A Three Dog Problem

Chapter 9

‘Simon, you look dreadful. What’s happened?’

On her first morning back at the Palace, the Queen emerged from her bedroom, dressed and coiffured, only to find her Private Secretary waiting for her in the corridor. This was hardly protocol.

‘Your Majesty.’ He bowed at the neck. ‘I wanted to be the one to tell you. I found . . . There’s been a most unfortunate accident. A terrible thing. I found . . . There’s a body in the pool, ma’am. Not in the pool, beside it. A housekeeper. Mrs Harris. I found . . .’

She stared at him. Sir Simon was one of the most competent men in the country. Ex-Royal Navy and Foreign Office, a pilot and a diplomat. She had never seen him like this. There was a smear of red on his earlobe. His tie was askew.

‘Come with me and tell me about it. Are you sure you don’t need to sit down?’

They walked briskly along the corridor to her study, while Sir Simon, limping slightly, poured out details in no particular order. The housekeeper had fallen, it seemed, and hit her head. The blood was caused by broken glass. The police were here. She looked very cold. He had found her first thing this morning.

The man was grey and she sensed that any minute the shock would kick in properly, and he would hardly be able to stand.

‘Get Rozie for me,’ she said, once they’d reached her desk and he was starting to repeat himself. ‘Then go home and don’t come back until I tell you.’

‘The police, ma’am . . .’

‘Rozie can deal with them. And they can visit you at home. It’s not far. You’ll be useless to me here.’ She said it sharply, not to be unkind but because she knew he wouldn’t leave unless she made him, and he was in no fit state to work.

It was her APS, therefore, who got the report from the police about how the housekeeper had died.

‘A thick piece of glass cut her artery just above the ankle,’ Rozie explained a couple of hours later, standing in the light from the study window, one floor above where the body had been found. She, too, had an odd look about her, but at least her manner was professional. ‘A freak accident. It looked as though Mrs Harris slipped and dropped a whisky tumbler she was carrying. The bottom of the broken glass had a lethally sharp edge that must have caught her as she fell. They think she was lying there all night.’

‘What was she doing with a whisky tumbler by the pool?’

‘Probably clearing it up, ma’am. A few had been left around recently.’

‘Can you die from a cut on your ankle?’

‘Apparently yes, if you’re very unlucky. That artery bleeds a lot. It looks as though she slipped and knocked herself out, then came to and tried to stem the bleeding – her hands were covered in blood. But she was too weak to do it, or get up and call for help. She only had a couple of cuts, but that’s all it takes. That’s what the police inspector I spoke to thinks, anyway. He’s requested an autopsy, so the pathologist will let us know for certain.’

The Queen was grateful for the way Rozie didn’t pause to check she was ‘OK’, as people usually did. When one had grown up with dogs and horses one was used to accidents of various ghastly descriptions. Used to death. And she had read the reports of more soldiers killed in battle than she cared to recall. She pictured the poor woman trying to stem the flow of her own blood, and was desperately sad there had been nobody there to help.

‘Why was she on her own?’

‘The Master’s not sure. There’s only one CCTV camera in the area and it’s been on the blink for ages. It’s possible she went to clear up after a family session. She was in uniform and didn’t have her costume with her. She probably only meant to be in there for five minutes.’

‘Poor Mrs Harris,’ the Queen said. ‘She’s been with us for years. I saw her only recently, at Balmoral.’

‘Yes, she went up with the second wave of staff, I believe.’

The Queen nodded thoughtfully. ‘And they think she slipped?’

‘It seems so.’

‘Let me know if they make any unfortunate discoveries.’

Rozie knew exactly what the Boss meant. ‘I’m sure it’s an accident this time,’ she ventured. The last time a body was found at a royal residence, it turned out not to be accidental at all.

Her Majesty gave her a piercing look through her bifocals. ‘Don’t be too sure of anything. It pays to keep an open mind.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Can you find out if Mrs Harris was in any trouble?’

The piercing look was still on her. Rozie felt the Queen’s concern. She had a split second to decide whether to keep her promise to Sir Simon from the summer. And if not, whether to tell the full story. She decided to keep some of her thoughts to herself. This was about Cynthia Harris; best for all concerned if it stayed that way.

‘I happen to know already, ma’am. She was.’

‘Oh?’

Rozie took a breath and explained. ‘There’s been a spate of poison pen letters. Several people didn’t like her. I mean, they had reason not to like her. I don’t know how all of them actually felt.’

‘What reasons?’

Rozie summed up what she had learned from Lulu Arantes and Sir Simon about the retirement and return. ‘There was a lot of resentment. And . . .’ Rozie paused.

‘And what?’ The blue stare was unwavering.

‘Well, ma’am, I understand several people thought Mrs Harris had undue . . . that she was quite close to you, ma’am, because she helped out with the guest suites and you’re so particular about them.’

Rozie wondered whether she was being too direct, but didn’t have time to find the elegant courtier’s way of telling the truth. Sir Simon would have managed – if he’d been here, and not at home with his wife and a stiff brandy.

If the Queen was offended, she didn’t show it. ‘Thank you, Rozie.’ But she pursed her lips again. ‘Why wasn’t I told before?’

‘About what, ma’am?’ Rozie asked, stalling for time.

‘About all this unpleasantness. The bad feeling about Mrs Harris. The poison pen letters. I could have done something.’

‘I – I don’t know. Sir Simon felt . . . I mean the Master . . .’ Rozie struggled to finish her sentence without implying the senior courtiers had made a terrible mistake. Which, in her opinion, they had.

The Queen nodded and waved a hand. ‘They had it under control, no doubt,’ she said coldly.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘They didn’t mind the implication that a housekeeper had me in her power.’

Rozie was shocked at the baldness of this statement. But she couldn’t deny it.

‘They were unhappy about it. But there was an HR process to go through before they could ask her to retire again. The anonymous letters made it difficult.’

The Queen was thoughtful for a moment as she looked out of the study window towards Constitution Hill. When she turned back her voice was sharp. ‘Is there anything else I’m being protected from?’

A million things, Rozie thought. But nothing worth sharing at this point. ‘Not as far as I know, ma’am. If I think of anything, I’ll tell you.’

‘Thank you. That will be all.’

Once she was alone, the Queen turned her gaze back to the view. It was a crisp October day and the sky was powder blue above the trees. For London, the air was clear and bright, but after the Highlands she could make out the fug of air pollution that rendered everything slightly grey. She had been anticipating problems on her return . . . But not this.

It was true, she and Cynthia Harris had been close in a way. When you need your home to run like clockwork, you come to rely on those professionals who work to your standards. Any room prepared by Mrs Harris was always impeccable. There was never a speck of dirt or a hint of disrepair. Fraying fabrics were magically replaced; requests for specific books or flowers were always met; even the allergies of guests’ staff were considered. There had been that awful time not long ago during the President of Mexico’s visit, when the Orleans bedroom in the Belgian Suite had been filled with Casa Blanca lilies, which had given his chief of staff a streaming nose in minutes. That would never have happened if Mrs Harris was in charge. It must have been while she was away. Hmmm.

The woman had been friendly but not forward, practical, tireless – and unquestionably loyal. In Balmoral she would always grab a net and leap about with the best of them to catch the infernal bats. They had shared the occasional joke. Her attention to detail was obvious in the way she looked after the rooms in her care, but they were not close in the way Rozie seemed to suggest.

The Queen sighed. After sixty-three years on the throne, she was not as impressionable as some members of her Household gave her credit for. She could see that Mrs Harris was a bit of a toady. She had noticed her occasionally being sharp with junior maids, but instantly sunny as soon as she turned her attention to a VIP. It had struck her as unusual that the woman was still working beyond retirement age, and indeed she had asked the Master about it last year, but he had said ‘she wanted to’ and ‘it was all under control’. It always was with the Master. But what control? Had he controlled who Mrs Harris made enemies of? Could he?

The Queen took off her bifocals and fiddled with her fountain pen. She felt a mix of guilt and frustration. If Cynthia Harris had been causing problems, someone should have said. One could live with the occasional poor choice of flowers in the Belgian Suite if it meant the Household as a whole was happy. Was that the sort of thing the housekeeper hadn’t mentioned in her handover notes? The Queen wished people didn’t always assume that obeying one’s every whim was the be-all and end-all. It was more than a whim to desire the staff to get on with each other. That mattered too, surely?

Even so. Mrs Harris’s reliability and flair were a rare mix and the Queen would miss her. The poor woman had been receiving poison pen letters and now she was dead.

And there was something else.

She thought hard for a moment, gazing into the middle distance. Rozie had said something she had meant to follow up on. What was it?

A spate of poison pen letters. Mrs Harris was not the only victim.

She reached swiftly for the phone on her desk and asked to be put through to the Master.

‘Good morning. I’d like to see you in my study immediately. If you would be so kind.’

Chapter 10

‘You what?’

Sir Simon, back at his desk and, it seemed, fully recovered from the shock, was incandescent.

Rozie stood her ground. ‘I told her about the letters. I had to.’

‘Oh, you had to, did you? Why, exactly?’

‘She asked.’

‘Asked if there were any letters, specifically? Any damaged items?’

‘No. She asked if I knew whether Mrs Harris was in any trouble. What damaged items?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I told you about the letters in confidence. God, Rozie! The Master told me in confidence. Can’t I trust you?’

He was standing at the carved marble mantelpiece in his office, flexing his hands into fists while she stood facing him. This was not a sit-down conversation. In fact, it was abutting the borders of a rollicking bollocking, Sir Simon-style.

‘Yes, of course you can,’ she said.

‘How? How?’

‘I can’t lie to the Queen!’ Rozie raised her voice to match his, which then became icy.

‘I never ask you to lie, simply to let the right person tell their own story. Is that so difficult?’

Rozie stood in silence. She understood, up to a point. But since her arrival late last year, she had developed a bond with Her Majesty that Sir Simon couldn’t even guess at. She had lied to him, when the Queen needed her to. If he even half suspected how much, she would become one of those people like Cynthia Harris who other staff hated for their privileged access to the Boss.

She kept her head held high. It was easy to know what to do: lie again. Brazenly. And as often as it took.

‘Of course, Sir Simon. It won’t happen again.’

She only called him ‘Sir Simon’ when he was shouting at her, which was rare. She saw from the tick in his cheek that he was slightly ashamed of himself. It was his tell. Breathing hard, she took advantage by withdrawing from the room and closing the door with infinite care behind her.

He wouldn’t know what she was thinking. It would drive him mad. Serve him right. And thank God he didn’t know what she was holding back, because if he did, he’d be even more furious with her than he already was.

When she was alone, Rozie messaged her sister in Frankfurt to let off steam. It was rare for a day to go by without an exchange of some sort between them – often accompanied by a meme, a few jokes and a selection of emojis. She didn’t tell Fliss what was happening, and Fliss knew enough not to ask. It was good just to make some stupid faces and apply the cheesiest filters she could find. Fliss, as usual, tried to teach her a new word in German. Today, it was Backpfeifengesicht: ‘someone who you feel needs a slap in the face’.

Rozie’s list of approving emojis went on for two lines.

The Queen spent the weekend visiting friends. On Monday morning, Sir Simon’s mood plummeted from chilly to glacial. He called Rozie into his office again.

‘Can I help?’

‘You certainly can. We’ve got the Met in. A detective chief inspector is arriving this morning. You can look after him. I have things to do. You can imagine how the press are slavering for details on the body.’

Rozie, who also had a full diary, simply nodded. ‘Of course. What’s he—’

‘He’s here about the letters. Well done. You can introduce him to the Master. That’ll be an interesting conversation. “We didn’t trust you to take care of it. We told Her Majesty and she’s called in the police”.’

Rozie peered to see if she could see actual steam coming out of his ears. ‘I’ll introduce the man, certainly. Do you know where he’s going to work?’

‘I know practically nothing. She organised this from her weekend jolly, God knows how. He may come with a hundred officers, for all I know. Put them in the Ballroom. Order up some computers and a whiteboard. Let’s make it an incident room.’

‘Yes, Sir Simon.’

He glared at her and left.

Soon afterwards, Rozie received a phone call to say that her visitor had arrived. She went to the entrance at the front of the North Wing in time to see the policeman striding across the Palace forecourt as the last of the scarlet tunics of the Foot Guards disappeared in the direction of St James’s Palace. As she approached, she was astonished to see that she recognised him.

The man nodding to the sentry at the gate was DCI David Strong, whom she’d met at Windsor Castle. He had been part of the team in charge of solving the murder there. He was short and squat, wearing a fringed woollen scarf over his suit to keep out the autumn chill. His salt-and-pepper hair had grown slightly greyer since the spring, she thought, but there was a gentle babyishness to his round, pink cheeks that made him look disarmingly cheerful. She greeted him at the door with a smile and a handshake.

‘David! Good to see you again.’

‘You too, Rozie. Sorry, I’d have been earlier, but I lingered to watch the Changing of the Guard. Haven’t seen it since I was a kid. All those soldiers in their busbies. What d’you call them?’

‘Bearskins.’

‘Do they actually make them out of bearskins?’

‘You don’t want to know. Come on through.’

She escorted him to her office and got an assistant to make him a coffee (she still remembered Baba Samuel’s slightly mind-boggled expression when she explained that, as Assistant Private Secretary she was not a secretary, and nor was the Private Secretary, but that they shared two assistants, who were). The chief inspector made himself comfortable in an antique wing-back chair between the fireplace and a tall Georgian window flanked by silk curtains and masked from the world outside by heavy netting.

‘Nice place you’ve got here.’

‘I like to think so,’ she agreed.

Strong guessed the netting was blast-proof, in the sense that it was designed to catch shattered glass and protect the room’s occupants in case of an explosion. Antiques and bomb threats. Swings and roundabouts. Still nice, though.

‘Did Her Majesty explain why I’m here?’

‘I think I got a fair idea from Sir Simon,’ Rozie said. ‘You’ve been asked to look into the poison pen letters received by one of our housekeepers, who died a few days ago.’

‘That’s about it. And the others too. She wasn’t alone, I gather.’

Rozie nodded as she bent down to fiddle with something on her desk. ‘Yes, there are a couple of others. A secretary and a catering manager. Mrs Harris wasn’t very popular.’

‘So I’m told.’

Rozie looked up again. ‘Does this mean the Queen thinks she was killed?’

‘No more than you do. Do you?’

‘No,’ Rozie said. Then, a little less confidently, ‘No.’

‘I mean, I’ve looked at the pathologist’s report. It does happen. Grisly way to die, but everything’s consistent with her having tripped and dropped the glass, then fallen onto it with the jagged edge piercing the artery as she landed. Really bad luck. You can bleed out in minutes if you’re not careful. Misadventure, he says. As far as he can tell.’

Rozie tried not to look as relieved as she felt. Of course it wasn’t murder.

‘But Her Majesty isn’t entirely happy with the internal investigation into the letters,’ Strong said. ‘Thank you.’ He smiled up at the assistant, who was back with his coffee.

Rozie tried not to criticise the Master in front of other staff, so she changed the subject. ‘I’m amazed that it’s you who came, though,’ she said. ‘Do you work at all the royal palaces?’

Strong laughed. ‘If only. No, the Queen asked for me specifically, apparently. You tell me why. First and last time we met was at Windsor, and I didn’t exactly come out of that one smelling of roses.’

‘You solved the case.’

‘I didn’t.’ He smiled wryly and took a sip of coffee. ‘Other people did it for me, and how they put all the pieces together I’ll never be quite sure. But apparently I didn’t blot my copybook too badly. I s’pose I know people here already, like you and Sir Simon. That helps. And I’ve got the support of my team in SCD11.’

‘Remind me . . .?’ Rozie asked. She knew that ‘SCD’ stood for Serious Crimes Directorate, but hadn’t mastered its administrative intricacies. Sir Simon would know, of course.

‘Mine’s a little unit for some of the more interesting stuff,’ Strong said. ‘We’re the SIS of the police, you might say. They like to call us the Shadowy Investigation Service. It’s “Specialist” really, but I prefer “shadowy”.’

He downed his coffee and Rozie offered to take him to the Master. A short corridor led to a set of double doors that brought them suddenly into the gilded splendour of the Marble Hall. Strong looked up and around at the moulded ceiling and neoclassical pillars, craning his neck as if he couldn’t quite believe he was really here. Rozie, who was used to it by now, carried on talking.

‘Are you bringing a lot of people with you?’ she asked, remembering Sir Simon’s tetchy comment about the Ballroom.

‘Nope,’ Strong said, dragging his eyes away from a priceless sculpture and striding out so as to keep up with her. ‘In fact, until I see the need to operate otherwise, it’s just me and my sergeant. We’ll just be asking a few judicious questions, you know. Nothing too scary. Make Sir Mike Green feel I’m not stepping on his toes too much.’

Rozie grinned at him. ‘Thank you for that.’

Strong gave her a sideways look. His sharp brown eyes belied those soft, rosy cheeks. ‘Might I suppose it was you, then, who spilled the beans to Her Majesty about the letters?’

‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ Rozie said. ‘And it’s Mike Green, by the way, not Sir Mike.’

‘Ha! I bet he loves that.’

‘Knighthoods aren’t automatic and he’s fairly new. He’ll get one eventually.’

‘You’ll have to talk me through the ins and outs of it one day,’ Strong suggested.

‘Not my speciality. That’s for the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.’

‘And what d’you call him?’

‘Lord Peel.’

Strong giggled to himself, in a way that was not entirely respectful.

Rozie maintained her pace as she guided him along more red carpet, past gilded mahogany doors and life-size portraits of the Boss’s ancestors, until they reached the end of the corridor, where the gilding abruptly ended and the carpet switched from crimson to a more hard-wearing industrial brown.

She turned left, and he had to jog a little to stay alongside her.

‘I hate to ask, but are we nearly there yet?’

‘Almost. This is the South Wing.’

‘Do you do this every day?’

‘Several times, if I need to. But the Queen’s private rooms are above ours in the other wing, so that makes it easier.’

He looked at her heels. ‘I mean, how?’

She smiled. ‘You get used to it. Here we are. Let me introduce you to the Master. I hope he’s expecting us.’

The utterly sour expression on Mike Green’s face as he greeted them suggested he was.

Chapter 11

It had been a full day and the Queen was grateful for a quick gin and Dubonnet before supper. This evening she was accompanied by Lady Caroline Cadwallader, one of her ladies-in-waiting. They watched the news on television with the sound down and the Queen wondered how the Master would be coping with the chief inspector’s arrival.

Just as the thought was crossing her mind, the façade of Buckingham Palace appeared on the screen, alongside an aerial shot of the pavilion that contained the pool.

‘Oh goodness, look!’ said Lady Caroline. ‘That’s us! Isn’t it dreadful? Shall I turn the sound up? By the way, the gossip in the servants’ hall is that there’s a policeman at work here now. Is it true?’

The Queen merely nodded and glanced at the unused remote control at her lady-in-waiting’s side.

‘He doesn’t think there was any skulduggery, does he?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘I wouldn’t put it past anyone, mind you,’ Lady Caroline observed chattily. ‘Mrs Harris was an absolute pill, apparently. There was such a to-do when she was brought in from retirement. Everyone was muttering about it.’

‘Not to me,’ the Queen said grimly.

‘Oh, ma’am, of course not! You have much more important things to think about. I’m sure the Master was sorting it out. He—’

She was interrupted by a knock on the door and the appearance of the Duke of Edinburgh, who strode into the room and said, ‘Are you watching this lunacy? Did you hear what they just said?’

‘No, actually,’ the Queen told him with a little sigh. ‘Caroline was talking to me about it.’

‘They’ve made up some story about Beatrice and Eugenie leaving champagne glasses in the pool. They’re speculating the woman fell on a broken bottle of Dom Perignon.’

‘What imaginations they have!’ Lady Caroline said. ‘You almost have to admire them.’

‘I bloody don’t.’

‘So is that what the policeman is investigating?’ she asked. ‘Broken glass?’

‘Health and safety gone bloody insane,’ the Duke grumbled.

‘No, actually,’ the Queen said in reply to her lady-in-waiting. She told them about the poison pen campaign and the Master’s failure, so far, to make any headway with it.

Philip made a ptcha! noise. ‘I’ve been wondering about Mike Green. Promoted to the level of his incompetence. Typical crab. Not the first balls-up on his watch.’

‘Is it really so bad?’ Lady Caroline asked. ‘This poison pen thing, I mean?’

The Queen ruminated on the aspects that particularly disturbed her.

‘One of the secretaries found a rather disgusting note on her bicycle seat. Some of Mrs Harris’s clothes were cut up.’

Philip made a face. ‘If it’s all frocks and bicycles I’ll leave you girls to it. And someone needs to tell the Tristrams at the BBC that we don’t all sit around by the damned pool all day drinking bloody Dom Perignon in our pyjamas.’

Once they were alone again, Lady Caroline asked about the note on the bicycle seat.

The Queen explained. ‘The poor young woman – Mary van Something – was distraught. I spoke to the Master about it, and he tried to reassure me that he’d discussed it with her and it was nothing more than a “date gone wrong” and some ruffled feathers. He didn’t see it as relevant.’

‘Oh no!’

‘Exactly. The poor thing was being stalked. The man stood outside her house. Those aren’t “ruffled feathers”.’

‘Indeed they aren’t. Have you discussed it with the Duchess of Cornwall?’

The Queen had not, but she knew Camilla would be as alarmed as she was. Indeed, it was Camilla who worked with charities in the field and who had explained the extent and the dangers of domestic violence. She cared very deeply about this sort of thing. Did it count as domestic violence if the woman didn’t claim to know the man? The Queen wasn’t sure, and frankly didn’t care. Whatever it was, it was out of the Master’s purview, and he should have known it.

She sighed. The previous Master would have got it instantly. Blessed with tact and sensitivity to match his unquestioned authority, he’d been a real rock. It was why her family had always tended to go for senior officers for such positions. They generally combined an essential esprit de corps with the subtle but ruthless efficiency she required from her courtiers. Philip was right. As a man who considered the navy the Senior Service, he was never going to give an RAF officer his due, even an ex-fighter pilot like Mike Green, but in this case he had a point.

The following morning, at her desk, the Queen was reminded of the competence of senior officers who did, happily, live up to expectations. Along with the boxes was a letter from the Second Sea Lord in Portsmouth. She had written to him from Balmoral about the oil painting of Britannia, the ‘ghastly little painting’, as Philip always called it. The Duke had never quite understood why she was so attached to it.

As it happened, the Second Sea Lord, now an admiral, had been one of Philip’s equerries many years ago, and the Queen knew him well enough to dictate a note. Sometimes, it took the personal touch. She had explained politely but firmly that the painting was hers and had gone missing in the mid-eighties. She knew it was not the Second Sea Lord’s fault that it had ended up in his possession: he’d only been in the job since last summer, while the painting had been in his office for at least a decade. However, one would be grateful if he could facilitate its return.

His reply was apologetic. He explained that he had recently returned from holiday himself, hence the slight delay, but as soon as he had read her note he had put a very able young lieutenant on the case of establishing how on earth he could have inadvertently acquired the Queen’s private property. He had also examined the painting in person, realised it was filthy (more apologies) and arranged to have it cleaned at the Royal Navy’s expense.

The Queen sighed hard at this. No! Really? Was it too late to change his mind about that? She wondered what excuse she could make.

Anyway, unlike Rozie’s more laissez-faire contact in facilities at the MOD, the very able young lieutenant had rapidly discovered that the painting had been personally chosen by the Second Sea Lord of ten years ago and:

I contacted him myself, living in happy retirement in the New Forest, and fortunately for us both he’s not gaga yet. Daily crosswords, he tells me, and watching Pointless on the BBC. He remembered the painting well, and says he originally saw it in the MOD building in Whitehall back in the nineties, in the corner office of a procurement mandarin of some sort. Years later, when he got the 2SL posting, he asked if the painting happened to be available. He assumed it wouldn’t be, but it never hurts to ask. In this case they found it languishing in central storage. He had it installed at the office in 2004. It’s been on the wall opposite my desk ever since.

The MOD’s records had been better kept than her own, she mused. Although that was probably a little unfair. These days there were teams of archivists and conservators who could lay their hands on a hatpin at a moment’s notice, whereas early in her reign, you could lose a framed Caravaggio and be lucky to track it down in the bowels of one of the palaces. The eighties was the decade when all that had changed, in fact. It was around the time Sholto Harvie had arrived. She remembered the old Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures fondly. Such a forward-thinker and planner, after the disaster of Anthony Blunt, and such good company. He was an expert on Leonardo, and he’d taught her more about art in a week than his predecessors had in a lifetime. It was a shame he’d stayed for so short a tenure.

Anyway, the ‘ghastly little painting’ was on its way home at last – though she wondered what state it would be in when the navy finally let go of it. However, that still left the troubling question of how the picture had ended up in the office of a Whitehall civil servant in the first place, when it should have been rehung in its usual place in her bedroom suite in 1986, while she was on her way back from China. If six decades of reigning had taught the Queen anything, it was that it was often the small things one should worry about. Big problems were obvious, with ministers and courtiers falling over themselves to fix them. Small ones were often a sign that someone wasn’t paying attention. Had that happened in this case? If so, what else had they missed?

She was musing on this thought when Sir Simon came back to retrieve the boxes and discuss the royal diary for the day.

‘The President of Croatia will be accompanied by her husband.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘She’ll meet the Prime Minister in the afternoon, and no doubt Brexit will be on the agenda. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall met her seven months ago, and so I’m sure you’ll want to pass on their good wishes. I have a printed copy of the briefing notes for you here.’

He opened the slim leather folder he’d been carrying, looked horrified for an instant, recovered himself and said, ‘I’m so sorry, ma’am. I appear to have left them on my desk. I can just go and get them if you’d like me to—’

‘Are you all right, Simon?’

‘Yes, ma’am. Perfectly. Absolutely.’

‘You look distracted.’

‘Not at all, ma’am.’ He adjusted his tie, while she watched him silently. ‘If you mean the incident in the pool, I can assure you, ma’am, I’m perfectly recovered.’

He was ‘ma’aming’ her like mad. He often did that when something was bothering him. He had seemed to recover well after finding the body last week, as she would have expected from a former naval officer, but perhaps she was wrong. ‘Are you sure?’

The piercing blue gaze made him stiffen with alarm. Sir Simon was not, it was true, feeling at his best. Normally he would have brazened it out, but he was appalled at the idea that the Boss should think he couldn’t handle the sight of a dead woman in a congealed puddle of her own blood. He was terribly sorry about the whole thing, of course, but absolutely fine. The problem was Rozie, and though the Queen seemed to be developing quite a bond with her and this would not go down well, he might as well be honest.

‘Just a few little wrinkles with the APS. I’m sure she’ll learn, but she’s created some local difficulties recently. We’re sorting them out. It’s all—’

Under control, the Queen thought, a microsecond before he said it. Yes, it would be.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Nothing I can help with?’

‘Nothing at all, ma’am.’

It would be the chief inspector’s arrival, the Queen reflected. The Master was probably ranting in his office even as they spoke. Poor Rozie: she had merely done as requested, in explaining about the letters. Sir Simon had confused ideas about where the young woman’s loyalties lay.

‘I’m sure you’ll deal with it,’ she said with a practised smile, at which he visibly relaxed. ‘Now if you can just get me the briefing notes, that would be very kind.’

While he was away, she considered what to do. Her Private Secretary was clearly still discombobulated by his discovery of the body, and even a man of his immense capability was not above taking the stress out on a more junior staff member who didn’t deserve it. She felt slightly guilty for giving him such a ready target in her APS. It was she who had encouraged Rozie to spill the beans about Mrs Harris, and then undermined the Master by calling in the police.

Three women had been targeted by the poison pen campaign. The Keeper’s secretary had resigned, the woman in the catering office was on sick leave with stress, and the housekeeper was dead – in the most extraordinary manner. No one else seemed unduly concerned, but the Queen made no apology whatsoever for her response. She had asked the chief inspector to be as diplomatic as possible, but no doubt it grated.

Meanwhile, Rozie was having to take the flak. It might be best if she wasn’t around for a few days. Sir Simon and the Master would have a chance to settle down and it would give the girl a little break from this atmosphere.

She looked through the printout of today’s engagements. After the visit from the President of Croatia, she had audiences lined up with three senior members of the Armed Forces. William was holding the day’s investiture in the Ballroom. Philip was hosting dairy farmers to a meeting in the Bow Room and heart and lung researchers to lunch afterwards in the 1844 Room. There were a couple of private audiences in the afternoon, and the evening called for silk and sparkles at a reception at the Royal Academy. However, one could squeeze in a few spare minutes between walking the dogs and getting changed, if one was careful. She made a note.

At the appropriate time, Rozie arrived at Her Majesty’s private sitting room for a chat. The room was cosy and comfortable, with plump cushions on upholstered chairs, family photographs on most surfaces and a series of lamps to cast a gentle glow. But the setting did nothing, it seemed, to put Rozie at her ease. The poor girl was trying to hide it, but the Queen had never seen her look so alarmed. She stood rigidly in the middle of the room, as if bracing herself for bad news. Whatever Sir Simon had been saying to her, it wasn’t reassuring.

‘I have a slightly unusual proposition for you, Rozie,’ the Queen said from the sofa.

‘Ma’am?’

‘I’d like you to pay a visit to someone who used to work for me.’

‘Yes?’ Rozie’s eyes widened. This was not what she’d been anticipating.

‘A man called Sholto Harvie. He’s an art historian. He used to work here in the nineteen eighties, and he might be able to shed some light on how my little painting ended up in the archives of the Ministry of Defence.’

‘I understood you were getting that back.’

‘I am,’ the Queen acknowledged, ‘but I still don’t understand why I should need to. There’s something not quite right.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t manage to solve it for you over the summer. I tried as hard as I—’

‘I’m sure you did your best. You’re usually successful, and that’s one of the things that strikes me as odd.’

Rozie looked confused. ‘I don’t . . .’

‘If everything was as it should be, you would have traced it quite easily from this end. The fact that you didn’t makes me uneasy. As the Surveyor at the time is no longer with us, I’m hoping Mr Harvie, his old deputy, might be able to help. He lives in the Cotswolds, I believe, and I’d like you to pay him a visit. It was all a very long time ago and it may take him a little while to remember something useful, so I suggest you offer to stay nearby and pop in a couple of days in a row.’

By now Rozie’s eyes were almost perfectly round with surprise. ‘You want me to go to the Cotswolds? For a couple of days?’

The Queen faked a grimace. ‘Or even three.’

‘I don’t think I can spare the time, ma’am. There’s the chief inspector, and the state visit to finalise, and your speech about peacemaking . . .’

‘The chief inspector can look after himself. Are you on top of the state visit and the speech?’

‘Well, yes, I am, but—’

‘Can you work on them from your laptop?’

‘I could, but—’

‘Could you go this weekend?’

Rozie swallowed. The Queen sensed she was struggling with something. ‘You’re busy?’

‘A friend’s getting married on Saturday,’ Rozie admitted.

‘I’d hate you to miss a wedding. Go on Sunday. Stay until Tuesday if you need to, assuming Mr Harvie’s at home.’

‘But on Tuesday you have the Patriarch of Moscow and the Archbishop. The High Commissioner . . .’

‘Sir Simon can brief me. They’ve met me before. We all know what we’re doing.’

Rozie gave her a look of pure bemusement. All this for a painting? it said.

Well, yes. And a bit of distance from Sir Simon. The Queen agreed, privately, how odd it must seem, but she still couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was off and it would be remiss not to try and find out what it was.

Chapter 12

Sholto Harvie, Rozie discovered, lived in one of the loveliest villages in the Cotswolds, in a cottage so beautiful it had featured in two national magazines.

He sounded delighted to get her call. ‘How wonderful to hear from the Palace!’ He insisted that she should stay with him for a couple of nights, rather than ‘shacking up at some little B & B in the middle of nowhere’. If he was amazed – astonished, even – to be approached out of the blue in this way, he gave no hint of it. Instead, he was all bonhomie, busily exchanging email addresses and sending her a detailed list of directions to his cottage and asking her to bring a couple of French cheeses from Fortnum’s that he couldn’t source in Wiltshire, for which he would happily reimburse her.

Rozie ended up working late on the Friday night to get through as much of her overcrowded inbox as she possibly could. On Saturday morning, upstairs in her little attic rooms, she was woken by the cheerful banging of the cleaner’s trolley and the sound of Lulu Antares singing.

Rozie opened her door to say hello, to find that Lulu was nursing one arm in a sling. Rozie didn’t ask why. They had the usual conversation about towels and linen and Lulu asked what Rozie was up to today. She explained about the wedding.

‘Ooh, lovely! I do like a good bash. Are they having it somewhere posh?’

‘Just a church in Canterbury and a local hotel.’

‘Are you spending the whole weekend down there?’ Lulu asked. ‘Only, I’ve got a cousin in Whitstable and it’s not very far and they do the most incredible fish and chips. It’s perfect for Sunday.’

‘I’d love to,’ Rozie said wistfully. There was going to be a man at the wedding she would have very much liked to eat incredible fish and chips with on the Sunday. But it wasn’t to be, and probably better that way. Rekindled old relationships were usually a disaster. He’d probably show up with a girlfriend and anyway, one-night stands were tacky. She lost her train of thought. ‘What was I saying?’

‘You’d love to, but . . .?’ Lulu looked hopeful.

‘I’m off to Wiltshire,’ Rozie said, indulging her. Repeating her strange plans aloud made them seem more real somehow. ‘I’m staying with an old member of staff, actually. He worked here back in the eighties. He has this amazing cottage in the Cotswolds, apparently.’

Lulu rested her good hand on the trolley. ‘Not Mr Harvie?’

‘Yes! Goodness, how did you know?’

Lulu rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve heard all about him. Awful man.’

Rozie laughed. ‘You said that about Cynthia Harris. They can’t all be awful!’

‘Really fake, if you know what I mean. Good luck with that one.’

Rozie looked again at Lulu. How could she even know? Her curly, dark brown hair was dyed, but her barely lined face suggested a woman in her forties. She would have been a teenager when he worked here, if that. ‘Did you know him?’ she asked, sceptically.

‘Me? No. But I’ve heard all about him. He was the Surveyor, wasn’t he?’

‘The deputy.’

‘Came in after all that terrible Blunt business. A Russian spy! Maybe it’s not surprising. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Anyway, have a nice day.’

Rozie recalled the last time Lulu had told her to have a nice day. It was just after mentioning the sister-in-law’s cousin who was bludgeoned to death.

‘Thanks,’ she said, without much conviction. She realised she was truly late now, and disappeared back into her room to shower and climb into the extortionately expensive dress she had succumbed to on Net-a-Porter, when Mark, the ill-advised ex-boyfriend, was on her mind.

Mark didn’t show up with a girlfriend. He showed up with eyes only for Rozie’s extortionately expensive dress, and a look about him that suggested he’d like to know if she’d invested in equally expensive underwear. (She had.) He looked, sounded and behaved like a man who was totally lined up for incredible fish and chips on Sunday, after an equally incredible Saturday night, and Rozie had to grip the steering wheel of her Mini very hard as she remembered telling him she needed to leave at 9 p.m. to make the long drive to Wiltshire.

He’d taken a room at the wedding hotel. They could have nipped upstairs if they’d wanted to, but that would have been tacky. She was regretting not doing it now, but she’d thank herself in the morning.

And it was her own fault that she was driving through the dark at half past eleven at night, fully sober, rather than making herself comfortable with Mark at the hotel bar. When Sholto Harvie had said, ‘Come on Saturday night, as late as you like, then you’ll be all fresh for Sunday,’ she could have said no. Hadn’t she deliberately accepted his invitation precisely so that she’d be here, on the M4, not creating some doomed drunken fumble she would inevitably regret?

No. She’d accepted the invitation because she assumed Mark would be with someone else and she couldn’t bear to watch him. But he wasn’t. And Mark wasn’t a fumbler. Not even close. Drunken nights with him had been some of the best.

Damn.

The Mini trilled once, twice, three times. She shook herself and clicked a button on the steering wheel to accept a hands-free call.

‘Yes?’

‘Rozie?’

‘I’m driving.’

‘I can tell,’ her sister said. ‘You always sound cheesed off when you’re driving.’

‘Just concentrating on the road,’ Rozie assured her. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing. I was on my way to bed. I just felt like calling. How’re you doing?’

Rozie considered this. Fliss never called on a Saturday night. Why on earth would she? Oh, Mark: Fliss was distant friends with the bride. She’d have realised he would be there.

‘I’m single and sober. Thanks for worrying about me.’

‘I wasn’t! I just . . . How’d it go?’

‘It was nice. Jojo wore Amanda Wakeley. Backless. Half the older men in the church nearly had a heart attack.’

‘She always did have a great back.’

‘Still does. Her brother made a pass at me.’

‘Again?’

‘Won’t take no for an answer. His wife was standing right there.’

‘I liked your dress. It was fly-y-y. Very Iman late nineties.’

‘How did you . . .? Ah.’ Rozie realised. Her private Instagram account. She’d put up a selfie and a couple of pictures with friends. She’d forgotten her sister stalked her online.

‘And Nick?’

Fliss meant Mark. Rozie didn’t correct her. ‘Nothing. He was there. Look, I’m driving up to the Cotswolds and I’ve still got a way to go. Can we talk tomorrow, or something? It’s dark and I need to concentrate.’

‘Sure,’ Fliss said, but she didn’t say goodbye. Instead, after a pause she asked, ‘Everything OK?’

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘No reason. How’s Sir Simon?’

‘He’s fine. Look, I can talk about him tomorrow, if you like.’ There was silence. Rozie felt annoyed at her sister’s prying. Her chest grew tight. It was as if a whole cauldron of annoyance was bubbling inside. Mark. This stupid journey. The note. A casual remark at the swimming pool. Maybe Lulu Arantes was right – maybe Sholto Harvie would turn out to be a sex pest. And what would Sir Simon think, with Rozie suddenly disappearing for three days? It was all very well for the Queen to ask her to do it, but Sir Simon liked to think he was in charge, even though he wasn’t.

‘He’s being a pain, OK?’ she snapped. ‘I can understand it. He found a dead body a week ago.’

‘I heard about that. So Sir Simon found the body, huh? Didn’t they bash their head or something?’

‘Yeah. It was just an accident. But he’s being a bit shitty. I said something and he’s not taking it well.’

‘You said the whole atmosphere was a bit shit this summer.’

‘It was. It is. You just feel like you have to watch your step. It wasn’t like that before. It’s like everyone’s watching everyone else and judging. And you don’t know what anyone’s thinking, about Brexit, or this Trump thing. You start to say something, and people just stare at you. And . . . Oh hell. Forget I said that. It’s late. I’m tired.’

In the silence that followed, she realised that had been quite a speech. She couldn’t usually get a word in edgeways when her sister called. It had always struck Rozie as funny that Fliss, the chattiest, loudest, most-likely-to-interrupt-you woman in the world, had a career as a psychotherapist and counsellor. It was only when she was in work mode that she—Damn.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Rozie challenged her angrily.

‘Of course I am.’

‘I mean actively listening. Like work. Are you working on me?’

‘No! Not at all. I would never—’

‘Ah-ah! Don’t you dare work on me!’

She always knew when her little sister was lying. Rozie was the most on-top-of-things person in the family. Always had been. If she could survive a foxhole in Helmand Province, she didn’t need her sister’s bloody therapy.

‘I’m fine,’ she said forcefully. ‘Thank you for asking. Just missing a little late-night action with Mark. It’s not a problem.’

‘I never said it was.’

‘Give Viktor my love. See you. Bye.’

Rozie ended the call with a jab, flicked on the radio, cycled through several stations and ended up with some late-night jazz that calmed her mood a little. She sped down the motorway at eighty-five, nudging ninety, until she imagined the news reports of her being arrested splashed all over the tabloids:

QUEEN’S FIRST BLACK ASSISTANT SPEEDING SHAME

Grudgingly, she slowed down to just over the limit, which in the sporty Mini felt almost stationary. The motorway was straight and endlessly dull, and the darkness hid whatever delights the countryside might have had to offer. It gave her time to think back to how angrily she’d responded to her sister’s check-in. That wasn’t like her at all. She was usually grateful for a call.

What had prompted that cauldron of fury? Mark was a part of it, yes – but he was just a guy she used to know. It was thinking back to Sir Simon and the Palace that had done it. There was crackling tension in the air, not just with him, but with everyone. True, the Reservicing Programme was putting people under pressure, but normally they pulled together as a team. There was the housekeeper’s death, of course, but things had been wrong before that. They were wrong when Rozie first encountered Cynthia Harris. She remembered feeling it in the canteen. At the time, she’d felt like an observer, but now she realised she was caught up in it too. The note tucked into her folded clothes. Everything had changed with the note. She tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but she’d been on edge ever since.

Driving west through the dark, she saw her London life come into sharper focus. There was a force at work in the Palace that was undermining the ‘happy ship’, as Sir Simon liked to call it, that she had joined. It was hard to pin down, but it manifested itself in dark looks and broken friendships, in cruel messages and damaged personal possessions. And even in death. In such an atmosphere, how could the housekeeper’s tragic fall possibly be accidental, as she’d just assured her sister?

The Boss had called in the police. She was worried too, but if she was trusting David Strong to find the answer, it meant she didn’t know where to look.

Rozie rolled her shoulders. For now, she was just glad to be away from it all for a while. Eventually the road sign she’d been waiting for showed up in the beam of her headlights: ROYAL WOOTTON BASSETT.

She turned off the motorway. The sign brought back a whole different set of memories. The last time she’d been here, she was in the back of a four-tonner and the town had been plain ‘Wootton Bassett’. At this time of night, for military personnel returning from active duty as she had been, the place was nothing special. But by day, when the dead from Afghanistan were transported in their flag-draped coffins from the military airfield at RAF Lyneham, the locals had turned out to pay their respects to each one. It must have been a strange sight. Hard not to be moved, and the Queen had granted the whole town the title ‘Royal’.

This was the first time Rozie had seen the words written down and they brought a lump to her throat. They brought back the banter in the back of the four-tonner on the way home from Helmand, and unspoken thoughts about families who’d be meeting up with someone who had changed in ways the mums and dads would never really know; other families who’d be meeting a coffin . . . friends you’d never see again.

She drove on. According to the satnav she’d arrive at Easton Grey at close to midnight. Sholto Harvie had promised her that it didn’t matter what time she got there. ‘If I’ve gone to bed, help yourself to whatever you can find in the kitchen. Your bedroom’s the first on the left at the top of the stairs. I’ll see you in the morning.’

She parked up at two minutes past twelve. An owl hooted as she unloaded her bags from the car. The key to the house was where he’d said it would be, under a box plant beside the front door marked The Old Haberdashery. She let herself in.

Chapter 13

In one of the staff kitchens at Buckingham Palace, a debate was taking place between two liveried footmen, who had recently come off duty, and a telephone operator and a security night-shift manager who were about to start. The topics of conversation were the same as they had been for a week: England’s chances in the World Cup, the Access Hollywood tapes, and the latest news regarding the body in the swimming pool.

‘Word has it,’ the junior footman said, casting his eye around his audience, ‘Sir Simon came out covered in blood – face, hands, the lot – and went straight to the Queen’s bedroom. She nearly had a heart attack.’

‘He fainted in her room. They had to shut it up,’ the telephone operator interjected.

‘What? The bedroom?’ the night-shift manager asked.

‘No, the faint. Nobody was supposed to know, but I heard it from one of the housekeepers.’

‘What was he doing in her bedroom?’

‘You’re over-exaggerating,’ the senior footman said, casting a withering look at his companions. ‘It’s all rumours. Fainting in her bedroom? Don’t be an arse. What you’ve got to ask yourself is: what was he doing in the pool?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When was the last time Sir Simon Holcroft went swimming? Tell me that.’

‘Don’t look at me. How would I know?’

‘Never. That’s when. That’s all I’m saying.’ The senior footman leaned back and folded his arms.

The operator wasn’t quite sure what his point was, but it certainly sounded suspicious, now you came to mention it.

‘What was she even doing there?’ the junior footman said into the ensuing silence.

‘Cynthia Harris?’ the night-shift manager queried. ‘That woman would get anywhere. Probably spying on someone. The family, I should think.’

‘She’d never do that. She had her nose so far up their—’

‘Spying on one of us, then,’ the operator speculated.

‘Maybe she had a secret drink habit. You heard they found her with a bottle of whisky?’ the night-shift manager said.

‘I heard it was gin,’ the junior footman added.

‘Did they?’

‘Serves her right, anyway,’ the senior footman concluded. ‘The manky witch.’

‘All the same,’ the night-shift manager said – and this was something he was certain of, because he’d seen it with his own eyes – ‘she was lying there all night, they said. You can still see the stain on the grouting, if you look.’

Rozie awoke to the smell of fresh coffee and the sound of virtuoso piano coming from downstairs. Eyes closed, she took a moment to remember where she was. Ah yes, a strange man’s house in the countryside. All alone. In a very comfortable bed, to be fair, with smooth linen, soft pillows and a duvet light as air that enveloped her in a warm cloud of goose down. The room also smelled fantastic. Was it spices or woodsmoke behind that coffee aroma? She wasn’t quite sure, but it was gorgeous. She just wanted to lie there forever, but the strange man would probably think that was rude. Reluctantly, she got up. There was a vintage green kimono hanging on the back of the bedroom door. She ran her hands over her very short hair (her mother was always telling her to grow it), slipped the kimono over her T-shirt and shorts and padded downstairs barefoot to say hello.

‘Ah, you must be Rozie.’

The man at the ancient Aga was rotund, with swept-back hair and an easy, soft-lipped smile. He wore a striped cook’s apron over French-blue cotton trousers and a crisp cotton shirt. Rozie was grateful for the kimono: it looked as though she’d made more of an effort than she had.

‘And you’re Sholto. Hi. Thank you for having me.’

‘Not at all. So glad you made it safely. Was it easy to find?’

‘It was, with your instructions.’

He smiled. ‘Now, what can I get you? Coffee? Orange juice, eggs, sausages? What does your heart desire? I should say, the eggs are fresh this morning, from next door’s chickens. The bread is yesterday’s, but it’s a good loaf – I pride myself on my sourdough. If you need to freshen the juice with some fizz, there’s a bottle in the fridge.’

She laughed. ‘No, really. I couldn’t. Coffee’s fine.’

He made a slight moue, but set about filling the base of a basic-looking steel pot with water from the tap. She watched as he added grounds to a middle section, screwed on an upper part and set it to heat on the stove. Meanwhile, she found she had sat herself at a stool at the kitchen island between them, where a couple of bowls of fresh berries were temptingly to hand. Sholto turned to say something, but instead murmured, ‘I thought so,’ and walked over to a fridge, from which he extracted champagne and sausages. Rozie was about to demur again, but realised she’d eaten half the strawberries and made a serious dent in the raspberries too. She was hungrier than she’d thought.

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’

‘Not at all, I bought them specially for you. Now, please don’t offer to help, because I don’t need it and I hate it. Just relax. I’ll be with you presently.’

She rested her elbows on the island and watched as he worked. Sausages were put in a pan to sizzle, bread was carved and oranges pressed to make fresh juice. He seemed to move in a little dance to the piano music coming from a speaker on a nearby worktop, his movements practised and fluid, humming as he went.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked. ‘The composer?’

‘Mmmm? Chopin. Played by Horowitz. Perfect for a Sunday morning. One, two, three . . . And!’

She thought he was counting to the music, but as soon as he said ‘And’, the little steel pot on the Aga started to bubble fiercely. Steam emerged energetically from its spout. Sholto watched it for a moment or two, conducting to the music with a wooden spoon he happened to be holding, then whisked it off and poured thick, dark coffee into a couple of waiting porcelain cups.

‘Enough for us both,’ he said. ‘I’ve already had my first, but the day doesn’t really start until the second. Chin-chin.’

He had heated some milk in a tiny copper pan and poured it into their cups. The resulting blend was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. He waved a hand. ‘It’s the only way to make it. I learned in Florence, years ago. I’ll teach you before you go.’

‘Yes please.’

Rozie was starting to realise that this was not a work weekend to endure, but a masterclass in good living. Anything Sholto Harvie wanted to teach her was something she’d be happy to learn.

While he cooked the eggs and sausages, she took the chance to look around properly. The kitchen was large and square, with stone-framed windows overlooking a courtyard garden through a curtain of honeysuckle. Old oak beams were hung with copper pots and sheaves of lavender. Cream-painted cabinets displayed mismatched china, artfully arranged, and an open door led to a neatly stocked larder. This was a cook’s kitchen, full of well-used implements, but an artist’s space too. No doubt the lustrous green platter of fresh lemons in the corner would be useful if you wanted to make lemonade, but its principal job was simply to look fantastic, which it did.

Rozie very, very much wanted all of it, just as it was, for herself. She hoped it didn’t show.

‘Here we are. Let me know if you want brown sauce or ketchup. Bon appetit.’

Sholto served her where she sat. The smell of fresh-cooked sausages was only beaten by the tingle of champagne and orange juice on her tongue. The room by now resounded with the orchestral crescendo of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which she had loved since uni.

If he’s awful, she thought, remembering Lulu, he’s my kind of awful.

‘Now, tell me all about you,’ Sholto said. ‘You must have led a fascinating life to be working so closely with Her Majesty. I want to know every little thing.’

They spent the day in conversation, doing some light gardening in the courtyard and cooking together in the evening, where Sholto allowed Rozie to prepare a salad while he put the finishing touches to a casserole.

Sholto had been surprised when she called, out of the blue, and a little nervous about entertaining her, but it was really very pleasant to remember his time working for the Boss. It was a privilege that few get to experience – a bit like going into space. They had formed a connection back then, he thought, he and the Queen. He was touched to think she must have thought so too. Rozie, he could tell, had also fallen under the Boss’s spell. It was easily done. He was a little jealous of the girl right now, if he was being honest with himself.

She had been fascinating on the subject of her childhood in Notting Hill, and her rather brilliant – though she was reluctant to share details – army career. All very impressive. Now it was her turn to ask about his time in as Deputy Surveyor. She’d asked about the summer of a particular year, but he wasn’t sure what he’d be able to tell her. However, he could give her a flavour.

‘London in the eighties. I can’t tell you how glamorous it was. Were you born then, Rozie?’

‘In 1986.’

‘Oh, just the time we’re talking about! Where?’

‘In Kensington.’

‘That’s where I lived, in Kensington Palace. Don’t laugh at me – lots of us did. I had a little flat at the back. It was fantastic. It was the days of Charles and Di, when it was all starting to go pear-shaped, of course, but hardly anybody knew. He used to weekend round here; Highgrove’s just up the road. She’d stay in town with the boys. I used to see Diana at KP all the time. Cigarette pants and fluffy jumpers, great ankles, great hair. She had the dirtiest, sweetest smile from under that blonde mop. “How are you doing, Sholto?” She always gave the impression she thought – hoped, even – you were up to no good. I only wish I was.’ He sounded wistful.

‘What was your job, exactly?’

‘I didn’t have a job exactly.’ He took a swig of wine and poured some into the casserole. ‘I mean, I had a job, but it wasn’t exact. The Surveyor’s department was terribly old-fashioned then. It was all very serious art history, don’t you know, like it was some sort of Oxford college, or the Courtauld. But we had this fabulous collection, and people needed to know about it and see it. The people, I mean. Everyone, not just us courtiers. It needed cleaning and cataloguing properly and . . . Oh, we were very busy. We made it up as we went along, but we were very good.’

‘I don’t think they do that now. Make it up, I mean.’

‘Oh no, they don’t!’ He laughed. ‘There’s an army of them now at the RCT – it’s a Trust now, of course – hundreds of ’em. You lose track. All those job titles! We were only a dozen or so. We had more of a free hand . . .’ He paused and Rozie looked up. She must have seen the bittersweet look on his face. ‘I helped to set up the conservation department. Probably the most important thing I did.’

They ate at a round table draped in a vintage tapestry. He explained that the ‘cottage’ was in fact an old haberdashery, converted from a shop a hundred years ago. Sholto watched Rozie drinking in what he’d done with the place, seeing what she could learn. In this room, an antique Venetian mirror above the mantel was flanked by symmetrical collections of modern porcelain and vintage glass. Elsewhere, he was more abandoned in his taste. There were paintings wherever the bookshelves allowed: oils and watercolours, old and new, in a wide variety of frames, hung from floor to ceiling in unpredictable patterns. He was convinced that in a few years’ time, when she could afford it, she’d do the same.

Once they’d finished their casserole, and the claret, and the cheese she’d so kindly brought from Fortnum’s, they took their drinks into the sitting room. Rozie curled her feet under her on one of the sofas. He asked what she was thinking about.

‘I was thinking how comfortable this room is. And wondering who painted that picture of trees on the stairs near my room, whose signature looks like Cézanne. And why you left London, if you loved it so much.’

He drummed his fingers against his glass for a while, reflecting.

‘Well, it took me twenty years to get this room right, but thank you for noticing. The rug was lugged back from Kathmandu, for example. My wife had some rather nice furniture.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Rozie said. She must have picked up on the past tense. ‘Did your wife pass away?’

He nodded briskly. ‘Yes. Heart attack. A long time ago. Sorry, what else? Ah – the artist on the stairs. That is indeed, well done you, Cézanne.’

‘What?’ She stared at him. ‘Really?’

‘Very small. Very pretty. I do adore his trees.’

‘Was it your wife’s?’

‘No, but good guess. I admired it when I was working for a wealthy widow in Hampshire. I advise on art collections, you see, and hers was outstanding. It helped that her husband had been a Scandinavian billionaire, but she had a good eye. Anyway, when she died . . .’ He waved a hand.

‘Lucky you.’

‘Lucky me, as you say.’

‘Why put it up the stairs?’

‘Because it’s funny,’ he explained. ‘Of course, it’s the most valuable thing I own. Like keeping your Oscar in the downstairs loo. What was the other thing? Oh yes, leaving London. I had to move out. I lost a friend there and it was too painful. But I still miss it. The palace, particularly.’

‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘I have a room there, overlooking the lake. It’s—’

‘I don’t mean Buckingham Palace – I mean St James’s.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s much more interesting than Buckingham Palace. Did you know it’s still the official residence of the monarch?’

Rozie shook her head. ‘So that’s why the ambassadors are appointed to it.’

‘Exactly. Henry VIII had it built on the site of a leper hospital.’ Sholto warmed to his theme. ‘And Buckingham Palace was built on the site of a failed mulberry orchard. The Boss once told me that James I wanted to produce silk, but got black mulberry trees instead of white ones, so the silkworms weren’t interested. She loves it when things go wrong in history. I find Buckingham Palace so ugly, don’t you? That awful façade. They should get rid of it.’

Rozie stared. ‘No façade? But what about the balcony?’

‘Oh, they’d cope.’ Sholto waved a hand dismissively. ‘They could build another one. The whole East Front has only looked that way since 1913. We think of it as ancient, but honestly, it’s nothing, in royal terms. Now, I really think we need a little whisky, don’t you? I’ll find us a decent bottle.’

In her bedroom in the North Wing, the Queen reflected on how she used to be able to see the Palace from her parents’ house on Piccadilly and wave to ‘Grandpa England’. It had seemed magical then. Today, it was grimmer than she’d known it for a long time.

The servants’ hall, she knew, was still rife with speculation about the body in the pool. The press and various magazines were offering huge bounties for recent pictures of the inside of the north-west pavilion, and so far they hadn’t got any. The staff were behaving with admirable decorum on that front, though it helped that there was a permanent guard at the door these days.

The media were far more obsessed with the fact that Buckingham Palace had a pool. Philip’s alarm had been well founded: there were screeds of articles speculating on the royals’ ‘luxury spa’ lifestyle and complaining about the ‘extortionate’ Sovereign Grant paid by the Treasury each year to fund it.

She was waiting for them to pick up the story of the poison pen campaign. They called that sort of thing ‘trolling’ these days, apparently. At least if they did, one could point to an ongoing police investigation into the matter. It made it look as though one was actually doing something – which of course one was, though she suspected it was not enough.

Was it possible that, in the midst of a cruel campaign against various female staff members, the violent death of one of them could be an accident? The Queen longed for reassurance that it was, but she was equally certain, deep down, that she wouldn’t believe it if she got it. The chief inspector was due to make his first report tomorrow. She looked forward very much to hearing what he had to say.

David Strong, for his part, was not particularly looking forward to reporting to Her Majesty. He found her faintly terrifying, for reasons he couldn’t quite pinpoint. She was hardly known for her towering intellect, but he had found, on his first case working for her at Windsor, that she was a hell of a lot sharper than she looked. Mistakes were picked up on. Dry comments were made. Eyes were rolled. He didn’t want the Queen of England rolling her eyes at him tomorrow afternoon. Seriously not.

Which was why, at half past eleven at night, he was still up with his sergeant, in their makeshift office at the Palace, going over what they knew – which wasn’t as much as he’d have liked. It had taken time to set up and get to grips with the environment. Far from a bank of computers in the Ballroom, he and Detective Sergeant Highgate had a padlocked cubbyhole in the South Wing on the floor above the Master’s office for conducting interviews, two secure office laptops, some notepads and a couple of wonky chairs that had seen better days. The air vice-marshal didn’t want them to get too comfortable, he assumed. No problem. Strong always worked better when he was uncomfortable.

To start with, there was just the language. He and DS Highgate were working their way through acronyms and nicknames as fast as they could. They were almost as bad as the Met. SJP was St James’s Palace, KP was Kensington Palace, the APS was that lovely, capable Nigerian girl, Rozie. Could you call her Nigerian when she came from London? He wasn’t sure. Nigerian heritage, that was probably it. The D of E was the Duke of Edinburgh (he knew that). Welly B was Wellington Barracks, where the soldiers who guarded the Palace were housed. The current lot were the Welsh Guards, who were known as the Foreign Legion for some reason. Strong’s mother was Welsh and he felt slightly offended, but hadn’t said so. For professional purposes, he greeted everything he was told with a smile, a nod and silence, which was generally interpreted as approval – whether it was or not.

He didn’t smile about the poolside accident, though. The woman sounded like an old bat, but still . . .

‘First off, the cause of death,’ he said to his sergeant. ‘Nothing new on HOLMES?’

DS Highgate, who had been tasked with checking up on the Met’s incident room database, shook his head. ‘No updates to speak of. The pathologist didn’t find any signs of violence, other than what can be explained by the dropping of the glass and the fall. “Laceration of the posterior tibial artery”. Looks like nothing, but you can easily bleed out if you don’t get to A & E in time.’

‘What d’you think of my suicide idea?’ Strong said. ‘She was under pressure, and the harassment was escalating in the days before she died?’

‘Nah.’ Highgate was unconvinced. ‘Too nasty.’

‘People cut their wrists. Why not an ankle?’

‘Why do it there? She had access to a bathroom with a bit of privacy. Everyone says she was a massive Queen fan. Person, not band. Why subject Her Maj to the publicity?’

‘Fair point,’ Strong acknowledged. The good thing about Andrew Highgate was that they tended to disagree about things. It kept Strong on his toes and lessened the risk of confirmation bias. He’d done the same for his boss in times past. ‘ABC, though,’ he added.

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Highgate promised. Strong had re-inforced the mantra from day one: Assume nothing; believe no one; check everything. Or as Strong generally preferred: Arrest everyone; believe no one. Except you couldn’t really do that here.

There was nothing suspicious in Cynthia Harris’s phone records, but they were still looking into that. They ran over the poison pen letters she had received. There had been eleven of them, all told, including a couple the year before her so-called ‘retirement’. All handwritten on cheap paper, some in pencil, some in biro, done with stencil sets to disguise the handwriting. No prints, beyond those of the woman herself, the Master, and the four people in HR who’d handled them. All correctly spelled and punctuated, which was unusual for this sort of thing. Three found in coat pockets, four in her locker, two in a handbag, one in a tote bag, one in a room she was about to clean. All containing personal information referring to private moments in her past.

‘The fake marriage,’ Strong noted. ‘She was accused of making it up just so’s she could change her name. I’m inclined to believe that’s true. The various demotions in her early days. We have a list of those, don’t we?’

‘We d-o-o,’ Highgate said, hesitating on the second word. ‘It’s a bit vague. HR are going to try and get us a better one.’

‘See if you can get it first thing. And then the abortion in 1987. She claims no one at the Palace could have known about that. Yet someone did.’

‘We also have a list of the physical attacks on her property,’ Highgate went on. ‘All fairly recent. Twice, in June and September, clothes marked with an indelible marker. Once, in early July, her locker emptied and contents scattered about. A make-up case “of sentimental value” was reported missing at that point.’

‘And the cut-up clothes three days before she died.’

‘Yes.’

‘Curious, those clothes,’ Strong said in passing. ‘Did you see the descriptions? Antique stuff – what d’you call it? – vintage. Designer, some of it. Makes her sound quite . . .’

‘Unusual?’ Highgate suggested.

‘Outgoing. Extrovert. And yet, everyone says she was a self-contained—’

‘Superbitch,’ Highgate finished off for him, roughly quoting what they’d been told. They agreed it was odd.

‘Main suspects were the Simpson woman and Mrs Arabella Moore, whose husband was sacked when he failed to replace Harris successfully,’ Highgate said. ‘The Simpson woman’s out, because she wasn’t in Scotland at the right time. But from what I’ve heard around the Palace, they were practically queueing up. Do these notes strike you as a woman’s work?’

They looked at them again, together, studying the style and content. It was hard to decide. Words such as ‘hag’ and ‘harridan’ were regularly repeated, along with ‘shrivelled-up’ (hyphenated) ‘shrew’ (alliterated). They knew from experience that on paper a woman could be as cruel to another woman as a man.

They moved on, running through the messages received by the lady in the catering office, Leonie Baxter, who’d been up in Scotland in the second wave of servants, but had come back early to help prepare the Palace. Her harassment had started in July and included misogynist Twitter trolling as well as notes. Cynthia Harris didn’t have a social media account, which might explain the difference. The paper notes, all in stencilled capital letters, were left in similar places: bag, coat pocket, desk drawer. Mrs Baxter, too, was unpopular in certain quarters, with a reputation for being ‘difficult’. She was a junior manager on the team that dealt with the entertainment budget – but most of her time was spent advocating for women’s rights within the Household: more comfortable uniforms, more women’s toilets, better career structures. She regularly pointed out that all the senior positions were occupied by men.

‘Except at the very top, ha ha,’ Highgate noted.

‘She sounds like a bit of a pain,’ Strong muttered.

‘You can’t say that these days, boss,’ Highgate warned him. ‘Women’s rights are human rights. Or equal rights, same difference.’

‘Yep, no problem, but there’s ways and ways of asking for them.’

‘Politely, you mean?’ his junior suggested.

‘In a friendly sort of way, yes. What’s the matter with that?’

‘Thin ice, boss,’ Highgate said with a shrug. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Thin ice.’ He scrolled through his notes. ‘Anyway, she’s disliked, but no obvious enemies. If anything, she was quite friendly with Arabella Moore. And then there’s the van Renen girl, and everyone likes her. No enemies at all.’

‘Or someone who’s keeping himself well hidden.’

‘If he’s even a part of this. He could be what he says he is: a Tinder date from outside the Palace.’

‘Except van Renen says he isn’t,’ Strong pointed out. ‘When are you seeing her?’

‘Next week,’ Highgate said. ‘She wasn’t happy about it, but when I told her the Queen had personally asked us to sort it out, she said OK.’

‘Good. And when do we get the handwriting analysis back on the stencils, by the way? I’m expecting a full character analysis from how much pressure he uses to dot the i’s.’

Highgate threw him a look. ‘God knows. Two to three weeks, they say, and I’ve pulled the whole royal thing, honestly. It’s austerity cuts. Everything has a waiting list. Same story with the tech guys looking into the social media stuff. They’re knee-deep in kiddie porn. It’s a long queue.’

Strong grunted. ‘’Twas ever thus,’ he said. ‘Believe me, it wasn’t all exactly a bed of roses ten years ago.’

‘I was in sixth form then,’ Highgate said cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t know. Of course, if Mrs Harris was murdered . . .’

‘We’d be at the front of the queue. Trust me, I’ve thought of that,’ Strong assured him. ‘Not that I’d wish it on her. But it would make our lives a hell of a lot easier.’

They wound it up for the night.

Despite his experience at Windsor Castle, Strong had somehow assumed that solving a crime at Buckingham Palace would be easier than normal. In fact, it was harder. He’d liked to have seen evidence of how Cynthia Harris was feeling the night she died. It was a shame there was no CCTV of her. The one interior camera on the ground floor of the North Wing had been on the blink for weeks. You’d think the place would be bristling with them, but apparently Prince Philip didn’t approve of ‘bloody spycams everywhere’, despite the Queen once being hassled in her own bedroom by a man who literally wandered in. She’d kept the man talking until a servant arrived, as you do with a total stranger in your bedroom. That woman was made of steel – another reason he was nervous about tomorrow. There was a plan to upgrade the security system, about thirty years too late, but it was waiting for some sort of parliamentary approval. Who’d be a royal, eh?

Chapter 14

Sholto Harvie came downstairs on Monday to find Rozie surreptitiously taking pictures of his sitting room on her phone. She quickly pocketed the offending article, but he’d heard the shutter noise from the stairs. She grinned at him guiltily from the hearth.

She was beautifully lit by the morning sun that poured through the east-facing window. She would make a wonderful model, he thought, for a man who knew how to paint. Or, rather, who could paint. Sholto knew exactly how, but what he’d gained in understanding, he almost entirely lacked in talent. He could still admire the rounded planes of her face, the strength of that short, sharp hair, counterbalanced by the sculptural quality of her smile. More than that, he liked the way she inhabited the kimono, the room, the house. She was a girl with the world at her feet and her life ahead of her. She thought she knew, but she had no idea, really, how far this job could propel her. She needed it to, he thought. She didn’t strike him as the sort to marry a man for his money, so she’d have to find a way of making it herself.

Was it Rozie he wanted to help, or the Boss? He couldn’t really decide. One had charmed him thirty years ago, and one was doing it now. He felt guilty that she had come all the way here to talk about a painting that was obviously very dear to Her Majesty, and which must have disappeared while he was working at St James’s Palace, but he couldn’t give her the information she needed. He wasn’t sure what help he could provide – very little probably – but he’d do as much as he was able, to make amends.

After breakfast, she asked him again about a refurbishment in the summer of 1986. He knew he’d been vague last night. It was all a very long time ago.

‘I’m racking my brains,’ he said, rubbing vigorously at a pot with his drying-up cloth, ‘but I didn’t have much to do with BP – beyond the objects inside it. I don’t think I even knew there was a refurbishment.’

‘Ah, well. It was a long shot.’ Rozie was disappointed. The Queen had seemed so optimistic.

‘I’m so sorry. I hate to let Her Majesty down. Absolutely hate it. I’ll keep thinking.’

Rozie thought he’d forgotten, but after lunch he suggested a walk in the woods behind the house and, as they tramped up the path, he said, ‘There’s something the Boss perhaps ought to know.’

‘Yes?’

‘Watch out for roots and rabbit holes. They’re a terrible hazard. Oh, I forgot – you’ve done obstacle courses in the army. What was I . . .? Oh, yes. Things going missing back in the eighties. I wonder if she’s aware of the Breakages Business. I think probably not.’

‘The Breakages Business?’

‘Yes.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Up to the left here and over the stile. There’s the most marvellous view coming up. Where was I?’

Rozie reminded him.

‘Aha! Sorry. I just love it out here, don’t you? Especially on a day like this. Turn right along the path. We’re nearly there. You see, if you lived round here you could keep horses. I don’t ride, but I suppose you must, if you were in the Royal Horse Artillery. You do? Oh yes, sorry, sorry, the Breakages Business. I s’pose they got the name from insurance fraud. You know . . . “breakages”. There were a few of them in the gang, not more than three or four, I should say, but their racket was to offload things that weren’t needed any more. Or sometimes suppliers would be told a delivery wasn’t up to scratch and it would be replaced, without letting the finance people know. That sort of thing. Ah, here we are. If you stop right there and look through the gap in the hedge, isn’t that marvellous? I like to think you can see halfway to Bath. Just glorious, rolling countryside. It makes you glad to be in England, doesn’t it?’

Sholto stood beside her in his battered shooting coat and country boots, puffing and grinning. His cheeks were red from exertion and he steadied himself with a hefty walking stick. Rozie dutifully admired the graded greens of hills and hedges, but she had suddenly lost interest in where they were going.

‘Insurance fraud?’

He shrugged. ‘Not exactly, but that’s what it was like,’ he conceded. ‘I never got the full gist of it. Just the odd mention in the staff club, in the days when we were allowed to drink. I should have said something – and I did – but it wasn’t really my job. I was just a painting filer.’

‘So what exactly were they doing? As far as you knew?’

He sighed. ‘I think it worked like this. Things were catalogued across all the royal palaces in London. If it counted as art or antique furniture, it was done by the Royal Collection. If it was standard furniture and fittings, it was done by the Works Department, I think it was. That probably doesn’t even exist now – there have been so many reorganisations.’

‘I know,’ Rozie agreed. ‘I found that out the hard way.’

He looked sympathetic. ‘Anyway, some of it’s on display, but a lot is in storage. If you want to find something, you consult the catalogue. If it’s not in the catalogue, it kind of doesn’t exist. The Breakages Business was all about spiriting things away that wouldn’t be missed. Small things, weird presents that were given a hundred years ago and never seen since, slightly worn-out things. There’s an art to working out when something’s beyond repair. The Queen has always run a tight ship and they were supposed to pass things on to Balmoral or Sandringham, but it wasn’t always appropriate, or possible. And they worked out a way of – at least, this is what I think they did, from conversations in the bar, just the odd passing reference, you know – they worked out how to siphon them off. Sell them on and keep the profits. Nice little earner. Not Gainsboroughs, or Crown Jewels or anything. Plates. Rugs. Unwanted gifts. I mean, the Queen gets hundreds of gifts a year. Did you know she was given hundreds of pairs of nylon stockings for her wedding? Literally hundreds. And five hundred tins of pineapple. It mounts up. You can’t give them all to charity. Where d’you put them? The clever part was having someone who worked in the archives, who could adapt the catalogue to fit. As I say, they didn’t do it with paintings, as far as I know, or I’d have put a stop to it myself. But maybe there was one. It would make sense, if they’d been refurbishing the Queen’s bedroom. Anyway, it was decades ago and it probably won’t help you now.’

‘It might,’ Rozie said.

He smiled and turned to lead the way back downhill towards the house. ‘I hope so. If it does, tell the Boss you got it from me.’

That night it was cold enough to justify a log fire. The woodsmoke reminded Rozie of the gorgeous scent in her bedroom.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘My dear, you can’t afford it. A candle called “Ernesto”. It’s supposed to remind one of the cigar smoke of revolutionaries. I’ve always adored it.’

He played Nina Simone and a French rap artist called MC Solaar – his musical tastes were broad – and they got talking about Paris, where she had spent one idyllic summer before joining the bank, and he’d spent two years studying Leonardo at the Louvre. She introduced him to Fela Kuti and some of her favourite Afrobeat stars. He was instantly into it. It was as if they’d known each other for years.

‘You can come here any time, you know,’ he said. ‘Just call. If I’m on a cruise, I’ll arrange for someone to give you the key. Think of it as your second home. I know you’d look after it. And the herbs could always do with cutting.’

She could tell he meant it. Rozie wondered what it was about her that had fired this connection. She sensed they shared something that neither found very often in other people. A love of art and music and beautiful things, yes, but she knew loads of friends who had that too. It was something about this art, this music, these things. And it wasn’t in any way sexual or crude, as Lulu Arantes had suggested. She felt perfectly safe with him.

Sholto made it easy. He understood the difficulties that normally came with her job. Most new people she met wanted the low-down on the Queen, Kate (always Kate) and the politics. Sholto asked about none of it, which was refreshing. Even the body by the pool. She’d mentioned it, but when he saw the look on her face he said, ‘I know. It must be very hard,’ and didn’t push it. He didn’t want the Queen’s inner thoughts on Brexit. ‘Let us never talk of it.’ Amen to that. She should really be driving back this evening, to be fresh for work in the morning, but he had offered another night and she couldn’t resist. She’d rise at dawn and burn up the motorway in the Mini.

And as soon as she got to London, she’d buy that expensive candle he said she couldn’t afford.

Chapter 15

Up at dawn on Tuesday, Rozie breezed up the M4 to the sounds of Farming Today on Radio 4. It was almost a straight line due east to the Palace. She was back in London before the traffic clogged the roads, feeling fully recharged, and managed to wangle a precious parking space in the Royal Mews, so that she even had time to nip up to her room in the West Wing and change.

Buying the candle would be a crazy extravagance. She’d looked it up online and the cheapest version was over sixty pounds. Her mother must never know. But she could imagine it now, as she fetched a skirt and jacket out of the wardrobe, filling this little room with heady scents of tobacco, leather and rum. She would have flowers by the bed: just a small posy of . . . something. She wasn’t an expert on flowers, but she was pretty sure she could do a deal with the Palace florist, and she would learn how to make coffee that fantastic if it killed her.

Had Sholto really meant it about the spare room in The Old Haberdashery? He’d seemed sincere enough. The idea of having a bolthole to escape to whenever she needed it was . . . it was almost unimaginable for a girl from a Notting Hill housing estate. It was the kind of thing her posh friends had had at uni and in the army. ‘Oh, you must come to Shropshire this summer. My parents will be away. It’ll be just us and the dogs. It’s an absolute tip and a bugger to heat. You can have one of the spare rooms.’ And her bosses at the bank, of course, whose houses were never ‘absolute tips’, thanks to small armies of housekeepers and gardeners. The Queen had three such places: two castles and a country estate – but she was the Queen, so fair enough. For Rozie, a cosy single room with a Cézanne on the landing wall outside would do nicely.

She put on the skirt, changed her shirt for a fresh one, and was slipping into her signature heels when she noticed something peeking out from between the pillows on the bed. It was the pale white corner of an envelope.

For a moment she felt as if she was free-falling into an abyss, so hard and fast she almost reached out for a belay rope. Her head was full of the buzzing of bees.

Knowing what it was, she forced herself to walk across the floor, bend down and pick up the paper that burned at her touch. In here. In her bedroom. With slightly shaking hands, she had to press hard to get the traction she needed to tear it open. The sender had gummed it closed. Would there be saliva traces? Even now she was wondering how to find him and stop him. Her chest was tight, her heart pumped fast. Her mouth was dry.

The note inside was folded three times, like the last one. She pulled it out between two fingertips. Same cheap paper as before. Heart hammering, she scanned the contents. Under two lines of writing in capital letters like before, there were the same crude doodles of jungle life, and a new one, horizontal across the bottom: a knife.

She even recognised the type. Though roughly sketched in blue biro, it was clearly a double-edged fighting knife, a Fairbairn Sykes, shaped like a dagger, as used by the Commandos in the Second World War. Those knives were legendary in the forces. She had seen a couple out in Afghanistan and been offered one as a gift. Outside the kitchen or army-sanctioned combat, knives were not her thing, though, and she had politely refused. Now, she folded the note, put it back in its envelope, and stood for a full minute, trying to numb herself to the shock.

You thought you fitted in. You grew up within walking distance of this place. You got the grades, learned your manners, made your family proud. The army used you as a bloody poster girl – which was one of the reasons she’d left it in the end – and yet whatever you did, wherever you went, there was always someone ready to shame you, dismiss you, erase you. The hurt burned. She wanted to punch something very hard. She wanted to tear this room apart and scream until she ran out of breath.

But she stood silently, listening to her shallow breathing, waiting for the moment to pass.

Because it was what he wanted, this private humiliation she did not deserve. He would not get it.

When she had decided what to do, she slid the envelope into the front pocket of her laptop bag, next to her office pass. Then she went to her wardrobe, pulled out a pile of hoodies and tracksuit trousers and retrieved a box of trainers at the bottom. From this, she took out the first envelope, which had been sitting underneath the trainers inside. She slid it into the laptop bag beside the new one.

From the moment the first note had arrived, she had tried to suppress her feelings. Then the death of Cynthia Harris a few days later had given her other things to think about. But it wasn’t that easy. The shock was still raw.

Soon she would go downstairs and deal with this. Her regimental specialism had been ‘find, strike, destroy, suppress’. She wasn’t going to let herself get derailed by some words and doodles on a scrap of paper. First, she needed to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment. Breathe, and count to twenty. Count to twenty again, get up and move on.

The Queen emerged from under the hairdryer hood and sat quietly as Ellie, her hairdresser, removed the rollers at her dressing table. She noticed Ellie squinting at the results and looked more closely herself.

‘Oh dear. What did we do?’

Their eyes met in the glass.

‘I don’t know, ma’am. I could swear I put them in exactly the same as always.’

Ellie looked mortified. But the Queen could have sworn to it too. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary as each roller was systematically applied – and yet here were two curls, far too tight and entirely out of place, making her look like an elderly Shirley Temple (Wallis Simpson used to call one Shirley, not out of any kindness), and resisting all Ellie’s attempt to tame them.

‘More lacquer?’ the Queen suggested.

‘I’ll do what I can, ma’am. Do you have a quiet day?’

Her voice was hopeful, but the answer was sadly no, unless you counted the Patriarch of Moscow and various other religious potentates in the morning, and the combined medallists of the British Olympic and Paralympic teams in the evening as ‘quiet’. Half the family would be there to attend the reception. She needed to look, if not her very best, then at least presentable.

‘Let’s try again after lunch,’ she said with a sigh.

‘Very good, ma’am. I’ll have everything ready.’

Half an hour later, when Rozie entered her study, she could have sworn the girl did a double take. The Queen would have liked to say something about the wayward curls and laugh it off, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to this morning. Hair was too important. It shouldn’t be, but it was, and that was that.

‘Did you have a successful time in the Cotswolds?’ she asked, hoping to be cheered up by news of Sholto Harvie’s famous hospitality.

‘Yes, Your Majesty. In a way. Very.’

The young woman’s bleak tone entirely belied the words she spoke. The poor thing sounded if anything more edgy than before. This was not about curls. The Queen peered at her from over her bifocals.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You’re not.’

‘No, ma’am. Not really.’

‘We can talk about the Cotswolds in a minute. What is it?’

Whatever her APS had been holding back – and the Queen now realised there had been something for a while – the time had come for her to share it. Rozie took out a folded piece of paper from the folder she was holding, opened it up and handed it over. The Queen read it.

‘Oh,’ she said, her voice crisp and icy. She turned it face down and placed it on the desk in front of her. ‘When did you get it?’

‘This morning. But I should have said something earlier. It’s the second one.’

‘The second?’

‘Yes. I got the first three days before you came back from Scotland.’

The Queen was silent. That explained it. She should have paid more attention. One should have known. Then she roused herself and said, with feeling, ‘I’m so sorry, Rozie. This is inexcusable. We must tell the chief inspector straight away.’

Rozie was nervous, but firm. ‘I know what you mean, ma’am. But I want him to keep it private. If he can.’

‘You mean, not tell the Master?’

‘Or anyone at the Palace.’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . .’ Rozie, so articulate in university debates and tutorials, in presentations at the bank or preparing speeches for national events, found it hard to vocalise what she was feeling. The notes were classic racist nonsense. They were designed to subdue and hurt – and Rozie didn’t ever want to be seen as a victim, or singled out for being anything other than brilliant at her job. That was how she’d always identified with herself. ‘I’d just rather . . . keep it to myself, if you don’t mind, ma’am.’

The Queen gave Rozie a long, unblinking look. She saw how much her APS was struggling, and although she didn’t fully understand why, she trusted the girl’s judgement. ‘All right. If you say so.’ Carefully, holding the grubby little piece of paper by one edge, she handed it back.

‘I’ll tell the chief inspector this morning,’ Rozie promised. ‘Meanwhile, would you like me to update you on what Mr Harvie told me? He was very forthcoming yesterday, though I don’t know how helpful we’ll find what he had to say.’

They moved on to a discussion of Rozie’s recent visit. The Queen thoroughly appreciated the girl’s professionalism and poise. It was just such a shame that a trip she had so obviously enjoyed – once she started talking about it – had been torpedoed by the despicable note awaiting her return. For both their sakes, she focused on the matter in hand. And it seemed Sholto had not let them down with his disclosure about the Breakages Business.

‘Do you think that could be how your painting disappeared?’ Rozie asked.

‘Yes. That’s exactly what must have happened. If it was left lying around while I was away . . . If someone saw it and thought it wouldn’t be missed . . . If they didn’t realise where it had come from . . .’

‘Would you like me to find out who was in the Works Department in the eighties, and if any of them are still here now?’

‘Yes please, if you can. And I think it might be useful if someone started a little rumour about the Breakages Business and Sir James were somehow alerted to it. It would fall within his purview.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.’

‘Naturally, you wouldn’t be the one starting the rumour, Rozie.’

‘Of course. I can mention to Sir Simon that I heard something in the canteen. He’s bound to tell Sir James. I can’t imagine he wouldn’t.’

‘Absolutely. They’re thick as thieves, those two.’

Rozie went back to her office and the Queen was left deep in thought. The Breakages Business issue she would deal with later. For now, there was the more immediate problem of the poison pen letter-writer.

If Rozie, too, had been targeted by vicious notes, were there still others they didn’t know about? This had worried her from the start. Meanwhile, the drawing of the knife was a huge concern: if this was the same person who had stalked Mary, then did that mean Rozie was in real danger?

The Queen tried to concentrate on the day’s agenda and the religious leaders who would soon be lining up to meet her. But her mind kept wandering.

Was he a racist, or a woman-hater, or both? Was it even a man? Or, rather, men. Ah, yes! That was one of the things that had bothered her about Rozie’s account. ‘Three days before you came back from Scotland.’ Until now, the Queen had assumed that one person was behind it all. Someone who had gone from London to Scotland with the second wave of staff who had arrived early in September and targeted Mrs Harris there. All the attacks were consistent with such an idea – except that whoever cut up all of Cynthia Harris’s beautiful, treasured clothes in Balmoral (who would do such a thing?) could not, the same day, have been targeting Rozie with a racist note at Buckingham Palace.

She distinctly remembered the chief inspector telling her about that last attack on the housekeeper’s possessions, and she remembered specifically because it coincided with the horrible afternoon they had buried Holly. If Rozie’s note had also been delivered three days before the family left Balmoral, then the note and the attack must have happened only a few hours apart, and though she herself could have managed such a task if so inclined, not everyone had ready access to a helicopter.

The Queen had watched a lot of detective programmes with her mother in her later years and knew all about copycat crime. Was that what this was? Had someone learned from what was happening to Mrs Harris, Mrs Baxter and Mary van Thingy, and adapted it for Rozie? Or had more than one person been targeting Cynthia Harris? The housekeeper was really very unpopular. The Household had been more intrigued than devastated by her death. The Queen, as a woman not in the first flush of youth herself, found the general lack of interest somewhat alarming.

At least Mary van Blank – she really must learn the girl’s name – was out of harm’s way in Shropshire now. Or one hoped she was. She wouldn’t be fully safe until this was all resolved. There was a pattern to all of the attacks, the Queen felt certain, though it eluded her every time she tried to fix on it. A hatred of women, certainly – but something more.

A memory jolted into place. Hiding in the cedar-lined wardrobe and that male/female voice saying ‘Do you think I give a rat’s arse about her feelings?’ And he, or she, was giving something that was to be distributed later. Was it notes?

If so, they were given to Spike Milligan, who was to pass them on. Spike Milligan, who had come up to Balmoral with the second wave of servants. He couldn’t have given Rozie her note – but he might know who did.

She made a mental note to let the chief inspector know – as soon as she thought of a way of doing it without explaining where she had been when she found out.

Chapter 16

The army had taught Rozie how to strip and reassemble an assault rifle in under sixty seconds without looking; how to avoid blisters while running twenty miles in boots; how to survive in the Arctic wilderness and the Brecon Beacons – and how to deal with regular, low-level racism and misogyny and come up smiling. You don’t get through years in the armed forces as a black woman without developing a few coping strategies. So she refused to let a couple of doodled notes get to her, even if one of them featured a fixed-blade fighting knife.

But her brain wouldn’t always obey her. It kept throwing up memories of odd glances she’d received from Palace servants: Mrs Harris’s clumsy failure to shake her hand, the woman who took one look at her in the canteen and said, ‘Of course, I have several friends in Africa. They’re all so intelligent.’ The time she’d encountered Neil Hudson, the Queen’s Surveyor, coming out of the pool this summer, and he’d said, ‘My God, you look magnificent. Like some sort of Nubian queen.’

Did he have any idea how racist that was? How it sounded? She had tried to shrug it off at the time. Could Neil Hudson – he of the yellow waistcoat and the quill pen mentality – be the sort of person who would draw a fighting knife? Wouldn’t he have chosen a cutlass, or a sabre?

Would he even have written that note at all, Rozie?

She was in danger of going crazy if she didn’t just bury the whole thing again and carry on. She couldn’t even bear to tell her sister about it: her sister who was a trained counsellor. If she told Fliss, it would make it more real – and that was the last thing Rozie needed right now.

A week passed. After a moderately busy day, the Queen was relaxing in her private sitting room, watching the late-evening news with her lady-in-waiting and the usual gin and Dubonnet. The news itself was far from cheerful. Theresa May had not exactly been feted in Brussels, despite assurances afterwards that it had gone very well. In newsreels of the visit, she reminded the Queen rather of the girl at a party that none of the others wants to play with, left by herself in a corner and pretending she likes it. In America, Donald Trump had called Hillary Clinton a ‘nasty woman’ in a debate. Was this really what statesmanship had come to? Where was the oratory of Kennedy, or Lyndon B. Johnson? Mrs Clinton seemed to be doing well, but the Queen didn’t envy her the exhausting rounds of constant scrutiny. The whole tone of the election descended almost daily, in the Queen’s opinion.

But one’s opinion was not called for in these circumstances. One could only watch and wait.

Her attention briefly strayed to the lamp behind the television set. It was an old silk shade on a utilitarian wooden stand from the war and was flickering slightly, which was always a little unnerving. One never knew quite what the electrics were going to do in this place. In ten years, it would all be fixed. She would have to move out of these rooms briefly – to Windsor or the East Wing. And the workmen would move in. She was still waiting to hear back from Sir James about the Breakages Business. Would everything be returned, or would little objects be ‘damaged’ and ‘lost’ – and if they were, could she completely trust the person who came with the bad news? Up to now, she would have done so implicitly, but Rozie’s chat with Sholto Harvie had cast a different light on things.

Mind you, by then she would be a hundred. Perhaps she would be past caring.

She sensed not. One had always cared. And at a hundred Mummy was still going strong. She’d have been furious if something of sentimental value was gone.

‘Want another?’

The Queen came back to the present. Sitting in a nearby armchair, Lady Caroline Cadwallader was waving her empty glass of gin and tonic. The Queen looked at her own glass, which was still half-full.

‘Not yet. I was distracted.’

‘Yes, I can see that. Are you worried about the body? Or the notes?’

She hadn’t been thinking precisely about either, but the Queen felt guilty to suggest it had been the electrics. She nodded vaguely. ‘Mmmm.’

‘Too dreadful. How is that nice policeman getting on?’ Lady Caroline asked. ‘Strong, isn’t it? I gather he’s quite popular with the staff. Polite and discreet.’

‘Oh, good. That’s what I asked,’ the Queen said, glad to be talking about something that approximated progress. ‘He’s very diligent. He has a lot to keep him busy.’

‘How encouraging!’

Reluctantly, the Queen said, ‘Not quite. His latest line of enquiry came to nothing.’ She wasn’t going to explain that she herself had suggested it. She had had high hopes for the questioning of Spike Milligan, but apparently the footman had furiously denied everything.

‘Oh dear.’ Lady Caroline stared glumly into her empty glass. The Queen rang for her page and got it refilled. Lady Caroline remained thoughtful.

‘You know, this nastiness takes me right back to my schooldays.’

‘Does it?’ The Queen was surprised.

‘Oh yes. I’ve been thinking about it since you told me. We had the most awful scenes. They lasted about a year. I was at St Mary’s, and we were in the first form or second form – I can’t quite remember – but we were little squibs, eleven or twelve, and missing our ponies and our mummies and trying to be brave about it. And mostly, we were. I had quite a decent time, actually, but some girls were floored by it. And there was this one girl, Peggy Thornicroft, who just had the most dreadful, horrible time.’

‘Oh dear,’ the Queen said, hoping to bring this topic of conversation to a halt, because it was really quite depressing and there was already enough to test one’s good spirits at the moment, surely? But Lady Caroline was too involved in her story to notice the tone. The Queen sipped her gin and stuck it out.

‘It was too, too bad. We all suffered. Because of course, we all came under suspicion. And we felt so sorry for her.’

‘Why? What was going on?’ the Queen asked.

Lady Caroline thought back. ‘It started with an apple-pie bed, I seem to recall. Something very innocuous – you know, when you try and get in but the sheet’s folded back on itself and you can only get halfway down. Or perhaps she got in and the bed was wet and we helped her change it. But then her letters from home went missing. Peggy was quite distraught about it. Her mother was very good and wrote at least once a week, but the letters were stolen – the old and the new – and she was practically beside herself. We all had our lockers inspected, and I think eventually they were discovered stuffed down one of the loos.’

‘The poor girl. What was she like, by the way?’

‘Peggy?’ Lady Caroline made a moue with her lips. ‘Well, you know, not the most likeable. I don’t remember her very clearly. She left after a couple of years. She wasn’t particularly clever, or stupid. She had a perfectly nice face and brown hair in plaits, but didn’t we all? She was an early developer, I do remember that. The poor thing got her monthlies early, she smelled of . . . you know . . . body odour. She got spots. Nothing too dreadful, but I think she found it hard. She was very good at drama, but nobody really cared about drama at St Mary’s, so it didn’t help.’

‘And what happened? Did they find the letter-stealer?’

‘Oh, it got much worse. That’s what reminded me about Cynthia Harris. Peggy got anonymous letters, hidden in her bed and her locker and even her blazer pocket. I never knew exactly what they said, but we were led to believe they were pretty frightful. The police were brought in at one stage and we had to give examples of our handwriting. They questioned us and the staff. It was very serious and frightening. And then her bunny, or teddy or whatever she had on her bed, went missing and it was found a few days later, cut up and partially burned on the gardeners’ bonfire.’

‘No!’

‘I know. Very personal. Just like Mrs Harris. One of the groundsmen came under a lot of suspicion after that. We all thought it must be someone in her dorm. And then, worst of all, there was the guinea pig.’

The Queen felt her heart drop. ‘What about it?’

‘We were allowed little pets from home, you know – things you could keep in cages. They were all in a converted stable behind the sixth-form block that we could visit before and after school. Peggy was very attached to her guinea pig, as you can imagine, with everything that was going on. I remember it was a sweet, fluffy little thing. Not so little, actually. And then one day it was found at the bottom of its cage with its neck snapped.’

‘Oh!’

‘I know!’ Lady Caroline said, seeing the shock on the Queen’s face. ‘Simply awful.’

‘Dreadful,’ the Queen agreed. ‘Did they find out who did it?’

‘Yes, they did. The police were hopeless, mind you. We were far too scared of their uniforms and craggy faces, and nobody would really talk to them. But our headmistress brought in this sweet little man – I think he was a priest, but he didn’t act like one, if you know what I mean. I don’t remember his name. He was very calm and friendly and just sort of hung around and chatted. You never particularly noticed that he was talking about Peggy. I don’t recall telling him anything remotely useful. But after a couple of days, he worked it out.’

‘And . . .?’

Lady Caroline held her hands out wide, theatrically. ‘It was Peggy!’

‘The girl herself?’

‘Absolutely.’ Lady Caroline shrugged. ‘Isn’t that a strange story? It was awful to go through at the time, as I said. So disconcerting. I don’t know how the priest man did it. But Peggy sort of admitted to it in the end. It was definitely her. She was doing it for the attention – which, of course, she got. For a year she was the main topic of conversation. She must have been very unhappy at home, my mother always said. But we never knew what caused it. Her parents came and took her away, but she was back the next term.’

‘No! Really?’

‘Yes. And we never talked about it. We tried to be nicer to her. Obviously, the girl had some sort of mental problem. And when you think about that poor little guinea pig, and what it must have taken . . .’

They looked at each other, both animal lovers, both trembling a little bit.

‘What happened to her in the end?’ the Queen asked.

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Lady Caroline admitted. ‘I did try and look her up, years later, on Facebook, and there was a woman with her name who could have been her, who had lots of pictures with her happy little family, sailing about the place and looking perfectly normal. But if it was Peggy, she would have changed her surname, surely, when she got married, so I don’t know for certain. She didn’t put where she went to school – which suggested to me that it was her. I mean, she wouldn’t have wanted us all finding her and raking all of that up, would she?’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Anyway, goodness, I’ve been rabbiting on and it’s not remotely helpful. I am sorry, ma’am.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘A bit ghoulish.’

‘Yes. But isn’t human nature interesting?’

‘It really is, isn’t it?’ Lady Caroline agreed.

The news was over by now and a panel show was on, which they watched for a little while before retiring to bed.

As she settled against the pillows to write in her diary, the Queen was still thinking about Peggy Thornicroft. Lady Caroline had apologised for not being helpful, but the Queen wasn’t so sure about that.

Chapter 17

‘So you’re suggesting, ma’am, that Cynthia Harris wrote those letters to herself? And cut up her own clothes?’

There was a strong note of scepticism in Chief In-spector Strong’s voice over the phone, though he was trying to hide it.

‘Only that it’s possible,’ the Queen said, from her study at Windsor, where she was weekending as usual.

‘We’ve been considering it as a potential line of enquiry, of course. It happens. But this would be a pretty extreme case.’

‘True,’ the Queen acknowledged. ‘But I can think of lots of reasons why Mrs Harris might have wanted to attract attention and sympathy, a bit like Lady Caroline’s schoolmate. She wasn’t popular. She knew she was disliked. Having managed to come back after retirement, she may have wanted to make it difficult for the Master to get rid of her.’

Strong agreed, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Well, that was certainly the effect.’

‘If it’s possible for someone to behave that way – to do themselves so much damage – then I wonder if she did. You haven’t managed to establish how anyone here could have known about her abortion, have you?’

‘Er, no, ma’am. Excuse me.’

He was having a coughing fit. Was it because she had said the word ‘abortion’? It was written in his own report to her, which he had talked her through. It was very tiresome, sometimes, how even sensible people expected one to think and speak like a medieval princess in an ivory tower. Although, goodness knows, they were probably familiar with abortions too.

‘That’s what I thought,’ she said.

‘She might have done it,’ Strong admitted. ‘But if so, what about the other letters? Like the ones to Mrs Baxter and Miss van Renen. Are you suggesting she sent them to cover her tracks?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just an idea. But I did wonder . . . If she was trying to attract attention to herself, why dilute it by creating other victims?’

‘Out of sheer spite?’ he suggested. ‘Because she was a fundamentally nasty woman?’

The Queen bridled at the words nasty woman. She had heard them recently in another context and they brought her up sharp. Peggy Thornicroft had been unhappy at home, according to Lady Caroline. The Queen wondered what might have caused Mrs Harris similar pain. ‘Was she? Perhaps that’s something you could check?’

Strong agreed that he would. ‘She couldn’t have sent the notes to your APS, though. Wrong place, wrong time, and she was dead by the time Rozie got the second one.’

‘Yes, it makes the question about who sent those rather interesting, don’t you think?’ she remarked, because it was on her mind. And instantly regretted it.

There was a note of real intrigue in Strong’s voice when he replied, ‘Yes it does, ma’am. It does.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘If it was someone else, they’d’ve had to’ve found out what the original notes looked like. Not super-difficult because, to be brutally honest, ma’am, your HR department leaks like a sieve. It’s certainly a thought.’

‘Anyway, I’ve no idea what you’ll find, but you’re very kind to look into it,’ she said hastily.

After she put the phone down she let out a deep sigh. Must be careful, she thought. Strong was a useful resource, but she didn’t want him getting any ideas. Among her aides, only Rozie knew how far she was prepared to go to solve a problem. The chief inspector was the professional. One tried to be helpful, that was all. God forbid she should ever be seen to do the police’s job for them. That would never do.

On Sunday, Rozie got up early and took a bus to Portobello Green. She’d always loved the flea market here, with its vintage fashions and antiques. Since her schooldays, when she wasn’t riding or doing homework, a lot of her free time had been spent visualising the life she would have one day, when she was a proper grown-up: the offbeat dresses she would wear; the furniture and fittings she would display; the perfect jewellery collection she would own. Her visit to Sholto Harvie’s home last weekend had only sharpened and intensified her vision. She wanted to touch it, smell it, put a price on it. She wanted to buy at least a perfect coat, or a vintage cushion, as a down payment on the dream.

Today, nothing was quite right though, and it wasn’t the real reason she’d come back to the area anyway. After an hour of window-shopping, she bought a bunch of dahlias from a flower stall. In her bag was a jar of chicken soup she had begged from the Palace kitchens, and a big box of Roses chocolates – because Mum always said you couldn’t visit the sick without a box of Roses.

The block of flats she was heading for was sandwiched between a primary school and a busy road. Rozie knew it well, because she had been a pupil at the school twenty years ago. Which was why her ears had pricked up on Friday when she overheard a couple of housekeepers talking about where Lulu Arantes lived.

‘She said it was a terrible accident at Vincent House.’

‘In Pimlico?’

‘No – Ladbroke Grove. She fell straight down the stairs – voom. Right onto that shoulder. Yeah, that one. And broke her collarbone, again. And two black eyes. She said she’d be in on Monday, but d’you really think so?’

Rozie certainly didn’t think so. Even for Lulu, working with a freshly broken collarbone would be insane.

She had got hold of Lulu’s number from another housemaid and texted to ask if she could visit. Rozie had said, truthfully, that her mum lived nearby and blatantly lied that she was coming over anyway and would be just around the corner. Lulu had said it would be nice to see her.

Rozie had a very bad feeling about this.

Her thoughts were dark as she walked along the familiar streets she had trodden as a schoolgirl in braids, back in those days when the worst that could happen was forgetting your homework or wearing the wrong kind of shoes to church. Now, she had a bad feeling about almost everything. Cynthia Harris was dead, Mary van Renen was so scared she had left London, Lulu’s own sister-in-law had been killed by her wife-beating husband, and in the back of Rozie’s mind was always that image of the elegant, deadly fighting knife, drawn so accurately, down to the ringed-grip handle.

Had Lulu really fallen down the stairs? Is that how she got those two black eyes? Who did she live with? They’d never socialised outside work and it wasn’t really any of Rozie’s business, but the feeling in the pit of her stomach told her that perhaps it should be, and if she was wrong, then at least there were the Roses.

At her knock, the door was opened by an elderly gentleman with unnaturally black hair, smartly dressed in chinos and a fitted cotton shirt. He had once been tall, but now had to straighten up a bit to look Rozie level in the eye.

‘Yes?’ His voice was croaky, his expression curious and wary.

‘I’m Rozie Oshodi. I know Lulu from the Palace. She said I could come over.’

At once, his face lit up.

‘From the Palace! Come in, come in. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you. She’s in bed. She will try and get up and move around but every movement hurts, you can see it. It’s the devil’s work persuading her to stay put. See what you can do, will you?’

Rozie promised. She realised, relaxing slightly as she followed him through the narrow flat, that she had been half expecting a muscle-bound partner in a wife-beater vest. But there was no sign of such a person. She really did not know Lulu’s situation and tried to be a bit more open-minded.

In fact, Lulu was sitting up in bed in a bright single room, cheerfully decorated in yellow and green, next to a table heaving with magazines and grapes. She grinned at Rozie as the older man walked away.

‘That’s Uncle Max,’ Lulu explained. ‘He lives with me – I live with him, really, it’s his flat – and he’s nursing me like a professional. He’s such a dear. Oh, soup! And chocolates! And flowers! You shouldn’t have. You really didn’t need to come. I’m fine!’

Rozie settled in a nearby chair. Lulu was chatty as ever, but the dark patches under her eyes were almost black. She winced whenever she moved. Rozie got her to admit that as well as fracturing her collarbone, she’d bruised three ribs.

‘On the stairs?’ Rozie asked.

Lulu sighed, winced and nodded. ‘I know. I don’t know what it is about me. I must have been thinking about my shoulder. Carrying a heavy shopping bag. Reached out to grab the handrail, missed, started to fall backwards, twisted and fell right on my face. Stupid thing to do.’

‘Where were you?’

‘She was right outside this flat.’ Uncle Max was standing in the doorway, holding a tray with tea things. ‘I heard a yelp and ran out and there she was, face down, arms akimbo. You could tell she’d done something awful. She let me ring the ambulance this time and she never does that, do you, darling?’

Rozie started at the word ‘darling’. What kind of ‘uncle’ was he?

He put the tray down on the floor, moved some magazines to make space for it and told them to wait while the tea brewed in the pot. Rozie asked how he and Lulu knew each other, and he parked himself on the end of Lulu’s bed to join in the conversation.

‘I’ve known Lulu since she was a baby, haven’t I, darling?’ he said. ‘She’s my sister’s girl and my god-daughter.’

OK, so he was that kind of uncle. Their close relationship was obvious from the way they interrupted each other’s sentences and finished each other’s jokes.

‘We’ve always lived in each other’s pockets, haven’t we?’ he said.

Lulu agreed. ‘Uncle Max was my coolest uncle by far. He was the person who took me dancing.’

‘You look surprised, Rozie,’ he said from the end of the bed. ‘Lindy Hop dancing, d’you know it? It’s a style from the forties, quite gymnastic. You should see me in my bags and spats and Lulu in her circle skirts. Although, for Lulu it’s a dangerous sport, isn’t it, darling?’

‘I’m always bashing myself,’ Lulu said with a grin. ‘I don’t know how I do it, really. Not just me. I gave my partner a black eye last month. I’ve crashed into you a few times, haven’t I, Uncle Max?’

‘More than a few. But hey, Rozie, tell me about the Palace. Lulu’s bored with keeping me up to speed. What’s the gossip?’

Lulu laughed again. ‘Uncle Max used to be a butler in the Household, did I tell you? It was the reason I applied.’

‘I’ve been hors de combat for ten years, though,’ he added wistfully.

They spent half an hour talking about how things had changed since he’d left. He was misty-eyed.

‘Every day, I miss it.’

Rozie laughed. ‘I doubt that. You must have worked incredibly hard.’

‘Oh, I did. We all did. Lulu does too, don’t you, darling? But with such pride.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Where else could you do such a job, with people you love and trust like that, eh? Tell me?’

Rozie wasn’t feeling it right now. But she nodded anyway.

‘And then, of course, that horrible death,’ he went on. ‘Two deaths – one at Windsor, and one at the Palace. I’m sure you know much more about them than you’d ever tell.’

Rozie gave the quick-fire response: ‘I really don’t.’

Uncle Max merely raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s exactly what you’d say, though, isn’t it? I won’t press you. I knew Cynthia, of course. Can’t say I liked her, but you had to feel sorry for her.’

‘Did you?’ Rozie thought of the horrible old woman who had sat beside Mary van Renen in the canteen that day.

Uncle Max nodded. ‘It was such a comedown, from the Royal Collection to Housekeeping. I think she started as a picture restorer, something like that – she had a degree in art – then she went to the Works Department and got briefly engaged to the boss. What was his name? No, can’t remember. Someone else I didn’t have much time for. But she didn’t give up, I’ll give her that. Went to Housekeeping, kept her head down, learned her trade, got good at it. No one ever questioned her work. But she wasn’t very nice, d’you know what I mean?’

‘She was an absolute bitch,’ Lulu interjected emphatically from her sickbed. ‘A total cow, and I don’t care what her sob story was. She should’ve dealt with it and moved on with her life.’

Rozie realised they were both looking at her for comment and she couldn’t think what to say. So many sudden possibilities were jumbling round her head that she needed to be alone to straighten them out. ‘I – I’m really sorry, it’s been lovely. But I should go. It was good to meet you, Uncle Max. I’ve taken up too much of your time, Lulu.’

That was true. Her friend protested otherwise, but the shadows under her eyes were deepening. Her shoulders drooped. Uncle Max promised to cook the soup for them both that evening, after she’d had a nap. Rozie left, feeling that she had been wrong about her sense of disquiet on arrival – but that she had a new reason to be uneasy now.

Chapter 18

Grace Oshodi had been cooking. This was entirely normal for a Sunday, and equally normal that, even though Rozie wasn’t expected, there was more than enough for her. She needed to think and she did that better on a full stomach. Or that’s what she told herself, anyway. She was six streets from home and Mum’s after-church Sunday feasts were legendary.

Having called ahead to announce her arrival, Rozie used the walk to Lancaster Road to do some mental maths. Cynthia Harris was sixty-three, according to her file. If she had joined the Household at, say, twenty-two, after an art degree (assuming Uncle Max knew what he was talking about), then the earliest she could have arrived was in . . . Rozie did a rapid calculation . . . 1975. That made sense. That was fine. It did not explain the bugs under Rozie’s skin, or the buzzing in her brain.

When did she go to the Works Department? her brain persisted in asking. Why did nobody say?

But she ignored it, and bought a second colourful bouquet, to take to her mother this time, and a good bottle of red wine.

For the first, fantastic forty minutes, it was as if she had never been away.

In the dining room, which played host to an upright piano, three guitars, two tall bookshelves and a small TV, as well as a table for six set awkwardly for eight, the family were helping themselves to the feast. The aroma of sweet peppers emanated from the tiny kitchen where every other Sunday her mother concocted meals big enough to feed the five thousand. She alternated with Auntie Bea, her sister, who was here along with her husband Geoff and sons Ralph and Mikey, whom Rozie and Fliss had grown up with like brothers. Rozie’s dad, Joe, sat at the head of the table with his eyes on a silent TV rugby match. On his right was a young woman she had never seen before.

This was not unusual. While her dad collected guitars, vinyl dance music from the fifties and vintage maps of the London Underground – all of which littered the flat – her mother collected people. A Sunday meal that didn’t include at least one old friend or new acquaintance was an opportunity missed, in Grace Oshodi’s opinion, and an affront to God’s bounty. In many ways, her mother reminded Rozie of the Queen at Windsor and Balmoral: it was all about sharing, hosting, connecting. When work permitted, they were both very social women who loved a laugh.

The latest addition to the Sunday table was a student called Yeshi Choen, a visitor from Bhutan studying for a masters in political history at the London School of Economics. The new guest barely glanced up from her food when Grace introduced ‘my daughter Rosemary’, which suited Rozie nicely. It meant she could catch up with her cousins as she loaded her plate with rice and beef stew, squeezing into a corner seat and patiently asserting her right to what little elbow room there was to be had.

‘So, are you still seeing Janette?’ she asked Mikey, to her right, secretly high-fiving herself for remembering the girlfriend’s name.

‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted, through a mouthful of stew. He swallowed. ‘And are you still tragically single?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Don’t tease the girl!’ Grace implored good-naturedly.

‘Don’t wha-at? You do know that is what she was put on this good Earth for? If we can’t have a go at her, what’s the point? Anyway, aren’t you always telling her you had two kids by now?’

‘I’m sure I’d never mention such a thing,’ Grace said primly, to general laughter round the table.

Rozie settled in as the mountains of beef and jollof rice, stewed beans and fried plantain disappeared into hungry mouths. Gradually, stomachs were filled, the frenetic pace of eating began to slow, and even Ralph, who was famous for how much rice he could put away, turned down a fourth helping and slumped back in his chair.

‘So, Rozie,’ he asked, ‘wassup at the Palace, girl? You got any news we oughta know?’

‘Not really,’ Rozie said lightly. ‘Same old, same old.’

‘You’re famous now, you know?’ Ralph said it like it was a challenge.

‘I am not,’ she assured him firmly.

‘You’re on Wikipedia. You’ve got your own goddam page. I looked you up.’

‘I—’

‘I beg your pardon, what is this? Where does Rosemary work? I do not understand.’ Yeshi had finished her stew and was looking at them with an expression of polite confusion.

‘She works for the Queen,’ Grace explained. ‘At Buckingham Palace. And Windsor Castle. And wherever else the Queen goes.’

‘I see. And what is the nature of the work she performs?’

Yeshi addressed her question to Grace, who explained as best she could. Rozie left her mother to it. She just wanted this topic of conversation to be over.

‘I see. She is a very senior person. I congratulate you, Miss Rosemary.’ Yeshi bowed gently in her direction. She leaned forward. Her gaze was very intense now. ‘And so, tell me please, what does your Queen think about the United Kingdom leaving the European Union in this Brexit situation?’

Rozie’s heart sank. She would be studying for a masters in political history, wouldn’t she? Not marine biology, or fine art.

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Her Royal Majesty’s opinion is important, no?’

‘The Queen is neutral,’ Rozie explained. ‘She’s above that sort of politics. It’s important that she—’

‘I heard,’ Auntie Bea said, leaning into the table too, ‘that she was super-thrilled. Like, she’s a total Brexiter because of Commonwealth countries like Nigeria. I read it on Facebook.’

‘How would they know?’ Grace said hotly to her sister. ‘Did she make a speech about it?’

‘She didn’t have to. One of her friends said.’

‘What friend?’ Grace’s voice was raised. Her eyes blazed. She was a passionate Remainer and an equally passionate royalist – more than ever since Rozie started her new job – and in her mind, the two things went together.

‘I don’t know!’ Auntie Bea countered just as loudly. ‘They were anonymous!’

‘Ha! Tell her, Rozie!’ Grace turned to her daughter in smug expectation.

‘I can’t!’ Rozie said, uncomfortably. ‘The Queen will follow whatever people voted for in the Referendum.’

‘But it was rigged!’ Grace expostulated. ‘And anyway, I’m not asking you what she’ll do, I’m asking what she thinks.’

Rozie held her breath for a moment. She couldn’t bear to argue with her own mother about this, and she’d explained often enough that she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, answer for the Queen on anything. This was the first time her mum had challenged her.

‘Oh, Rosemary doesn’t know.’

Everyone turned to look at Joe, who had the air of a wise old owl at the other end of the table. He smiled knowingly at them all. Rozie mouthed ‘Thanks,’ at him, but he wasn’t being kind.

‘The Queen plays her cards close to her chest. She wouldn’t trust a girl like our Rosemary with her deepest thoughts. You just take in the boxes, don’t you?’

‘Well, I—’

‘She does not!’ Grace insisted, affronted. ‘She’s one of the inner circle now. Did you know . . .?’ She turned back to her sister. ‘Rozie went on holiday to St Barts with some aristos she made friends with at the Palace?’

‘Ha! You might have mentioned it,’ Auntie Bea said with a sarcastic grin. ‘About forty thousand times.’

‘I did not!’

‘You did. And you said she played catch with Prince George at Easter, and lent Kate her shoes when there was a crisis.’

‘Mu-ummy!’

But Grace ignored her daughter’s protest. ‘Well, you seemed interested enough at the time, my dear. You were all, “Oh, I remember that picture. I saw it on What Kate Wore”. You stalk that poor girl online.’

‘I do not!’

And so the conversation degenerated into speculation about the Duchess of Cambridge, whom Rozie now thought of as ‘Catherine’ – not that she said as much here – and how great she looked in Canada, when she would get pregnant again, and whether she was feuding with some of her inner circle, and why she never seemed to have any ‘best friends’. And Rozie, who knew the answers to some of these questions, and thought the others absurd, and all of them uncomfortable for the woman in question, was grateful to be left out of the chat. Instead, she silently helped Mikey and Ralph clear the table, carefully stacking the dishes on the minimal counter space in the kitchen, as she’d done since childhood.

Mikey turned to her as she finished balancing a pile of plates on the still-warm cooker. There was a look in his eye that made her wary.

‘You went to St Barts?’

She nodded.

‘You never said.’

‘No need.’

He grinned. ‘Yass, queen. Classy. I like your style.’

She smiled back, breathing a bit more deeply, enjoying the relative peace.

‘What’s it like, though? The island?’ Mikey asked.

‘Incredible. French. Laid-back. Good food. So expensive that it makes your eyes water. It’s how very, very rich people imagine what it’s like to relax.’

‘Did you relax?’

‘Actually, I did,’ she laughed. ‘They did this dish with fresh fish that was . . .’ She gave a chef’s kiss. ‘Yeah, I kinda liked it.’

He shook his head with mock seriousness. ‘We’re losing you, Captain Oshodi.’

She moved in for a cousin hug. Her voice was low and she was suddenly very serious. ‘You’ll never lose me, Mikey.’

He sensed something inside her and hugged her back. ‘It’s OK,’ he murmured. ‘I was joking. We got you.’

He didn’t understand why his cousin, officially the toughest woman he knew, was holding him tight. ‘Hey, let it out, girl,’ he said gently, patting the back of her head with gentle hands. Her shoulders heaved a couple of times. ‘It’s OK,’ he repeated. ‘I got you.’

She took a breath and stood back. He hadn’t seen streaks of tears on that beautiful face since she was about fourteen and Patrick Stryker, the Year 10 football captain, broke her heart in assembly.

Taking his hands in hers, she asked him, ‘What do you see, Mikey?’

He didn’t know what he was supposed to answer. He shook his head. But she was firm.

‘What do you see?’

In confusion, he said, ‘I see you, Zee. What else am I supposed to see?’

She squeezed him close again and murmured, ‘Nothing,’ just as Ralph came through the door, armed with a dangerously tall pile of serving bowls and said, ‘Hey? Wassup, guys? Spill the tea.’

Rozie needed a moment to herself, and Mikey steered his brother back out of the little kitchen and shut the door behind them. Staring out of the narrow window, at kids playing ball in the communal yard, Rozie thought of the notes and the drawing of the knife, and promised herself she would not let the bastard do this to her.

He was trying to take her apart. He had chosen the wrong target and he would live to regret it. Meanwhile, she wrapped the love of her family around her like a force field. Mum arguing with Auntie Bea, Dad not quite getting what she did, Ralph eternally teasing, Fliss listening from Frankfurt, all of it. She had better things to do than let him into her head. He wanted her out of the Palace? She would insert herself ever more closely into it. She would find him and get under his skin. Let’s see how he likes it.

Chapter 19

It was dark early. Tomorrow would be Hallowe’en. The bus back to the Palace passed little shops selling masks and tridents. Rozie noticed how many rubber masks were of politicians’ faces these days. If you wanted to scare your friends, you went as a prime minister, or a European bureaucrat, or a would-be president.

She showed her security pass to the guard at the forecourt and made her way straight to her office. One of her jobs was to keep the file of all Chief Inspector Strong’s reports to the Boss. This included copies of the notes that Cynthia Harris had been sent – or sent herself – and a biographical note that his sergeant, DS Highgate, had put together after talking to HR.

Rozie checked through the notes first. Two of them mentioned Mrs Harris’s early demotions. ‘YOU USED TO BE SO HIGH AND MIGHTY NOW YOU’RE JUST A DIRTY LITTLE SCRUBBER’; ‘THEY DIDN’T WANT YOU AT SJP AND THEY DON’T WANT YOU HERE YOU VICIOUS SHREW. NOBODY WANTS YOU. **** OFF AND KILL YOURSELF’

Following these up, DS Highgate had traced her career in a stark, printed note.

BIO

Cynthia Harris, née Butterfield

b.1953, Brighton, E. Sussex

MA Art Hist, Uni of Edinburgh

Joined 1982, age 29. Asst curator, R. Collection. SJP.

Promoted Asst to D Surveyor QP 1983

Moved Works Department 1986

Moved Housekeeping 1987. Housemaid?

Promoted senior hk 1992

Promoted Head of N Shift 1996

Windsor C 1998–2002

Senior hk BP 2002–2016

Rozie stared at the notes for some time, standing at her desk with her coat still on. Just as Lulu’s Uncle Max had said, Cynthia had joined the Household as an assistant curator of the Royal Collection. And she’d gone from that to a housemaid? Really? It was Cinderella in reverse. What DS Highgate didn’t seem to have learned, but Uncle Max had remembered, was that when she moved to the Works Department she got engaged to its head. That had obviously gone sour: if a ‘Mr Harris’ had been head of the department, somebody would have said. Then promotion, promotion . . . then moved away to Windsor Castle. Was she already making waves by then?

But all that was incidental. What mattered were the dates, and they were exactly what had caused the bugs under Rozie’s skin. Cynthia Harris had been working for the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in the early to mid-eighties. She had been assistant to the Deputy Surveyor himself, for goodness’ sake. She must have moved from the Royal Collection to the Works Department around the time the Queen’s oil painting went missing. She was, it turned out, the person who could, quite possibly, have shed more light than anyone else on Rozie’s enquiries over the summer.

Except nobody Rozie spoke to had ever mentioned her.

Of course, even if she’d known, Rozie couldn’t have talked to the housekeeper directly in the summer months, because she’d been in London while Rozie was in Balmoral and vice versa. Rozie would have had to wait until Cynthia came back to work at the Palace in October, but by that time . . .

This is what the bugs were all about. She pictured Cynthia on her first night back, losing her balance and the crystal tumbler dropping, the glass smashing, the jagged edge fatally piercing the skin as she fell, then the artery. She im-agined her lying stretched out on the green tiles, as the reports had described her (Sir Simon would never discuss his discovery in detail), and the blood pouring from the wound.

Had Cynthia simply slipped in her bare feet on those tiles? Rozie had never truly been convinced, and the Queen obviously wasn’t either. She had called in a senior policeman within days of the housekeeper dying. She knew, intuitively or otherwise, that there was something more.

Rozie knew she was adding two and two and making about two hundred and fifty, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.

Why did nobody tell me?

In the morning, she would talk to Her Majesty.