A Death in Diamonds

PARIS, APRIL 1957

Chapter 1

The Queen knew instantly that she had made a fatal mistake, figuratively speaking.

‘Mais bien sur, madame. Ça arrive.’

During the candlelit dinner at the Louvre to celebrate her second night in France on this, her first state visit, she had merely mentioned, perhaps a shade too wistfully, that she had never seen the Mona Lisa. The Salle des Caryatides was packed with le tout-Paris. Every minister, grand hostess and eminent dignitary was here, it seemed, sitting elbow to elbow, dressed in their finery, watching her closely. However, beyond the odd statue and ceiling, she had yet to see any art.

Now, after a brief consultation among the luminaries of the museum, two porters were carrying the Leonardo into the room, resplendent in its ornate gilt frame. They leaned it against a chair for her to look at, and it was the most extra-ordinary moment: those two famous eyes, staring impenetrably back at her from under their heavy lids. One knew the image so well as an illustration that it was astonishing to come face to face with the real thing. The Queen felt for an instant how so many people must feel, perhaps, coming face to face with her.

The portrait carried a huge weight of expectation, but was remarkably human in scale, close to, in the flickering light. Behind the eyes, the Queen saw a young woman, beautifully composed and a little bit self-conscious in the act being scrutinised. I know how you feel, she thought. The artistry was wonderful, of course, but it was hard to concentrate while everyone was leaning forward to see her reaction.

‘C’est merveilleux, n’est-ce pas?’ she said, fully aware that this might well be the understatement of her visit.

Shortly afterwards, when they were joined by yet more of the great and good in yet another lavish salon, the spotlight on the Queen herself was even more intense. Hundreds of people jostled together, eager to greet her, and sharp elbows dug into nipped-in waists as they jockeyed for a better view. At one point the crowd surged forward in a wave and the Queen felt the press of the throng. She was quite hemmed in and there was no room to breathe. For a moment she was almost frightened. It was gratifying to be so popular, but right now, she would be grateful to get out of the evening with her clothes and person intact.

Thinking of what her grandmother, Queen Mary, would say, she steadied herself and put on a brave face. But as she looked out over the sea of eager faces, two stood out. One was not looking in her direction exactly, but at someone in the crowd behind her. His face was briefly twisted into an unguarded scowl and there was a look of savage hatred in his eyes. The Queen had seen that look only a few times before, as a teenager at Windsor, when officers or their families had described some of the worst atrocities of the war. She knew who he was, understood his history, and guessed who he might be staring at.

The other face was scanning the room with undisguised disdain, the mouth crimped in frustration. At last, the eyes found hers, and instantly the face went blank. But the Queen had seen enough. This was someone she knew very well.

She had work to do when she got home, because it was clear that someone from inside her closest circle had been trying to sabotage this visit. Her response would be delicate and difficult, and she wasn’t sure who she could trust.

In the car on the way back to the British Embassy, she said to Philip, ‘Did you notice, they served us oysters tonight?’

‘Yes, very good ones.’ He gave her a knowing grin, before frowning slightly. ‘I didn’t think you liked them, though. Did you eat ’em?’

‘No, I didn’t. Actually, I’m quite fond of oysters.’ She returned his grin. ‘But I simply can’t eat them abroad.’

‘I think we can trust the Frogs, on this occasion. They’ll hardly try to poison you. And they do oysters better than anyone. Always did.’

‘I don’t doubt that. It’s not the French, it’s the oysters themselves. One never knows. And an upset tummy would be a disaster.’

‘I suppose it would. Pity. They were top-hole.’

The Queen adjusted her fur around her shoulders and glanced out at the twinkling lights on the Place de la Concorde. They would be back at the embassy soon. She loved this grand square by the river, with a backdrop provided by the classical Crillon Hotel, a central ancient obelisk, topped with gold, and a general air of panache. But it did not escape her memory that a king and his family had literally lost their heads here.

Should she tell Philip what she was really thinking?

The limousine traced the edges of the square and drove down the Rue Royale. The last time she and her husband were here in ’48, she had been secretly pregnant with Charles. Oh, to be twenty-two, newly married and hopelessly in love, in Paris for the first time, while everyone went wild all around them, still carrying the joy of Liberation. What a trip that had been.

She didn’t think, before they arrived two days ago, that they could possibly repeat that experience – not now she was the grand old age of thirty, with two children at home and all the cares of state, and the endless unfounded marital rumours one had to endure. But tonight, the Parisians thronged the streets as enthusiastically as ever. She was touched beyond measure. Philip was right: she doubted very much indeed that they had tried to poison her, or undermine her with a dodgy huître.

And yet . . .

The Queen asked for little when she went abroad. She had a strong constitution and decent stamina, was happy to work to a punishing schedule and ate almost anything that was put in front of her. However, shellfish were a rare but firm exception. One simply couldn’t fulfil one’s duties if one was doubled over with stomach cramps; her Private Office always made that clear. Nevertheless, last night she had been served six oysters à la sauce mignonette avec fraises et champagne, as if nothing had been said.

It would be easy to put it down to a simple muddle. Inevitably, little things were always going wrong and usually it was terribly funny. But there had also been the question of the missing speech.

Twenty-four hours ago, her reply to the toast from the President of France was set to be the pièce de résistance of her first day in France. It was a reminder that she spoke fluent French and a hymn of praise to the Entente Cordiale that bound two nations whose joint sacrifices had won a war against terrible odds. The text wasn’t long, but it had been weeks in the making and she had practised it endlessly.

Then, an hour before she was due leave for the Élysée Palace to deliver it, her private secretary had approached her, pale as death, and announced that both it and all copies and carbons had gone missing. He and the ambassador were desperately scrabbling to put something new together, but she knew it wouldn’t be the same. There was a high risk that speaking unfamiliar phrases in her second language would lose most of the speech’s power.

By a stroke of luck, she had remembered that one of the later drafts of the original had come back from the typing pool at Buckingham Palace with a couple of excellent suggestions, in perfect, idiomatic French. It had occurred to the Queen that the secretary in question might have kept a carbon of her own, and she must have done, because fifty minutes later she was dictating it down the telephone to the private secretary himself. Disaster was averted.

That temporary loss of the original, on its own, one might have put down to misfortune. But all copies and carbons? Really?

And now, on top of those near disasters, the unguarded look of disgust directed at the pressing crowd around her at the Louvre shed a new light on everything. Someone most definitely did not want this visit to succeed. Someone in her own circle. Someone she had always trusted implicitly until tonight.

The Queen recognised that on this evidence of missing carbons and unexpected shellfish and sour expressions, it would be easy to say she had a young mother’s overactive imagination, or that she was tired and emotional after two busy days abroad and developing an unhealthy complex of some sort. None of which she dared be accused of, when this visit was so important.

Anyway, at this moment what could she or Philip do? As the car turned left into the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she kept her thoughts to herself.

Chapter 2

‘Well done, Your Majesty,’ her private secretary told her the next morning, a trifle patronisingly. ‘I think we can chalk last night down as another success.’

‘Thank you, Hugh. It was a bit of a crush. There were moments I wondered if they were going to swallow me whole.’

Sir Hugh Masson smiled as if her observation were merely a joke. He hadn’t been on the receiving end of that tidal wave of attention.

This morning, her three pinstriped senior courtiers were lined up neatly in front of her at the ambassador’s residence, ready to discuss the new day. Sir Hugh was accompanied by Major Miles Urquhart, the deputy private secretary (or DPS, as he was known); and Jeremy Radnor-Milne, her press secretary. Solid, traditional and dependable, they were chief among ‘men in moustaches’, as Philip called them – a collective term for the old guard the Queen had inherited from her father.

Sir Hugh Masson’s solid grey whiskers were counterbalanced by a large pair of black-rimmed spectacles that emphasised his bookish tendencies. ‘The prime minister wanted me to let you know how pleased he is with how everything’s going, ma’am. Your evening gowns are a particular hit. The choice of flowers of the French fields for the decoration was much admired.’

‘Mr Hartnell did try very hard with the embroidery.’

‘It’s good to see British design compete with the French,’ Miles Urquhart, the DPS, added cheerfully. ‘And outclass them, you might say.’ He sported a russet ’tache that bristled with delight and national pride. Urquhart was always absolutely certain that the British monarchy was the best institution in the world and the answer to almost any problem, even fashion-related. The Queen found it quite challenging to live up to such high expectations.

‘Oh, I hesitate to say we outclass Dior and Balmain,’ she demurred, ‘but I’m glad we can hold our own.’

‘One begins to understand why they wanted you as head of state.’

She shook her head. ‘That was very odd, wasn’t it?’

It was still astonishing to her, and not helpful in managing Urquhart’s expectations, but – unknown to all but the British prime minister and his closest circle – the French prime minister had indeed raised the idea of a Franco-British union on a visit last year, with her as its figurehead. It had taken them all aback.

‘After all they went through to get rid of the last lot,’ she added. ‘Mr Eden was right to say no. Anyway, I get the impression it was all the scheme of Monsieur Mollet alone. Nobody’s mentioned it since.’

Jeremy Radnor-Milne laughed a little too loud. ‘Haha! You’re well out of it, ma’am. France hasn’t covered itself in glory recently. They seem rather desperate, if one may say so.’

The press secretary wore a thin black line of facial fuzz modelled on the actor David Niven’s, in an attempt to suggest the actor’s military derring-do and suave urbanity. Like Urquhart, he was conspicuously patriotic and he was probably referring to France’s ill-fated attempt last year to maintain control of Egypt’s Suez Canal by sending in the troops. However, the United Kingdom had done the same, and come out of last year’s Suez affair equally disastrously.

Gone were the days of gunship diplomacy, when the old imperial powers could sail in and sort out problems abroad with a little show of muscle. One needed the Americans on board now and, as Mr Eisenhower had made it very plain from Washington that he was not going to get involved, the French and British were forced to make an ignominious retreat. At home, Mr Eden had lost his premiership because of it.

‘The talk here is all about making friends with the Hun,’ Urquhart said, with a shake of his head. ‘This new treaty of Rome. The “Economic Community”, whatever they call it. You wouldn’t think France and Germany had been at each other’s throats for the best part of a century.’

‘I suppose that’s what they’re trying to avoid,’ the Queen pointed out. ‘But I’m not so sure everyone’s behind the treaty.’ She addressed herself to her private secretary. ‘I wanted to tell you, Hugh, the Comte de Longchamp is not in favour at all. You know his war record – what the Nazis put him through. And my papers tell me he has the ear of his president.’

‘How do you know, ma’am? Who told you?’

‘I saw it on his face last night,’ the Queen said. This had been the first of the two odd expressions she noticed at the Louvre. ‘A look of pure hatred, directed at the German ambassador standing behind me. I know it was the German ambassador because he has the most frightful breath. Somebody really ought to tell him at some point. Not ideal for a diplomat.’

‘I’ll pass the news on,’ Sir Hugh promised.

‘Not the bit about the breath.’

‘Oh, that, too, ma’am. The Foreign Office will be delighted. Thank you.’

They moved on to her itinerary for the day, which was set out in five-minute increments from now until midnight, describing exactly where she would be and whom she would expect to meet, from the workers at a Renault factory to the Mayor of Paris. She noticed that there were two comfort breaks, of five minutes each, and planned to limit her liquid intake accordingly.

At the end, she mentioned the oysters.

Two sets of bushy eyebrows furrowed in horror and the lips of Jeremy Radnor-Milne pursed in confusion under his thin black moustache.

‘Shellfish,’ Sir Hugh explained in hushed tones, before turning back to the Queen.

‘Did you eat any, ma’am?’

‘No. I was terribly rude. I had some of the sauce mignonette.’

Radnor-Milne’s jaw had dropped. He gaped like a fish. ‘I . . . I . . . I don’t see why on earth they would have—’

‘Some chef must have got carried away with the menu,’ Urquhart snapped, puffed up with indignation on her behalf. ‘I’ll have a word.’

‘Please don’t bother,’ the Queen said. ‘It’s too late now.’

She had been watching them closely. The men in moustaches all seemed equally aghast, just as they had done two days ago when her speech went missing. These were men whose service her father had prized, and she relied on them completely in order to carry out her job. One of them, she now knew, was lying to her. What about the other two?

Chapter 3

Bobo Macdonald – Margaret, or Miss Macdonald to everyone except the immediate royal family – had a few whiskers of her own, but she was very much not one of the men in moustaches. She was the Queen’s dresser and more: her original nursery nursemaid, her confidante, the only person except her sister to have shared a childhood bedroom with the young princess, and the only one trusted nowadays to prepare and preserve her clothes. There was nowhere Bobo didn’t travel with her mistress. She had even accompanied the royal couple on honeymoon.

That evening, she was on duty while the Queen got ready for her last night in France.

‘What do you think?’

The Queen was peering at herself anxiously in the cheval mirror in her dressing room at the ambassadorial residence. Her third evening gown of the visit was a new step: the first time she had ever worn a body-skimming column dress, instead of one with her signature full skirts, like her mother’s.

The silk glittered in the lamplight, heavy with handsewn crystals. It was a beautiful creation, but was it too much? Or not enough? Its designer, Hardy Amies, had also created the peacock-blue gown she had worn last night. When he showed her the sketch for it, she had wondered about the strong colour. He suggested it worked because ‘you are a femme de trente ans, ma’am’. It was the unkindest thing he had ever said to her, and she had told him so.

Perhaps to make up for it, Mr Amies had put her in this shimmering silver column, which was just the sort of thing Marilyn Monroe might pick. Could this femme de trente ans get away with it?

‘You look magnificent. Your best frock yet. Och, you know you do, Lilibet. Look at you!’

At least Bobo was convinced about this one. The Queen turned to check her silhouette from different angles. She missed the comforting swish of net skirts. Last November, when she had met Miss Monroe at a film premiere, the actress had been in a golden figure-hugging dress that might as well have been a bathing suit. The Queen herself had chosen a black velvet crinoline, narrow at the waist and roomy everywhere else, and was grateful for the confidence it gave her. Poor Marilyn in her golden frock had chewed all her lipstick off by the time they shook hands.

She had been the sweetest thing to talk to, though. Marilyn was staying near Windsor at the time, and they talked about how nice it would be to meet up there too, not that either of them had the time. The Queen had the impression of a bold but fragile creature, like a young racehorse or a wild deer. She had wanted to lend her a fur and wrap her up.

Anyway, that was then. Now, she was the one in the slinky dress. She needed a second opinion. ‘Bobo, can you call the duke for me?’

To everyone but the Queen, Prince Philip was ‘the Duke of Edinburgh’, or ‘sir’. He didn’t have a Bobo of his own to call him by a nickname and be treated as a trusted friend. Certainly not since he had recently lost his own much-missed private secretary in a divorce scandal. At least he had her.

Bobo spoke to the page outside the door, who passed on the message to Philip in his dressing room. The reply came back that he would be a couple of minutes, which gave the Queen time to touch up her lipstick and put on the jewellery that Bobo had laid out for her. While she fiddled with the earrings at her dressing table, Bobo sought to calm her mistress’s rare attack of nerves.

‘Did you see the newspaper headlines? The French are calling themselves monarchists! It’s just you and the Chelsea murders on the front pages at home.’

‘The Chelsea murders?’ the Queen asked, turning round with the left earring in her hand. ‘What murders?’

‘Oh, it’s dreadful. Two bodies, found in one of those little mews houses off the Old Brompton Road. It was all over The Times and the Daily Express.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The ambassador gets them by air from London. The housekeeper showed me.’

‘Did they say who they were?’

‘Not yet, dear. Just that it was a man and a woman, and she was no better than she should be. The awful thing is, it seems almost certain the Dean of Bath did it, or one of his guests.’ Bobo shook her head. ‘He rents the house where it happened for his visits to London. He looks such a mild-mannered man in the photograph, although they say he had a good war – so not that mild-mannered.’

‘Was it definitely murder?’ The Queen knew the dean in question a little. An upstanding member of the Church of England and a charming occasional dinner guest at Windsor.

‘Oh yes, dear. It was all very violent. And a little bit suggestive.’ Bobo pursed her lips and her eyes gleamed. ‘The girl was wearing nothing but satin lingerie and diamonds. Lying on the bed like Snow White, the papers said, but they probably make that sort of thing up, don’t they? And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Snow White depicted in her smalls.’

‘Who was depicted in her smalls?’ Philip asked, striding into the room and looking somewhat distracted as he inserted a cufflink into a recalcitrant cuff.

‘The dead woman in Chelsea, sir,’ Bobo explained.

‘Oh?’ He didn’t look up. The cufflinks were gold, held together by a delicate chain, and fiddly to use. ‘And how did she die?’

‘According to the papers, they were both strangled and the gentleman was stabbed in the eye. Isn’t it wicked what some people can do? It beggars belief.’

‘Oh, I can believe anything of some people,’ Philip said. He glanced up from his shirtsleeve. ‘You wanted to ask me something, Lilibet?’

The Queen had put on her earrings by now. She placed her tiara in position and stood up again, saying nothing, because she wasn’t quite sure how to ask for what she wanted.

He looked her up and down.

‘New dress?’

‘Yes.’

‘Haven’t seen you in that style before.’

‘No.’

‘It’s different. Very . . . sparkly.’

‘Oh.’

There was a short silence.

‘Isn’t she a picture?’ Bobo said, with an edge of Scottish censoriousness in her voice.

Philip took his cue at last.

‘You look ravishing, my darling.’ He grinned rakishly and strode towards her. ‘If Ava Gardner was a couple of inches shorter . . .’

He took his wife’s hands in his and kissed her palms, one after the other, and she was reminded how irresistible he was himself, and how hopelessly devoted she was. Not just because of his Viking-blond looks, but for his ability to make her weep with laughter one minute and to be quite serious the next, as he was now, aware of how important this visit was, how much was asked of her, and how much she needed him.

‘Good, well, that’s settled, then,’ Bobo said. ‘Your tiara’s a bit wonky, dear. Don’t forget the necklace. I’ll go and fetch your fur.’

Outside the room, at the top of the stairs, a small group was gathered. It consisted of the ambassador, two military equerries who assisted the royal couple in their public duties, Sir Hugh and Philip’s new private secretary, all ready to accompany them down. They were speaking in low voices but the words ‘Cresswell Place’ were audible.

‘What’s that?’ Philip asked. ‘What’re you talking about?’

‘The murders in Chelsea,’ the ambassador explained. ‘Have you heard?’

‘Oh that. Strangling and stabbing,’ Philip said, fiddling with his second cuff. ‘Those the ones?’

‘Yes, exactly. Hardly the modus operandi one would imagine of the members of the Artemis Club.’

‘What?’ Philip’s head jerked up.

‘Well, apparently the dean was dining at the club that night and he brought a small group back to play cards. Nobody else went in or out, apart from the victims, so . . .’ The ambassador trailed off and coughed. ‘I’m aware you’re a member of the Artemis, sir.’

Philip’s face tightened. ‘I am.’

The ambassador laughed nervously. ‘I don’t mean to imply . . . Rather, the people who came back with the dean that night were all above board. Decent men, spotless reputations. You knighted one of ’em last year, ma’am.’ He nodded to the Queen. Nobody had said anything about her dress yet, but they were men, so they wouldn’t. ‘They apparently accompanied the dean home for a quick game of canasta.’

Sir Hugh intervened with a slight cough. ‘So they claim. The awkward thing is, according to the press reports, the dean told the charlady not to clean upstairs the next day, as she usually did. He then returned to Somerset, and she only discovered the bodies when she went upstairs a week later.’

‘Gosh, so when did they die?’ the Queen asked.

‘I suppose it would be a week ago last Sunday,’ Sir Hugh said, rapidly calculating. ‘The thirty-first. That would be the night of the card game. They must have been lying there all—’

‘Damn!’ All eyes turned to Philip. ‘I’ve bust a cufflink. You!’ He held out the offending article to the young equerry standing nearest to him. ‘Find my valet and get replacements. Quick, or we’ll be late.’

He caught the Queen’s eye and she could see how irritated he was. They looked like the Britannia cufflinks he’d had personally designed to commemorate his recent trip to the Southern Hemisphere.

‘I suppose they’ll say in the papers that I was involved somehow,’ he grunted.

His new private secretary coughed. ‘They already are. I’m sorry, sir, I haven’t had the chance to update you. I’ve just read the piece. They noted that you dined at the club that night too.’

Philip glowered at him. ‘And did they equally note that I was tucked up safe in bed by eleven?’

‘They didn’t.’

‘They wouldn’t.’ He gave a theatrical shrug and glanced at his wife. ‘I only have my security detail and Her Majesty to plead my case.’

At this, five pairs of eyes turned quizzically to the Queen. After the minutest of pauses, she smiled back at them with a raised eyebrow and a little shrug of her own. They allowed themselves a chuckle.

‘The papers didn’t suggest you were part of the dean’s party, sir,’ the private secretary assured him. ‘Merely that you were in his set.’

‘I’m damned well not. Who is this blasted dean anyway?’

‘Bath,’ the Queen told him.

‘Oh. Yes, we do know him, vaguely. Decent sort. Worked at St George’s Chapel. Hardly a friend.’

‘Cufflinks, sir.’

The pink-faced equerry was back, spurs clinking on the boots of his uniform, hand outstretched with the replacement links in his palm.

‘Let’s go,’ Philip said. ‘I can fix these in the car. Bring the papers, too. I can read ’em on my lap, nobody’ll know. Time to be zoo animals again.’

The final event of the day was to be a river cruise down the Seine, and the Queen had been hugely looking forward to it. What could be more romantic, in April, than a trip under the bridges of Paris, accompanied by her husband, with the Eiffel Tower behind them, and in the distance the illuminated towers of Notre Dame?

What she had failed to imagine, and perhaps she should have done because it was there in black and white on her itinerary, was that the President of France would be sitting on her other side. They were on his launch after all. Both he and Philip were positioned at arm’s distance from her, too far to chat comfortably to the president, and certainly too far for Philip to tell her what he really thought of all the tableaux that had been set up for them to admire along the banks.

It was difficult to see very much, because there was a spotlight trained on her face from a few feet away. She could just about make out that the river was lined with thicker crowds than ever, all craning their necks to see and packed so tightly one worried they might push forward and fall in. If it were possible to spend a less romantic evening in Paris, it would take some doing.

Nevertheless, her new dress sparkled obediently under the lights and her cheeks grew numb from smiling. Philip, grinning at a floodlit tableau of Napoleonic soldiers near Les Invalides, seemed to be enjoying himself. He always did, on the water.

As they glided along, the Queen thought about what Bobo had said about the Artemis Club, and the night the murders must have taken place. She pictured the poor girl, strangled to death in a room with a man who was essentially a stranger, wearing nothing but silk and diamonds. A true pause for thought, when one happened to be wearing silk and a large array of diamonds oneself.

What an awful way to die. She must have felt so terribly alone.

The Queen realised she wasn’t concentrating and glanced out to see several ranks of floodlit choristers singing ethereally in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. Soon, the launch was floating past the Île Saint-Louis, and the sky lit up with a sudden explosion of fireworks.

Her initial surprise gave way to gradual delight. She imagined an anonymous young couple in the crowd, his arms around hers, his chest warm and solid against her back, craning their necks towards the fireworks together, unseen.

Yes, that would be lovely.

She turned her head to the president and called out something pleasant and diplomatic, in French. The spotlight still trained on her face, they headed back the way they had come.

Chapter 4

‘Just a simple lunch,’ the Queen Mother said. ‘For the three of us. You must be exhausted after your trip. You need to get your strength back, Lilibet.’

The Queen was delighted to be back at Windsor Castle, after a packed five-day schedule in France. She had spent a joyful evening with the children and another hour playing with them this morning. They were keen to know about their gifts, which were inevitably too delicate to play with, but they soon forgot about them anyway in a ridiculous game of chase with their father, who was just as happy to be in their company as they were to have him back.

After all that excitement, it was comforting to be among the familiar art and antiques of her mother’s residence at Royal Lodge in the castle grounds. She declined a spot of champagne in the sunny morning room because she had several meetings coming up, but her mother and sister both accepted a glass from the butler’s tray.

‘What’s Philip up to this afternoon, do you know?’ the older Queen Elizabeth asked.

‘Flying. He wanted to take advantage of the good weather. Down to Southampton, I think.’ The Queen smiled gamely, as if every minute that Philip was in the sky didn’t worry her just a little bit. It wasn’t the flying so much as the landings. A wartime Spitfire pilot had once said every landing was just a controlled crash, really. There had been one or two close shaves in the past. Philip thought them terribly funny. She didn’t.

‘Lucky him,’ the Queen Mother said with a grin, knowing exactly how her daughter was feeling and choosing not to get involved. ‘You were both so marvellous in Paris. Weren’t they thrilled to have you back?’

‘Mmm,’ the Queen agreed with a shy grin. ‘A little bit too much, sometimes.’ She told them about the crush at the Louvre.

‘God, a museum,’ Margaret groaned. ‘They might have at least taken you to Montmartre, or a show. I hear the new one at the Crazy Horse is eye-popping.’

‘They’d hardly have taken me there!’ the Queen protested. ‘And we did see Édith Piaf last time.’

‘Édith Piaf!’ Margaret made a face like a squeezed lemon. ‘Yves Montand, he’s the one these days. Did you see Mr Dior, by the way?’

‘We did,’ the Queen agreed. ‘Very briefly. He wasn’t looking terribly well, poor man. He was very complimentary about you, Mummy. He told me that whenever he wants to think of something really beautiful, he remembers the clothes Mr Hartnell made for you in ’thirty-eight.’

The Queen Mother glowed with pleasure. ‘My white wardrobe? For the Paris trip? What a darling man. One was in mourning for your grannie, of course, but French mourning is so very interesting. Le deuil blanc. Like Mary Queen of Scots.’

‘But with parasols,’ Margaret added. She turned back to her sister. ‘I do think you might have worn one Dior gown. You’re in danger of looking old-fashioned.’

Their mother’s smile became a little more fixed. It wasn’t always easy to have a younger daughter at home, still rather pointedly recovering from the most famous broken relationship of the decade. Especially when the older one was happily married. And the sovereign of countries whose land mass circled the globe.

‘Lunch is served, ma’am,’ the butler announced, to her great relief.

They went through to the dining room, where the table was set and the footmen were ready to serve. The older Elizabeth knew her elder daughter’s tastes were simple, so she had asked for just a consommé, a little salmon en croute, some green vegetables and potatoes from the gardens at Sandringham and a light lemon posset, served with a rather good Pouilly-Fuissé from her personal cellar. Conversation over pudding turned to Clement Moreton, the poor Dean of Bath, whose unimpeachable life as a cleric was currently being dissected by all the newspapers.

‘I feel so sorry for the man,’ she said. ‘He’s a delight. A very good card player, but not in that way, you know. Just a charming, sensible companion. And his sermons are always so short. Cissy’s beside herself. They all are.’

Cissy, the dean’s cousin and childhood friend, was one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting. She was good with dogs and very popular. The Queen made brief noises of sympathy, and asked if he was friends with Philip, which her mother thought she should be more likely to know herself.

‘They might have made friends in the war,’ the Queen Mother acknowledged, ‘but Philip was at sea and Clement was with the Royal Artillery, so I doubt it. Clement served with great distinction, you know. It’s quite impossible that he was involved in this business, and not just because Cissy says so. I have literally seen the man upend a glass on a piece of paper to transport a spider safely outside. Admittedly, he did see some horrors in Germany, but war is war, isn’t it, and quite a separate thing? And then there’s the question of the tart in the tiara. What did they say she was called?’

‘Gina Fonteyn,’ Margaret said promptly. ‘Like Margot.’

‘Who?’

‘The ballerina, Mummy.’

‘Margot Fonteyn? My God, are they related?’

‘No! Margot’s called Peggy Hookham really, and goodness knows what the tart’s real name was. The papers said she was Italian.’

‘Anyway, what about her?’ the Queen asked her mother.

‘Actually, I was thinking of the tiara,’ the elder Elizabeth said. ‘Clement told Cissy that the police showed him a picture of the diamonds, in case he knew where they came from. Of course, he had no idea, but he said the tiara was made up of roses and daisies in pink and white diamonds, with pale green peridots for the leaves. It’s quite an unusual combination and it reminded me so much of the Zellendorf tiara, from ’twenty-four. Cartier, very delicate, made for Lavender Hawksmoor-Zellendorf. It was supposed to resemble an English country garden. So pretty. I wondered about trying to buy it for you, Margaret, when it came up for auction last year, but of course it was much too expensive.’ She sighed. ‘One has to manage one’s spending money so carefully.’

Margaret looked disappointed. ‘Margaret Rose,’ she said pointedly, stressing her middle name.

‘Well, exactly.’

‘Who got it, Mummy?’

‘I don’t know, that’s the thing. Not that I didn’t ask, but everyone was very tight-lipped. Some foreign johnny I imagine. They have all the money nowadays. An American, probably, or the Aga Khan, or the Shah. Anyway, it disappeared. Such a pity as it’s a lovely piece.’

She stopped, sensing that while her younger daughter still looked wistful and slightly cross about the diamonds, the older one was staring at her with a hint of criticism. She raised her hands defensively.

‘You see, one didn’t know the girl, but one does know tiaras. What I meant to say was, if it is the Zellendorf, how on earth did she get hold of it?’

After lunch, the Queen suggested a walk outside, but instead Margaret inserted a cigarette into a long-handled holder and had one of the footmen light it for her.

‘Hmm.’ She stared up ruminatively through the smoke. ‘Cresswell Place. Anything goes on in that street. I think it’s exactly the sort of place you’d find a body and stolen diamonds.’

The Queen turned to her. ‘Oh?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve been there a couple of times. There’s an artist who hosts these fabulous little parties. Tiny mews house, like a doll’s house, really. You can hardly squeeze everyone in. They play the saxophone and dance on the stairs, it’s terribly funny. You never know if you’re going to be talking to a stockbroker or a demi-mondaine, or a spy. Or me.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘I can see why the dean liked it there.’

Her mother was shocked.

‘I very much doubt that’s why he chose the street. Cissy says Clement is humiliated beyond belief. And so unsettled. To think that sort of thing was going on under his roof! And what if he’d been in when the killer came?’

‘I don’t think you could confuse the dean of a major English cathedral for a jewel thief and his paramour,’ Margaret said through another puff of smoke. She eyed her mother. ‘You know, I still don’t have a tiara of my own.’

The Queen said nothing at this, but was privately exasperated. The point was certainly not the tiara. Perhaps Margaret harked back to it because she really didn’t have one of her own, whereas the Queen couldn’t remember exactly how many she had access to. Such thoughts made her judge her sister less harshly than she might otherwise. On a good day, Margaret was the soul of generosity.

‘. . . yourself.’

‘Hmm?’ Margaret had been saying something she had missed.

‘I said, you’ll be going that way soon anyway, so you can see the place for yourself.’

‘Will I?’

‘Mummy said you’re visiting Deborah Fairdale in the Boltons. Creswell Place is right next door.’

‘Oh! Yes we are. For drinks on Friday.’

‘Well, look out. You’ll be practically on the murderer’s doorstep.’

Margaret said it with something approaching relish. The Queen was very much looking forward to seeing her friend, but that aspect of the visit came as a bit of a shock. And also, she realised, an opportunity.

Chapter 5

The thing Fred Darbishire really wanted to know – and it was a big thing – was why he’d got this gig at all. It should by rights have gone to Chief Inspector George Venables, who regularly nabbed the best cases in Chelsea and Kensington. Venables was on the cusp of being made detective superintendent at a record juvenile age and everyone circulated around him like little planets. A double murder on his doorstep? A society vicar in the frame? The mention of the Duke of Edinburgh, and the cover of every newspaper in the land, alongside the Queen and the Duke in Paris? Venables would normally go for it like a shot.

But apparently the Criminal Investigation Department’s darling was ‘indisposed’. Or he had holiday booked. The rumours varied and Darbishire believed none of them. Nothing short of his own deathbed would keep George Venables away from something he really wanted. So here was Darbishire, a mere detective inspector, along with his trusty, useless sergeant, Woolgar, in charge of the whole shebang, and expected to be grateful instead of suspicious, which he was.

He stood at the entrance to Cresswell Place, a cobbled street of mismatched two-storey mews houses just off the Old Brompton Road. Darbishire happened to know, because his uncle Bill was interested in etymology, that ‘mew’ referred to the moulting feathers of birds of prey, and the first mews – on the site of the present National Gallery in Trafalgar Square – was built to house the king’s hunting hawks while they moulted. Uncle Bill wasn’t so interested in the monarchy, so Darbishire didn’t know which king, but one long ago enough to have gone hawking.

That mews burned down and was replaced by stables for the royal horses, which kept the name. Afterwards, mews streets like this were built to house the horses, carriages and, later, the cars and servants of the grandest London houses. Since the war, hardly anyone could afford servants like before, so these places had become chichi little pieds-à-terre for the posh set. From hawks to horses, and from housemaids to Hooray Henrys. Uncle Bill would sniff at them: once a home for horseshit, always a home for horseshit. But now, it seemed they were good enough for the Dean of Bath and his ilk. And for men with their high-class escorts dripping in diamonds.

The house rented by the Dean of Bath at number 44 was a two-up-one-down affair in faded pastel pink, which had originally been built to serve one of the grand Chelsea villas of the Boltons. Like most of its neighbours, it retained the inbuilt garage it came with. According to the dean, the garage space was rented separately for parking a vintage motor, and the owner of the vehicle confirmed this. There was no longer an internal door between the garage and the rest of the house, and no indication the garage had been used that night, so that person was out of the frame for now.

‘I don’t see why we have to go back inside. We’ve got the pictures,’ Detective Sergeant Woolgar muttered.

Len Woolgar was six foot four, built like a brick shithouse, and unbelievably lazy for a man in mint condition. Put him in a rowing boat on the river and he was a demon – practically Olympic standard, so they said at the Yard, which was why he’d joined the force. The Metropolitan Police boat crew was top class. But put him on an actual police job, requiring thought and dedication to duty, and he was a liability. He was usually hungry. He would be now, but he’d had two egg sandwiches for tea before they left. A third created an unsightly bulge in the pocket of his coat.

‘It’s not the same if you can’t stand in the room and look around it,’ Darbishire told him. ‘We might miss something.’ By which he meant he might miss something. Woolgar would miss everything, guaranteed.

The constable guarding the front door of number 44 gave them a respectful nod. ‘Afternoon, sir. Sergeant.’

‘Any trouble?’

‘Only a few pressmen. Nothing I can’t handle. There’s one at the far end taking a picture of you now.’

‘So there is.’

Darbishire took the house key from his pocket and let himself inside. Woolgar followed.

‘Watch yourself on the—’

‘Arse!’

The sergeant had beaned himself on the low door lintel again. You’d think, being six foot four, you’d learn to duck eventually.

The door opened straight on to a long, narrow living room with a kitchenette at the back, the right-hand half of the downstairs space being taken up by the garage. At the far end, a little window above a Belfast sink overlooked a small yard with an ivy-covered wall. Woolgar’s presence seemed to fill the modest seating area at the front, where the canasta game had taken place. It was furnished with two rickety card tables and bits of old mahogany furniture that still showed evidence of a dusting with fingerprint powder.

The only new piece was a chrome drinks trolley, well stocked, which Darbishire suspected was the tenant’s own addition. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a senior member of the Church of England to be a demon with a cocktail shaker but, having met the man, Darbishire suspected he probably was.

Clement Moreton and his three fellow members of the Artemis Club had made liberal use of the trolley on the night of the thirty-first. The dean had treated them to a cocktail of his own construction featuring lemon juice and vodka. He claimed that was the cause of his headache the following morning and the reason he told the charlady not to linger any longer than strictly necessary, and not to clean upstairs.

‘She’s noisy. She rattles round the place like a Sherman tank. I don’t make a mess. I’d only been there overnight and I was going home that day anyway, so I assumed another week wouldn’t make much difference before she changed the sheets . . .’

The guests that night had comprised a university professor who had been friends with Clement Moreton since his Oxford days, a widely respected circuit judge and a canon at Westminster Abbey. All were known to each other, but did not socialise as a unit. According to their matching testimonies, each man had been out of sight of the others for a matter of a few minutes, no more.

To Darbishire’s right, an open staircase was set against the wall that divided the living area from the garage. Between hands of canasta, Moreton and the other three men went upstairs once each to use the facilities. There was no lavatory downstairs – no room for one.

Darbishire thought back to the pathologist’s comment from an hour and a half ago.

‘Not my place to do your job for you, but if one of those highfalutin clubmen card players did it, I’ll eat my hat.’

Darbishire’s own visit to the Artemis Club yesterday had proved a disappointment. It sounded a grander institution than it was, physically at least – which was little more than a doorway off a street near Piccadilly, leading up to a few rooms for drinking and gaming and a private dining room. He wondered if Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club was a bit like this. Except that one had a swimming pool, so possibly not.

Anyway, pool or no pool, membership of the Artemis included half the aristocracy and most of the Cabinet. Darbishire knew a thing or two about what went on in those exalted circles and wouldn’t put anything past them. The problem was not where the dean and his guests came from, but the layout of the mews house when they got here. There was simply no way to murder two people upstairs in the way it was done and come down those open stairs without your physical appearance afterwards being observed by all concerned. So, either they were all in it together or the guests, at least, were innocent. They claimed not to know anything about the couple upstairs, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

He climbed the stairs with a heavy tread. He knew what lay ahead.

‘The one thing I don’t get, sir,’ Woolgar said on the way up – and Darbishire was intrigued by what was coming next, because there were at least a dozen things he himself didn’t get – ‘is, you know, the couple . . . Why they didn’t, you know . . . do it.’

‘Mmm.’

Woolgar’s tread on the stairs was heavier than his. The whole house seemed to rattle.

‘I mean, she’s all dressed up. She’s a tart, isn’t she? They’ve got the house to themselves. According to that witness statement, she comes in at ten forty-five, lets the bloke in around eleven. Assuming that witness is reliable, they’ve got a good forty, forty-five minutes to themselves before the clubmen get back . . . But they don’t . . . you know.’

The pathologist had just now confirmed his initial finding that there was no evidence of sexual activity between the couple, as Darbishire had reported to his sergeant.

‘Which suggests they were surprised by someone else before they had the chance to,’ he muttered.

‘Except nobody else came in the front way until the dean and his mates got back,’ Woolgar pointed out, ‘and there’s no sign of forced entry from the back. Forty-five minutes, guv. Longer, if they waited while the others played cards downstairs, and then the dean came up on his own and killed them afterwards for whatever reason. What did they do?’

‘Perhaps they played cards themselves. Or talked philosophy.’

‘D’you really—? Oh. Right. Sorry, sir.’ Woolgar still never quite knew when to take his guvnor at face value. ‘So, what . . . ?’

‘I don’t know, Sergeant.’

By now Darbishire had reached the landing. To his left lay the bedroom used by Clement Moreton. It was spartan and uninteresting, except for the green glass vase that had been taken away for processing by the laboratory. Behind it was a bathroom: small, modern, yellow-tiled and garish, accessed from the landing. Forensics had spent a lot of time in it, because apparently so did the killer or killers, who were unfortunately very good at cleaning up after themselves.

To the right lay the door to the larger second bedroom that ran from front to back, above the garage. This was where the bodies had been discovered. Moreton swore blind, or as much as a churchman ever did, that he never entered this room. His story was that the rental agency told him it was used for storage by the landlord and kept locked. He claimed he tried the door once and the handle rattled uselessly, as he expected it to. He didn’t need the space so didn’t worry. It was why the rent was cheap. The charlady confirmed this story, though she said that when she finally came upstairs a week after the murders, the door had sat ajar, which is what made her curious.

And yet, the room wasn’t filthy with dust and grime when the police first entered. If the char didn’t normally go in to keep it clean, who did? Another question.

The bedroom door sat open today and Darbishire walked inside. The room was dominated by a big brass bedstead topped with a fat mattress, stripped of all bedding. It sat against the back wall, facing a bay window that overlooked the cobbled street. This was where the blonde was found, lying on her back, arms crossed over her chest, with a posy of flowers tucked inside them. The male victim was curled on the floor at the foot of the bed in a pool of blood, trousers round his knees, with a slim blade sticking out of his right eye. No wonder the char’s screams were heard halfway down the street.

Woolgar hovered in the doorway and cracked his knuckles.

‘What did Deedar say, sir?’

The pathologist visited by Darbishire was called Johnson, but was universally known as Deedar. It related to all the Sheffield steel involved in his profession, apparently. Sheffielders were known as ‘Dee-Dars’, because of the way they said ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for ‘you’. As a native of Aberdeen, Johnson didn’t do this, so it had taken Darbishire a long time to work out the etymology of the nickname. By now, most officers assumed it was something to do with police sirens. But the inspector didn’t trust easy answers. He tended to ask questions until he got the hard ones.

Darbishire also knew that Woolgar didn’t miss today’s appointment at the mortuary with him because of a misunderstanding about timings, but because the smell of formaldehyde made him sick. If there was a future great detective inside that burly frame, it had a very long way to come out.

‘It’s largely as we thought,’ he said. ‘Did you make any progress with the other girl, by the way? The original one?’

Woolgar shook his head. ‘She’s vamoosed, no surprises. Beryl, her name is.’

‘I don’t need the name, I need the individual.’

Beryl was the lucky girl who was supposed to be meeting up with the male victim on the evening of Sunday the thirty-first – a blonde, like he’d requested from the Raffles escort agency. For some reason, this girl – Gina – had stood in for Beryl at the last minute.

Darbishire didn’t believe in luck. Another question.

A modern ladies’ vanity unit upholstered in smoky blue velvet sat under the window, topped with a triple mirror and an empty Venetian glass ashtray. It didn’t align at all with the battered antiques downstairs: this room was kept for special assignations and decorated as such. There was also a large art deco wardrobe in the far corner, ideal in size for a couple of men of murderous bent to wait, unseen, for their victims – except that it was found to be full of catering-size boxes of tins of spam and a broken chair, awaiting repair. There wouldn’t have been enough space to house a five-year-old.

In his forties, with the slicked-back hair of a Mediterranean or South American, the male victim had been identified by the papers in his pockets as Dino Perez from Argentina. The Raffles escort agency had been the first to confirm the couple’s identities, although they had initially misidentified the girl. They said Perez had told them he was staying at the Dorchester, but the hotel had no record of him.

Darbishire walked over to the far side of the bed. He wanted to picture the scene as Deedar and his team thought it went, see if it worked.

‘According to the forensics, Perez would have been standing between the bed and the door when the killers came in, with his back to them. The state of his trousers suggests his concentration was elsewhere. He was stabbed in the side with a slim blade, about six inches long, almost certainly the knife that was jabbed into his eye post-mortem. Given the way the knife twisted as it went in, it was likely he turned and caught them off guard.’

It would have been a painful wound, but not fatal straightaway. Hardly the most efficient way to kill a man.

Woolgar watched silently from the doorway, where the assailants must have entered, knives out. He was trying to picture it too.

‘Somehow Perez got free,’ Darbishire went on, moving towards the bay window. ‘There was a struggle. He got as far as the foot of the bed, where they managed to cosh him on the back of the head. Right-handed, Deedar thinks. Why they didn’t do that first, I don’t know. Still no sign of the cosh. Perez fell . . .’ he checked against the bloodstain on the carpet ‘. . . here. And that’s where he was garrotted. Using cheese wire, or something like it, Deedar says. The stocking we found round the neck was superfluous. The wire’d already gone halfway through his windpipe.’

Woolgar nodded. ‘Belt and braces, you might say.’

You might, though Darbishire wouldn’t. It was an odd thing to do, though. Were they squeamish, these thugs? Did they want to cover up the wound with the stocking? Or in their fury, did they both want a go? That made sense, given the stag-handled flick knife someone ghoulishly parked in his eye afterwards. It was a slim, evil-looking affair, of the type the Italians called a stiletto. He’d seen many like it before.

‘Definitely two of them, then?’ Woolgar asked, taking out his notebook.

‘If not, why didn’t the girl intervene?’

‘Perhaps she did.’

‘If she did, why didn’t she scream the bloody house down while she was doing it? Nobody on the street heard a peep. They all heard the char clear enough a week later.’

Woolgar scratched his chin.

‘So there were two at least – one to go for him, one to keep her quiet?’

Darbishire had assumed this from the start, and Deedar agreed. ‘Hence the bruising on her arms and legs. She didn’t scream, but she fought against it. She knew what was coming.’

‘She could have been the one killed first.’

‘Not impossible,’ Darbishire conceded. ‘But the bruising suggests otherwise. They used the missing stocking on her, by the way. The seam’s still visible on her neck.’

Woolgar winced. He wasn’t good when it was a woman. He definitely wasn’t cut out for long mornings in a mortuary.

‘She was washed before she was put in position,’ Darbishire added. ‘Curious, no? Not all over, but enough to get rid of whatever blood was on her, which would’ve been mostly his. Wet towel dumped beside the bed. No decent prints anywhere. Then she was laid out in that ritualistic way, with the purple flowers—’

‘Lilacs, guvnor.’

‘Lilacs, if you say so . . . taken from the vase in the other room. Shoes put on her bare feet, tiara arranged nicely in her hair, even if the updo was missing a few pins by then. They didn’t rush. No sense that they were under pressure or worried about witnesses.’

Which is why the Artemis crowd were in the clear. None of them would have had time for all the artful arrangement, and to clean themselves up too. Or the opportunity to hide the girl’s missing dress and the stocking used to strangle her.

‘What if . . .’

‘What if what?’

There was a light in Woolgar’s eye. ‘How about if it was some sort of satanic ritual and he was the collateral damage . . .?’

‘Nice idea. Except, Gina Fonteyn wasn’t supposed to be there, remember?’

‘What if it didn’t matter who she was? What if—?’

‘That’s enough of the “what ifs”, Woolgar. If you set out to do that sort of thing to a girl, you don’t ensure you’ve got a jumpy gangster in the middle of it all, do you?’

‘No, sir,’ Woolgar conceded, reluctantly.

It wasn’t a cult. It was a gangland revenge killing of some sort, surely? That’s what they thought at the station, too. The East End visiting the West End, with a cosh and a garrotte.

‘Interesting that they didn’t take the diamonds,’ Darbishire added. This, too, had been bothering him.

‘Perhaps they thought they were paste?’

‘Even so, good repro gems are worth a bob or two.’

Woolgar shrugged. ‘Dunno, sir.’

On that, they agreed. The inspector preferred not to think of the young woman’s face in the mortuary just now. Human faces do not fare well after a strangling and a week lying undiscovered on a bed. Her peroxide hair, soft and curled and lacquered into a sophisticated style, looked horribly out of place against the skin. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were dark, he’d noticed. As was – and it was necessary to look – the rest of her. The limbs were slim and athletic. It could easily have been the body of the twenty-three-year-old she’d told the agency she was, though Deedar thought she’d knocked a few years off her real age.

‘Wrong time, wrong place,’ Darbishire concluded. ‘Unlike Beryl, who so conveniently wasn’t here.’

‘Yes, guvnor.’

‘And why were they in this room at all? When any minute a senior member of the clergy might come and find them at it?’

‘Dunno, sir.’

Darbishire pointed at Woolgar’s notebook. ‘We need another word with that charlady. I suspect that’s how the girl got the key to let herself in.’

‘At least we know how they got out,’ Woolgar suggested.

When the police had first arrived, they found the back door unlocked and unbolted, but otherwise untouched. Moreton swore he always kept it bolted from the inside, hadn’t touched it for months, and the char swore she hadn’t touched it either, so if they were telling the truth, the killers couldn’t have got in that way. Moreton said he couldn’t remember seeing if the bolt was in place before heading home to his cathedral on the Monday morning, so it was probable that they had escaped via the little yard.

‘Getting out was easy. It’s still the entry we need to worry about.’

Woolgar’s shoulders slumped. ‘So we’re back to the dean.’

‘We’re back to the dean.’

Who, in Darbishire’s considered opinion as a policeman with twenty years’ experience, couldn’t have done this. Not physically, on his own, and not psychologically in any way, shape or form. Having met the man, the inspector could easily imagine the Very Reverend Clement Moreton killing someone in self-defence, but not like this. Not with that girl watching, and then kill her as well, and go to his dentist for his Monday morning appointment in Harley Street and back to his cathedral as if his worst care in the world was toothache, as every witness swore he’d done.

Besides, there were those forty-five minutes to account for between Perez’s arrival at number 44 to join Miss Fonteyn, and Moreton’s return from the Artemis Club with his friends at a quarter to midnight. Darbishire really didn’t think the tart and her client had spent them playing cards, or talking philosophy. They were together here at eleven, and almost certainly dead by eleven thirty. Killed by persons unknown. Who teleported, like something out of H. G. Wells.

Woolgar pocketed his notebook and they headed back outside, into the pink light of a spring evening. Darbishire rolled his shoulders, glad to be in the fresh air. He wondered about the main witness that night: the young woman in the mews house opposite, up all night with her baby, who saw the comings and goings of Perez and Fonteyn, the dean and his guests. Her statement fitted in with the reports of taxi drivers and the suspects themselves, so she wasn’t making it up. But she didn’t see the men who must have done it. She had been interviewed by one of the sergeants and was very helpful at the time. Obviously, given her importance, Darbishire needed a personal word and soon, but like Beryl, the missing tart, she seemed to have gone to ground.

Once again, he wandered down to the end of the street, to get a sense of the yards behind the houses and their relationship to the gardens of the grand villas beyond. They were separated from each other by a motley collection of sturdy walls and flimsy wooden fence panels. The killers may have escaped across a series of yards until they were further down the street, but it seemed more likely they went straight over the ivy-covered wall of number 44 into the garden behind. Some of the ivy roots had been pulled away and a couple of crushed shrubs the other side of the wall were vaguely suggestive of a heavy landing, although the damage could equally have been made by a large animal. It hadn’t rained, and there were no telling footprints in the earth. There never were.

‘Off home, sir?’ Woolgar asked.

Darbishire nodded. He lived only a couple of streets away, in a nice new block of flats purpose-built for the police on one of the few local bomb sites, a couple of years ago. This area had been miraculously spared by the Blitz – as if the golden denizens of the nearby stucco villas had been protected by the Luftwaffe themselves. There had been some tragedies, of course, and some empty sites, even now, like missing teeth. But mostly it was a place of Edwardian mansion flats and cheap hotels, of large Victorian houses, churches and schools, all muddling along comfortably together between the medley of shops along the King’s Road to one side, and bedsits of the Old Brompton Road to the other.

Darbishire liked it round here. He liked to keep it tidy. He didn’t like it when someone strangled and garrotted two people to death and left their bodies for a traumatised charlady to find. He intended to deliver whoever did it to the hangman’s noose as soon as he could.

After saying goodbye to his sergeant, he picked up an evening paper at a corner shop. There was a round-up of Her Majesty’s trip to Paris, with a picture of her on a boat on the River Seine, looking very regal in a shiny silver dress and a big white fur, and a tiara like the one she wore to get married in. She must have been having the time of her life.

Chapter 6

By the following Monday, the royal couple were back at Buckingham Palace and life was humming along at its brisk, London pace. One floor below the Queen’s private apartment in the North Wing, the press secretary put his head around the private secretary’s office door.

‘I’m looking for the Eisenhower file. Need it for a briefing this afternoon. HM’s got the call with the president at four. Have you seen it?’

Sir Hugh Masson looked up from the papers he was reading. ‘No, Jeremy. It’ll be in Miles’s office. Did you hear about the first time the Queen encountered him? Or didn’t, rather.’

‘Eisenhower? No.’

Sir Hugh smiled and sat back in his chair.

‘I heard this first-hand from the King. It was ’forty-two, and General Eisenhower was visiting Windsor Castle. Eisenhower was supposed to have a little tour before the official introductions, but the King and the family were sitting out on the terrace when he saw the general’s party heading their way. The King knew it would cause a terrible fuss if the general was made to encounter them au naturel, like that, without warning, so he got them all – the Queen and the young princesses too – to get down on their knees and hide under the tablecloth until the party was out of sight. They were hooting with laughter. Didn’t say a word afterwards. Very funny.’

Jeremy Radnor-Milne smiled politely. ‘How sweet. But as I say, I need the file itself.’

Sir Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s probably on Fiona’s desk somewhere.’

‘It isn’t, I’ve looked.’

‘Have you checked the cabinets?’

The press secretary’s slim moustache wiggled in irritation. He had indeed checked everywhere obvious in the filing room, where the absent Fiona worked occasionally.

‘The thought did occur to me. I’ve got that typist girl helping me look. The trouble is, Fiona seems to keep things in the most extraordinary places. We found the Danish paperwork on one of the radiators in Miles’s office. All the Cheshire research was in a basket marked ‘Dog Biscuits’. God knows how she finds anything. No wonder the speech went missing.’

Sir Hugh rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t remind me. Why doesn’t she leave it to the secretaries?’

The press secretary grimaced in agreement. Though he, Masson and Urquhart all shared the title ‘Secretary’ in one form or another, none of them did secretarial work of any sort, nor would they know how to. That was for the typists. The Honourable Fiona Matherton-Smith was a rare bird indeed: a woman untrained in secretarial arts, who was one of the higher breed designated with a capital ‘S’, like them. Her official title was Assistant Private Secretary and she assisted them all, but she was especially useful – although ‘useful’ was a loose term, in Fiona’s case – when it came to helping the deputy private secretary set up royal visits or manage Her Majesty’s correspondence. She was very easy on the eye, but paperwork was not her strong point.

The sound of pounding leather soles on the carpet in the corridor was followed by the appearance of the DPS himself, Miles Urquhart, looking anxious. ‘Any idea where Her Majesty is? I can’t find her.’

Sir Hugh leaned back in his chair and grinned. ‘You’ve lost the Queen?’

Urquhart glowered. ‘Don’t joke, Hugh. Has she taken the dogs for a walk? Her diary’s empty. I assumed she’d be doing paperwork but she’s not upstairs.’

Sir Hugh checked his own copy of the royal schedule, running his finger down the appointments for the day. ‘She’s having a dress fitting, apparently. Mr Hartnell. It should be in your copy too.’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ Urquhart complained. ‘Dammit! I need to talk to her. Just had Washington on the phone. They’ve brought the call forward. The president can only do it in half an hour.’

Sir Hugh was startled. ‘What?’

Radnor-Milne threw up his hands in horror. ‘That bloody file!’

‘I’ve found it, sir.’

There was a woman standing in the doorway. One of the junior secretaries, in a serge suit and sensible shoes, clutching a familiar-looking manila file. Radnor-Milne groaned at her. ‘Too late now.’

‘I can’t go to HM if she’s in a state of undress!’ Urquhart wailed. ‘That’s what Fiona was for.’

‘We could get a lady-in-waiting,’ Radnor-Milne suggested.

‘It’ll take too long.’

‘Where is Fiona, anyway?’ the private secretary asked. ‘Why isn’t she back yet?’

‘Still under the weather,’ Urquhart complained. ‘Her mother’s taking her away, she said, for her nerves.’

‘Her nerves?’

The DPS’s florid cheeks went pinker with disgust. ‘That’s what she said. What is it with women? Why can’t you trust them? Her nerves? What about my nerves? Christ!’ Urquhart shot an anguished look at the typist in the doorway. ‘Hey, you. McGinty. Jane, is it? You’ll do, at a pinch. Can you take a message to Her Majesty?’

The woman clutching the folder stared back at him.

‘Don’t look like a startled deer, girl! You’ve met the Queen before.’

‘I haven’t, sir.’

‘Oh. Well, you’re doing it now.’ Urquhart checked his watch. ‘Tell her the American president will call in twenty-five minutes, at twelve instead of four, and we know that’s not what we agreed but there’s not much to be done about it. She can make it to her desk if she runs, or of course we can have a telephone brought to her, but I imagine she’ll want privacy.’

‘Runs?’ the secretary asked faintly.

‘What?’

‘Did you say “if she runs”?’

‘Yes. Have you seen Her Majesty run?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, she does. She likes the exercise. You should see her when one of her dogs goes off after a rabbit or the children get too close to the lake.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What are you waiting for? You know where the fitting room is? South Wing, next to the old chapel door. Off you go. You’ll need a decent turn of speed yourself or HM will require a Derby winner if she wants to get to her office on time.’

Joan McGraw (her names included neither Jane nor McGinty, but she was very low in the pecking order and put up with it) paused for a moment outside the private secretary’s office in the North Wing. She couldn’t quite believe what she was about to do. But she had no time to lose and precious little time to think. She flew down the red-carpeted corridors in her sturdy lace-ups, past gilt-edged doors to state rooms and priceless marble statues, sweeping staircases and several frowning footmen, until she eventually reached the dowdy limewash and linoleum of the administrative offices in the South Wing.

She was grateful to have been her school’s cross-country champion, but she was still out of breath. The royal fitting room was to her right, with a page in uniform standing outside the door. She took a moment to calm herself.

The page knocked on her behalf and a very familiar voice said, ‘Come in.’

Joan did so, to find three middle-aged women and a very dapper gentleman in a pinstriped suit standing around the monarch, who was pinned into a white calico dress which Joan recognised as a ‘toile’ – a pattern for the real thing – while one of the women fussed at the fabric round her bosom.

The Queen gave Joan a casually curious glance.

‘Yes? Is it something important? We’re rather busy.’

Joan curtseyed, averting her eyes from the pushing and pulling of royal flesh inside the fabric. She explained about the call.

The Queen glanced at her watch. ‘There’s enough time to take it at my desk. You can come with me. I’ll finish this later. Mr Hartnell, I’m so sorry. I hope you understand. We really mustn’t keep the president waiting.’

The designer was obsequious in his forgiveness. Her Majesty disappeared behind a screen with one of the women and emerged five minutes later wearing a sensible skirt and twinset, and a grin.

‘We have twelve minutes. Odds on we can make it in ten. Sugar, off we go.’

For a moment, Joan assumed that Sugar was a nickname for the woman who had accompanied the Queen behind the screen, but it turned out to be a corgi, who had been lounging in front of a fireplace. The dog cheerfully shadowed her mistress at a brisk trot as they set off back across the palace. Joan jogged along too.

‘Why isn’t Fiona here?’ the Queen asked as they sped along. ‘Hugh would normally have sent her to find me. Is she still away?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘For how much longer?’

‘It’s not certain ma’am, but—’

‘Yes?’

‘I sense it will be quite some time.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’

It wasn’t ‘nerves’. On a brief visit to the Private Office two weeks ago, Joan had observed Fiona being sick in the lavatories. Fiona told Joan in passing that she had been doing this every morning for the previous month, and wondered if she had caught some sort of tropical disease. Joan had been the one to break the news to her. She still remembered the look of dumb shock in Fiona’s eyes.

Joan could have told the men in the Private Office as much, but she wouldn’t have betrayed a confidence and anyway, they didn’t ask her. The Queen turned her head to give Joan a look of surprise. It wasn’t normal for staff not to be able to tell her things. But she didn’t press the point.

‘Have you taken over from her?’

‘Oh, no, ma’am. I’m just a typist. I happened to be around when Fiona, um, had to leave. I was able to help out in a small way.’

‘Not such a small way if you’re still there. My DPS is a notorious taskmaster. Well done.’

By now they were approaching the ornate Ministers’ Staircase, heading for the undistinguished lift nearby that went to the Queen’s private apartments. Joan basked in this unexpected praise.

In the lift itself, they took the opportunity to catch their breath and size each other up a little. Her Majesty was a disconcerting mix of perfectly normal and hypnotically familiar. Joan found it hard not to stare. There was an odd modesty about her for someone whose image was so famous. Her face was almost bare, except for a little lipstick and powder, her bushy eyebrows resolutely unplucked, her pale skin smooth and unrouged. What she lacked in vanity she made up for in self-possession. Joan was the taller of the two by several inches, but the Queen was still clearly and comfortably the boss.

The Queen sensed a certain confidence in Joan, too. Though she was ‘just a typist’, she was obviously enjoying her little adventure. She had an attractive, open face with freckled skin and Titian hair (Philip would have called it ginger) neatly rolled in a slightly old-fashioned style. The Queen noticed she didn’t wear a wedding ring and wondered what the story behind that might be. After the war, there were so many. Anyway, here she was.

As they shared a smile, each saw a woman with a job to do, a practical sort, up for a challenge. There was an intelligent spark in Joan’s hazel eyes that the Queen liked very much. In the tight proximity of the creaky lift, with the clock running down, she recognised a kindred spirit.

As the lift reached its destination, Joan finally plucked up the courage to ask something that had been on her mind.

‘Ma’am, while you were in Paris, how did the speech go? I mean, I hope you got it in time.’

The Queen stopped and looked at her closely.

‘It was you.’

Joan blinked. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You found a carbon? Was it in a bin or something?’

Joan was surprised. ‘No, ma’am. They’d all disappeared. But I could remember it.’

‘What? The whole thing? By heart?’

‘Yes.’ Joan was bemused.

The Queen tipped her head to one side and looked at her harder still. ‘It went very well, thank you. Do you have one of those, what do they call it, photographic memories?’

‘I don’t think so, ma’am. I just . . . if I see something, I can generally remember it.’ Joan felt acutely embarrassed. She didn’t understand why other people had trouble recalling the images they had recently seen. What was so difficult about it? Like her father, she’d been able to do it all her life. He didn’t understand the problem, either.

‘I think that is a photographic memory,’ the Queen said. ‘Ah, here we are. Outside my study with . . . what?’ She looked at her watch and smiled. ‘Three minutes to spare!’ She paused on the threshold and turned back. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

‘McGraw, ma’am. Joan McGraw.’

‘That’s Irish, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. My grandfather was Irish.’

‘Mmm. And you speak French fluently?’

‘I do. My mother was French. I also speak German.’

The Queen nodded thoughtfully. ‘How old are you, if I might ask?’

‘I’m thirty-seven, ma’am.’

She nodded again. ‘I see. Did you have an interesting war?’

They held each other’s gaze for just long enough for Joan to signal that she knew what the Queen meant. ‘Interesting’ wars for clever young linguists at the time tended to involve spying or, in Joan’s case, decoding work at Bletchley Park, before moving on to other, equally interesting things.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The Queen gave her the briefest nod. ‘Yes, well, thank you for your message. And now I must see what Mr Eisenhower wants from me.’

That evening, the Queen had a question for Sir Hugh as he discussed her schedule for the following day.

‘I gather Fiona won’t be coming back for a little while. Is that right?’

‘Ah. Do you? I—’

‘She wasn’t an ideal APS anyway, Hugh. She was always confusing Austria and Australia.’

Sir Hugh was alarmed. He was very fond of Fiona. She was the great-niece of a duke, one of his own distant cousins, and an excellent horsewoman with a weakness for cocker spaniels and couture fashion she couldn’t afford. She could be a little scatty, in an endearing way, but he would argue she made up for it with her cheerful nature, the boxes of pastries she brought in each morning, made by her family’s exceptional London chef, and her uncanny ability to know when he, Miles or Jeremy needed soothing or cheering after a fraught encounter.

‘She was deb of the year, ma’am, if you recall. I think it’s simply a matter of training. With time, she—’

‘Anyway, we need someone new. I like the girl I met yesterday. I think she shows promise.’

‘The redhead? McGinty? She’s just a typist, ma’am. She—’

‘So she told me. I think there’s more to her than that. She helped you out in Paris, didn’t she?’

‘Dictating over the telephone? Yes, she did, but—’

‘She got us out of a hole. I’m very grateful. Don’t search for a replacement for Fiona just yet. Let’s see how this one gets on. And her name’s McGraw.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Not McGinty. You’re thinking of the nursery rhyme. Thank you so much, Hugh.’

This was a dismissal, and he knew it. He was astonished.

‘Ma’am.’ Sir Hugh bowed and left.

Afterwards, the Queen smiled to herself. His grey whiskers had quivered with indignation at the very idea of a lowly secretary taking on such a valuable role in the Private Office. As she had known they would.

It was inevitable that the men in moustaches would provide acute resistance to a girl with an Irish name, a typist, no less, taking her place alongside them. But the Queen needed an ally, someone outside the close-knit institutional world she had inherited from her father. She sensed this morning, looking into those clever, frank hazel eyes, that she had found one.

Hence her forcefulness with Sir Hugh just now, which was rare. Her private secretary wasn’t going to make Joan’s life easy, but he would at least give her a chance, because he had no choice. The rest would be up to her.

Chapter 7

Inspector Darbishire made his way to the interview room at a police station in Southend. After a nationwide search lasting two weeks, Beryl White had finally been tracked down by a sergeant working for the Vice Unit. DS Victor Willis had discovered the missing escort at the home of her brother and his family. She refused to return to London, so Darbishire and Woolgar travelled to Essex while Willis stayed with her to ensure she didn’t do a flit.

‘Nice work, Sergeant,’ Darbishire acknowledged, as the man waited at the door to greet them.

Willis gave a friendly smile. He had a record of helping out with reluctant witnesses. His slick good looks and a kindly manner seemed to have a special effect on women of ill repute.

‘Would you like me to sit in with you, sir?’ he asked, eyeing Woolgar, who lurked further down the corridor.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Darbishire assured him, although he briefly wondered what it would be like to employ Willis’s sharp wits and good looks, instead of Woolgar’s bulk and lively imagination. ‘Anything I should know? What frame of mind is she in?’

‘I told her she could have the duty solicitor if she wanted, sir, but she declined.’

Darbishire nodded. Silly girl – but he wasn’t complaining. It was easier for him if there was no lawyer to interfere with his line of questioning. Given the approach he planned to take today, it helped a lot. ‘Still being difficult, is she?’

‘Oh no, sir. She just wants it over with. I told her as long as she cooperates and tells us everything she knows, she’ll be all right. She should be a good girl. I gave her a decent talking-to.’

Darbishire wasn’t entirely happy with this. It should have been a job for the duty solicitor she didn’t want – but he assumed Willis had done his best. He called Woolgar over and they went in, leaving Willis to make his way home.

Beryl White was precisely what you would expect a high-class escort to be, that is, young and beautiful, with skin like silk and a nose like something off a Greek sculpture, perfectly coiffed platinum-blonde hair and a buttoned-up dress fitted a size too tight, to show off her assets. The Raffles agency advertised its services as offering ‘pleasing feminine company for uplifting conversation with the discerning gentleman’. It was quite plain that it wasn’t chiefly conversation that got uplifted in her company. But perhaps she was good at that, too.

As Darbishire sat down opposite her, he noticed the frequent glances she gave DS Woolgar from under those long eyelashes of hers. Once again, he managed to fill the room with his looming presence, though he had positioned himself behind his boss, near the door. She seemed intimidated, but if she was afraid of what Darbishire thought she was afraid of, it might help for her to know that the police could also be a force to be reckoned with.

‘So, Miss White—’

‘Call me Beryl. Everyone does. Except . . . my gentlemen.’

‘What do they call you?’

Beryl slid her eyes to meet Darbishire’s. ‘Whatever they like.’

He held her gaze. He was aware that he was about to do the same, in a way.

‘With all due respect, I prefer Miss White.’

‘“With all due respect,”’ she echoed, raising one sculpted eyebrow. ‘May I?’ She fished a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag and lit one, eyeing Woolgar once again through the smoke.

Darbishire got down to business.

‘You’ve been away from London for some time, Miss White. Would you like to explain why?’

‘I needed some sea air.’

‘And why was that?’

She shrugged and glanced around the little room. ‘Can’t a girl need a bit of a break sometimes?’ Then, catching his stern expression, she stared down at the table between them. ‘I lost a good friend,’ she added, subdued.

‘You made yourself very hard to find. You must have known we were looking for you.’

She shook her head adamantly. ‘I had no idea. My brother’s family don’t get the papers. It was just a little break, that’s all. I’ve got nothing to hide.’

We’ll see, Darbishire thought.

‘Tell me what happened the day of the thirty-first. You were due to see Dino Perez, as arranged by the agency. He’d asked for you specifically, the day before.’

‘Not specifically, no,’ she corrected him. ‘And it was two days before, not one. He was out of town, but he said he’d like company when he got back. His last companion was . . . otherwise engaged. I suppose I was closest to what he wanted.’

‘Which was?’

‘A princess.’

She looked at him archly and let the words hang in the air. The way she carried herself, her bone structure, the way her blonde hair caught the light . . . He could see why the agency picked her.

‘Any princess in particular?’

‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘A blonde.’

‘What happened next?’

Beryl started off composed. ‘I put the date in my diary. But the next day I woke up with the most god-awful headache. A real blinder. I could hardly see.’ Her eyes briefly widened, as if she was reliving it. ‘Once it comes it stays for a day or two and I’m out of it, and afterwards I’m good for nothing. So I told Gina, God bless her, and she said she’d step in for me. And she did, the next day.’ She paused, lips trembling. ‘I’ll blame myself forever.’

She glanced away with a shuddering breath. Her act was touching, but slightly over-rehearsed, in Darbishire’s opinion.

‘Why ask Gina yourself?’ he asked. ‘Why not get the agency to sort something out?’

Beryl shrugged. ‘Once you say yes to a job, it’s up to you to get it done. Besides, I knew Gina would do it. She owes me. Owed me.’ Her long eyelashes brushed her pretty cheeks with tears.

He came in gently for the kill. Having spoken to the agency, he knew about the request. ‘There’s something I don’t understand, Miss White. Why ask Gina to stand in for you, if Mr Perez wanted a blonde?’

A slight frown formed between Beryl’s eyebrows, and for an instant she looked a bit rattled.

‘What d’you mean?’ she asked.

‘Gina was normally a brunette, wasn’t she? She is in all her photographs. She had very recently dyed her hair – to become a blonde, like you, yes?’

Beryl took a moment to restore her composure. ‘She was dark, yes, but she didn’t want to be. She’d seen the sort of clients I got. She’d been interested in changing her look anyway.’ With a steady gaze, she added, ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes, you know.’

Darbishire didn’t, personally. His wife’s hair was jet black before the grey started to appear. But then, he didn’t think of himself as a gentleman, either. He moved on.

‘So, she peroxided her hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you help her?’

‘No.’

‘And did you provide any of her clothes?’

‘No. We’re different sizes.’

‘And the tiara?’

‘What about it?’

‘Real diamonds. Was it yours?’

Beryl stopped and stared at him as if he was from Mars. ‘Yeah,’ she drawled. ‘It was my second party tiara. I kept it with my bleeding crown jewels.’

‘You’d never seen it before?’

‘No. I hadn’t. Still haven’t – except that drawing in the papers.’

‘You didn’t need one . . . professionally?’

‘I had a little paste thing.’ She glanced at the stub of her cigarette, now finished, took another one from the packet and lit it. ‘Nothing special. Got it from a shop in Brighton, in the Lanes. I offered it to Gina but she didn’t need it. Found something better, didn’t she?’

‘Evidently she did. Any idea how?’

Beryl took a drag and shook her head.

‘Are you sure you didn’t provide it?’

‘No!’ She seemed genuinely surprised by the question. ‘How could I? Why would I?’

‘Nobody gave it to you, or asked you to—?’

‘What are you getting at?’ she asked, brow furrowing. ‘D’you mean another of my gentlemen? No.’

This was not what Darbishire meant. If a gang had planned this murder and stolen a tiara to order, or if they’d had one lying around after a robbery and decided to use it for fun, it was plausible – just – that they had given it to Beryl to pass on to the unfortunate Gina. This was one of his theories. But he believed her surprise at the suggestion. She simply wasn’t a good enough actress to fake it.

‘What did you know about Perez?’ he asked, changing tack.

‘Nothing.’ Her gaze was shifty again.

‘He was a client of the agency,’ Darbishire pointed out.

‘He wanted company a few times, yes. But I’d never met him.’

‘You said his last “companion” was otherwise engaged. Was that deliberate? Did you ask to take over?’

‘No! She didn’t want him! She—’ Beryl caught herself and stopped suddenly.

‘She what, Miss White?’

‘Nothing,’ the girl said. Her attempt at breeziness was undermined by the stiff set of her shoulders.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Darbishire barked. ‘Don’t even think about it. Why didn’t she want him?’

Beryl stiffened further. ‘Look, it was nothing. She just said that he wasn’t the most . . . gentlemanly. It’s not exactly news. They’re not all saints. There was something in his eyes, she said . . . But that’s all I knew, I swear.’

The agency hadn’t mentioned this. They weren’t entirely forthcoming with information, Darbishire had noticed. Given that it was illegal for them to profit from prostitution, they had to be careful what they said.

‘What about Gina?’

‘What about her?’

‘Did she know about him, too?’

The escort shifted uncomfortably and crossed one elegant leg over the other. ‘I might have told her. She was just grateful for the job. Look, can I go? I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even there!’

‘That’s the point, Miss White,’ Darbishire insisted, stepping up a gear. ‘You weren’t.’

‘W-what d’you mean?’

Sensing he was on the right track, he pushed on.

‘There’s something you’re not telling us. And if you don’t come clean, this won’t end well for you.’

She flicked another frightened glance towards Woolgar. Darbishire looked round to see if his sergeant was glowering at her in a threatening way, but he seemed as impassive as ever.

‘That house,’ Darbishire said harshly. ‘Why did they go to Cresswell Place in particular?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘Why not a hotel?’

‘I told you, I don’t know! I assumed Mr Perez asked to go there.’

‘You do know, Miss White. We’ve talked to the char who cleaned at number forty-four. She’s admitted that room was used for occasional assignations by the agency. Gina Fonteyn somehow had the keys, but Perez was expecting you. Admit it – you gave the keys to her. You’d been there before and—’

‘Not for months!’ she insisted. ‘I didn’t touch those keys, I swear!’

‘Let me put a theory to you,’ Darbishire suggested.

‘OK, but—’

‘I think you arranged where Gina Fonteyn was going to meet up with Dino Perez. Somewhere nice and quiet, without witnesses like a hotel clerk. I think you made sure you were out of it, but you let somebody else know too. There are some dangerous characters involved, Miss White. Men who know how to hurt a pretty face. Maybe there was money in it for you, or maybe you were just scared out of your wits, but you did something you’re ashamed of. And you fled London as fast as you could to get away from it—’

‘I swear! I never—’

‘But you can’t escape, Miss White. Not from these people. Not without our help. You need to be honest with us or we can’t protect you.’

She trembled and looked desperately towards Woolgar. What was it about him? Darbishire briefly wondered if he had another sandwich stuffed in his pocket and she thought it was a gun. Should he throw the man out? He would, if she did it again. Darbishire turned and glared at him, then straightened and lowered his voice to reassure her a little. Perhaps he’d overdone the threat.

‘We can protect you, Beryl, but you have to help us. Can you? For Gina’s sake? Because I don’t think you meant any of this to happen.’

Beryl stared him full in the face, wide-eyed and noticeably pale.

‘Meant it to happen? Meant it? What are you getting at? Of course I didn’t mean it. I just . . . Gina wanted to go with him. I didn’t know where they went, I swear. D’you think I’m in danger? I just went away because I was feeling rotten, like I told you. My head.’ She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples, as if to demonstrate. ‘What dangerous characters? I don’t even know any. I mean, I know some, but none as would do this. Would they? I don’t understand. I—’

‘There, there. Calm down. As I say, we can protect you.’

She glared at him again. ‘You can’t,’ she spat, to his astonishment.

‘What do you mean by that?’

Her whole demeanour changed. She had been openly panicking, but now she sat back in her chair and her lip curled. ‘Since when did the likes of you ever protect the likes of me?’

For the first time, Darbishire sensed he was seeing the true Beryl White. And she had a very low opinion of him, of the Metropolitan Police, and of everything that had happened here so far, despite his best assurances.

For the next half-hour, he grilled her as hard as he could about who might have set up the meeting with Perez, what she knew and what they did to buy her silence. But the silly girl was scared witless, and for a full thirty minutes he got nothing further out of her at all.

Chapter 8

The Honourable Fiona Matherton-Smith had a beloved spaniel called Monty, and Joan knew this because Monty’s empty dog basket still took pride of place beside the radiator in the deputy private secretary’s office, which she now also shared. In the week since she had been offered the job of assistant private secretary by Sir Hugh (with obvious shock and reluctance on his part, and absolute astonishment on hers), Joan twice tried to move the dog basket, to make way for much-needed filing cabinets, but Miles Urquhart wouldn’t hear of it.

‘The place isn’t the same without Monty,’ he opined. Joan tried not to take it personally, but a treasured spaniel was one of the many things Fiona possessed and she did not. Others, in no particular order, included a title, a famous family chef, an outsize bottle of L’Air du Temps (a gift from an admirer, found in a desk drawer next to the paper clips) and a personal acquaintance with at least half the men who had been at Eton in the last twenty years.

It wasn’t easy to make up for these deficiencies. However, for what it was worth, Joan had an innate ability not only to find important documents in Fiona’s idiosyncratic horizontal filing system, but to put them back in places where other people – notably the private, deputy and press secretaries – could find them too. There was also her memory for names: both of the senior men around the globe who needed to speak to the Private Office, and for their secretaries and assistants, who purred like kittens to be remembered and suddenly made all transactions easier.

On her first day, Joan installed an impressive typewriter on her desk, and though the DPS insisted the noise of the keys would drive him mad, her ability to anticipate and type up the notes and memoranda he needed saved him precious minutes in a busy day. She couldn’t bring in Parisian-style pastries, but she wasn’t a fool and she arrived instead with bags of fresh bagels and cinnamon babkas from the East End, which were always gone by ten o’clock.

Every half-hour, Urquhart would give her a new task, or a head would pop round the door and the private or press secretary would add something for her to do. It was mostly menial work and the thanks were always perfunctory, but Joan didn’t care.

She was at the centre of the world and loving every minute.

Within twenty-four hours of her arrival, someone from the White House had called to sort out the Queen’s sleeping arrangements for her stay in Washington in October. Urquhart, who found such details beneath his dignity, had left her to it.

Joan had since met the prime minister, the lord chancellor, the Archbishop of York and the chairman of the BBC. She saw Her Majesty almost daily, to deliver or pick up the red boxes of official paperwork for the Queen to review. And because Joan mastered the files so quickly, she became the expert on the schedules for the upcoming royal visits. Other members of staff were coming to rely on her. They would always address their questions to the DPS, but they increasingly turned to Joan for the answers.

There was something she needed to discuss with the Queen, but their brief conversations had been taken up with immediate plans for the Easter weekend and Her Majesty’s birthday. Meanwhile, the only problem lay with the secretaries (lower case), who were once so friendly. When Joan used to pop across from the typing pool, they would include her in their tea breaks and their gossip. But since her elevation to a capital S, they looked on her with suspicion. The nicer she was to them, the more distant they became.

Still, the job itself was a dream, she knew she was doing it well, and for now that was enough.

‘The new girl’s a disaster, ma’am. I’m sorry, but there we are.’

Miles Urquhart stood stiffly before the Queen in her study. It had taken him a few days to get this little meeting in Her Majesty’s diary, but at last the time had come. His russet moustache quivered with righteous indignation: to be expected to work alongside a little know-it-all Irish minx! What had Her Majesty been thinking? It was demeaning, demoralising and it had to stop.

‘Oh? What’s she done?’

Urquhart briefly closed his eyes. What hadn’t Joan done?

‘She doesn’t know her place, ma’am.’

‘And what is that?’

‘To be my assistant,’ he said gruffly, sensing more resistance from Her Majesty than he had anticipated. ‘To learn fast and do as she’s told.’

‘I see.’

‘And she has been sadly disappointing on both counts. I didn’t want to bring this to your attention, ma’am. Normally I’d deal with it myself, but I know you suggested the girl personally and I thought you ought to know before any action was taken.’

‘Bring what to my attention, Miles?’

Where to begin?

‘She’s frequently late. She’s cocky. She doesn’t know her limits. She almost made a complete hash of a sensitive issue in Washington, classic example, and I’ve only just rescued it. And—’

‘I thought Hugh said she was flying through the filing and doing rather well.’

‘That was at the start, ma’am. Before we found out her true nature. I’m not surprised she can’t cope, of course. Girls of her class aren’t cut out for this sort of work.’

The Queen pushed back her chair and sat with her hands in her lap. She looked composed, but had she sported a moustache, it might have bristled tellingly too.

‘Oh. You mentioned an issue in Washington . . . ?’

He refrained from rolling his eyes, but a tic went off in his cheek at the memory of it. ‘This was on Saturday, ma’am. I only found out on Sunday but as it was your birthday, I didn’t want to bother you. And as I say, I’ve dealt with it.’

‘I’m sure you have, Miles. Dealt with what?’

‘A ridiculous breach of protocol. Joan tends to chat to every Tom, Dick and Harry who calls up, regardless of status. She made friends with some secretary at the White House and took it upon herself to overrule your sleeping arrangements for October. I might not have noticed, but she pointed it out to me herself, as if she was proud of it.’

‘And what did she do, exactly?’

Urquhart’s tic beat faster. ‘The protocol is quite clear. All leaders visiting the White House stay at Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue, as they’ve done since Churchill’s unfortunate visit to the executive residence in 1942. I gather he was known to wander about the White House at night with a little more freedom than the president found acceptable. Given that history, it makes it all the more embarrassing that Joan and this American secretary took it upon themselves to change your schedule and move you and the duke back to the executive residence for your stay.’

‘Did she?’

The Queen’s eyes widened. Again, her upper lip didn’t amplify her emotion, and Urquhart assumed horror, like his own.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ve spoken to my man in Washington. He’s busy putting it right before the president gets to hear about it. We would hate him to think we have no respect for tradition, for privacy . . .’

‘I see,’ the Queen said. ‘Have you spoken to Joan about this? Did she explain?’

‘She said she discussed it with Jeremy, but he denies it. I’m afraid she can’t absolutely be relied upon to tell the truth. Another class trait, possibly. To be charitable, one might assume that perhaps she feels overwhelmed.’

The Queen cut across him. ‘If you had spoken to her, Miles, she might have told you that I wrote a note following my discussion with the president last week. Mrs Eisenhower very kindly invited the duke and me to stay with them in the White House. I was touched by the gesture. It was a sign of our personal friendship.’

‘Ma’am, I—’

‘Of course, I accepted. You didn’t see my note? I do hope you can talk to your man in Washington before the president does get to hear about the new arrangement. I’d hate us to look ungrateful.’

Urquhart stood rigid with dismay. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And silly, and uncoordinated.’

There was a pause.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Urquhart was stung. It was rare for Her Majesty to issue a rebuke, but when she did, she chose her words well. Silly and uncoordinated. If Sir Hugh were to hear of it . . . It was all the fault of that stupid girl, of course, for not making herself clearer and then discussing the thing with Jeremy, and not himself, if indeed she’d talked to anyone. She had been nothing but trouble, apart from the filing – which any office girl could do. It was what he was trying to say. He returned to his point.

‘She didn’t show me the note. But, that’s not all, ma’am. I really can’t have her working for me.’

‘I hate to mention it, Miles, but she doesn’t actually work for you, she works for me.’

‘Well, technically, ma’am.’ He caught the look in HM’s eye and corrected himself. ‘I mean of course she does, but . . .’

‘You mentioned lateness?’

At least Her Majesty was listening, and keen to get to the bottom of the thing.

‘Twice, at least,’ he explained. ‘Swanning in at past nine a.m.’

Fiona, bless her, was rarely in by ten, but always looked divine when she arrived with her darling Monty. Joan, if anything, looked more frazzled and unkempt when she was late than when she crept in on time.

The Queen nodded. ‘Oh dear. And “cocky”, I think you said? In what way?’

Had he said ‘cocky’? Well, she was.

‘McGraw’s attitude to punctuality speaks for itself, ma’am. She’s a typist: she should be able to keep office hours if anyone can. She’s been here five minutes and she’s getting ideas.’

‘Ah.’

‘It’s not a surprise, as I said.’ At last, Urquhart could play his ace. He looked suitably sombre; it didn’t do to crow when delivering the coup de grâce. ‘Jeremy’s been doing some research. Due diligence, you might call it, and we’ve discovered she has a history of this sort of thing.’

‘Oh?’

‘McGraw’s war record. Gross insubordination. Far worse than we might have imagined. I’m not surprised she doesn’t talk about it. I’m afraid, given what we know, we can’t possibly keep her in the Private Office after this.’

‘May I see it?’

Urquhart dutifully held out the manila folder he’d armed himself with before leaving his office.

‘Of course, ma’am. It’s all there in black and white. I’m sure when you read it, you’ll see what I mean.’

Chapter 9

Joan found herself summoned to the Queen’s presence at half past six, as she was preparing to tidy up her desk. It would be the first time in five days that she’d finished before 9 p.m., but she didn’t mind this little delay – in fact, she was excited. There was a lot she wanted to discuss with Her Majesty if she got the chance. She arrived at the door of the royal study on the second floor in a buoyant mood.

The look on the Queen’s face put paid to that.

‘Good evening.’

Joan curtseyed warily. ‘Good evening, Your Majesty.’

‘We don’t have long. I’m due downstairs shortly. I’ve been reading about your war record.’

Joan’s good spirits evaporated.

The Queen sat at a heavy, Chippendale pedestal desk set at right angles to the room’s bow window, with the darkening sky behind her left shoulder. There were comfortable chairs elsewhere in the room, but the cluttered desk was a place of work. Tonight, a bulb in an Anglepoise lamp illuminated the incriminating document sitting on the royal blotter.

‘The DPS unearthed it for me. I’m afraid we have a bit of a problem.’

A bit of a problem.

The room was quiet, except for the sound of Joan’s new life crashing down around her. She stood straight and still, using everything she had to stop her eyes from even glistening.

‘You were demoted, I understand.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Oh dear.’ The Queen looked up. ‘I actually remember the incident, though I didn’t know your part in it. My father told me about it.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes. Everyone was concerned about Brigadier Yelland losing his command of Longmeadow in the run-up to D-Day. You worked for Yelland, I understand?’

Joan nodded. The headquarters at Longmeadow marked the end of her ‘interesting’ war.

Before arriving there, she had already been moved from Bletchley to Trent Park in Middlesex. At the latter, her role had been to interview senior German prisoners of war. She had been chosen because she was young and female, which instantly wrong-footed them and proved a good way of tripping them up. To that she added her linguistic ability, a certain hard-headedness and natural investigative skill, so that the work had come easily.

She wasn’t pleased when an admiral at Naval Intelligence tasked her to assist Brigadier Yelland at his secret HQ in the spring of 1944, but the new job came with a promotion and the assurance that the high-ups in Whitehall were keeping an eye on her career.

Longmeadow Hall in Dorset turned out to be the headquarters of some of the most important intelligence gathering on German forces in France, prior to D-Day. It was staffed by the best and brightest officers from across the Allied forces, working in great secrecy and under extreme pressure. But Yelland struggled with organisation and morale was at rock bottom under his command. Joan was drafted in as his assistant in the hope that a woman’s touch would smooth over any problems, without ruffling the sensitive feathers of the brigadier himself.

As soon as she understood the nature of the D-Day plan, Joan realised how much faith they had put in her. She was honoured to be involved, but Yelland was beyond help and didn’t want it. He was in the grip of a severe drinking problem and incapable of listening. He would make mistakes, blame others, alienate important people and retire to his room with a bottle of gin. She endured this regime for six weeks with a growing sense of dread, knowing how much depended on the work they were doing. In the end, she jeopardised everything, made a secret trip to London, and took the biggest risk of her life.

And paid the price, or so she thought.

She had lost her job at the base, and any hope of a career. When the war ended, nobody in the Admiralty wanted to employ her. She was lucky to get secretarial work where she could find it. The typing pool at Buckingham Palace had been her first full-time job in years.

It would all be in the report sitting in front of the Queen tonight.

‘General Eisenhower was aware something was wrong at Longmeadow,’ the Queen told her, folding the manila cover shut. ‘As I’m sure you know, several staff members had already complained through the proper channels. But you didn’t do that.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘In fact, you took it upon yourself to go straight to Admiral Butt in Naval Intelligence, who reported what was going on directly to the prime minister. As a result of your trip, Yelland was sacked within forty-eight hours.’

Joan was thrown back to the week of her court martial. Her crime of ‘gross insubordination’ had been thrown in her face by a very supercilious major, extravagantly whiskered, who had ground her reputation into the dust. She had overstepped the mark, broken the rules by taking matters into her own hands, and shared secrets of national importance. She should have used official channels. She wasn’t to be trusted. She was lucky to escape without a dishonourable discharge.

The Queen carried on. ‘As the report states several times, in the armed forces it’s essential to go through the chain of command. You had a duty to report your concerns to your immediate superior.’

Joan bowed her head. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘I tried, ma’am, but—’

‘Who was your immediate superior?’

Joan sighed. ‘Brigadier Yelland, ma’am.’

The supercilious major at the court martial had found no irony in this at all.

‘Mmm. Who else was there, holding a senior position at Longmeadow?’

Joan tried to hide the memory of her frustration. ‘No one, ma’am.’

There was a grim look in her eyes as the Queen glanced back at the file. She seemed to be mulling over what to say.

Joan made a snap decision because she realised she may not have much time.

‘Ma’am?’

The Queen looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘Before I . . . before you . . . I just need you to know that I’ve come across something disturbing in the Private Office. I know you may think this is just sour grapes, given what you’ve just said, but I assure you it isn’t.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was something in the Denmark file a couple of days ago. About your state visit next month. It’s odd, but there was a request for the Duke of Edinburgh to be escorted on his individual excursions – he’s making two of them, as you know – by a particular young lady from the Danish Embassy. I thought it was unusual, because of course she’s based here in London, not Copenhagen, so I double-checked with the duke’s private secretary and he said he knows nothing about it. The request certainly didn’t come from him. He doesn’t know Miss Kern and he’s pretty sure the duke doesn’t either. The thing is . . .’ Joan paused, and noticed the Queen’s blue-eyed gaze gathering a touch of frost.

‘Continue,’ Her Majesty said tightly.

‘The thing is, ma’am, she’s very striking, this woman, Ingrid Kern. She has shining blonde hair, you know the sort, and I understand she stands out on the diplomatic circuit. Her presence would be noticed. People would ask questions, and as things stand, they’d be hard to answer.’

Joan knew what she was implying. Prince Philip was known to have an eye for pretty women, especially blondes. Equally, they had an eye for him. When his engagement was announced in 1946, there had been a song about the loss to the debutante world of the dashing ‘Philip Mountbatten RN’. Recently there had been talk while he was touring the Pacific at Christmas. His private secretary’s wife had asked for a divorce while they were away, and rumours were still flying around about what both men had got up to on Britannia. Today, if he was seen with a blonde who shouldn’t be there, conclusions would be drawn as fast as newspapers could be printed.

In the silence that followed, the frost turned to ice.

‘Did you find out who asked for her?’ the Queen asked in glacial, clipped tones.

‘No, ma’am. I didn’t dare go too far because . . . because . . .’ Joan knew she sounded ridiculous, and especially in light of the reason for her presence here in the first place. But in for a penny, in for a pound.

She went on defiantly, ‘Because I don’t know who to trust, ma’am. Everyone in the Private Office seems incredibly dedicated, but . . . The way the text of your speech went missing in Paris – that just can’t happen. There are too many backups, it’s just not possible. For example, I’d kept a carbon of my own draft of it, as a memento, if you must know. It was in the drawer of the desk I was using, but that copy disappeared too. The head of the typing pool was going frantic. The whole thing was just so . . . strange. And when I asked casually about Ingrid Kern this morning, everyone claimed never to have heard of her. But someone put that note in the file, ma’am. It was typed and unsigned. Before I go, do you want me to rescind it? Anyway, I thought you should know.’

‘I see. Please do.’

‘And there’s the issue of Blair House in Washington. That was odd too.’

‘I know about Blair House,’ the Queen said quietly, dismissing it. Her thoughts were elsewhere. ‘A misunderstanding.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry, ma’am.’

Joan ground to a halt. She’d said everything she needed to say, and it was probably too much, as usual. Her father had always told her she needed to learn diplomacy, and she meant to, but what always tripped her up was a fierce regard for what felt right at the time, or what she thought that was, anyway, and she just couldn’t shake it. She looked briefly around the lamplit room, with the dogs snoozing on the floor and the family in photograph frames, and felt in her bones how much she’d have enjoyed working for this woman, and how sad she was to give it up.

‘Don’t be,’ the Queen said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t be sorry.’ The Queen seemed to gather herself. ‘Not for the Blair House business. And thank you for warning me about Miss Kern in Denmark. In fact, I’d been meaning to ask you to do some work for me.’ She sat back and smiled faintly. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were ready, but it seems you’ve been doing it anyway. That makes things much easier.’

‘But I thought . . . ?’

‘Ah, yes. The chain of command. Your act of gross insubordination.’

Joan said nothing.

‘For the good of the country.’

Oh. That wasn’t how the bewhiskered major at her court martial had put it. It sounded quite different when the Queen described it.

The Queen pushed the report away from her. She smiled. ‘That’s what my father thought. General Eisenhower too.’

‘Did they? But—’

‘The chain of command . . . It does rather require every link to be reliable, doesn’t it?’

Yes, it did. Yelland was an incompetent bully in a position of extreme sensitivity, and he was the only person Joan was allowed to turn to with her complaint. She had never regretted causing his departure. So, Her Majesty appreciated irony after all.

However, Joan hadn’t forgotten how the conversation started. ‘You said there was a problem, though, ma’am. With my record.’

‘Oh, there is.’ The Queen gestured at the file. ‘You were demoted from third officer back to ordinary Wren, and as far as I’m concerned you should have been promoted. However, I can hardly undo the decision-making processes of the navy. Rather, I can, but I won’t. I rely on my admirals, and they rely on me.’

‘Oh,’ Joan said, feeling suddenly like a cork rising from the bottom of the ocean.

‘But we’ll think of something. “Gross insubordination”. At least you can’t go over my head. Where would you go?’

The monarch kept a straight face, but Joan permitted herself a grin. ‘I’m not sure there is anywhere, ma’am.’

‘Well, quite.’

The Queen glanced at her watch and reached for the telephone on her desk. She told the palace operator to tell the duke that she would be with him in five minutes before leaving for the Boltons. Then she turned back to Joan.

‘I mentioned getting you to do some work for me.’

Joan’s pulse quickened. ‘Yes, of course. What is it?’

The Queen briefly outlined her concerns from Paris. She completely agreed about the inexplicable strangeness of the missing speech. On top of that, she described the unwelcome presence of the oysters and the unguarded expression of annoyance at her warm welcome at the Louvre, worn by one of her own courtiers.

‘And now this girl, Ingrid. It confirms my fear that my foreign visits are under threat. It might seem as if I’m overreacting, but I think I know when something’s off.’

‘I see.’

‘I need you to find out what this pattern means. It’s a lot to ask. For obvious reasons, you’d be acting alone. There’s no one else I can . . . D’you think you can manage it?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Joan had visions of Elizabeth I entrusting Lord Walsingham with similar missions. It sounded lonely and dangerous . . . and right up her street. ‘Yes, of course I can. Do you have any idea who it might be? Someone to keep an eye on?’

‘I do. But I have no idea why he would behave in such a way. I won’t tell you who it is for now. I find if I say something, people tend to take it as gospel. I want to see if you come to the same conclusion by yourself. And anyway, he might not be acting alone.’

‘I understand, ma’am.’

‘Now, I’m afraid I must go. I’m already late.’

Throughout the discussion, Joan had the impression that something else was preying on the Queen’s mind – more worrying, even than the fact that one of her closest advisers might be undermining her and was, in fact, a traitor. What could be worse than that? Joan also sensed that there was no one the Queen could talk to about it – no one at all. Which begged a few questions.

She had a lot to think about.

Chapter 10

The Victorian villas of the Boltons were a cut above most Chelsea houses. They sat in opposing crescent shapes either side of an oasis of green, where St Mary The Boltons church catered to a select little congregation. Deborah Fairdale’s home, which she shared with her husband and daughter, was the largest and loveliest of them all, as befitted a Hollywood star who had become as much loved on the West End stage as she was in America.

Born to a music teacher and his wife in South Carolina, Deborah never expected to be sharing jokes with the king of England and Sir Laurence Olivier, but after starring alongside Cary Grant, she had come to England to perform in a Noël Coward play, fallen for a Brit and stayed. In her West End dressing room back in 1937, Paul Locke had led her to believe he was a car mechanic, which was sort of true, but really, he was a racing driver. Now, at the grand old age of fifty-two, and minus a leg after the Battle of Monte Cassino, he ran his own racing team. He didn’t mind being ‘Mr Fairdale’ half the time, when really she should be ‘Mrs Locke’. It was one of the many things Deborah loved about him.

Together, they were the couple that every London socialite wanted to know. Miss Fairdale was a proud Southern girl and tried to maintain her home state’s reputation for hospitality. When it came to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, she always liked to have someone special for them each to meet. They couldn’t always socialise with who they chose, and the duke in particular had an endless appetite for interesting people in the arts and sciences, so Deborah liked to mix it up a bit.

She had been excited all week, thinking of this particular soirée, but it wasn’t going the way she’d planned at all. Paul had found her a rocket designer whom Prince Philip would adore, but her special guest for the Queen was horribly late, and in the meantime all anybody wanted to talk about was murder. Deborah had tried several times to shift the conversation on to more enlightening topics, but by the second martini she realised Her Majesty was as interested as anyone else.

For her part, the Queen was having a fascinating time. She had grown up with some of the best gossips in the country – her mother’s household – so she was used to the interest that many people took in other people’s business. Tonight, she had her own reasons for being among them, so she didn’t judge. In fact, she was grateful.

‘So, tell me,’ the wife of a press baron asked, ‘can you really see the place where it happened from your house?’

‘Not quite,’ Deborah admitted. Standing beside the grand piano in her double-aspect living room, she gestured beyond the balcony windows. ‘The mews house backs on to a garden about five houses down. If you lean out of our top floor bathroom you could probably see the roof.’

‘Oh my God! How thrilling! Did you hear anything?’

‘Not a peep,’ Paul said smoothly, circulating with the cocktail shaker. ‘Although to talk to my wife, you’d think it happened in our basement.’

Deborah struck a theatrically affronted pose.

‘Paul! Don’t be rude. We did have the police round, to ask if we’d seen any sign of fugitives, but of course we hadn’t. I’m ashamed to say I was disappointed.’

‘How do you know there wasn’t anyone hiding in the garden?’ an old Hollywood pal of Deborah’s asked.

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you suggesting my garden is an overgrown jungle, by any chance, Carole? True, it’s so full of trees and bushes we wouldn’t have seen a thing, but the chickens would have clucked the place down. They get furious if their sleep’s disturbed. And Gregory would have gone absolutely berserk.’

Gregory Peck was the name of Deborah’s cockerel, who was infamous in the Boltons for his dawn alarm. He was only kept alive by the fact that the neighbours were grateful for her little flock’s fresh eggs. Gregory was touchy and territorial, and he’d have crowed the place down if anyone had leaped over their garden wall. But that night he’d been perfectly quiet until dawn.

‘Did anyone else see anything?’ the rocket designer wondered.

‘The police have been tramping round all the gardens, looking for clues,’ Deborah said. ‘As you can imagine, Gregory didn’t approve. If someone had got in, they could’ve run down the little side passage, I suppose. I asked Mike, our chauffeur, whose house is on the street . . .’

‘Your chauffer lives there?’ the press baron’s wife asked. ‘Practically next door?’

‘Five doors down.’ Deborah and Paul were among the few residents of the Boltons who could still afford to keep the original mews house on.

‘He must know something?’ Carole said, with her lovely Californian twang. ‘Did he see the people going in? Or coming out? Were they in cahoots? Don’t you love that word? Cahoots. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

‘Mike didn’t see a thing. Not that night. But . . .’ Deborah lowered her voice and they all leaned in. ‘He’s heard stories about other couples. Going into that very house. On other nights.’

‘The dean’s house?’

‘Uh-huh. They were always very proper,’ she added, using the British term. ‘Well dressed in their dickie bows and furs. They’d be dropped off by cab and disappear straight inside.’

‘No!’

‘Oh yes. He has it on good authority. The thing about Mike is, he’ll talk to anyone. He’s a fount of knowledge. Never talk in the car, that’s what I’ve learned. Chauffeurs say nothing, but they hear everything.’

‘So the dean’s house was a . . . knocking shop?’ Carole’s companion, a big game hunter, asked, with a sidelong glance at the Queen. She felt dreadful for poor Clement Moreton, but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation.

‘I dread to think what it was,’ Deborah said. ‘Perhaps he was running a very upmarket bedsit. Who knows?’

‘Did your man hear anything that night?’

‘Well . . . he thinks he heard a gunshot,’ Deborah admitted, with a look of innocent mischief that had been one of her calling cards in Hollywood.

There was a communal intake of breath and then the questions came thick and fast.

‘A what?’

‘Gunshot?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘That never got mentioned,’ the press baron’s wife remarked, looking peeved that her husband’s many papers had missed it.

‘Well, I know,’ Deborah agreed. ‘So maybe it was a car backfiring, but Mike swears he heard something. At around two or three in the morning, All I know is, it didn’t set Gregory off, so it wasn’t in our backyard.’

The conversation moved on to other topics and the big game hunter decided to tell the Queen in great detail about the drama of his recent visit to Tanganyika. She waited for half an hour, wondering if the subject of what had happened in the mews would come around again. Keen for more information, she eventually did the only thing she could think of, and spilled the remains of her martini on her dress.

‘Oh, how clumsy. Deborah, you wouldn’t mind helping me sponge this off, would you?’

Miss Fairdale, nominated for two Oscars, was always a good sport. They perched side by side on the edge of the bathtub, doing the best they could with a damp flannel on the satin skirt. The Queen took the opportunity to ask after Deborah’s daughter, Bridget. ‘She must be quite grown up now.’

‘Oh, she’s certainly that, ma’am. She’s seventeen and she hates me.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t!’

‘She tells me she does, in no uncertain terms. I’m bourgeois and conventional. I’m too concerned with my appearance. I don’t care about the future.’

‘Gosh, that sounds rather exhausting.’

‘Oh, she loves me to bits. You’ve got all this to come, ma’am. How are your babies?’

‘They’re very well,’ the Queen said. ‘Anne’s determined to do everything Charles can do, and better. But it’s hard if you’re six and your brother will insist on being eight and a half.’

‘I doubt she lets that get in her way.’

‘No, she certainly doesn’t. And if she thinks I’m bourgeois and conventional, she certainly hasn’t told me so. By the way, I wanted to ask you something . . . Paul’s a member of the Artemis Club, isn’t he?’

Deborah nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Did he hear any rumours about the thirty-first?’

‘About the dean and his guests, you mean?’ Deborah asked, dabbing gently at the skirt with a fresh flannel. She sounded relaxed and light, but the Queen knew what a very good actress she was.

‘About anything, really,’ she replied, trying to maintain the same light tone and wondering if she was pulling it off as effectively. ‘The club or . . . what happened afterwards.’

Clearly, she wasn’t Hollywood standard. Deborah gave her one sharp, penetrating look.

‘There are always rumours,’ she said carefully. ‘I wouldn’t pay them any attention, ma’am.’

The Queen had hoped she wouldn’t need to. Deborah’s answer confirmed her fear that she very much did.

Meanwhile, the actress tilted her head back and dabbed at the skirts one more time. ‘There. I think we’re done! I don’t think we’ve made the stain any worse, anyway.’ She went to put the flannels in a laundry bin and added, ‘You know what men get up to when they’ve had a few too many. High jinks and stupidity. I make a point of not asking Paul for any details. I’m sure I’d be so disappointed if he told me.’

The Queen felt reprimanded. Deborah was one of her most candid friends and if she wouldn’t talk, no one would. Perhaps that was a good thing, all things considered, but the Queen dearly wished her friend had made an exception for her.

‘Thank you so much for all that dabbing,’ she said, standing up and brushing her skirts down. ‘Does the stain show?’

They decided it did, but that everyone outside would pretend not to notice, and made their way back to the party.

When they got there, Philip was turning down an offer to race in Paul’s Lagonda at Goodwood.

‘My God! The men in moustaches would never let me! They’d be dragging me out by the lapels.’

‘You must have some fun sometimes,’ the big game hunter insisted.

‘I never do. Not allowed. My life is simply too boring for you to imagine.’ Philip glanced across at the Queen. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’

She smiled at him blandly. ‘I wouldn’t say too boring. I’d like to think we do the odd interesting thing.’

‘We don’t! We never do!’

She would have loved to prove him wrong, but it was time to go. She still had paperwork to catch up with back at her desk, and a very busy day tomorrow. Their hosts accompanied the royal couple to the hall.

‘I suppose the next time we’ll be seeing you is at the palace, next week,’ Paul said, taking the Queen’s fur from the butler and giving it to Philip, who placed it round his wife’s shoulders.

‘The palace?’ Philip queried. ‘God, poor you. Why?’

‘Because it’s Bridget’s presentation – had you forgotten? It’s her coming out year.’

‘Oh, I had. She’s a deb, is she? We’ll look out for her, won’t we, Lilibet? Poor kid.’

‘Poor kid?’ Paul asked.

‘Lining up like a lamb to the slaughter. It can’t go on,’ Philip said. ‘I always feel so absurd, nodding to them all. And they look like frightened rabbits and afterwards their mothers are the cat that got the cream.’ He didn’t mention that his sister-in-law had unkindly remarked that the presentations had to stop because ‘every tart in London’ was getting in.

‘Well, I’ll be the cat that got the cream,’ Deborah said. ‘And Bridget may well be a frightened rabbit, but you’ll smile at her, won’t you?’

Philip looked sheepish. ‘I promise I’ll make an exception for Bridget.’

‘And I know you’ve already said you probably can’t make it, but we’d love to see you at her party next month,’ Paul added. ‘Debutantes are passé, I get it. But we’re pulling out all the stops anyway. Bill Astor’s given us the use of Cliveden. It’s a masked ball, and the theme’s Shakespeare. You can go incognito if you like.’

The Queen was wondering what to reply, when the doorbell rang and Deborah’s hand flew to her heart.

‘Oh! At last!’

Her other special guest had finally arrived. A distinguished-looking black man in a smartly tailored dinner suit was divested of his overcoat by the butler. The Queen took in his gently waving hair, his lugubrious eyes, his familiar smile . . . She was amazed, and thrilled, and only sorry they were leaving. Deborah had done it again.

‘Ma’am, I’d like to introduce Mr Duke Ellington,’ Deborah said. ‘He was held up at the 400 Club, but we forgive him.’

The musical maestro bowed. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, Your Majesty. A little matter of paid employment. I got here as fast as the audience would permit.’

The Queen beamed at him. ‘How wonderful to meet you, Mr Ellington.’

‘Likewise, ma’am.’

‘Is this your first visit to London?’ Philip asked him.

‘No, sir. That was back in ’thirty-three.’ Ellington turned to the Queen. ‘Long before you were born, ma’am.’

He held her eye. Having, in fact, been born in 1926, the Queen admired his gallantry. ‘Oh, really?’ she said, throwing him a cool look, letting it stand.

The maestro’s eyes twinkled. ‘Yes, indeed. I remember I played four-hand piano with your uncle, the Duke of Kent.’

‘Was he any good?’

‘Not bad, for a prince. He sat in on drums with the band as well. There was no getting away from him. Anyway, it’s nice to be back. Do you like jazz?’

‘I’ve loved it all my life,’ she assured him.

‘I promised Miss Fairdale here that I’d play a little something. Have you got time for a song or two?’

The Queen thought about her busy week ahead. She should really go home and get some sleep, but right now, at this minute, she was in heaven. She took off her fur and handed it back.

Chapter 11

As April drew to a close, the Queen and Prince Philip got ready to embark on a packed programme of visits round the country. Joan was not invited to join the men in moustaches on these trips. Miles Urquhart had managed to convince Sir Hugh that there wasn’t room for her on the royal train.

One morning as she waited to pick up the red boxes, Joan heard the confident tread of Dilys Entwistle’s court shoes as they clacked down the linoleum of the North Wing corridor. The private secretary’s personal secretary stopped at the DPS’s open door and coughed. Joan looked up from her desk.

‘Sir Hugh would like a quick word before he goes,’ Dilys said.

Joan frowned. ‘With me?’

‘Yes, Miss McGraw.’

Joan saw the way Dilys pinched her lips when she said ‘Miss McGraw’. She had suggested that Dilys should continue to call her Joan, as she had in Joan’s typing pool days, but the other woman primly insisted on ‘Miss McGraw’ now. Joan felt judged and found wanting. But it didn’t do to let it show.

‘I’m coming. Do you have any idea what it’s about?’

‘None at all. Sir Hugh doesn’t let me into his confidence.’ With a sour look, Dilys waited to accompany her down the corridor.

An uneasy truce had emerged between Joan and the men in moustaches in the days since the Queen had made her feelings known about the ‘gross insubordination’ report. Joan’s place in the Private Office was safe for now, but Urquhart, whose office she shared, had effectively sent her to Coventry. His detailed instructions for what Joan was to do while he was away were delivered via his personal secretary, Sarah, even though she worked down the corridor and Urquhart’s desk, by contrast, was literally opposite Joan’s.

It hadn’t escaped her notice that Urquhart was also the person in charge of the royal couple’s upcoming Danish schedule, where Ingrid Kern had made her strange appearance. Technically, it was easier for him than anyone else to sabotage the Queen abroad. But in reality, any of the three men had access to the files and diaries in question, and were senior enough to instruct staff to do their bidding and keep quiet about it.

Of all of them, Urquhart was the least likely to get away with it, Joan thought. Now that she was experiencing his more childish and stubborn side, she saw a man who simply couldn’t hide his feelings. Dealing with him was a walk in the park compared with Brigadier Yelland.

So far, she hadn’t seen much of Jeremy Radnor-Milne, the press secretary. He was either locked away in his office or out wining and dining his contacts, but Joan noticed he had a large framed photograph of the Queen on the wall behind his desk. The real person working two floors up wasn’t enough for him, it seemed.

Sir Hugh Masson also hadn’t crossed paths with Joan much, but she knew that he was a canny operator, respected for getting difficult things done without losing good relationships. Sir Winston Churchill himself was an admirer and a friend.

The private secretary’s own war service wasn’t easy to investigate, meaning he had probably worked in military intelligence, and he was understated and academic in his manner. Some people mistook his politeness for weakness. They did so at their peril. He would make a formidable adversary, she thought – if that’s what he turned out to be.

Sir Hugh’s office sat across the corridor from Joan’s and exactly two floors under the Queen’s, overlooking the treetops of Green Park beyond the palace wall. The room was tall and airy, with Georgian windows, a marble mantelpiece and several pieces of antique furniture. It spoke of quiet power and a strong sense of history. Unlike Her Majesty, he kept his desk free of memorabilia, and immaculately tidy. He indicated a wing-back chair beside the fireplace. Joan took it.

‘We appear to have a problem,’ he said, sitting down opposite her. He removed his spectacles and gave them a polish. ‘With your accommodation.’

‘I see.’ Joan paused. She had been preparing for much worse. ‘No, actually, I don’t see. What problem?’

‘As you know, your lack of punctuality has caused Miles great concern. I’ve looked into it, and I understand that you travel across London each morning from Bow – a matter of six or seven miles. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which would be all right, I suppose, if the buses were reliable, but I gather there have been various traffic incidents recently. It’s quite unsustainable. Her Majesty has made it clear that she wants you to be on hand, and I don’t want you getting here tired and flustered. And we really can’t have the Queen’s temporary APS eating jellied eels on Brick Lane, or whatever else they do.’

Joan’s hackles were rising fast. She did her very best to keep calm.

‘I wouldn’t say I was ever flustered—’ she protested, but he cut her off again.

‘The women in the Private Office do not live in Bow. It’s in the East End of London. Too far, in every sense. It risks making you look unprofessional.’

‘I—’

‘So I’ve arranged alternative accommodation. Something more suitable, closer to home. A decent address in Pimlico. It’s walking distance from the palace – a good twenty minutes, but think of it as exercise.’

Oh. This was a complete surprise.

‘That’s very kind of you, but . . .’

‘But what? I’m not really offering, Joan. I’m informing.’ He pursed his lips and regarded her across steepled fingertips.

‘I see, but I’m afraid . . . I don’t see how I can afford it,’ Joan admitted.

Didn’t he think she’d live closer if she could? As it was, a bedroom in her aunt’s flat, shared with her three young cousins, was the best she could do.

‘Westminster rents are problematic,’ Sir Hugh agreed. ‘I understand that. And good places are hard to find – unless one knows the right people. You’re smiling. I read that to mean that you don’t know the right people, and I do, and you’re probably right. As it turns out, we know someone who can help. The rent is perhaps still a little out of your league, even on higher wages . . .’

‘My wages are higher?’

‘Didn’t anybody tell you? Yes, quite considerably. Even so, that part of Pimlico might be a stretch, but don’t worry about it for now. The important thing is that you’re here when we need you, and that you get safely home.’ He shook his head. ‘One doesn’t like to think of what can happen the other side of Fleet Street.’

‘It’s pretty friendly,’ Joan assured him. ‘You’d be surprised.’

His nose twitched, as if he’d thought of something. ‘I notice you don’t really have the accent, by the way,’ he said. ‘How did you avoid it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Cockney. Growing up in the East End . . .’

‘I didn’t,’ Joan said. ‘I went to school in Cambridge. My father works there.’

‘Oh! Does he? At the university? What college?’

‘St Anselm’s.’

Sir Hugh brightened suddenly. ‘Ah! I had no idea. What’s his field?’

‘His field?’

‘Academically. One of my godsons is up at St Anselm’s now, reading Classics. I wonder if he might know him.’

Joan gave him a wry smile. ‘I’m sure he does. My father’s the head porter.’

Sir Hugh looked momentarily derailed. ‘Ah. Oh. Mmm. I see. Important job.’ The warmth of genuine interest faded, to be replaced by something more distant, if not unkind. ‘I remember I was scared witless of the head porter at Trinity. Six foot four in his bowler hat.’

‘My father’s six foot five.’

Sir Hugh frowned. ‘Wait a minute. My godson mentioned something . . . He wasn’t at the Somme, was he? Decorated for valour?’

Joan nodded. Vincent McGraw was a bit of a legend among the undergraduates, having single-handedly rescued four officers of the Coldstream Guards who were trapped under fire in their collapsing trench. He was nearly seven feet tall in his head porter’s bowler, powerful as a boxer, firm but fair, the night-time nemesis of drunken student revellers. At home, he was soft as a pussycat, a prizewinning solver of The Times crossword, and a soppily fond single parent to his only child.

‘You must be very proud of him,’ Sir Hugh suggested.

Joan shrugged. ‘I am.’

After that, Sir Hugh’s expression was neutral. He didn’t give away whether he was pleased to be working with the daughter of a hero from the First World War or alarmed at having to make conversation with the offspring of a college servant. He steepled his fingers again.

‘The thing is, it’s going to be all hands to the pumps until we find your replacement. Fiona’s replacement, I should say. We have a particularly intense few months ahead. Lots of diplomatic visits abroad. Denmark is . . . Denmark. Always good to be friends with the Scandinavians. And they’re related, of course.’

‘I’m sorry, who are?’

‘Her Majesty and their royal family. So is the duke. That always helps. But then we have the trip to Canada and America coming up, and that must absolutely not go wrong. Canada is a jewel in the Commonwealth crown. Her Majesty already knows the country and is fond of it. And the United States . . . I need hardly say . . . after Suez . . .’

‘I understand,’ Joan said.

Sir Hugh looked sceptical. ‘Washington’s reaction to the intervention in Egypt was alarmingly hostile. They threatened our economic stability.’

‘I know,’ Joan said. ‘It must have come as a shock to Mr Eden, after the close relationship during the war.’

‘It did, rather. He had overplayed his hand.’

‘And I suppose they’re still angry about Burgess and Maclean.’

Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were British diplomats who had suddenly fled to Moscow in 1951, provoking a national scandal. Both had worked in Washington on sensitive issues while reporting to the Foreign Office and – as it turned out – the KGB. Too late, it had been discovered that they had been pouring secrets into Russian ears for years.

Sir Hugh gave Joan an appraising glance through his spectacles. She sensed that transatlantic political tensions hadn’t been Fiona’s strong point.

‘Anyway, there are bridges to rebuild,’ he acknowledged. ‘And Her Majesty is Mr Macmillan’s secret weapon. To be deployed with deadly accuracy and devastating effect. She must dazzle.’

‘Do they want to be dazzled?’

‘In my experience, everybody does. A few inverted snobs think they don’t, but they end up being the most dazzled of all. We have the advantage that she is an attractive young woman. And a dutiful one. The Queen may lack the education of her courtiers, but her instincts are good.’

Yes, they are, Joan thought. Possibly better than yours. She said nothing.

‘She seems to like you, so I imagine you’ll spend plenty of time in her company when we get back. If any issues arise, I want you to bring them to me directly. May I have your assurance on that?’

‘Absolutely,’ Joan lied.

‘Excellent. Good luck. And let me know if there are any problems with Dolphin Square meanwhile. Her Majesty wouldn’t have raised the issue if she didn’t want it solved, so I’ll assume you’ll say yes? You can move in at the weekend.’

‘Dolphin Square?’ Joan asked.

Sir Hugh frowned. ‘Didn’t I say? Your new address. Large block of flats near the river. It’s several blocks, in fact. A few MPs use it as their London pad. My aunt used to live there for a while. It’s perfectly respectable, and above all, safe. Ah, Dilys. Yes?’

His secretary had arrived to announce that his next visitor was waiting to see him.

Back at her desk, Joan wondered if Sir Hugh thought he had just bought her complicity with the offer of a posh address. He certainly wanted to know what she – and Her Majesty – were up to. But Joan didn’t really blame him for that. If she had been in charge of the Private Office, she’d have wanted to know too.

If the private secretary was working against the Crown, he was covering his tracks extremely well. It was hard to imagine sounding more dedicated to supporting it. But equally, that meant he understood what the stakes were. If he did want to undermine the Queen, he’d know exactly how to do it.

Could he be in the pay of a foreign state? Joan wondered. Had the Soviets managed to recruit him in the thirties, like Burgess and Maclean? Surrounded by Georgian architecture and antiques, it was hard to imagine anyone more British. But, if they wanted a spy, wasn’t that precisely the sort of person they would pick?

Chapter 12

Back in London after his brief trip to Essex, Inspector Darbishire was happy to be on home turf again. It was accidental that Cresswell Place happened to be so close to where he lived with his wife and daughters. However, it had turned out to be quite useful in this case because he was still trying to speak to a couple of key witnesses, and they were turning out to be stubbornly difficult to get hold of, except by telephone in one case, which had thrown up more problems than it solved.

They were never in during working hours, so he had taken to popping round to their houses in the mews first thing in the morning, or after tea, to see if he could go over their statements. Still no joy. Now it was nearly ten o’clock at night and every self-respecting Londoner – those that didn’t go gadding about in gentlemen’s clubs, or serve the ones who did – was on his way to bed. Would Mrs Gregson from number 23 be at home? Darbishire was increasingly curious to find out.

He was still working on the theory that the murdered couple were lured to their deaths because of something in Mr Perez’s murky business dealings. Darbishire and his men had interviewed all Miss White and Miss Fonteyn’s recent clients, who were a motley selection of financiers and playboys, expatriates and industrialists. In Miss Fonteyn’s case, there was even a lovesick poet who couldn’t afford her, like something out of the opera. Most were acutely embarrassed to be questioned, but none looked the type to garrotte a man, or had any discernible reason to do so. Perez, on the other hand . . . Perez was travelling on forged documents and Darbishire was still waiting for information about where they came from. There lay his answers, he felt sure.

The why of the murders would surface any minute; the how they already knew. But the exact when continued to elude him – and how it was done without anyone else in the street noticing. The answer surely lay with Mrs Gregson, the key witness, who lived almost directly opposite the dean’s house. She must have made a mistake about who went in and out, missing the murderers entirely, but she swore blind at the time that she was completely accurate.

Mrs Gregson was a young mother who had been nursing a restive baby at her living room window that night, and was probably sleep-deprived. She spoke to a couple of detective sergeants from his team the day after the bodies were discovered. She had a remarkable memory for timings, and claimed it was because she was desperate to get the tot to nod off, and kept looking at the clock.

Darbishire knew she’d got the arrival and departure of the Artemis Club crowd right because the times were corroborated by the cab driver who’d brought them to Cresswell Place and two others who’d picked the guests up later. There would be no shame in admitting she got something else wrong – but something odd was happening. He needed to sort it out.

Unlike its pastel neighbours, Mrs Gregson’s house at number 23 formed part of a short row of houses in the Arts and Crafts style. The top half was hung with terracotta tiles that gave it airs and graces beyond its station, in Darbishire’s opinion, as if it thought it was a cottage in Tunbridge Wells. He knocked at the door. A young man answered, whom Darbishire had met before. He was thin, pasty-faced and nervous. Or, not nervous so much as wary. There was a difference.

‘Ah, Mr Gregson?’ The young man nodded. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you at this late hour. Is your wife back?’

‘Back?’ The man blinked.

‘Only, you said last Monday she’d gone to her mother’s. Because of the stress. Quite understandable. But I found the telephone number for the address you gave me in Shropshire – her parents live a long way away, don’t they? – and when I rang, they said she’d gone out for a walk with her little girl. She was very helpful when she rang back. She confirmed everything she’d told us before. But I’m confused. I think we must have got crossed wires somewhere.’

‘Oh?’

The young man was wearing a hand-knitted sweater with rather a large hole in it, Darbishire noticed. The sort of hole a wife would normally mend. But Mrs Gregson had a baby to take care of, so perhaps that explained it. His whole face was trying to form a shape of bland politeness, but the wariness seeped from every pore.

‘It’s just that my Mrs Gregson . . . your Mrs Gregson indeed . . . has a little boy, not a little girl, doesn’t she? That was what she said in her original statement. Not the sort of thing a mother gets wrong!’ Darbishire’s face formed a jovial grin around his shrewd eyes.

‘Ah.’ Mr Gregson looked momentarily confused himself, but his frown soon cleared. ‘They must have meant she was out with her sister’s little girl. They’re staying there too, with my parents-in-law. Linda, my wife, helps out when she can. Perhaps she took them both out.’

Darbishire nodded. ‘Mmm. That makes sense. Thank you.’

‘Not at all,’ Mr Gregson said with a smile of . . . was it relief?

‘May I come in, by the way?’ Darbishire asked. ‘I don’t want to keep everyone on the street awake.’

‘No,’ he responded sharply. ‘It’s just . . . I’m doing something for work. I’m a photographer. It’s all very delicate. Can’t disturb it. Sorry.’

Photographer. Hmm. Darbishire didn’t know that much about photography but perhaps it explained the pervasive, unpleasant smell emanating from somewhere in the background.

‘Oh dear,’ he said easily. ‘I’ll have to stay out here then. I wonder what the neighbours will say. Ha!’

Mr Gregson was intransigent. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you any further.’

Darbishire shook his head. ‘But I’m sure you can. When Mrs Gregson called me back, I had a few questions about the baby that night, the night of the murders. I asked if perhaps she had colic – like I say, I was getting my wires crossed – and your wife said she’d been sick with it for weeks, but she was getting better. She, you see. A little girl. Not a little boy, as my sergeant noted down the first time he spoke to you both. Named Francis. Is that correct?’

‘Sorry, what? Oh, yes – Francis. That might explain it. The different spellings.’

‘Mmm. But not the different pronouns.’ Darbishire’s face still smiled and his eyes were shrewder than ever.

‘I see what you mean. I don’t know what my wife was thinking.’

‘Nor do I, Mr Gregson. And my men and I have been talking to people up and down the street, as you know, and a few times we’ve mentioned the young woman with the colicky baby, and do you know what? Nobody’s seen that baby. Not a soul.’

‘We keep ourselves to ourselves. My wife hasn’t been well.’

‘Or heard it. A colicky baby that cries through the night?’

‘He doesn’t cry if we soothe him.’

‘So he’s a he now?’

‘He was always a he! My wife is confused! She misunderstood you. She hasn’t been sleeping.’

‘I did wonder about that,’ Darbishire said. Then his voice hardened. ‘About that baby. There’s no birth record of a Francis Gregson, or indeed Frances Gregson – I looked for both – in the last two years. Your wife is either in grave danger, or she never existed either. Which is it, Mr Gregson?’

‘Listen,’ Mr Gregson said, his face transformed, his body hunched with a new sense of urgency. ‘Everything she said was true, I swear it. Everything about what happened opposite. I was awake most of the night with her, and I saw it too. We don’t know who did it, and we’ve nothing to gain by lying. We just wanted to do our duty. Yes, she’s frightened. Frightened for her life. Do you blame her?’

Darbishire was unmoved. ‘Given how little she saw that’s of any real use to us, I rather do. If anything, she’s been wasting police time so far. Tell her I’d like to see her at the station in the morning. You too, sir. If you’re not there, there will be consequences. Goodnight, Mr Gregson. Sleep tight.’

He crossed the street to the western side, to his second elusive witness.

Number 42, a couple of doors down from 44 (the houses in the mews were numbered sequentially), was the London residence of a William Pinder, civil servant. Mr Pinder, who definitely existed, as confirmed by the War Office, had spoken to the police a couple of times, to assert that he was alone at home that night, having taken a sleeping draught, and he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. Darbishire had a couple of supplementary questions to ask, but Mr Pinder, too, had recently been out when his officers had called by.

The inspector knocked without much hope but, to his surprise, the door was answered within a minute.

‘Yes?’ a female voice demanded through a tiny crack. Her cut-glass accent was apparent in one word. It reminded him: Mrs Gregson’s accent on the telephone had been posher than her husband’s just now. Should he read something into that? Or was he just being a snob?

‘Police, ma’am,’ Darbishire explained. ‘Would you mind . . . ?’

The woman opened the door by about a foot, to reveal that she was in her dressing gown and slippers, with her hair in curlers under a little pink net and a blanket over her shoulders.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Are you Mrs Pinder, by any chance?’

‘Marion Pinder, yes.’

‘I’m Detective Inspector Darbishire, CID. So sorry to disturb you. Is your husband in?’

She frowned. ‘No. He’s, er . . . no. He’s in the country.’

‘Not Shropshire, by any chance?’

She stared at him. ‘Surrey. He’s staying with his parents. What?’

She’d spotted the massively sceptical look on Darbishire’s face. But coincidences did happen. He gave her the benefit of the doubt.

‘Why isn’t he staying with you, if you don’t mind me asking? I mean, from what he’s already told us you share a home in Reigate with the children. He just stays here during the week for work, yes?’

Mrs Pinder scowled and pulled the blanket tighter around her. She, too, had no intention of inviting him in. Darbishire was a friendly man by nature and this aspect of the job didn’t always appeal to him: alienating bystanders in the interests of investigation. However, he was good at it.

‘Bill normally stays here,’ she agreed. ‘Sunday night to Thursday. But he’s not well. I’m just sorting out some things here.’

‘Is he infectious?’

‘No! Nothing like that. We just . . .’ Her face hardened. ‘We needed some time apart, if you must know. Or we did. Now I’m wondering . . .’ As her voice trailed off she looked lost and sad. Darbishire sensed she needed a solid shoulder to cry on, but it wouldn’t be his.

‘Can you ask him to get in touch with me? One of your neighbours claims to have heard a gunshot the night of the murders—’

‘Gunshot?’ She almost leaped out of her skin.

‘Yes, and unless it came from number forty-four, where we have no evidence of it, it must have come from this property, if it came from anywhere at all. The house in between is empty, you see.’

‘I know. But there wouldn’t have been a gunshot. We don’t even have a gun. My husband was fast asleep, as I said. He’s been finding it difficult to rest recently so he took a significant amount of sleeping powder. I know because he was very groggy when he spoke to me the next morning. He’d have slept through anything. Who said so, anyway? Was it those bastards from across the road?’ She flicked her eyes to the space beyond Darbishire’s shoulder. ‘Don’t believe a word they tell you.’

He was so surprised by the crystal-toned profanity coming from under those curlers that it took him a moment to recover.

‘What about them? Do you mean the Gregsons at twenty-three?’

‘The Gregsons? No. You mean the Hallidays. But they moved out last month because of the flood. I was in town for the ballet and I saw them put all their things in a van.’

‘The flood?’

‘Yes. One of the pipes sprang a leak. Mrs Halliday said it was going to take weeks to dry the place out. She has trouble with her lungs, so they found somewhere cheaper in Earl’s Court.’

‘Very interesting.’ It had not escaped Darbishire’s notice how garrulous Mrs Pinder had suddenly become. ‘But if you didn’t know the Gregsons, who were you referring to?’

She pursed her lips and clammed up again.

‘Which “bastards” did you mean, Mrs Pinder?’

‘You’ll have to ask my husband. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to bed.’

She shut the door in his face. Darbishire turned around to examine number 22, directly opposite. This was where she had been looking when she swore. It was part of the Arts and Crafts row and slightly taller than the others. An extra floor had been added above the pantiles, with a couple of windows at roof level, overlooking the street.

Darbishire mentally consulted his notes. The current tenants were academics of some sort, who had been pleasant but largely unhelpful as witnesses. According to their statements at the time, they saw nothing of the goings-on at number 44, but one of them claimed to have heard a motorbike roaring away in the distance after the so-called gunshot, which enhanced the theory of a backfire.

Darbishire knocked on their door, but nobody answered.

He had arrived at Cresswell Place with one set of questions and found himself going away with a completely different set. What was wrong with William Pinder, if anything? Who, or what, were the Gregsons, and why were they prepared to live in a dangerously damp house while they pretended to look after a non-existent baby? Had he been worrying about the wrong witnesses anyway? Who, underneath it all, were the ‘bastards’ at number 22?

What had Gina Fonteyn and Dino Perez got themselves into?

Chapter 13

The following day, as soon as it could be arranged, Darbishire was back at Cresswell Place armed with warrants, several burly constables and a ram to break down doors if necessary.

It was necessary, because neither door at numbers 22 and 23 was answered. Both houses turned out to be deserted. Inside, number 23 smelled powerfully of drains and mould. It had officially sat empty since the Hallidays left a month ago, exactly as Mrs Pinder suggested. Number 22, by contrast, was unnaturally neat and tidy. Its paperwork was superficially in order, but the department at King’s College where the academics who rented it supposedly worked had never heard of them, and they had somehow managed to live in the place for several weeks without leaving a single fingerprint.

There was one minor consolation: Mrs Pinder was reluctantly persuaded to let them into her home at number 42. The team did a thorough search, but found no evidence of a gun having been discharged. Nor was there any sign that any of the slightly shabby walls had recently been redecorated. Darbishire took the opportunity to venture out into the yard at the back, whereupon a dog in the yard of number 41 instantly set up a cannonade of furious barking. The same dog, as the saying went, who had curiously done nothing in the night-time. Darbishire made a mental note.

Sergeant Woolgar was highly impressed with this turn of events, which only showed how much he knew. Young Chief Inspector Venables, on the other hand – now happily reinstalled behind his desk – gave Darbishire a chuckle and an ironic salute.

‘I hear the mews was a busted flush. Commiserations, George. Drink later?’

After work, the two men left the station at Lucan Place, and headed for a pub near Cadogan Square that Venables claimed to favour. It was a strange little interlude. The star of Kensington and Chelsea was perfectly friendly, but after five minutes on the subject of his recent absence, Darbishire still couldn’t really tell whether to commiserate with him on needing to take a walking trip for health reasons, or congratulate him on a nice little holiday.

He had assumed Venables wanted to tease him about his ‘busted flush’ this morning, but instead, the chief inspector chatted about Fulham’s recent track record in the Second Division and his concerns about the effect of rock and roll on the youth of today, especially young women.

‘I’ve been looking at footage of Elvis Presley. The bobby-soxers lose their minds, you know. They’ve even been known to . . .’ he lowered his voice ‘. . . lose control of their bladders. God help us all when he comes to Britain.’

Darbishire’s girls were four and seven, so he wasn’t unduly worried. He found the new music foot-tapping enough, but he preferred the big band sound for dancing. Still, he was making a mental note to look out for footage of one of those concerts when Venables put down his empty pint glass, stood up and said he needed to be somewhere. It was hardly worth coming this far for that odd, disjointed chat. They said goodbye outside the pub and Darbishire headed west, for home, thinking of his sweet little girls.

Perhaps it was because he wasn’t paying proper attention that the sudden hand on his shoulder came as such a shock. He turned round, tensed for a fight. None came, but the hand remained firm and exerted a lot of pressure considering the diminutive size of the man applying it.

Darbishire’s new companion looked determinedly ordinary. A pale face under a brown trilby, a standard mackintosh, soft-soled brown shoes. He swung Darbishire around, heading south.

‘Let’s keep moving, old man. Easier that way.’

Darbishire did as he was told. He felt something dig in his back, through his coat. He didn’t know if it was a knife, or a rolled-up newspaper, or a gun. They walked down past the square at a fair clip. The road was busy enough with cars, vans and pedestrians. If his new companion tried to steer him into a side street, out of public view, Darbishire would make a move, but for now, he wanted to hear what the man had to say. He remained tense, ready for action.

The other man’s casual tone belied the strength of the grip on his shoulder.

‘I come bearing a message. With your best interests at heart. It won’t take long.’

‘Who sent you? I talk to organ grinders, not their monkeys.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, old chap. Monkey it is. Believe me, if you knew who the organ grinder was, you’d be flattered.’

‘What message?’ Darbishire asked.

‘The Chelsea murders. You’re doing an excellent job, very thorough. Admirable. We’re right behind you – we want the villains caught as much as anyone. Happy to assist in any way. But you’re going up a blind alley, I’m afraid, old chap. A dangerous blind alley. We’d appreciate it if you left well alone.’

Who on earth had the chutzpah to threaten a detective inspector in broad daylight, in the centre of London? They were still surrounded by people, although, in the nature of Londoners, none of them took a shred of notice.

‘I’m a policeman,’ Darbishire muttered. ‘I don’t leave well alone. It’s my job not to.’

‘All very admirable, as I said. But it won’t help you here. The witnesses have told you all they can and they haven’t lied. Monkey or not, I can assure you of that.’

Darbishire was not assured. ‘I assume you mean Gregson. Who on earth squats in a mould-covered, stinking flat, purely so they can mislead a police investigation? What’s going on? What don’t I know about?’

‘Nothing that need concern you. Nothing of any illegality whatsoever.’

‘Oh? I suppose the neighbours wiped a building down of its fingerprints because they were feeling tidy. This isn’t my way home, by the way.’

‘I know.’

The little man pushed him left at the corner of Cadogan Gardens. His tone was still light.

‘You’re probably imagining criminal gangs and drugs and all sorts of unpleasantness. Were they were planning a bank robbery, like The Ladykillers? Excellent picture, very funny. Have they kidnapped the scion of a royal family? Or did they keep a mouldering body in the basement? I can assure you none of these things are true.’

Darbishire had been imagining exactly these things, or variations on them. He was more sure than ever that he was dealing with a gang. Who else would send someone with a prim little voice who called you ‘old chap’ and looked like a cut-price Humphrey Bogart? The incongruity of it all was what made it seem most likely. But the specific denials were a surprise. Were they to distract from another possibility that he’d missed? Or a tissue of lies?

‘Excuse me if I don’t take the word of a total stranger who accosts me in the street.’

The man relaxed his grip. ‘I understand your hesitation. But I wanted you to hear it from us personally. No hard feelings. Carry on the good work. Just . . . focus on what was said, not who said it. Be a good boy. It’s to everyone’s advantage.’ He raised his free hand for a moment, as if waving to a distant friend. ‘Ah, this is me. It’s been good to have this little chat. Don’t forget what I said.’

A black cab pulled up smoothly in the road beside them and he climbed into it almost without breaking step. The taxi pulled out into the traffic of Sloane Street and Darbishire watched as it disappeared in the direction of Hyde Park. He had no idea who the man was, or who he was working for, but he had to admire the slickness of their operation.

And Venables was in on it. That’s why he took Darbishire to that particular pub. It was so obvious that the chief inspector didn’t feel the need to pretend to hide it. Which meant that either this went all the way to the top, or Venables was in with some extremely shady characters. Either way, pursuing those elusive witnesses wasn’t going to lead anywhere.

His initial suspicions about this job had proved spot on. Turning for home, Darbishire smiled grimly to himself.

Chapter 14

Philip was right when he talked about the need to end the outdated flummery of court presentations for young, marriageable debutantes. They might have worked well in the days of Queen Charlotte, but in 1957 the Georgian tradition had become decidedly quaint. And it took up so much time. The Queen had already decided that next year would be the last of them, though it had yet to be announced. However, after her wonderful evening with Duke Ellington, she decided to make an exception for Bridget Fairdale’s coming out ball.

The Queen was very fond of Deborah, and the word ‘incognito’ had clinched it for her. She loved dressing up, always had, and she adored people-watching when she got the chance. It would be so much easier if not everyone was watching her. In addition, the theme was Shakespeare, which made it easy to rustle up an appropriate costume. And the venue was Cliveden, which would make a magnificent backdrop for whatever Deborah chose to do.

Philip had no difficulty deciding on his costume. For a Danish prince – even one who had given up his title – the chance of going dressed as Hamlet was too good to miss. He copied the black velvet doublet worn on-screen by Laurence Oliver, which showed off his pale blond hair. The children were delighted with it when the royal couple went up to the nursery to say goodnight. On the other hand, the Queen was pleased to see that Anne had to stare at her for a minute before recognising her at all.

Cliveden lay higher up the reaches of the River Thames, a half-hour’s drive from Windsor. Originally a home of dukes, it had been bought and restored by William Waldorf Astor, the second richest man in America, who had chosen to settle here after a family dispute. He was responsible for building the original Waldorf Hotel, which was now part of the Waldorf Astoria, used by a succession of presidents and princes. She would be staying in it herself when she went to New York.

At Cliveden, William’s daughter-in-law, Nancy Astor, had updated the decor along with her fellow Virginian, Nancy Lancaster. Cliveden’s interior put Windsor Castle’s decoration to shame in many ways. While the Queen had antiques and tapestries that had been in her family for centuries, some of them were getting a bit tatty, unlike the Astors’ fixtures and fittings, many of which had once belonged to Louis XV, all now restored to their full glory. The benefit of American money was obvious. And the Queen did not have the luxury of carpeted bathrooms, which Nancy Astor seemed to think of as quite normal. Even going to the lavatory at Cliveden was a treat.

Tonight, the grounds were ablaze with electric light and lanterns. Deborah Fairdale had asked Cecil Beaton to provide the theatricals, and the drive from the fountain to the main house was thronged with fairy creatures in woodland costumes inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There was even a donkey on the front steps, bedecked with flowers.

Deborah and Paul met the royal couple in the entrance hall. The Queen had always loved this room because of the romantic couples carved above the banister posts on the stairs. These too were wreathed in roses. The actress looked magnificent in a waist-length red wig as Titania. Her husband was a Grecian Oberon.

After the usual formalities of greeting, Paul grinned at the Queen. ‘I hardly recognised you in those breeches, ma’am. And the hat with the feather! Let me guess . . .’ He frowned and hesitated.

‘She’s Viola,’ his actress wife cut in, ‘disguised as Cesario, aren’t you, ma’am? I love the breeches, they’re quite the thing on you. Have you worn them before?’

‘I was Aladdin at Windsor once,’ the Queen admitted with a grin. Philip, who was visiting while on embarkation leave during the war, had been quite taken with her performance.

‘Ah, a fellow thespian,’ Deborah proclaimed. ‘And a cross-dresser. Isn’t it the best? Oh, here she is.’

Their daughter Bridget appeared from the direction of the garden, looking desperately young and lovely, with several male admirers in tow. She had chosen to be Ophelia, draped in ropes of herbs and wildflowers, which the Queen thought rather unfortunate, given what happened to the poor girl in the end.

She dropped into a rather perfunctory curtsey, but gave the Queen a genuine smile of welcome.

‘I didn’t think you’d come, Your Majesty. I thought you’d have much better things to do.’

‘On an evening like this, I can’t think of anything nicer.’

‘Oh I can.’ Bridget rolled her eyes.

‘Really?’ This seemed surprisingly ungrateful.

‘I mean, here we are guzzling champagne and there are people in the Pacific getting ready to end the world.’

Bridget gave the Queen a look of heartfelt fury and a couple of her admirers nodded in approval. They had longer hair than usual, the Queen noticed, and one had a juvenile attempt at a beard. University students, she thought. She recognised the type. Their bows to her were minuscule.

Deborah was making earnest gestures at her daughter to shut up or change the subject, but Philip was interested.

‘D’you mean the hydrogen bomb?’ he asked. The words seemed odd coming out of the mouth of an Elizabethan prince in doublet and hose.

‘Yes! Of course! I can’t believe we’re doing it.’

A bearded admirer – another Hamlet – stepped forward. ‘It’s Armageddon, isn’t it, sir? We should be out there, stopping it.’

‘If we don’t do it, somebody else will,’ Philip pointed out. ‘That genie’s out of the bottle, I’m afraid.’

Deborah looked despairing: this was supposed to be a party. But Philip was enjoying himself. The university students gathered round him, all talking at once, and they wandered off together, with Bridget in tow, arguing the merits and otherwise of mutually assured destruction. Deborah followed them like an anxious mother hen, glancing back to the Queen with a look of horror.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Paul said, grabbing a couple of champagne coupes from a passing waiter. ‘Bridget’s having one of those moments. She mad on a boy who’s a physicist at Oxford. Convinced the world’s about to end. Forget Cecil Beaton – she’d rather be on a rowing boat in the middle of the ocean, chanting for peace.’

‘But we’ve got peace,’ the Queen said.

Paul shrugged. ‘You and I know that, ma’am. They take it all for granted, these young people. They want us to go around shaking hands with Soviets and turning swords into ploughshares. They don’t know what’s going on behind the Iron Curtain . . .’ He stopped and slapped his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. Enough! Let me start again.’ He reset his face to its normal, suave, gently amused setting and asked, ‘Have you heard about Bill Astor’s new swimming pool?’

Bill Astor was the redoubtable Nancy’s son and a fellow horse owner.

‘Didn’t he have it put in with the money he won when Ambiguity won the Oaks in ’fifty-three?’ the Queen asked, grateful for the change in subject. Although she was rather jealous of that little win. She wouldn’t mind winning the Oaks herself.

Paul grinned. ‘Of course you’d know! Nancy wouldn’t let him have one at first, but Bill can afford it now. It’s in the walled garden. Would you like to see it?’

The Queen was pleased at the chance to go outside, and she was always curious about swimming pools. They were such an extravagance but also very practical for one’s health. Paul accompanied her as they wandered past the converted stables, where Bill lived, to a lovely walled space where a body of water a bit smaller than a tennis court glinted temptingly in the moonlight. Four women in bathing suits and rubber caps performed tricks together in perfect time. What Shakespeare would have made of synchronised swimmers, the Queen didn’t know. But they looked very graceful as they rose and twirled and disappeared under the water, save only for one pointed foot.

After that, a group of Guards officers appeared through a door in the wall and announced that horses and carts were taking guests down to the river. The Queen never missed an opportunity to meet a horse, and found herself cheerfully accompanied down the winding drive to the riverside.

She loved this spot. Windsor Castle had many things, including a medieval chapel and a thousand years of history, but it didn’t have a riverside mooring where one could keep a boat. Here, on a gentle stretch of the Thames, several couples were taking to the water. It was a gentle evening in early May, and England was at its best. The Guards officers vied with each other to take her out on the river, but she politely declined. The boats were pretty to look at, but not entirely safe, she decided. Not with the flickering lights and the general level of inebriation. As the officers drifted away, she was happy to stand by the boathouse and watch.

It was easy to spot the debutantes who hoped the evening – or the summer – would end in a proposal. They arranged themselves as attractively as they could in the launches and rowing boats, looking doe-eyed at their partners. Others sat stiffly, looking out into the dark. At one point, she thought she saw Jeremy Radnor-Milne emerging from the Astors’ famous electric canoe, but it turned out to be the real David Niven. He was wearing some sort of fairy headdress and was quickly surrounded by female admirers, much as Bridget had been surrounded by men. The Queen decided to join them – she was a fan, too – but as the film star headed for a buggy waiting to take revellers back up the hill, she felt heavy footsteps beside her.

‘Your Majesty!’

She turned round to see the portly Duke of Maidstone, dressed as Prospero, clutching a hip flask. Bunny Maidstone had been a very good-looking man in his youth, but the contents of many hip flasks over the years had made him go to seed. He didn’t seem to have noticed, and behaved like a matinee idol. Unlike the real film star, up ahead, who was climbing into the cart without her. It filled up with squealing women and set off.

‘Bunny!’ she said politely. The duke had been called this since his schooldays, for reasons lost in the mists of time. ‘How are you?’

‘All the better for seeing you, ma’am. You’re looking delectable, may I say? Trousers! How funny. D’you mind if I tag along?’

The Queen did, but couldn’t say so. She wished Philip was with her. He’d have told the duke exactly what to do in no uncertain terms, but she simply wasn’t made that way.

‘I didn’t know you knew Deborah,’ she said, to make conversation while they waited for more carts to come.

‘I don’t, really,’ he admitted. ‘But my elder boy races with Paul’s outfit. He’s got a bit of a thing for Bridget. She’s fallen in with this Trotsky crowd, though. One hopes she’ll grow out of it.’

‘Mmm.’

The Queen looked desperately up the drive, but there was no sign of more horses.

‘Did you see the Astors have got a swimming pool?’ Bunny scoffed. ‘Terribly infra dig.’

The Queen thought it infra dig to dismiss the prize possessions of one’s host, but she had often noticed that some dukes thought themselves above that sort of nicety.

‘I ask you!’ he went on. ‘Astors. They may be viscounts these days, but they’ll always be hoteliers at heart.’

‘We have a pool ourselves,’ she reminded him. ‘My father had it put in when we were little.’

‘Ah yes!’ Bunny took another swig from his hip flask. ‘That makes sense. You wouldn’t want the whole of London crowding in to ogle at two girls’ adolescent bodies . . .’

‘I thought this one looked rather charming,’ she said quickly, eager to move off the topic of adolescent bodies – hers or anyone else’s. A buggy arrived at last, with room for two, and Bunny sat snugly beside her. So snugly in fact that she said she’d rather get out after a couple of minutes and walk back across the lawns. She remembered Fiona Matherton-Smith’s mother telling her once about ‘NSITs – men who were ‘not safe in taxis’. Bunny wouldn’t try anything, but she knew how it felt.

The lawns were full of people, at least. Fairies cavorted around them and the sound of laughter came from behind a thick laurel bush. Several Romeos and Juliets passed in the opposite direction. There were a couple of Queen Elizabeths in farthingales and ruffs, which the Queen thought was cheating slightly. As Bunny insisted on walking her back to the house, which still seemed a long way away, she noticed that for once her costume was doing her no favours. No one recognised her and came to the rescue. She realised that she relied on this happening more often than she cared to admit.

Her attention was caught by a very beautiful woman on the arm of a man in a toga. She was wearing sandals, turquoise jewellery and a tight, gold lamé dress that reminded the Queen of the one worn by Marilyn Monroe.

‘Cleopatra,’ Bunny said, following her gaze. ‘Clever. Oh my! Look who it is!’

‘Who?’ the Queen asked.

‘That’s Lucy Seymour, with her husband. Bit of an ice queen. No wonder Stephen . . . But anyway, I’m surprised to see them here tonight. Very brave. Ha!’

He bowed lavishly to them as they passed, and they both looked slightly horrified and walked on quickly. They, too, didn’t recognise the Queen, although she thought the man in the toga looked familiar.

‘Why brave?’ she asked Bunny.

‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ The duke gave her a conspiratorial look. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, ma’am, but everyone’s talking about it. It was Lord Seymour who owned the tiara found on the Chelsea tart.’

‘The one that went to auction? Was he the buyer? My mother was telling me about it.’

‘Yes, ma’am. My nephew works at Bonhams. They were in a quandary about whether to say anything to the police. A client, you know. But someone would have said something eventually, so they told Scotland Yard, and now it’s halfway round London. Of course, everyone thinks Stephen did it, but I can categorically assure you he didn’t.’

‘How do you know?’ she asked.

‘My brother was with him at Eton. He’s a thoroughly good egg. A sound junior minister. God knows how he got caught up in this mess.’

The Queen knew Lord Seymour vaguely through his work for the Government. She found the man unobjectionable, but she thought the duke was being a little naive.

‘Bunny, it’s not unheard of for politicians to be involved with escort agencies. Or old Etonians.’

He laughed.

‘Oh, no, ma’am. No indeed. But they try and stay out of murder.’

‘I’d like to think they do.’

His lips twitched as he watched Cleopatra and her Mark Antony walk out of sight. ‘The diamonds must have been stolen,’ he mused. ‘Curious how the tart got hold of them. The girl was obviously dedicated to her art . . .’ He frowned impishly. ‘I wonder who she was doing.’

‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

‘No, who she was doing,’ Bunny repeated. He took a swig from his hip flask and gave her an unsettling look. ‘The tarts at Raffles have a speciality. Well known for it in clubland. Hasn’t anyone told you?’

The Queen felt vaguely alarmed. ‘Why would they?’

‘Because it involved you, ma’am.’

They were getting nearer to the golden light and laughter from the house. One of her friends recognised her at last and waved, but the Queen ignored the chance to escape. She needed to listen.

She stared at Bunny. ‘Me?’

‘Mmm. They impersonate famous women. Liz Taylor, Vivien Leigh. Marilyn Monroe. They’re very good, I’m told. Not that I’d know personally.’ The leer that accompanied this statement made clear he would very much know.

‘Poor Marilyn,’ the Queen said faintly. She thought back to her encounter with the real Miss Monroe. So, prostitutes – to call a spade a spade – impersonated the actress professionally? How extraordinary. How uncomfortable for her. ‘I don’t see how that affects me, though.’

‘Ah. Well, it’s not just film stars. All sorts of famous women. The Duchess of Argyll, for example.’ The duke coughed. ‘I’ve heard your sister’s quite popular.’

The Queen couldn’t believe she was hearing this. She stopped dead. There was a sort of ringing in her ears. She couldn’t answer for a moment.

‘M-Margaret? Really?’ She had thought Bunny was the one being naive, but it was plain he thought she was.

The duke made a poor attempt at looking ashamed of himself.

‘Isn’t it awful? Don’t worry, ma’am, you aren’t as much of a draw. I think the gentlemen are a little bit too intimidated.’ He swept into an ironic bow. ‘Anyway, your hair . . .’ He gestured vaguely at her hat. ‘The tart in the tiara was a blonde, so nothing to worry about. My money’s on Lana Turner, or that new little French firecracker, what’s she called? Brigitte Bardot. Or Grace Kelly. She’s quite the—’

‘Darling! Are you all right? I’ve been looking for you for ages.’

Philip’s voice came from close behind her, and the Queen turned to him in shock and relief. The single look he shot at Bunny made the duke scuttle off into the night.

‘Was he being a bore? Look at you! Pale as death.’

Instinctively, she pressed herself against the comfort of his velvet doublet, and he put his arms around her.

‘Dammit, Lilibet, was he pestering you? I’ll kill him if he was.’

Her heart gradually stopped racing and she gathered herself. When she was sure she could sound at least relatively light-hearted, she asked, ‘Did you know about the tart in Chelsea? Bunny was telling me the most extraordinary things.’ She outlined her recent conversation as calmly as she could.

‘Oh that,’ Philip said with a smile, as if it wasn’t important. He straightened the feather in her hat, which had been squashed in their embrace. ‘Yes, I did. Didn’t think you’d be interested.’

‘You’d be surprised what interests me.’

‘Not bloody Maidstone, I hope.’

‘Very much not.’

‘Oh, listen.’ He raised his head. ‘They’re playing Cole Porter on the terrace. Shall we dance?’

As they headed towards the lights of the terrace, she took his hand in hers and determined not to let him out of her sight for the rest of the night.

Chapter 15

The following morning, the Queen asked to see her private secretary after breakfast. In a few hours, Margaret and her mother would be popping across to Windsor Castle from Frogmore House for lunch. They would both be keen for all the gossip from Cliveden last night. But first she had something to do.

She had spent an hour or two sitting bolt upright in bed last night, contemplating whether to tell her sister about what she’d found out about the Raffles agency. Margaret would be fascinated and quite possibly flattered. But even so . . . The Queen was annoyed at herself for letting Bunny see her personal shock. There had been a gleam in his glassy eye as he told her the story last night, as if he were enjoying her reaction.

No, she had decided not to tell Margaret. The whole thing was too disturbing.

However, the information had its uses.

When she was ready, her page knocked on the door to announce Sir Hugh’s arrival.

‘What can I help you with, Your Majesty?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid I had rather a shock last night. I found out that I might be connected in some way with the murders in Chelsea.’

‘You, ma’am?’

‘The escort agency in question has . . . specialities.’ The Queen maintained a steady look as his eyebrows shot up. ‘You perhaps know about them. Lots of people seem to. Apparently, those specialities concern me. So I’d like to see the police reports.’

‘But, ma’am . . . !’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘You aren’t involved at all, I assure you! The girl in question was a blonde, for a start.’

‘She had dyed her hair. I read it in the papers.’

‘Yes. But before that she specialised in Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor . . .’

Goodness. Sir Hugh really did know a lot about it. ‘Was that in the papers?’ she asked.

‘No, but one learns these things.’

‘I see. Well, last night I learned some of them too.’

Sir Hugh’s whiskers twitched with indignation. ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. Who on earth had the impudence to—?’

‘It doesn’t matter. But it will be reassuring to see how the police are getting on. You don’t see any obstacles, do you? To getting the report, I mean?’

He hesitated for several seconds before reluctantly shaking his head. He really didn’t want her to see this report for some reason, which made her want to see it all the more.

‘N-no obstacles, ma’am. But I imagine the Criminal Investigation Department will be very surprised to be asked.’

‘Perhaps.’

She held her nerve and didn’t waver. Whatever the reasons for his own reluctance, he was right about the CID. It was true that she didn’t usually involve herself directly with murder cases. Her official reason for doing so this time was tenuous and unsavoury, as she privately admitted to herself, but it would do. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but she’d know when she’d found it.

‘Thank you very much, Hugh.’

He took this as the dismissal it was.

As the door closed behind him, the Queen felt a little sorry for her private secretary. He must be wondering what on earth she was thinking. But Philip had broken a cufflink at the mention of the goings-on in Cresswell Place, and things hadn’t been quite right ever since.

This wasn’t the first little mystery she had encountered. She had been solving them since childhood, but not always without pain, heartache and disappointment, so she had learned not to trust her inner thoughts even with the people she most loved. Their ideas of what was in her best interests and her own weren’t always aligned. Her interest this time was deeply personal and she would have to keep it to herself.

She didn’t think her husband was involved in anything nefarious – not exactly. She didn’t know anyone else in the world more dedicated and sincere in everything that really mattered. But Philip loved risk and silliness too. Was that it? Not all his friends were entirely reputable. Every time she thought about it, she felt a bit dizzy. And then she remembered that all you can do is keep going, trust in God and try your best to do the right thing, however small that might be.

She hoped the police report would be reassuring. At least, one way or the other, she would know.