shirt, wandering back to his office in the warren of tunnels beneath Disneyland.

`Nobody's told you?" Ben still wore his smile, but his eyebrows shot up in his own unique version of disbelief.

`Told me what?" `It's off. She's not coming.

`Last night's little business did the trick, then?" `No, James.

This morning's little business did the trick." `That's a question of semantics.

`No, I mean less than an hour ago." `An hour..." Ben explained that the royal party had been staying with friends on the outskirts of Paris, and the Press had got wind of the location. The story was that they were there, cameras and notebooks at the ready, when she had emerged with her two children, at seven a.m for the drive to Euro Disney would take at least an hour.

`It seems that one of your people was with the royal detectives.

I haven't got the details, but she spotted Dragonpol's sister among the crowd. The lady in question had a very nasty hand grenade in her handbag. Your officer disarmed her. So, it's all over. The Princess made an immediate decision and called off the visit.

`Pity she didn't take notice earlier.

It was not until he arrived back in London, later in the day, that Bond learned the identity of the officer who had spotted Maeve Horton.

The taxi from Heathrow had dropped him in the King's Road and he walked, carrying his garment bag, to the Regency house. He was about to put his key in the lock when the door was opened by his elderly housekeeper, May, now returned from her jaunt up to Scotland.

May looked at him accusingly. `Mr James, there's a young woman here who says she's a house guest. She's a pleasant lass, and speaks English like a native, though she tells me she's foreign." To be `foreign' as far as May was concerned, was tantamount to being a carrier of what she called `that terrible Black Thing they had in the Middle Ages' Fredericka von Grusse sat in the living-room wearing a very stylish pants suit in red, with a lot of military flair and gold buttons on the jacket.

`You didn't tell me about the Scotch dragon,' she whispered after they got their breath back.

`Flick, the word is Scottish. I thought you spoke English.

Scotch is a drink-though I'm always reading American novels which refer to Scottish people as Scotch. It's like calling citizens of Oporto winos." `I know,' she grinned. `I love you when you get all correctional. I hear there was a bonfire party out at Euro Disney.

`You've heard about Maeve old Hort as well, have you?" `Heard about her? I nabbed her." `You ?` It all came out over a light supper, served by May who had begun to soften towards Fredericka.

Fredericka von Grusse had worked some kind of witchcraft on M and had been sent as the service representative among the Scotland Yard royal detectives.

When it came to leaving the house where the Princess and her children had spent the night, Fredericka had gone to take a look at the journalists before they brought the royal party out.

`Maeve was standing there, trying to look insignificant among the photographers,' she told him. `So I took no notice, pretended I hadn't see her. I walked around and chatted to some of the Press people, then worked my way behind her, did a kind of mental frisk and knew she was up to no good." `So?" He liked the part about doing a mental frisk.

`So I jammed my gun in her ear and told her I'd blow her head off if she moved. The cops came down, searched her and carted her away.

She had this damned great grenade in her handbag, and there's no doubt she was going to use it.

Fredericka had been allowed to sit in on the first interrogation and it was immediately obvious that Maeve's love for brother David was of the unbalanced and unhealthy variety. `She said she'd have died for him, that he had more talent in his little finger than Oh, you know how these obsessive people go on. The whole damned family was crazy if you ask me." It also became clear that sister Maeve was the true answer to one of the great Dragonpol conundrums. `She did the flowers,' Fredericka told him. `Admitted it almost as soon as I asked. If anyone had bothered to check her passport, they'd have found she followed on David's heels, taking those bloody roses with her and making sure that they were delivered to the gravesides. Oh, by the way, M wants us both in the office by nine tomorrow morning.

`To congratulate us, no doubt." Bond cocked his head and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

`Or to ask for a full explanation of two dead bodies at Schloss Drache." When it came to it, M asked no awkward questions. He spoke for a long time about the Dragonpol incident, and getting quite serious about it at one point. `Friend Dragonpol,' he said, `is, I believe, a symptom of the sick and dangerous society in which we live." From there he launched into the real reason he had summoned them to his office.

`There are changes in the air." He seemed tense and serious.

`Changes that will affect this service drastically. The job's changing with the world, though I personally believe the world's a more dangerous place than it was when we had a cut-and-dried cold war. A thousand times more dangerous, which is probably why the powers-that-be are demanding a complete reorganization. It's going to affect me, and it's particularly going to affect you two. You'll get the full details of promotion and the new job within the week. I simply wanted to warn you before it happens.

`I hope it's not playing detective again,' Bond muttered. `That's too dangerous.