Free Rogue's Gallery by Robert Barnard

know about that?’
    â€˜â€™Appen more than you knew. I checked on the night she disappeared that there was still the case she packed should anyone be rushed off to hospital. It was where it always was, in that old wardrobe on the landing. And I checked next day as well and it were gone. And I knew that the spade you put away in the shed had earth on it, thoughI hadn’t used it at all the day before. And I was bound to see where the earth had been turned over.’ He took my hand, shook it, and then kissed it. ‘You did a good job, David. The best thing you ever did. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’
    I nodded. When I thought about it, I decided the final tally concerning what I had done was not too bad: five children growing up to be fine adults, a man rescued from a hideous marriage. If I was the exception, it was because I was the one who did it. I was and am a special case. All the time I was nursing Dad I was having funny visions of bars growing inside the windows of our house, felt that the open prison I had lived in up to then was turning into a high-security one. Dad’s death when it came would not release me, nor did it. I had no friends, though the family who were still around in the neighbourhood were friends, and those are the best kind.
    Now I am retired, and I work in the garden, though not there , and listen to the radio, watch a bit of television. I like to know about other people’s lives. But I like to know about them from afar: I have grown so used to my house, and sometimes it seems to me that I have always been old in it. And now I know I have come to love it. Here is enshrined everything I have achieved. I am a prisoner who has come to love his cell. Nothing is left of the David who might have been. I am watching from outside, as if I was dead. I killed our mother, and she in her turn has killed me.

T HE F ALL OF THE H OUSE OF O LDENBORG
    When he emerged from the grand audience chamber the prince was in a right pet.
    â€˜It makes me absolutely sick!’ he muttered. ‘Sick to the pit of my stomach. Did you hear that, Pat? The odious endearments to his new wife. My mother! The King my father not two months dead, and my mother is now my aunt and he is now my stepfather! Did you hear him calling me “son”?’
    â€˜I did, and I heard your reply, Hammy.’
    A smile of satisfaction lightened his petulant face.
    â€˜Did you? Pretty neat, I thought it.’
    And totally unwise, like everything he did. After a great deal of ‘son’ talk had made him more and more tetchy, his mother had commented on the cloudiness of his brow.
    â€˜On the contrary, I’ve had too much “son”,’ he said. Quick, I suppose, but not the way to behave in the newKing’s court. Claudius is a soldier, and not to be played with.
    Hammy was peeved. Naturally he was peeved. The moment his father, the old king, died, his uncle called a snap election, won it, and was crowned before Hammy could get back to the Danish capital. He was studying, as I was, at the University of Wittenburg, where he was a very ineffectual president of the Student Union. I was his deputy, and I did all the work and took all the decisions, with typical Irish efficiency. He spent most of his time in amateur dramatics – the traditional resort of the totally unserious student – which was how he acquired the diminutive of his name. I read whatever books were available in English or Latin, and financed my studies as Diplomatic and Foreign Affairs Correspondent of the London Sunne.
    â€˜The man is a brute!’ exclaimed Hammy. ‘If only I’d been here to stand against him. As it was, the Danish aristocracy was bound to elect a man of that type. They’re still Vikings at heart.’
    I wasn’t inclined to deny, after a mere week or two of observations, that King Claudius was a thug, albeit a thug with an expensive education. Still, Hammy was