A Death in Diamonds

Afternotes

Sharp-eyed readers may recognise number 22, the Arts and Crafts house in Cresswell Place where the dubious academics stayed, as the mews house of Agatha Christie. She was one of the first people to do up a traditional servants’ house in the 1920s and set her short story ‘Murder in the Mews’ there. With admirable generosity, she lent the place to a couple of friends, who ended up introducing her to her future husband, Max Mallowan. Sometimes good deeds do go unpunished. The other houses are invented.

Duke Ellington actually met the Queen at a white-tie event at the Leeds Music Festival in 1958, so I have borrowed their exchange for a private event a year earlier. This is what he said about meeting the royal couple:

‘You are astonished by the applause and then struck speechless by the grace of the beautiful Queen . . . HM’s general tone reflects the contentment of a normally happy married life, in contradiction of all the rumours and accounts of monarchs, which restores your faith in people as people. A handsome couple with careers. Two young people trying to get along.’

He did indeed write a suite for her after that meeting, and had a single copy produced to give her as a personal gift. The Queen’s Suite, now recognised as among his most beautiful compositions, remained hidden from the public until after Ellington’s death in 1974. I listened to the centrepiece of the suite, a song without words called ‘The Single Petal of A Rose’, many times while I wrote this book. The Queen remained a fan of Ellington’s music all her life.

Daphne du Maurier really was married to General Boy Browning, who had also been Princess Elizabeth’s head of household and then worked for Prince Philip. As a couple, they went to Balmoral, which Daphne hated because of the stuffiness of court life. But not, as far as I know, in 1957. However, she was asked to work on the Christmas message that year, which is how I got to find out about this – to me – extraordinary association with the Queen. And yes, Prince Philip was a fan, with a love of sailing in common (though not, I imagine, her novels). He was rumoured to have asked her advice before he married. I like to think the author of Frenchman’s Creek would not have advised in favour unless she thought he was deeply in love.

Billy Hill was unimpressed about having his phone tapped by the police. He retired to Spain, but bought a nightclub in Tangier in the late 1950s, which his partner, Gypsy, ran for many years. I wonder where he got the idea from . . . His place in the London underworld was taken by his protégés, the Krays.

My story contains echoes of scandals that would eventually happen in the 1960s – the Profumo affair, featuring the swimming pool at Cliveden; the Third, Fourth and Fifth men of the Cambridge spy ring – one of whom, Kim Philby, announced his (disproven) innocence in a house that happened to back onto Cresswell Place; and the ‘treacherous’ coup that Harold Wilson feared in 1968. Powerful men with an excessive regard for their own intelligence have been known to make stupid decisions. Truth is always stranger than fiction.

I invented a lot, but not the way the Queen was received in France or the USA. From Eleanor Roosevelt’s diary, 26 October, 1957:

In 1959, Princess Margaret bought the Poltimore Tiara at auction. She wore it on her wedding day in 1960 to a society photographer called Anthony Armstrong-Jones. He had taken the official photograph of the Queen and Princess Anne reading together, to mark the young princess’s birthday in 1957. The print was made on 10 October, shortly before the Queen left for her trip to Canada and the United States.

Readers of the same vintage as me may have grown up with the Jennings stories of Anthony Buckeridge. Long before the days of Harry Potter, they recounted the adventures of a (very non-magical) boy at a British boarding school. Growing up far away in Hong Kong at the time, I devoured them. And so, I have borrowed the names of Jennings’s friends Darbishire (spelled this way) and Venables, in honour of the real Chief Inspector George Jennings of the Kensington division, whose team solved the Rillington Place Murders in the 1950s. His subordinate, Inspector James Black, successfully led the early part of the investigation and it is in Black’s honour that Darbishire is a mere DI, but the relationship between my inspector and Venables does not reflect the far more respectful one between the real Metropolitan Police officers.

As I researched the Special Operations Executive, and also murders in and around Chelsea and Kensington in the 1950s, I discovered that two female wartime heroines were murdered there, one by a stalker, one unsolved. The first was Krystyna Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, a Polish agent in the SOE with an extraordinary war record, who was reduced to menial jobs afterwards, before being killed in Earl’s Court in 1952 by a jealous man who had worked as a fellow steward on an ocean liner. The second was Teresa Lubienska, a seventy-three-year-old Polish countess who had been in the Polish Underground Army and survived two concentration camps, and was stabbed by an unknown assailant at Gloucester Road tube station in 1957. Both should have been hailed as heroes. Instead, they led difficult post-war lives and only now is their heroism being fully appreciated, as female historians and writers take on the task of bringing to light what they did. I learned a lot from Mission France by Kate Vigurs, first published in 2022.

The tale of the fictional Marianne Fleury was inspired by my reading of Miss Dior, by Justine Picardie, first published in 2021, which tells the extraordinary story of Christian Dior’s sister Catherine. She was a young Resistance fighter, captured and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp from Paris. She returned after the war, almost unrecognisable after all she had suffered, but continued as her brother’s muse and became a successful rose farmer in Provence, whose flowers were used in his perfumes. Christian died in the time frame of this book, in 1957, but Catherine died in 2008, at the age of ninety. Justine’s book captures the joy and terror of those war and post-war years. It also describes the importance of couture fashion in the rebuilding of post-war France. I recommend it.

S.J. Bennett, August 2023