A Death in Diamonds

Extract from The Queen Who Came in from the Cold Coming 2025

‘Isn’t Mrs Jones vile? I loathe her. I just hate her to the depths of my being and want awful, disgusting things to happen to her. Is that terrible of me? I have visions of her stripped of that gaudy dress and dragged through the streets. Wasn’t she hideous tonight? I’ll have her rendition of “Let’s Fall in Love” going through my head for a week. She deserves rich punishment for that, at the very least.’

Pavel Michalowski listened to the disembodied voice coming from the speaker he had rigged up to his telephone receiver as he assessed the work he still needed to do tonight. Pavel was good with wires and technology. He had been building radios since childhood. The speaker, combined with a microphone ‘borrowed’ from the BBC, was a neat little technical l solution to the problem of staying in touch with loquacious friends and demanding clients while getting on with the task in hand.

‘You love her, admit it,’ he said, picking up a stack of bills and glancing through them. ‘You’re just jealous.’

‘Of Tony Armstrong Jones? Are you joking? The man is tiny. And outrageous. And so bourgeois.’

The voice, rich and resonant, belonged to Pavel’s friend Henry Coxon, a journalist and bon viveur. He was talking about Princess Margaret, nicknamed ‘Mrs Jones’ by Henry since her recent marriage to Pavel’s friend, Tony.

‘So are you – bourgeois at least,’ Pavel said. ‘So am I. And Tony’s talented. So’s she. The song was nice. She should do it professionally. It would do her good to try hard at something.’

‘Did you say she was good?’ Henry asked. ‘I can hardly hear you. Have you got me echoing round your house again? I hate it when you put me on the speaker.’

‘Then don’t call me when I’m catching up on work after a party.’

Henry was upset. ‘When else can I call, if not after a party? It’s the only time I have anything to say.’

‘You have nothing to say. You’re a bigger bitch than her highness.’

Henry was bitter because he’d had visions of squiring the princess himself. When her last engagement had gone wrong, he honestly thought he was in with a chance. Not of ending up at Kensington Palace, perhaps, but at least of a tale to tell his grandchildren. Instead, her amused indifference burned and baffled him. And now Pavel’s friend Tony had nabbed her.

‘Oh, that’s mean!’ he complained. ‘And it’s her royal highness. You wouldn’t know that, being foreign.’

‘I’m not foreign,’ Pavel reminded his friend, good humouredly.

‘With a name like Michalowski?’

Pavel ignored this remark. He thought back to the song, to which Margaret had adapted the lyrics. Birds do it, bees do it, Even the Navy overseas do it . . . Humming to himself, he turned to his dining table, which served as his office desk, and cast his eye over a print that had recently returned from the framer. It was a posed image, Pavel’s stock in trade: a girl in pearls, head turned three-quarters to the camera, body in a black turtleneck sweater that paid testament to the structural quality of her underwear. This particular subject wasn’t a girl, more of a proper woman, with a younger version of herself sitting beside her, hair neatly brushed and caught in a clip, staring limpidly out of the frame.

Pavel gazed at the two faces briefly before sliding the picture into its packaging and stacking it with a pile of others awaiting distribution or collection. Girls in pearls bored him to tears.

Henry was still going. ‘Of course, I’ll have to say something nice in my column on Friday. God, I hate the way we have to grovel, don’t you? It’s so outdated. They’re humans, these royals. Why can’t we just say so?’

Pavel grunted a non-committal reply.

Henry lowered his voice, but its plummy tones, rendered raspy by a forty-a-day cigarette habit, still filled the room.

‘You know, I was rather outspoken at the Ivy a couple of nights ago, after the second bottle. I could swear someone started following me afterwards. The dark forces of the Establishment, out to stifle the gentlemen of the press. Can you hear me? Are you even listening?’

‘I’m listening,’ Pavel assured him. ‘But I don’t know why. You’re so full of shit. Go to bed, Henry.’

‘You love my shit, Pav darling! You do! And you know I adore Mrs Jones really, the minx. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her, giving up the love of her life for the sake of her duty, when all she really wanted was the chance to keep us all bobbing and bowing to her. Doesn’t it drive you mad? But that little waist, that hair, those … I know you don’t like it when I refer to the royal boobs, but they were spectacular tonight. I wonder if she’s preggers. Of course, you like ‘em boyish ….

Pavel opened the door of his darkroom, converted from the integral garage of his little house, where enlargements of more interesting prints were pegged on strips of washing line above a trestle table that held his developing trays.

‘Talking of which, a bird threw herself at me last week,’ Henry said. ‘Proper posh totty. Forgot to tell you. You think I don’t still have it in me, Pav, but I assure you, this one was a corker. Legs all the way till Christmas. Couldn’t get enough of me …‘

Pavel been at a club in Soho last night, greedily capturing the silhouette of a spotlit saxophonist through a haze of smoke. The blown-up print was certainly more arresting than the posed portraits, but was it too obvious? What about the wild-eyed look of the pianist, urging the horn section to greater heights? Or the blonde with the French-looking haircut, very short, like Jean Seberg, whom he’d encountered at the bar?

‘Look, someone’s at the door,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment. If I’m not, call the police. I’m coming, I’m coming!’

His voice faded away, and Pavel’s thoughts remained with the blonde, who had slipped out of his flat this morning leaving a tangle of sheets imbued with her smell. Before going, she had borrowed his camera to take his post-coital picture and, more by luck than judgment, she’d done a decent enough job. He examined his face in the resulting images impartially, noting the lack of symmetry between his eyes, the severe angularity of the nose. It was, however, a beautiful face. It must be: it got the job done, as witnessed by the rumpled sheets upstairs. He thought of it as another tool of his trade, like the hands that were so good with wires and switches.

Pavel wondered in passing how Henry had got on with the ‘posh totty’ he’d just mentioned. Henry wasn’t usually successful with women, unless they happened to have a thing for tweed jackets and cord trousers. It was the uniform they’d worn at prep school together aged seven, and that Henry had yet to grow out of. Which probably explained a lot.

Pavel looked round. Something was off. Behind him, the house had gone very quiet.

Where was Henry? What had happened to him?

‘Hello?’ he called out.

Hadn’t Henry mentioned being followed? Pavel had automatically ignored his friend’s mentions of ‘dark forces of the Establishment’. He didn’t believe in such things. Still, Henry was very good at making enemies and apparently he’d trash-talked the Queen’s sister in a public restaurant. Pavel felt a prickle of unease.

‘Henry?’ He left the darkroom and walked over to the microphone, which sat on a teetering stack of unreturned library books. ‘Henry?’

There was a strange, muffled sound through the speaker.

‘All present and correct,’ Henry said, through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘I just had to go to the cake tin for a little something. Fruit cake. Wedding last weekend. Whisky makes me peckish. And Mrs Jones was very miserly with the canapés. What was I saying?’

‘Someone was at your door.’

‘Oh yes. The mad old bat downstairs wanted to tell me off for dancing around in hobnail boots. By which she means walking in stockinged feet across my own floorboards. I swear I’ll kill her one of these days. What was I saying before that? Oh, God, tonight’s cabaret. Bloody Cole Porter. I’ll have to put something in my column on Friday. What shall I say? “Charming’” “gracious”, “tuneful”, grovel grovel grovel … “Her Royal Highness, in sparkling form, accompanied herself on the piano with the skill of a seasoned performer . . .” “The blooming cheek of a fresh young bride . . .” Blooming cheek indeed. God, I hate myself. I said, I hate myself, Pav! Are you there?’

But this time, Pavel had gone to answer a knock at his own door. He lived in the heart of Belgravia and it wasn’t unusual for friends who’d been tipped out of pubs and clubs or girlfriends’ flats to show up in need of an overnight place on his sofa. However, to his surprise, the two darkly-dressed men standing on the threshold were strangers. Without preamble, the taller of the pair said, ‘We have a message from Mirny. Hand delivered.’

‘Pav! Honestly!’ Henry boomed out behind him. ‘I don’t think I can do it. I need another job. D’you think the Socialist Worker will hire me?’

The tall man frowned. His eyes flicked past Pavel’s shoulder to the lamplit room. He seemed to hesitate. ‘You’re not alone?’

‘I am,’ Pavel assured him.

He’d had a brief moment of panic, but the mention of Mirny reassured him. He needed to talk to these visitors undisturbed. He ushered them in and indicated the empty room with a sweep of his hand. As they stepped inside, the shorter man closed the door quietly behind them.

‘You’re not listening. I’m hanging up!’ Henry threatened. ‘Honestly, all you do is berate me anyway, when I’m just speaking for the common man.’

They all looked towards the speaker and the two strangers’ eyes lit up with relief. They were alone.

‘Mirny?’ Pavel asked, sotto voce.

The taller man indicated the speaker, and Pavel went over to the telephone, depressing the exposed hook switch with his finger and cutting Henry off mid-flow. As he turned back, the taller man took two athletic strides towards him and caught him on the jaw with an upper cut so powerful that he heard his brain rattle in his skull.

The pain was secondary to the shock. Pavel’s legs gave way and he began to fall. Scrabbling hands clutched at thin air. So it had happened after all. He should have been paying attention.

As he hit the ground, he felt someone grip his forearm, and the sharp prick of a needle through the crisp, thin cotton of his shirt. His vision was blurred and the two men seemed to swim above him, as through water. He said a prayer, but no words came out of his mouth.

‘Nice speaker setup,’ one of the men observed.

‘Shut up,’ the other one told him.

Seconds later, the world faded to a pinprick and turned black.

Click here to find out more about THE QUEEN WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by S.J. Bennett.