Spare

To me, JLP’s finest trait was his reverence for truth, his expertise in truth. He was the opposite of so many people in government and working in the Palace. So, not long after he started working for Willy and me, I asked him to get me some truth—in the form of the secret police files on Mummy’s crash.

He looked down, looked away. Yes, he worked for Willy and me, but he cared about us too, and he cared about tradition, chain of command. My request seemed to jeopardize all three. He grimaced and furrowed his brow, an amorphous area, since JLP didn’t have a lot of hair. Finally, he smoothed back the charcoal bristles remaining on each side and said that, were he to procure said files, it would be very upsetting for me. Very upsetting indeed, Harry.

Yes. I know. Sort of the point.

He nodded. Ah. Hmm. I see.

A few days later he brought me into a tiny office up a back staircase in St. James’s Palace and handed me a brown Do Not Bend envelope. He said he’d decided against showing me all the police files. He’d gone through and removed the more…“challenging” ones. For your sake.

I was frustrated. But I didn’t argue. If JLP didn’t think I could handle them, then I probably couldn’t.

I thanked him for protecting me.

He said he’d leave me to it, then walked out.

I took several breaths, opened the file.

Exterior photos. Outside the tunnel in which the crash occurred. Looking into the mouth of the tunnel.

Interior photos. A few feet inside the tunnel.

Deep interior photos. Well inside the tunnel. Looking down the tunnel, and out the other end.

Finally…close-ups of the smashed Mercedes, which was said to have entered the tunnel around midnight and never emerged in one piece.

All seemed to be police photos. But then I realized that many, if not most, were from paps and other photographers at the scene. The Paris police had seized their cameras. Some photos were taken moments after the crash, some much later. Some showed police officers walking about, others showed onlookers milling and gawping. All gave a sense of chaos, a disgraceful carnival atmosphere.

Now came more detailed photos, clearer, closer, inside the Mercedes. There was the lifeless body of Mummy’s friend, whom I now knew to be her boyfriend. There was her bodyguard, who’d survived the crash, though it left him with gruesome injuries. And there was the driver, slumped over the wheel. He was blamed by many for the crash, because there was allegedly alcohol in his blood, and because he was dead and couldn’t answer.

At last I came to the photos of Mummy. There were lights around her, auras, almost halos. How strange. The color of the lights was the same color as her hair—golden. I didn’t know what the lights were, I couldn’t imagine, though I came up with all sorts of supernatural explanations.

As I realized their true origin, my stomach clenched.

Flashes. They were flashes. And within some of the flashes were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens. Those men who’d chased her…they’d never stopped shooting her while she lay between the seats, unconscious, or semiconscious, and in their frenzy they’d sometimes accidentally photographed each other. Not one of them was checking on her, offering her help, not even comforting her. They were just shooting, shooting, shooting.

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t dreamed. I’d been told that paps chased Mummy, that they’d hunted her like a pack of wild dogs, but I’d never dared to imagine that, like wild dogs, they’d also feasted on her defenseless body. I hadn’t been aware, before this moment, that the last thing Mummy saw on this earth was a flashbulb.

Unless…Now I looked much closer at Mummy: no visible injuries. She was slumped, out of it, but generally…fine. Better than fine. Her dark blazer, her glowing hair, her radiant skin—doctors at the hospital where she was taken couldn’t stop remarking how beautiful she was. I stared, trying to make myself cry, but I couldn’t, because she was so lovely, and so alive.

Maybe the photos JLP held back were more definitive. Maybe they showed death in plainer terms. But I didn’t consider that possibility too closely. I slammed the folder shut and said: She’s hiding.

I’d requested this file because I sought proof, and the file proved nothing, except that Mummy was in a car crash, after which she looked generally unharmed, while those who chased her continued to harass her. That was all. Rather than proof, I’d discovered more reasons for rage. In that little office, seated before that wretched Do Not Bend envelope, the red mist came down, and it wasn’t a mist, it was a torrent.

53.