A Three Dog Problem

Chapter 20

It was to be a month of diplomacy and death.

Back from a refreshing weekend at Windsor, the Queen was on her way downstairs to have lunch with Philip, Charles and Anne, to talk over a few issues surrounding the wider family. It was agreed that when Charles took over, the Firm would be slimmed down, for public purposes at least. Fewer faces on the balcony overlooking the Birthday Cake, fewer close protection officers required; more work for those that remained visibly royal. But the senior royals – her own children and Charles’s boys – were ready for that. It was the lesser family members who would kick up a fuss. They liked being seen to be useful – and all the jollies that went with it. One had to let them down gently, and Charles still had a list of details to discuss.

Her equerry interrupted her at the foot of the stairs with the news that her APS would like a word, and it was rather urgent.

‘She said it’s to do with the enamel box, ma’am.’

The Queen sighed briefly.

‘Tell them to keep the soup hot. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ll see her in the 1844 Room.’

She walked swiftly towards the nearest unoccupied room where they could shut the door with the certainty of not being overheard. Willow, Candy and Vulcan padded happily at her heels. As she strode past portraits of ancestors clad in velvet and ermine, she vividly remembered the day she had given Rozie the box the girl was referring to, at the end of the first mystery Rozie had helped with, as a token of her gratitude. If Rozie had mentioned the box, then it would be with good reason.

The Queen reached the 1844 Room, which sat among the semi-state apartments on the ground floor. This was where she held audiences with her most important visitors. Its peach-pink walls were calming to nervous guests, but there was a formal grandeur to its twenty golden marble pillars, its malachite candelabras and the blue and gold Regency furniture. Like many of the public rooms in the Palace, it was multi purpose. She thought of them as stage sets, ready to be transformed as the occasion required. Yesterday, Philip had used this one to host a lunch and today the furniture was arranged along one side as the porters readied it for a reception. Fortunately, it was empty for now.

‘Make sure we’re not disturbed, will you?’

The equerry took this as confirmation that his presence wasn’t required and remained in the corridor outside. Rozie arrived a couple of minutes later.

‘You’ll have to be quick. I only have a minute.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty. It’s about Cynthia Harris.’

‘Oh?’

Rozie rapidly explained about her brief discussion yesterday with Uncle Max.

‘I looked up Mrs Harris’s employment record,’ she went on, ‘and it turns out she was almost certainly at the Works Department, as it was called then, in 1986 when the refurbishment was done. The current team in Operations pointed me towards a man called Joe Flowers who used to work there as a superintendent. But he’s struggling with Alzheimer’s. I went to talk to him at his care home when I got back from Balmoral, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him.’

‘They may well not have known about Mrs Harris.’

‘True,’ Rozie said, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. ‘But before that, she was assistant to the Deputy Surveyor at the Royal Collection, ma’am, and at the time, that would have been Sholto Harvie.’

‘Sholto? Gracious!’

‘If a painting had gone missing, surely she would have known about it, and she’d remember? I know it seems minor, but you said you were surprised I couldn’t find the right link in the picture’s journey, and it seems to me that Mrs Harris could have been that link. If we now think there was a racket going on . . .’

‘The Breakages Business. I see.’

‘Perhaps Cynthia knew about that. Perhaps they suspected she did. I just find it . . .’ Rozie searched for a reasonable description of her state of mind. ‘Of concern,’ she said, though the feeling was stronger, ‘that there was somebody right here all along, who was on the spot at the time, and nobody mentioned her to me. We were in separate places over the summer because I was in Scotland when she wasn’t, and vice versa. When you came back from Balmoral, I would have had the opportunity to talk to her face to face at last – if I’d only known how useful she could be. But of course, that never happened.’

‘Yes, I see,’ the Queen said.

‘Your staff tend to stay a long time. Everyone tells stories. I can’t believe Uncle Max was the only person who knew about her previous jobs. And afterwards, Mr Harvie saying nothing about her death? It just doesn’t make sense. At the time I thought he was being reserved and diplomatic, but if she worked for him directly – well, it’s just weird. He was very conversational most of the time.’

The Queen pursed her lips. She looked very grim indeed. ‘You do know what you’re suggesting, don’t you?’

Rozie said quietly, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She swallowed.

There was the sound of snuffling and the pattering of doggy paws on the carpet as the two women stood quietly, considering the body lying in a pool of blood.

‘Well,’ the Queen said at last. ‘Do you have anyone in particular in mind?’

‘I don’t. Not that I can make any sense of, anyway.’

‘Have you talked to Chief Inspector Strong?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Let me think about it for a while.’

‘I—Of course. Yes.’ Rozie relaxed a little. ‘I didn’t think you’d believe me. I thought I was getting a bit dramatic.’

‘And yet you came to find me,’ the Queen said, ‘and kept me from lunch with the Princess Royal. You must have thought it was important.’

Rozie tried to hide her smile. Princess Anne was known for her punctuality. Even her mother might be on the receiving end of a sharply raised eyebrow. ‘I did. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. And now I really must go.’

However, after Rozie left her, the Queen remained in the calm stillness of the room, grateful for a moment of solitude.

Rozie had been on her mind yesterday while she was out riding at Windsor. She had been thinking about the notes. If Cynthia Harris had targeted herself, one had to wonder who had targeted Rozie and why. The notes seemed designed to get rid of her and the Queen had wondered if there was a specific reason why somebody wanted her out of the way.

And now this. The idea that Mrs Harris had been deliberately killed, almost the moment she got back to the Palace from Scotland, to stop Rozie from talking to her. Why? Because Rozie had been asking about a painting by a fairly unknown Australian that went missing thirty years ago. It was outlandish. It was outright ridiculous. And yet . . .

The strangest thing of all was the behaviour of Sholto Harvie, who had failed to mention that he once worked closely with a woman whose death was in the news, along with fanciful stories of young princesses and bottles of champagne. Why stay silent about that, but disclose the story of the Breakages Business?

Sholto couldn’t be the killer – if indeed there was one. What harm could he have done from the Cotswolds? And anyway, why help and hinder at the same time?

There was a gentle knock at the door. ‘Ma’am?’

Damn. The soup would be cold, or boiled, and Anne, Charles and Philip would be livid. She called out that she was coming and followed the dogs as briskly as she could.

Chapter 21

That afternoon, Anne put her head around the study door.

‘Not disturbing you, am I?’

She was. The Queen was catching up on some private correspondence. But it didn’t matter. Anne, who was in town for various work commitments, sat on the comfy armchair she generally used if she came to visit and accepted the eager, nuzzling curiosity of Vulcan and Candy as they came to settle at her feet. Willow remained by her mistress, but cocked an ear in acknowledgement.

‘It’s not the same, is it?’ Anne said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were full of sympathy. ‘D’you miss her badly?’

She meant the dog. It was only four weeks and a bit since the vet had performed his final, inevitable task on Holly, and several times a day the Queen felt a sudden tug at her consciousness: the different sound made by three sets of paws, not four; wondering what treats one might persuade the elderly dog to eat, and remembering that there was no need; the sight of the corgi’s eager body waddling and waggling ahead of her down the corridors, snaking round her ankles as she tried to sit down and lying in all the most unfortunate places – a ghostly memory now.

In fact, the Queen had been responding to a couple of old friends who’d been offering their condolences. Dog-lovers, they understood.

‘Yes, I miss her very much,’ she said. ‘But life goes on, doesn’t it?’

‘I know, Mummy, but you can talk to me. I bawled my eyes out when Mabel died.’

‘You did,’ the Queen remembered.

That was the thing about Anne: tough as old boots, which meant she hadn’t cared a jot if the family saw her blubbing at the death of a precious pet. Mind you, one of her bull terriers had caused a corgi to be put down once. Not a happy memory.

Who, the Queen thought, could kill their own guinea pig? Her mind was back with Peggy Thornicroft, and from there to Cynthia Harris again.

‘You seem very distracted,’ Anne said. ‘I thought so over lunch. Anything I can do?’

She reflexively declined the offer. ‘No. It’s not Holly.’

‘Oh, God – it’s not the President of Colombia, is it? He hasn’t asked for anything outrageous in the Belgian Suite? D’you remember that prince who wanted an open fire?’

She did. He wanted it so his chef could cook appropriate meals the traditional way, but it had been agreed that such a fire in the kitchens might be a safer option.

‘I do. Not that.’

‘Oh, not the housekeeper in the pool? That was bloody bad luck. I haven’t told the little ones about it. They’d go apeshit.’

‘Not that either,’ the Queen lied. ‘But I do have a problem. I sense I should alert the authorities about something, but if I do, it will go from something very small to something very big very quickly, and I won’t have the power to stop it. And I might be wrong.’

‘Can’t you get Sir Simon to fix it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Really? There’s not much he can’t do. Except find meaningful jobs for Beatrice and Eugenie, I s’pose.’

‘Not this.’

‘Can you wait? See if it sorts itself out?’

The Queen smiled fondly at her daughter. She loved Anne’s practicality and instinctive desire to help, combined with the tact born of a lifetime of knowing that Mummy had to deal with secret things on a regular basis, and if she didn’t want to tell you, you didn’t ask.

‘I don’t think it will,’ she answered. ‘I wish it could.’

Anne stood up. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. But when I had a problem setting up the horse trials at Gatcombe, I remember I was calling up all and sundry, making my presence felt and being a bloody nuisance, and you said to attack it one piece at a time, and do nothing until I was sure of my facts.’ She walked over to give her mother an affectionate kiss. ‘I’m off to get changed. Black-tie dinner in the City to raise wodges of dosh for the Royal Voluntary Service. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Alone again, the Queen pushed aside the letter she’d been writing and considered her daughter’s advice. Her duty told her to raise her concerns about Mrs Harris with Chief Inspector Strong as soon as possible. If Cynthia had died to stop her from talking to Rozie about what happened in the nineteen eighties, then murder had been committed within the precincts of the Palace and of course the police must know.

But had it?

Despite the Queen’s misgivings from the start, the police were still content that Mrs Harris’s fall was a tragic accident. Had someone really masterminded that trick with the tumbler? (The Queen couldn’t help seeing it as a trick.) All Rozie had done over the summer was ask around about the long-ago disappearance of a minor oil painting. Would someone plot and kill to stop her making progress? Really?

If one did talk to the chief inspector, he couldn’t possibly keep it quiet while he made a few discreet enquiries. He wasn’t like Billy MacLachlan, her old protection officer who occasionally helped out in his retirement. Strong would be duty-bound to report his findings up the line. Even if his bosses tried to keep it quiet, it was a murder at Buckingham Palace. She could imagine the headlines and endless updates in the news.

The Queen gazed out of the window. The gas lamps were on in the grounds – relics from a Victorian age, though her great-great-grandmother had found them too newfangled for her taste. Beyond the walls, London went about its business, oblivious. She could feel a headache coming on. To talk or not to talk? All she had was a hunch, although when Rozie had spoken to her in the 1844 Room, their joint conclusion had felt much more than that.

Anne’s advice, though given without much context, seemed sound. If she were a minister, preparing to present to herself, she would endeavour to put a decent case together and be sure of her facts. She must do the same for the chief inspector.

Yes, that was the answer. She sat back in her chair with relief. She knew where to start. But she couldn’t do it yet.

Chapter 22

The State Visit of the President of Colombia began on Tuesday. This was a highlight of the calendar that the Queen cared about tremendously, and she wanted London and the Palace to be at their best. Over the years, there had been some leaders of Latin American countries one had found more congenial than others. Mr Santos, who was on the brink of achieving a historic peace agreement at home, was a man she was pleased to welcome with all the pageantry State and Crown could command. He had once been a student here, and now he was the most recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, due to give a speech at the London School of Economics about the role of young people in the peace process. He would visit Northern Ireland, hot on the heels of her own recent trip, and see the tremendous progress that a community could make when it actively turned away from conflict. She was grateful to Rozie for finding a suitable quotation from a Colombian writer for her own speech of welcome. Which is harder to fight: war or indifference?

That night, she gave the speech in the gilded Ballroom, at a banquet for a hundred and seventy. The tables, positioned in a U shape, were so wide that footmen had had to walk across them in stockinged feet to smooth out the cloths and position the silver gilt dessert stands and branching candelabras from the Grand Service, dating back to the early nineteenth century. Each place was set with six cut-crystal glasses. The flowers included choice varieties from Colombia alongside home-grown blooms. The Master had checked – with a ruler – that the knives and forks were set the correct distance from the edge of the table. She herself had closely inspected the settings beforehand, to ensure everything was right.

Sitting beside Mr Santos at the head table in the Ballroom, she wore the Victorian Suite diamonds and sapphires. The overall effect, with matching tiara, was suitably large and showy, to match the banquet. The Queen liked to break out all the rocks for occasions such as this. She had already given the President a formal reception on Horse Guards Parade, a carriage-ride up the Mall and lunch in the Bow Room. There was more to come tomorrow. It was the chance to connect with a world leader at a personal level and spread a little dazzle.

At times like this, and during the investitures and the garden parties, one could forgive Buckingham Palace for being so large, so extravagantly redesigned and decorated by her third-great-grand-uncle, George IV, and so difficult to maintain. It was not ideal as a home in many ways, but when the nation wanted to extend its thanks or hand of friendship, there was nowhere quite like it for doing the job. She and the rest of the family went out of their way to make the once-in-a-lifetime experience as delightful as they could for their visitors.

During the dinner, she was very glad to think that Mr Santos and his wife would have no idea of the horrors going on above their heads, where the space above the Ballroom ceiling had been recently inspected to make sure it wasn’t as critically dangerous as the one above the State Dining Room, which was still out of use. The Palace was a bit like a swan on the lake: gliding gracefully on the surface, paddling like billy-o underneath.

To her relief and the Master’s, no ceilings fell. After two nights in the Belgian Suite and a packed agenda of events, Mr Santos left for Northern Ireland and the Queen had a bit of breathing space.

On Thursday morning she travelled to Newmarket to unveil a statue of a racehorse in honour of her long and happy association with the town. In the helicopter on the way to Suffolk, she read a note from Sir James giving her a quick update on the new investigation into the Breakages Business that Rozie had covertly instigated. Her heart sank. It was half a page.

Initial enquiries suggest that there was a problem with a manager in the eighties called Sidney Smirke who became head of the Works Department. He was known as a bit of a character, but towards the end it became sadly obvious he was a raging alcoholic. He got a criminal record for beating up a man outside a pub and my predecessor at the time had to get rid of him. It’s not impossible that he tried to run some sort of racket, but I can absolutely assure you that any possible issues with a ‘Breakages Business’ are purely historic. If I come across anything else, I’ll let you know instanter, but I don’t need to assure you that my team have management of your assets under tight control.

She looked up from the note with a sigh. There it was again. If anyone else told her everything was ‘under control’ she might be forced to break something herself.

She tried to use the rest of the journey to make sense of it all, but helicopter rides are not designed to aid the thinking process. This was a three-dog problem. She resolved to give it her full attention when she got back.

Chapter 23

For years, it had been the Queen’s habit to take a few dogs for a walk in the grounds if she had a big problem to consider. Too many, and one ended up spending more time calling them to heel than thinking. Nowadays, she didn’t have the luxury of choice.

On her return to the Palace that afternoon, there was a small gap in her schedule before tea. She put her papers aside and checked the sky outside her window. It was grey and gloomy, with a likelihood of rain. No matter. She told her page to explain to anyone who asked that she was going out and she might be some time.

The dogs accompanied their mistress to the boot room, where she slipped into a raincoat, headscarf and sensible shoes before heading out into the garden. Candy and Vulcan’s dorgi ancestry resulted from an encounter years ago between her corgi, Tiny, and Margaret’s dachshund, Pipkin. Despite their stubby legs, these two were energetic creatures who appreciated the exercise. Willow, the corgi, did not look convinced she needed another walk after the one she’d had with a footman this morning, but she came along out of curiosity, if nothing else.

The cool, tangy air outside was an instant reminder that it was the first week of November, and winter was on its way. The Queen felt it prick her skin and catch in her throat. Ahead, the lawn stretched down towards the lake. Two weeks ago, with autumn at its height, the view had been awash with vibrant colour from the bright yellow ash, the flaming swamp cypresses and tawny horse chestnuts that flanked the lawn and encircled the water. Today, the trees were a patchwork of gold and brown, and the lawn was edged with flurries of fallen leaves. In the past, there would have been bonfires; now there were composters. Philip ensured they were all environmentally efficient, but she missed the smell of woodsmoke on the air.

She turned along the West Terrace, keeping the Palace to her right as she headed for the kissing plane trees. The dogs were already ahead of her; they knew this route. They padded along the path, sniffing the borders and pausing occasionally if she called. At the end of the terrace they trotted past the north-west pavilion, which Papa had converted into the pool. From here, it looked like a Greek temple with Georgian windows. The Queen looked up as she passed, considering its interior and the night the family got back from Balmoral.

‘What had happened to Mrs Harris, then?’ she asked the dogs, who were more inquisitive about what lay under the leaf piles than their mistress’s musings. She kept the rest of her thoughts to herself.

Why on earth would Cynthia Harris go there? The police were happy enough that she had done so alone, out of mere officiousness, or on a whim. She had arrived in her slippers, which were found in the ladies’ changing room, so it didn’t look like a romantic encounter – not that anyone had expected it to be. Outside, the grounds were full of hidden CCTV cameras that could be triggered by the slightest movement, all of which were working. No one had entered the Palace unofficially that night. If the housekeeper had met anyone, it was an insider. There were no signs of trauma on her body, other than the knock on the head and the cuts to the lower leg, no indication that she was hurt or forced.

Even the newspapers were happy: they had run dozens of articles about the dangers of cutting yourself on the ankle. In the absence of photographs, they had mocked up endless pictures of what Mrs Harris must have looked like, lying there, with images of crystal glasses of all shapes and sizes, and advice on where to procure similar items from Harrods and Thomas Goode.

Surprisingly, they never had picked up on the poison pen campaign. Their angle was that Mrs Harris was a tragic victim of cut crystal and bad luck – or possibly the lax habits of poor Beatrice and Eugenie, who were in fact several miles away at the time – so it didn’t fit that she might be unpopular. Simon had tried to explain this, but the Queen was quite aware of it already. She knew precisely how certain elements of the press decided their story first, then found the facts to fit. Her family had been at the receiving end of it all her life.

By now she had reached the plane trees planted by Victoria and Albert either side of the path, a hundred and fifty years ago. They arched above her, high into the sky, their spreading branches intertwining just as her great-great-grandparents must have planned. At this point she followed the path to the left, towards the rose garden. Was she stirring up trouble for nothing? What could she prove? Given all the trouble it would cause, why would she even want to try?

She passed the little summer house, where in warm weather she liked to give tea parties to the great-grandchildren. Willow stayed nearby on the path while Candy and Vulcan nosed about outside.

Because she knew something was wrong. One did not give up so easily.

‘Motive, means, opportunity,’ she muttered. ‘You know that, Willow, don’t you?’

The corgi panted at her in a non-committal way. They carried on.

Rozie had provided the motive. But while it gave the Queen pause for thought, it was so weak. Even if Cynthia Harris knew all about the Breakages Business and the purloined painting, who would commit murder for the sake of protecting a small-time art thief and a racket to sell unwanted presents? Not that they were ever unwanted, of course, just difficult to store.

As for means, the Queen had nothing but conjecture. Her knowledge of her staff did not extend to any unusual proclivities they might have for piercing arteries on demand – so this didn’t narrow the field in any useful way. And opportunity . . . If Cynthia Harris had been murdered, it must have been by someone who knew the Palace well, was staying there that night and could avoid the internal CCTV. At the moment, three-year-old Prince George could evade that if suitably determined. About fifty servants had been at the Palace that night. She had watched MI5 put all her staff under suspicion recently and had no intention of doing so again without due cause. No, she would have to unlock the motive first, before she could consider making any headway on how it was done, or by whom.

The rose garden in November was not at its best. She called out some encouragement to the dorgis and kept moving. Traffic bowled busily along Constitution Hill beyond the wall to her right. Ahead, the path under the trees took her past the old tennis court, where she had played some great games with Papa as a teenager, and a few with a young Philip Mountbatten, when he was courting her and keen to impress. Beyond that was the ‘worm pie corner’, where he and the gardeners experimented with the latest recycling and composting techniques. Philip was always keen to stay ahead with the help of the latest science. His diary, even now, was full of visits to medical research centres and universities. In fact, he was off in Hertfordshire today, opening a new science building. He was the Prince Albert of his day, she thought: progressive, eager, indefatigable. And somewhat foreign, when he arrived. Misunderstood by many and much loved by the people who knew him best.

She dragged her attention away from her husband and back to the matter in hand. Willow had to be persuaded away from a particularly smelly set of bins. By now she was at the far end of the garden, where the diesel chug of buses and taxis from Grosvenor Place created a steady bass note under nearby birdsong and the distant sound of a leaf blower on the lawn. The path turned once more to the left. In a couple of minutes, looking back, she’d be able to see the West Terrace again behind the lake.

Somehow, in the strange way that meditative walking sometimes did, this suggested a different way to attack the problem. Turn it around. If she couldn’t persuade herself that Mrs Harris was murdered, she should try and convince herself that she wasn’t.

Very well. The Queen strode with more purpose now, counting off the arguments for an accident. First of all, Cynthia herself. It seemed unlikely that the housekeeper would have gone to the pool at night merely on the off-chance of clearing something up – but if anyone was going to behave in an odd, excessively conscientious way, it would be Cynthia. Second, it was perfectly possible she had not been killed by a poison pen letter-writer, because Lady Caroline’s theory about her writing to herself was quite compelling. Especially if there was something in her past that had made her unhappy. That was in the hands of Chief Inspector Strong now. And the stalker? The Queen was sure that was a separate business regarding Mary van Renen, and possibly Rozie. It hadn’t led to violence – yet. Thank God.

What about the Operations Team, who never mentioned Cynthia to Rozie? That was odd. Was it possible that none of them knew the history of the housekeeper – unpopular as she was – who came from the Royal Collection and used to work there when it was the Works Department, years ago? Cynthia had even been engaged to the manager, apparently. But ‘apparently’ wasn’t good enough. Perhaps the engagement was idle speculation, or a false memory. In the Queen’s experience, the Household loved nothing more than passing down Palace lore from generation to generation, but it was also possible that some details would be changed or forgotten over time. Cynthia herself might have been glad of it. Yes, she could accept the idea of collective amnesia about the housekeeper’s history, if she had to. And anyway, even if the Breakages Business was still running, and Cynthia knew about it, and Rozie was onto it, she was back to her first question: who would commit murder for the sake of a few gifts and bits of furniture that nobody had missed?

Vulcan appeared from the bushes with a disgusting tennis ball that must have been last used on a dog walk in the summer. It was green with slime, and slobbery. She told him to get rid of it and glanced to her left, where the lake was now fully visible through the trees.

What about Sholto Harvie? If Strong’s research was correct – and Rozie could check it for her – Sholto and Cynthia must have worked together closely in the mid-nineteen eighties. Was he being polite when he didn’t discuss Cynthia’s death with Rozie, beyond acknowledging that he knew she was dead? The Queen strode on, trying to fit the psychology to an innocent explanation. She remembered vividly how much he’d loved his job as Deputy Surveyor. She didn’t remember Cynthia being his assistant, but it was quite possible she simply hadn’t known.

From what Rozie had said, Sholto still thought of those days with immense fondness. It was such a pity he had left so soon. He had the makings of an excellent curator and art historian, and he was popular with the other staff at the Royal Collection. She had half expected him to run the department one day. No, it was not obvious to her why a man like Sholto would have lost interest in someone he’d been close to in those days that were so special to him. He had only been there a few years, and Cynthia must have been his assistant for at least two of them. One couldn’t help wondering why on earth she had left. And for a job that was much more menial.

The Queen slowed down and looked back at the shadowy grey-brown outline of the Palace emerging through the trees. It was so richly full of history – even if bits of it were practically falling down. The first-floor rooms had played host to a major statesman last night. They were lined with historic art and treasures that might be worth killing for, perhaps, if you were that way inclined. Sholto, indeed, had been partly in charge of looking after those treasures. But that’s not what Rozie had been asking about when she went to stay. Anyway, Sholto had been helpful. Even if he didn’t know what had happened to the ‘ghastly little painting’, he had given them the Breakages Business. She was back where she started.

Except . . .

What if it wasn’t that at all? Sholto had brought the Breakages Business up, but she began to wonder if it had been a screen for something else. In that case, the question was – what? This was all about Cynthia Harris in the end. What else could Cynthia have known about?

Picking up the pace of her walk again, the Queen cast her mind back furiously over those happy years when she had consulted him about her art collection. Try as she might, she didn’t remember anything of major interest going missing. Nothing she hadn’t subsequently resolved, anyway. There were only the Thingummies, and they were the opposite, really: they were found.

Three Renaissance paintings – no, it was four – had turned up at Hampton Court Palace having been lost in storage for centuries, and one had been really quite excited for a while, but on closer inspection they’d turned out to be copies. Wasn’t it . . .? Yes, it was Sholto who was in charge of that whole episode. He’d had the paintings cleaned and checked by experts. It had all taken an age because . . . Hmm. Yes, why had it taken so long? She racked her brains again and shouted quite harshly at Candy, who was burying her nose in something repulsive further down the path. This had all happened when Diana was around. Life had been a series of little dramas. Ah! Now she had it, and it was very sad. The young curator who was supposed to be working on the paintings had suffered a terrible accident that had set everything back by weeks or months.

What was the artist called? It was a woman, and she was famous. Sholto had been terribly excited. She was a bit later than the Renaissance. Seventeenth century. Gentileschi – that was it. Her work was worth a lot of money, quite rightly so because she was brilliant. The Queen had loved the paintings and was so disappointed to find out they weren’t originals after all.

How much money? Was it thousands, or hundreds of thousands?

A man could kill for hundreds of thousands.

She began to see a pattern. It was dim, and it didn’t fully fit together, but two ‘terrible accidents’ was starting to feel less like bad luck and more like a dark and sinister pattern that started and ended with Sholto Harvie.

Overhead, the clouds mirrored her thoughts and shifted from polished steel to gunmetal grey. Rain wasn’t far away. Rounding the lake, she bowed her head, called the dogs to her side and took a rapid shortcut home across the lawn.

Chapter 24

Billy MacLachlan was FaceTiming his granddaughter in the Isle of Wight from his flat in Richmond upon Thames when a call alert flashed up on his screen. It was seven-year-old Betsy’s bedtime and he was telling her a story. The screen was filled with her pink, chubby face contradicting him and instructing him to do it differently at every turn. It was exhausting, and the best bit of the day by miles. Almost nothing short of a national emergency would drag him away from Betsy at this hour . . . But the number on his screen was in the nature of a national emergency.

‘Sorry, love, got to go.’

‘Why, Grampa? You were just getting to the good bit with the can-tank-rious fairy.’

‘The Queen of England needs my help.’

‘But Grampa—?’

Already, he was gone. Betsy would tell her parents that Grampa Billy had said the Queen of England had called again, and they would laugh and explain that that was Grampa’s little joke, because he used to work for her a long time ago. They probably suspected that this was really his code for problems with his waterworks, or maybe a secret girlfriend – who, frankly, he would be perfectly entitled to since Grandma Deidre died twenty years ago. MacLachlan didn’t really care what they thought, as long as it was not the suspicion that he might be telling his granddaughter the truth. Anyway, it wasn’t the Queen of England exactly: it was ‘Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. He had used a kind of shorthand: synecdoche – the part for the whole.

‘Yes, Your Majesty?’

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you this evening?’

‘I was just talking to my second-favourite Elizabeth, ma’am.’ This wasn’t entirely true – Betsy was the light of his life – but Disraeli said that when talking to royalty, flattery should be laid on with a trowel. ‘What can I do for you?’

This time it was the Queen’s turn to tell him a story. It started with some forgotten paintings found in storage at another royal palace, and ended with the body in the Buckingham Palace pool last month, which he had always thought extremely fishy, despite what the media said.

It was only a few months ago that he and the Boss had discussed another murder. After working as her protection officer, he’d risen through the ranks to chief inspector, built up a tidy pension and retired to the genteel borough of Richmond, where he was bored witless and grateful for any opportunity to stretch his brain beyond the Times crossword and the Polygon. The Queen turned to him every now and again. It was always on the QT and he was glad when she did.

‘So if I’ve got this right, four paintings were discovered, but they weren’t by the artist everyone hoped they were.’

‘Exactly. It looked as though they must have been copied from the originals. It was quite a common practice in the seventeenth century, I was told. They were quite well done, but once they were cleaned up, they weren’t nearly as impressive as we all at first thought.’

‘And you say a curator was injured, ma’am. Is that where you’d like me to start?’

‘Yes, please. It was in the mid-nineteen eighties. I don’t remember the year precisely, but I’m sure the Royal Collection Trust will be able to tell you exactly when the paintings were discovered, and it was a few weeks after that.’

‘Can’t Rozie help?’ He wasn’t trying to be difficult, but he knew the Queen’s APS had done sterling work last time and was surprised she wasn’t better suited to this particular task, being on-site, so to speak.

‘I fear she might have disturbed a hornet’s nest already. As I say, she was talking to the Surveyor shortly before Mrs Harris died. If it was someone there that she alerted . . .’

‘I get it, ma’am. New face, different story.’

‘Yes. But I don’t know how you’ll do it.’

‘Nor do I, ma’am. That’s the fun of it. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found anything. Actually, I’ve got a few mates from my old days working in your service. I can ask around. I don’t think it’ll be a problem.’

‘And there’s one other thing.’

She asked him to look into the recent whereabouts of an ex-staff member of hers. After he put the phone down, he went over to his drinks cabinet and poured himself two fingers of Johnnie Walker Red Label. Then he sat for an hour with his laptop and a notebook and pen, researching, writing, thinking. He hadn’t felt this energised for weeks.

Maybe she and Betsy were his joint-favourite Elizabeths. Was that really bad? One was named after the other, so perhaps that made it OK.

Chapter 25

Rozie came out of the Queen’s study the next morning feeling relieved and anxious in equal measure. The Boss had made it clear that she’d been doing a lot of thinking. She’d found a potential motive for the killing of Mrs Harris, but it was still tenuous. She didn’t go into detail; they were so busy discussing next year’s schedule there was hardly time for murder.

Nevertheless, she could sense the Queen was making progress. It was unnerving to think that if she was right, she, Rozie, was the cause of Cynthia Harris’s demise. Meanwhile, as requested, she had made a handwritten list of all the people she had spoken to about the Britannia painting over the summer. She had written each name with thought and care, knowing it might lead to a killer. She was off to double-check Mrs Harris’s records with HR.

Reaching her office corridor, she encountered Sir James, who looked like thunder and didn’t say hello. She popped her head round Sir Simon’s door to see what the matter was.

‘Don’t worry,’ the Private Secretary said, waving a hand at her without looking up. ‘It’s under control.’

‘Are you sure?’ Rozie asked. Sir Simon’s eager-beagle face looked just as miserable as his friend’s.

‘It’s fine,’ he insisted. He was still cross with her about the unnecessary policemen. ‘It’s just the final Reservicing figures. They don’t quite add up and it’s got to go to print first thing tomorrow. Mary van Renen was working on it and the temp . . . Well, the less said about the temp the better.’

‘Can I do anything?’

He raised his head to gazed at her wearily. ‘D’you know of an Excel wizard who understands databases and the ins and outs of BP refurbishment issues and has a free morning? Because I don’t.’

Rozie smiled. ‘I worked at an investment bank, don’t forget. They made me go on courses.’

‘But it’s . . .’

‘What?’

‘Secretarial.’ He looked apologetic.

She shrugged. The old ‘secretaries-who-aren’t-secretaries’ thing.

‘This is important,’ she said. ‘If you show me where to look for problems, I’ll probably find them faster than anyone else who might be available.’ Mrs Harris’s HR records could wait an hour or two.

‘Really?’

Sir Simon’s features rearranged themselves, as if by magic, into their traditional combination of intelligent, curious hopefulness and Rozie made her way to the outer office in the South Wing where the Keeper’s harassed assistants worked. Here, she acquainted herself with the issues and made herself comfortable at a free desk, which happened to be the one where Mary used to sit. She was the first person to think to call Mary herself, who talked her through the numbers. Then she delved deeper into the databases to understand the discrepancies and lost all track of time.

The Queen was in her study when Philip popped his head round the door in passing to tell her some hair-raising stories about the US election that she would rather not have heard.

‘I suppose the spooks have told you it’s all being run by Russia and Facebook?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘Don’t count on it. I got a sit-rep from someone at the Guinea Pig Club memorial thing.’

For a moment the Queen had a vision of Peggy Thornicroft’s poor creature in the outhouses at her boarding school, but this was a club for aviators who had been guinea pigs in quite a different way. They were the men who had been shot down in their planes in the Second World War and suffered horrific disfigurement through burns. A surgeon called Archibald McIndoe had put them back together as best he could, feeding them barrels of beer to keep their hydration and their spirits up. He was a pioneer of plastic surgery and one of Philip’s wartime heroes – and hers too – as were the young men (old men, now) who had been in the surgeon’s care.

She had been entertaining Mr and Mrs Santos at the time, but in a perfect world she would also have liked to go with Philip and to spend an hour or two with the few pilots who remained. They were of one’s own generation, they had been to hell and back and nothing could faze them. No doubt the visit would have been full of off-colour jokes and bonhomie. Her own events were never like that. There was something about the way men relaxed in each other’s company . . .

She sighed briefly. ‘How many of them are left?’

‘Seventeen,’ he said.

‘Out of how many?’

‘Six hundred and forty-three.’

But even seventeen still alive today wasn’t so bad, she considered, given that Philip was ninety-five and most of them would have been the same age as him. She remembered so well the dances they’d held at Windsor Castle, and how bright and charming all the young men were who came, and how so very many of them never came back. One after the other, after the other. It was dizzying, sometimes, to think of those names and handsome faces, and how one had twirled around the floor with them. And then the telegram.

These men must have believed, as their flaming machines plunged towards Earth, that their time had come. How many might have guessed they would live to their hundredth year, and some beyond it?

Sir Simon and Sir James arrived, to talk her through the Reservicing Programme proposal for the last time before it was submitted. The Keeper happened to mention that Rozie was busy sorting out a last-minute issue with the numbers.

The Queen smiled. ‘She’s a woman of many parts, isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Sir Simon gruffly admitted. ‘And she offered to help – she didn’t have to.’

This pleased the Queen even more. She liked people who pitched in and got on with things. One of her pet hates were the other kind: the prissy ones who stood on their dignity and watched chaos swirl around their ankles while they did nothing to avoid it. But it was awkward not to have Rozie here just now. She would have understood the following request and obeyed it without question. Sir Simon, on the other hand . . . Oh, well. One was the Boss, after all.

‘Simon, before you go, I’d like you to find the young woman who’s curating the Canaletto exhibition for the Queen’s Gallery next year. I particularly want to speak to her.’

‘Today, ma’am?’

‘Yes.’

Her look was firm. His half-raised eyebrow descended obediently to its natural plane.

‘Of course. But I’m sure Neil Hudson would be more than happy to come over if you wanted to discuss anything. He’s in overall control and he—’

‘There’s no need to disturb my Surveyor.’ Neil Hudson’s name was on Rozie’s handwritten list, which was folded in the top drawer of her desk. ‘The curator will do perfectly well. You know my schedule. If you could fit in half an hour this afternoon, that would be very kind.’

Sir Simon nodded. That would be very kind translated as Shut up and get on with it. He had learned this early, and did both.

Chapter 26

By sheer luck, the Queen’s next appointment quite naturally provided plenty of opportunity to talk about what was on her mind. With her page in attendance, she made her way to the Yellow Drawing Room again, where plastic sheeting had been liberally spread out on the carpet and Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood was waiting for her, along with the documentary crew. Over the summer, Lavinia had created a clay bust from her drawings. Unlike many other portrait artists, Lavinia didn’t like to work from photographs. ‘They kill the image for me,’ she explained the first time they worked together. ‘If I can’t capture it with my hand in the moment, then it doesn’t feel part of the process.’

This part of the process was something the Queen always marvelled at. A damp clay sculpture, built around a metal armature, had been somehow manhandled from Lavinia’s studio in Surrey to this room in the Palace, where it stood on a rotating modelling stand, draped in wet muslin. Nearby, a velvet-lined box displayed the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara, ready for the dresser to help her put it on. She had chosen this particular piece for the portrait because it somehow managed to be delicate and dazzling at the same time. This was ‘Granny’s tiara’. Her beloved grandmother, Queen Mary, had given it to her as a wedding gift and she had worn it so often since that it was an old friend. It had not escaped her notice that she thought of her tiaras the way other women might think of their hats or – what? in these more modern times – their favourite handbags, perhaps.

Lavinia chatted as the Queen applied the diamonds, checked herself briefly in a mirror and made herself comfortable in the designated chair. When she was ready, the artist carefully unveiled the work in progress and the Queen was delighted to see that, once again, Lavinia had done a splendid job. One looked like oneself, but ten years younger. She had indeed captured some sort of sparkle about the eyes, as she had promised, and how she could do that in rough clay the Queen couldn’t begin to understand.

Now, with a couple of precious hours ahead of them, Lavinia worked directly into the sculpture, pausing occasionally to check the dimensions against the original flesh and bone with callipers, talking as she went. The Queen had requested that the camera crew only stay for the first hour, so the second hour was much more relaxed. They discussed the Olympics, the garden, the racing on Channel 4. The Queen said she had recently seen a fascinating programme about art forgery and fakes. (She had, but it was about five years ago.)

‘I had no idea there were so many. I hope I don’t own any!’

The artist pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with putty-smeared hands. ‘I hate to say it, but you probably do. It’s endemic. Most galleries have the odd fake or two, whether they know it or not. Of course, they’d never admit it.’

‘But how do they manage it?’ the Queen wondered. ‘The forgers, I mean. There are all these techniques for examining paintings these days, aren’t there? X-rays, I mean. And that thing they do with colours, to test what they’re made of.’

‘Mass spectrometry? Yes, you’re absolutely right. Technology’s come on in leaps and bounds. Forgers have to be so much cleverer today.’

‘Oh? Since when?’

Lavinia didn’t answer for a moment. She was busy with the slope of the nose and needed to concentrate. When she was happy with the line she said, ‘The science gets better with every decade. But when I was an art student – and I used to love this sort of stuff – you would hear tales to make your hair curl. Back in the seventies the experts did it mostly by eye. They used to check the materials, of course. I mean, if you did a Botticelli portrait on canvas, when everyone knew he used wood panels for portraiture, then you were in trouble. Or if you were stupid enough to use titanium white, which only came in in the twentieth century. But a lot of it was around provenance and whether a painting had the right “feel”.’

‘That’s so interesting.’ The Queen looked and sounded distantly composed. In fact, her mind raced and her nose itched, but her hands remained loosely clasped in her lap. A lady did not touch her face in public; Queen Mary had taught her that, as well as giving her this tiara. And a queen did not look unduly fascinated by crime. ‘So if you wanted to forge a painting, back in those days, how would you do it?’

‘Really, ma’am?’

The Queen glanced over at Lavinia, who was smiling. Her cheeks and forehead were smudged with wet clay, her hands busy as she sculpted the face. She was working hard, but a lot of it was about looking and muscle memory. It left her free to consider the Queen’s suggestion.

‘I often wondered. It would be a nice way to make your fortune – as long as you didn’t get caught and go to jail. So many forgers did. But I secretly admired a lot of them. They were really good painters and craftsmen in their own right. The detail of getting it perfect: that’s a challenge in itself.’

‘What sort of detail? Let’s say it was a Rembrandt.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Lavinia grinned. ‘Wow, that’s a toughie. Well, let’s assume I’m a genius-level copyist, to start with. We’re talking the golden age of Baroque. First of all, I’d get hold of a painted canvas from the period. That’s pretty important. It’s got to be the right linen, the right weave, the right wood in the stretchers – even the right nails. I’d scrape off the oil paint until I got to the ground – that’s how the canvas is prepared. It’s got to be authentic, so I’d leave that in. I’d research what Rembrandt’s paints were made of and make my own with the same ingredients. I’d use his method of drawing, and practise his style until I could do it in my sleep. But the painting itself is half of it, really. The rest is the provenance side, and often that’s harder to fake. Has it been in a collection? You’d need the right inventory numbers, and they’d need to match the records. Faking a painting from your collection would be hard, ma’am, because it would be so easy to cross-check. Often the back tells you as much as the front. Is it stamped? How was the canvas attached? What kind of frame has it been in?’

‘I suppose if you had the original to work off, that would make it much easier?’

‘Infinitely,’ Lavinia agreed.

‘But if you wanted to move a painting secretly, how would you go about it? I saw a film once where a man put it in a briefcase, but that didn’t seem very realistic.’

‘Oh, The Thomas Crown Affair,’ Lavinia said with another grin. ‘I loved that film, and no, you can’t hide a Monet in a briefcase. But if you were really desperate you could always take the canvas off the stretcher, roll it up and take the stretcher apart. You’d have to put it all back together of course, with the original nails. Fiddly job.’

‘Can you really roll a canvas? A painted one?’

‘Absolutely, if you’re careful. You keep the painting facing out and do it like a carpet. It’s not ideal, but I’m guessing your forger is a desperate criminal.’

‘Hmm.’

‘We had to do it for a painting my mother bought at auction once.’ Lavinia applied some clay to an eyebrow and smoothed it, stood back and judged the effect. ‘All quite legitimate, but the only way of getting it to her was in my 2CV, and it was six foot square. Dismantling the frame was heartbreaking, but by the time we’d put it all back together and touched up the dodgy bits, you’d never have known. There! I think I need a bit of a stretch myself.’

Later, Dr Jennifer Sutherland was amazed to find herself in the Queen’s Gallery, beside the South Wing of the Palace, waiting to be joined by Her Majesty. They had met a couple of times, briefly, when the Queen had come to St James’s Palace to inspect preparations for an exhibition. She had never been alone with the Queen before. And she was still regretting her trousers.

She looked down at them now. Three days in a row she’d worn them, because they were the comfiest ones she owned. They were expensive when bought, designer stretch jersey, black and figure-hugging, but overstretched and slightly baggy now, and still bearing the traces of yesterday morning’s boiled egg, though she’d tried to wash the mark off in the loos.

Jennifer had pictured a moment like this, of course, up close with Her Majesty, but in her dream she’d been about to collect her MBE (or perhaps even her damehood), and was wearing Vivienne Westwood pinstripes and vertiginous Louboutins, her hair recently coloured and her mum in the audience. Not at three thirty on a Friday afternoon, in work clothes, and for no obvious reason. Neil Hudson had said the Queen didn’t notice what you were wearing, but Jennifer didn’t believe him. She was a woman, and women noticed. She might not care, but that was another matter.

The one thing Jennifer wasn’t at all nervous about, though, was telling the Queen anything she wanted to know about the upcoming Venice exhibition, for which she was the senior curator. She had done her PhD on Grand Tour city views, or ‘vedute’ as they were called in Italian, and Canaletto was the most famous artist to produce them. In fact, it was a treat to have this opportunity to talk about her favourite subject with its most famous collector.

And there was the owner herself, suddenly, short and sturdy, in a skirt and cardigan and sensible heels, with a page hovering in the background and a couple of low-slung dogs for company, looking cheerful and relaxed.

‘Did you know, this room used to be a conservatory?’ she asked, after Jennifer had been introduced.

‘I did wonder.’

‘To match the one on the other side. Then it became the chapel. But it got a direct hit during the war.’

‘Was anyone killed?’ Jennifer asked.

‘Miraculously, no. My mother said she was glad we’d been bombed, because now we could look the East End in the eye. It was rather alarming, though. She was at the Palace when it happened.’

Jennifer had always admired the Queen Mother. When the royal family were advised to shelter in Canada during the war, she had written: The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances whatever. They were not just words, when bombs were falling. Another fifty feet to the right or left . . .

‘We were hit nine times. It was my husband’s idea to convert the chapel ruins,’ the Queen went on. ‘Now it’s all much grander than it used to be. Every monarch likes to make their mark, and this was mine. Do tell me how the exhibition will look.’

Jennifer was surprised. The Queen wasn’t known for taking such an interest in the build-up to a show. But they discussed where various paintings would go in the three available rooms, and it was increasingly clear she had her personal favourites from her collection. She reminisced about her own visit to the Grand Canal, and how it contrasted with her Canalettos.

‘I suppose you’re an expert on the seventeenth century?’ the Queen asked in passing.

‘Yes, ma’am. I am. Baroque and Rococo.’

‘Oh, good. Are you interested in Gentileschi, by any chance?’

‘Of course! Which one?’

‘Artemisia,’ the Queen said. She had done her homework.

Jennifer smiled widely. ‘Absolutely! She’s one of my favourite artists of the period. We’ve got a self-portrait of her in the current show, actually.’

‘I thought so.’ The Queen had opened the exhibition, called ‘Portrait of the Artist’, a few days ago.

At Jennifer’s instigation, they walked over to look at the painting in question. Jennifer sighed in wonderment, as she always did with this one.

‘Remind me,’ the Queen said, ‘how did we come to have it?’

Jennifer was on home ground. ‘It was painted here, when she worked at the court of Charles I. He invited her over from Italy, where she was already famous.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. She became well known when she was still in her teens. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was already a court painter here for the king. A lot of their work was lost after his execution, including this one, but it was recovered after the Restoration. I think it’s one of the highlights of your collection, ma’am.’

They stood in front of it together. The Baroque was all about light and shade, bravura painting and new perspectives. In this self-portrait – which Jennifer assumed was an attempt to get new patrons and show off the artist’s skill – Artemisia captured herself brush in hand, gazing towards a blank canvas off to one side, on which she was about to start work. The bottom half of the painting was taken up with her elaborate green silk sleeve and her palette. Above, light fell on her corseted, lace-edged chest, highlighting her décolletage. But the head in the upper right-hand corner was not coquettishly posing, it was looking away from the viewer and concentrating on the job. Her dark hair was caught up loosely, with several messy strands escaping. Her eyes were hard to see. The viewer’s own eye was drawn instead to her muscular raised right arm, holding the brush, as she prepared to mark the canvas. The sleeve on this arm had fallen back to reveal the flesh, but the exposure wasn’t designed to be sexy – and this is what Jennifer so loved about it – it was just a casual result of her work. This was a woman saying what it feels like to be a woman, and getting on with things, and being bloody good at them. Watch her if you want to, but she’s got better things to do.

‘She reminds me a bit of Frida Kahlo,’ Jennifer said.

‘Oh, really?’

Jennifer sensed her remark hadn’t landed. ‘I don’t think you own anything by her, ma’am,’ she admitted. ‘Mexican. Twentieth century. She had the same bold approach to self-portraiture.’

‘I think this one’s rather marvellous.’

‘It is. Your ancestor had a good eye.’

‘Why an allegory, do you think?’ the Queen asked, peering at the label, which said it was called Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting.

‘Oh, I think she was having a joke at her male colleagues’ expense. In Italian it’s “La Pittura”. Painting is feminine. It was something the men couldn’t be.’

The Queen stepped back. ‘I remember the first time I saw her work and realised that a woman had painted so well in the seventeenth century. It was quite a shock.’

Jennifer nodded. ‘It can’t have been easy, though she wasn’t by any means the only one, or even the only great one. I’m sure it helped that her father taught her how. She wouldn’t have had access to the training otherwise.’

‘Ah. Training from one’s father.’ The Queen’s face lit up in a way that caught Jennifer quite by surprise. ‘I’m familiar with the concept. Are her paintings very valuable?’

‘Not as much as Orazio’s. History tended to ignore her and favour him. Although as you can see from this one, she was just as good. Much better, in my opinion. I think she’s finally reached the million-dollar mark. But she has her league of followers. She really was exceptional, and there aren’t that many examples of her paintings.’

‘Thank you,’ the Queen said. ‘A million dollars? How interesting. And I look forward to seeing the Venice scenes next year. Can I ask you a small favour?’

‘Of course, ma’am.’

‘Do keep this conversation between us private, if you would be so kind. Even among your colleagues. I’m afraid I can’t explain why, but it would help.’

Jennifer promised. At first, she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to savour every little detail with her fellow curators at the RCT, but on the walk back to St James’s Palace she considered that an air of mystery might be even better. Oh, we talked about her favourite paintings . . . Something vague like that.

Chapter 27

At her temporary desk in the Keeper’s outer office, Rozie looked up from her screen and was amazed to see that outside the light was fading. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly 5 p.m. The discrepancies in the finance spreadsheets had been tracked down to a couple of lines in the database: cross-checking with meeting notes from the relevant committees (Sir James Ellington was a stickler for record-keeping, for which Rozie silently saluted him), it was clear that certain cost projections didn’t tally with the real figures in the accounts.

If you were to illustrate the problem, a graph that should predict a steady rise in some fairly low-level maintenance requirements suddenly took off two years down the line in an almost exponential curve. Thanks to Mary, the Keeper already knew roughly where to look in the database; Rozie had simply helped him pinpoint the mistake. Apparently, Sir James had asked various underlings to fix the issue several days ago, but they had merely assured him it was all ‘under control’. He had found this, he said, infuriating – given that it so obviously wasn’t.

Anyway, armed with pages of printouts and a borrowed laptop, Rozie made her way to the property accounts department to get the problem fixed. It would have made sense for them to be in the South Wing, near Sir James himself, but it was in the nature of Buckingham Palace for the sensible thing to be completely different from what actually existed. For reasons nobody could remember, this particular team were buried in the basement, off a long corridor in the West Wing, opposite the kitchens. Rozie hurried down three flights of stairs, past the vast boiler room that fed the central heating, like something from an ocean liner, and on until she came to their unassuming office underground.

To her surprise, it was empty, but there seemed to be a bit of a party going on in the staff kitchen next door. After the focused energy of everyone upstairs, the new atmosphere was a bit of a shock.

‘Is it someone’s birthday?’ she asked.

Four heads turned to look at her. Four glasses of Prosecco paused mid-air. She felt the festive mood shift.

‘Er, sort of,’ the nearest man said, with a half-smile she couldn’t read. He was short and out of shape, Rozie saw, with a belly he could afford to lose. His suit was crumpled and his tie loosened. ‘Care to join us?’

‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I just need someone’s help with this.’

She noticed that two of the men were Mick Clements and Eric Ferguson from the Operations Team, whom she had spoken to over the summer. Now, as then, Mick, the head, seemed sullen and hostile at the sight of her, while his younger colleague tipped his head to one side, as if examining her in a glass case.

Mick put his Prosecco glass down with slow deliberation.

‘I guess I’ll be going, then.’

As Mick brushed past her, she felt his body bristle with barely contained disgust. She couldn’t imagine what she had done to deserve it, and the others were hardly less hostile. Nobody invited her to go to their office, or offered to help. Rozie stood her ground and explained her problem, resting her open laptop on a kitchen counter. As the party atmosphere fizzled out, she felt a mixture of discomfort and annoyance. It wasn’t yet five thirty and upstairs the workday was still well under way; here, they seemed to think it was over. They were not remotely interested in her problem, though they were quick to dismiss her afternoon’s work.

‘I think you’ve missed the point a bit, miss.’

The junior-looking accountant stuck his hands in his pockets and gave her a shrug. His colleague stared at the ground.

‘I don’t think I have. Can I ask who’s in charge?’

The short man in the crumpled suit grunted something and reluctantly listened as she explained again what figures she needed. He shook his head and looked at her sadly.

‘Like Andy says, you’ve got into a bit of a muddle with this one, sweetheart. You’ve got your databases mixed up.’ He reached across her and tapped on the keyboard of the laptop, breathing noisily into her shoulder. ‘This line here doesn’t relate to that one there. Don’t worry, we can sort this out for you next week.’

The air was thick and stale, and uncomfortably warm. Rozie stubbornly explained her calculations line by line, only gradually revealing – as they continued to shake their heads and contradict her – that she was as financially literate as they were, if not more so; that she was working on their boss’s most important project of the year, and that if they couldn’t help her in the next five minutes, she was going to have to report them for obstruction.

She watched their dismay, resistance and eventual capitulation. They went back to their desks reluctantly to adjust their projections in line with her new figures, and she couldn’t get out of the office and their company fast enough.

Eric Ferguson accompanied her. Tall and lanky, he’d been lounging in the doorway since his boss left and she’d almost forgotten he was there.

‘I’m going your way,’ he said. ‘Let me carry that laptop for you.’

‘I can manage,’ Rozie said.

When they were out of earshot of the accountants, he hooted.

‘Phew! That was tough. I felt for you, Captain O, I really did.’

‘They could have been more helpful.’

‘Yeah, you could say that. I thought you went pretty easy on them. Mind you, they’d just had some bloody bad news.’

‘Had they? I thought they were celebrating.’

‘Commiserating. Drowning their sorrows. Pete – he’s the fat guy – he thought he was getting this big bonus today, but it just got cancelled.’

Eric seemed to be waiting for a comment, so Rozie said, ‘Oh.’

‘He had the fizz anyway, so . . .’

‘I see.’

‘Yeah. Bad timing.’

They were back near the boiler room, big enough to power an aircraft carrier, which emitted a low, steady hum so powerful Rozie could feel it in her bones. She remembered something from her research today and nodded towards the noise.

‘They’ll be overhauling all of that before too long. I bet you can’t wait for the Reservicing.’

Eric gave her his odd sideways stare for a moment, then his face melted into a grin. ‘Loads of work for us, you mean? We’ll be at it non-stop. Can’t wait though, yeah. Tippety-top.’

With a nod, he indicated a nearby staircase and disappeared up it at a trot. Rozie shrugged to herself, thinking back to the accountants. That atmosphere had been weird. Only now did she fully take on board how unwelcome her presence had been.

Was it one of them who had sent her the notes? she wondered. Was it personal? It was hard to see how or why: she’d never met them before. ‘Like some sort of Nubian queen’, Neil Hudson had said, as if he was being complimentary. Sod him. She would not suspect everyone she encountered. She would not let the pathetic little knife-doodler drive her out of the job she loved.

But still. She picked up the pace and speed-walked back to the office with the new projections. Slightly out of breath, she accepted Sir James’s fulsome praise for ‘saving the afternoon’. Then she made her way to DCI Strong’s little incident cubbyhole on the floor above, to let him know of a couple more poison pen suspects to investigate.

Chapter 28

The Queen fitted in one more meeting at the end of the day.

After dinner, Billy MacLachlan was also shown to her private audience room. He looked around briefly, pleased to notice that almost nothing had changed in the time since he last saw it. A few photographs of grandchildren had now been joined by those of great-grandchildren. Prince Harry, meanwhile, had changed from the nervous teenager with the cheeky grin into a more confident young man, whose star quality shone out through the ginger beard.

‘It’s good to see you again, Billy,’ she said.

‘Likewise, Your Majesty.’

She thanked him for his help at Windsor at Easter, and he refrained from thanking her for tasking him with this new job. It was better if your employers thought you were doing them the favour.

‘Did you find the curator?’ she asked, inviting him to sit down.

Dogs came to sniff at his trousers, then settled at the feet of their mistress.

‘Not a curator, ma’am – a conservator,’ he said, sinking into the sofa cushions and making a mental note to brush the dog hairs off his trousers later. ‘They clean the paintings and reverse the ravages of time, but I’m sure you know that. His name was Daniel Blake, and he was hired by Sholto Harvie, the Deputy Surveyor, in 1982 to work for the Royal Collection. He was the first full-time conservator they had – now there’s a whole studio of them. Anyway, Mr Harvie made the case for a full-time employee and Blake worked alongside him out of Stable Yard House.’

The Queen pursed her lips, then shook her head. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘No reason why you should. He was fresh out of the Courtauld. In his late twenties, with a degree in chemistry and another in the history of art. Harvie and he got on pretty well, from what my sources tell me. But you were right, ma’am – Blake had a terrible motorbike accident in 1986. It was in the summer, shortly after they’d discovered those Baroque paintings in Hampton Court Palace. He was heading out of town up the M1 to go and meet some friends. A climbing trip, something like that. The smash was pretty bad.’

‘And he recovered?’ the Queen asked. ‘Where is he now?’

MacLachlan paused for a beat. ‘No, ma’am, he didn’t recover. I interviewed an uncle. Blake’s mother died five years after the smash and the uncle thinks it was the grief that did it. Blake had a refurbished Norton Commando bike, ma’am – his pride and joy, sounds like. Nice bikes, but notoriously unreliable. Crashed into by a lorry at a roundabout and was in a coma for several weeks before Mrs Blake had to make the decision to turn off the machines. The uncle I spoke to had helped him refurbish the bike and got a report from a garage afterwards – he wanted to know if it was something they’d done wrong or whatever. They said there was a loose bleed nipple. It’s a component in hydraulic brake systems, ma’am. It can happen. The front brake was leaking fluid and Daniel didn’t stand a chance. He skidded into that lorry and went right under it. It’s a miracle he survived at all. P’raps better if he hadn’t. For his mother. Making that decision. I don’t know . . .’

The Queen looked dour. ‘Something no mother should have to do.’

‘Quite.’ MacLachlan was glad to change the subject slightly. ‘You mentioned there was a delay at that time about looking into the Hampton Court pictures, ma’am. The Artemisia Gentileschis.’ He had practised the pronunciation watching art videos on YouTube. Not what he’d have expected, it was sort-of Gentilesse-skis. ‘You were right about that too. They were all pretty cut up about Blake at the Royal Collection. He would have been the one to clean them up, so naturally it put the work back quite a bit.’ Artistic types, he thought, though he didn’t say it. If policemen downed tools every time somebody got knocked about, they’d never get anything done.

The Queen nodded. ‘Those brakes. Is it possible to loosen the . . .?’

‘Bleed nipple, ma’am.’

‘Deliberately?’

MacLachlan had of course considered this. ‘Yes, if you know what you’re doing. If I wanted to give a man on an old Norton Commando a nasty surprise and get away with it, that’s what I’d do.’

‘Thank you, Billy. Now, the pictures. I’m keen to know what happened afterwards. I have a dim memory of the copies going into storage, once it was agreed Artemisia didn’t paint them. And I’m sure . . .’ She leaned forward, absent-mindedly stroking the corgi’s ear as she considered. ‘. . . At least I think the Surveyor told me that two of the originals were later found elsewhere.’

She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. The one time she had seen the canvases, soon after their discovery, they had been laid out in a conservation studio at St James’s Palace, two flat on a table and a couple of others propped in front of them, on the floor. Everyone had been very excited, Sholto most of all. They were portraits of women – more allegories, perhaps – very dirty and dingy, with the occasional flash of brilliance underneath the centuries of grime. She didn’t remember them precisely, only that the light and shadow on the faces was very clever, and the women were beautiful but also interesting, like real women, women she knew, people with complicated interior lives, caught in the moment. They had been quite lovely.

Then there had been a long gap over the autumn when nothing had happened, and it was explained that the young conservator – Blake – had had his accident, so someone else had been called in to look at the Gentileschis and clean them up. Afterwards, when the experts came to examine them properly, it turned out they were copies after all, and not even particularly good ones, apart from the faces. She had been disappointed, but other things had demanded her attention. Of course! The trip to China. She was away for several weeks, working hard each day to make the tour a success.

‘I was aboard the royal yacht at the time,’ she muttered. ‘Very busy.’

When she had come back, she was exhausted and the Gentileschis were a distant memory. Soon afterwards she was finalising the following year’s trip to Canada with the Foreign Secretary. Meanwhile, after a mix-up that was never fully addressed, she chose Cuneo’s sketch of the lake through the trees to fill the gap on the pale jade wall outside her bedroom, where once the vibrant, ‘ghastly’ oil painting of Britannia had been.

‘Ma’am?’ MacLachlan gently brought her back to the present. ‘D’you want me to look into the other “accident” while I’m at it? The one in the pool?’

‘No.’ She was firm. ‘That will be a job for the police if we come to it. The official police, I mean.’

She still dreaded alerting Chief Inspector Strong to a murder at the Palace. Now quite possibly two. First, she needed to assure herself of a connection between them. That reminded her.

‘Did you find out where Sholto Harvie was the night Cynthia died?’

‘I did. Somewhere in the Adriatic Sea, between Split and Ravenna, with three hundred witnesses. He was an expert guest on a cruise ship called the Evening Star, talking about the art of Greece, Venice and everywhere in between. Nice work if you can get it.’

‘I imagine it must be.’

MacLachlan looked as if he was about to say something, hesitated, then summoned up his courage and said it anyway. ‘You must miss her a lot, ma’am. Britannia. You sailed everywhere.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, simply.

And the worst of it was, having taken her yacht away from her and made travel and official entertaining exponentially more difficult, Mr Blair later admitted it had all been quite unnecessary. Suddenly she was very tired. She thanked Billy again for his work so far and took herself to bed.

Chapter 29

The weekend at Windsor was beastly. One of her great pleasures, after church on Sunday, was normally coffee with her cousin Margaret Rhodes, who lived in the Great Park. She was one of the only people left who had known one all one’s life. As a little girl, she had known one as Lilibet, and to this day she was one of the few people one could talk to with utter frankness about everything that was going on in the world. She was a year older, and to see her soldiering so magnificently on was always heartening. Except, this weekend it was clear she was unwell. When the Queen popped in to visit her, there was a frailty to Margaret that was distinctly worrying.

Life without her cousin, the Queen reflected, would be a different life altogether. It would be a new age, and with Philip retiring to Norfolk soon, it would be lonely in a new way. She had lost her sister fourteen years ago, shortly followed by Mummy, and one by one, close family and friends from the early days had followed with dismal regularity. Even the dogs. Since she was seven, there had been corgis in her life, in ever-increasing numbers, and now, with Holly gone, there was only Willow. The Queen had already decided not to breed any more, because she knew she would not be around forever to look after them, and from a strictly practical point of view, they were a trip hazard, and it was beholden to the monarch not to break her neck if she could possibly avoid it.

She would cope. She would move on, just as she always did. And perhaps she was being maudlin and her cousin would get better soon. But it was a cold, dank, November weekend and the mood in the country and elsewhere was increasingly rattled. Would the fissures in Europe and in America mend themselves easily, regardless of who was in power? The US elections were due to take place in two days and the media were obsessed. Philip might joke about Facebook, but even the White House was ‘confident’ that Russia had tried to use it to influence the democratic process. It seemed as if the very foundations of democracy were being undermined in ways she hadn’t seen since the war, which was longer than many of her subjects’ lifetimes. Like everyone else, she felt they were all on the brink of something they didn’t fully understand, grasping around to hold onto whatever they believed in, praying that it would stand.

Philip had started a picture. He had his oils out in the Octagon Room – which stank of turpentine – and he was putting together a decent landscape of Balmoral, based on some sketches he’d done in the summer. It was the garden, seen from inside the castle. She marvelled at his self-control to do something creative and retrospective, and not to sit glued to the BBC.

‘That’s nice,’ she said, standing over his shoulder.

He grunted.

‘Balmoral?’

‘No. Timbuctoo.’ He had a recording of an old cricket match playing in the background, and she sensed she was distracting him.

‘Have you heard a weather forecast recently? I missed my ride this morning. Is it going to keep raining like this?’

He turned round properly to face her. ‘No idea. Look, I’m sorry about Margaret. You’ll stop feeling such a misery guts if you go and find something useful to do.’

He was probably right. She half-heartedly started a jigsaw of Dunfermline at the finishing post of the St Leger, but found herself pondering on the connections between Cynthia Harris and Sholto Harvie, and Mary van Renen, the secretary who had left, and Mrs Baxter, who was ‘difficult’, and Rozie, who had merely asked about a painting but wondered whether she might have inadvertently caused a murder. Daniel Blake was one part of the puzzle, but even if Sholto had caused his ‘accident’, he couldn’t have caused Cynthia’s from the middle of the Adriatic.

The Breakages Business was another piece. The Queen wasn’t sure if it was just a distraction set up by Sholto, or whether it was something more. She wasn’t satisfied with Sir James’s cursory look into the matter. If she was going to be useful, she decided this was where to look next.

By Monday morning she felt much better, cheered by a good night’s sleep and a pleasant early ride in the park. She worked in the car on the way back to London and was ready to face the week with her normal vigour.

Rozie was in charge of the boxes today.

‘There is something I’d like you to do for me.’

Rozie brightened instantly. ‘Of course.’

‘It’s about the Breakages Business. I’ve been thinking about the tunnels under the Palace. You must have heard of them.’

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Rozie said. ‘That there used to be a network connecting all the royal palaces in this area.’

‘Not “used to be”,’ the Queen corrected her. ‘Is. They were used to store lots of the more valuable furniture during the war, then rather forgotten about.’

It was hardly surprising. Papa had other things to think about, repairing the worst of the bomb damage, trying to make the place presentable again with everything rationed and much of the empire still cut off as trade routes slowly re-established themselves. It wasn’t until she and Philip had been living here for a while that the Duke had grabbed his equerry and gone on an exploratory adventure in the bowels of the Palace and beyond.

You’ll never believe what we’ve found, he’d said on his return, dirty and happy, covered in mud and dust, with wisps of cobweb in his hair. Two crates of china. German. Looks important. Some nineteenth-century wine. Fourteen Regency gilt chairs. Seven mouldy mattresses, a portrait of George III, four marble fireplaces and a family of Romanian refugees. At that, her eyes had widened. Ha! he’d said. He’d made the last bit up, but he was amused by her lack of surprise at the rest.

At the time, they had all been fascinated by the forgotten treasures, and Philip had explored the tunnels further to see where they went, hoping to set up a useful little route for staff and family to travel out of the public eye between Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, where Mummy and Margaret now lived. He eventually reported that while the tunnel was reasonably roomy under the Palace grounds, its offshoots became narrow, low and damp as they ran under Green Park towards St James’s Palace. Walls seeped with slime and some areas were quite impassable. Philip had closed them off, giving instructions that the better-built parts near the Palace be used for storage only.

The Queen summarised this for Rozie.

‘I believe there is a doorway of some sort that lies roughly under Constitution Hill. It cuts off the far section and it’s supposed to be firmly locked. When things are quiet, might you perhaps be able to check that it really isn’t being used?’ She phrased this carefully. It was a genuine request to Rozie, with an opt-out clause framed in her eyes. The far end of the tunnels was unsafe, after all, and she didn’t want Rozie to take any risks unwillingly.

In fact, Rozie looked so delighted at the idea that the Queen had to give her strict instructions not to venture beyond Philip’s locked doorway, should such a thing be possible. She took care not to break her own neck and preferred her APS to do the same.

‘And one other thing. I believe that Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood may know Sholto Harvie’s background.’

‘The sculptor who’s doing your portrait for the Royal Society?’

‘Exactly. I’m sure I remember her discussing a connection. You could perhaps ask her about him, privately. If you’d be so kind.’

Rozie nodded. ‘What sort of thing would you like to find out?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Queen said. ‘It might be nothing. But ask, and see what you find.’

Chapter 30

In the South Wing office of the ‘rollicking bollockings’, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Green had not particularly been enjoying the last four weeks. Normally he was in his element in the run-up to Christmas, organising lavish dinners and banquets for the cream of international society. But this year there had been the unfortunate death of the terrible housekeeper and the extra pressure of the Reservicing Programme and, worst of all, the jumped-up policeman, Strong – or Bogroll, as he was known in court circles – was ferreting around the Palace and basically telling him how to do his job.

It was the Master himself who had come up with this particular epithet. There was that TV ad from his childhood about loo paper: ‘soft, strong and very long’. Bogroll was certainly soft and meetings with him felt endless. It was in the tradition of Palace nicknames. Mike Green was well aware that he was ‘Crabmeat’ to his elders and betters. The army and navy had called the RAF ‘crabs’ for decades, so it was inevitable really. The Master took it in very good spirit and smiled indulgently whenever someone accidentally said it to his face.

He smiled to himself now because Bogroll had been defeated. He wasn’t the one to spot the clue that solved the whole problem of the poison pen campaign. He hadn’t conducted the crucial interview with the perpetrator. (Admittedly, the chief inspector was rather annoyed about that – but was it the Master’s fault if he had been away on a training course on the critical day?) He hadn’t obtained the signed confession. Strong hadn’t looked convinced by any of it when faced with the evidence, but that was typical of the smallness of the man: he just couldn’t accept when he’d been bested. A gracious ‘Congratulations’ would have been enough.

The Master was looking forward to his meeting with Her Majesty. He hadn’t seen her alone for a week, in which time much had happened. He trusted she would be delighted. She might also be just a little penitent that she hadn’t trusted him in the first place, though of course she wouldn’t show it, and he wouldn’t expect her to.

They had half an hour scheduled before lunch, in her private audience room. It was their first opportunity to catch up since the state banquet.

‘Not too many disasters behind the scenes, I hope?’ she asked.

‘One or two, ma’am. I’m afraid Vulcan disgraced himself again. He appeared from nowhere when a guest was emerging from the loos and bit him in the ankle.’

‘Oh dear! One of ours or one of theirs?’

‘One of ours. A Permanent Under Secretary, as I recall.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then.’ She grinned. ‘He won’t sue. Do send a note, though. “The Queen deeply regrets . . .”’

‘Of course.’ He smiled, feeling a bit like a magician about to produce a rabbit from a hat. ‘I thought you might like to know, ma’am, that we’ve solved the nasty matter of those letters.’

Her eyes widened behind her glasses. She looked positively shocked.

‘Really? I didn’t know you were still looking into them.’

He assured her that he very much was.

‘In conjunction with the police?’

‘In a way, ma’am.’

The chief inspector and his man were always available to help out (she seemed ready to dispute this, but he hadn’t produced the rabbit yet), but they were focusing mostly on Cynthia Harris, and he, the Master, had a broader view. He admitted that their general presence might have spurred the culprit on to come clean when caught. If so, he was grateful for the assistance. (He wasn’t, but you had to make Her Majesty feel useful.)

‘Come clean?’ the Queen queried. She still looked mightily puzzled. ‘Do you mean, he’s admitted it?’

‘She,’ the Master gently corrected. ‘And yes, ma’am, she has. She couldn’t help it: she was caught in the act. I have her confession here.’ At which point, he opened the leather folder he’d been holding to reveal the signed typescript in all its glory.

The Boss was too startled, obviously, for the delighted smile yet, but he would settle for astonishment. He had been quite surprised himself.

‘And who is she?’

‘A housemaid, ma’am. A woman called Lorna Lobb. She was seen at the canteen last week, hovering near the table where your APS was sitting. My team have been asked to be on the lookout, and it was one of my clerks who spotted her. Rozie was busy talking to someone else and my clerk saw Mrs Lobb about to drop something in her bag. He managed to corner her before she could do it. It was all very discreet. I don’t think Rozie even noticed, ma’am, but Lorna could hardly deny the envelope she was holding, or the fact she was wearing a single latex glove. She was quite terrified when we questioned her about it. And quite rightly. The note was absolutely appalling.’

‘Lorna Lobb?’ The Queen considered the name, her brow deeply furrowed. ‘Which notes did she deliver?’

‘All of them, ma’am, except the ones to Mary van Renen.’

‘Are you quite sure? Including the notes to Cynthia Harris?’

‘Absolutely. We have it here in writing.’ He tapped the folder. ‘She didn’t do it on her own account. She was working for Arabella Moore who, by the way, denies everything, but the case is very solid. Mrs Moore is married to Stewart Moore, who you may remember left under an unfortunate cloud that was somewhat of Mrs Harris’s making. There was bad feeling between her and the housekeeper.’

The Queen’s brow remained stubbornly furrowed. ‘But didn’t Mrs Harris receive other notes years ago? Before she retired, I mean? Before Mrs Moore would have had any reason to resent her?’

The Master had considered this himself. ‘She did,’ he acknowledged, ‘but Mrs Lobb claims to know nothing about those. I assume they were the work of someone else, giving Mrs Moore the idea. Mrs Harris was unpopular with some of the junior staff even then. She may quite easily have said or done something to create ill will.’

The Queen’s gaze rested on a selection of photographs in silver frames. Her lips were pursed. ‘Did Mrs Lobb explain what Mrs Moore’s motives were for the other messages? The ones not received by Mrs Harris, I mean.’

‘No. After a certain point she clammed up, unfortunately. But I did my own research. Mrs Moore was known to have had words with Mrs Baxter about the unrest she felt Mrs Baxter was stirring up in her staff. And with Rozie there was a racist element. I must say, this came as a complete shock. I’d never have guessed. Mrs Moore has always seemed a picture of propriety.’

‘Yes, she has,’ the Queen said quietly.

‘I asked if Rozie wanted to make an official complaint, formally to the police, I mean. But she didn’t. She was quite clear about that.’

‘And what about Mary van Renen? You said Mrs Lobb didn’t confess to those notes.’

‘Ah. That’s another matter entirely, ma’am. I don’t know if you remember, but Miss van Renen was being harassed by a man she had met on the internet. He caused some unpleasantness, but it was unrelated to Mrs Moore’s campaign.’

‘I see.’ Her Majesty didn’t seem puzzled any more, thank goodness, merely grim: the way she looked when watching parade manoeuvres poorly executed by troops of foreign nations in the rain. ‘And what does Mrs Moore have to say about all this?’

‘As I said, she’s denying everything, quite vociferously, but she would, ma’am, wouldn’t she? There’s a formal process we need to go through before we let her go. I have initiated it. She won’t be with us for much longer.’

The Queen’s brow furrowed again. ‘You haven’t sent her home already?’

The Master admitted that he hadn’t. He’d been too busy recently to give it his full attention, and – this was something he kept to himself – it was in his interest to keep Arabella Moore on for as long as possible. She might be a nasty, racist bully in her private life, but she was an excellent man-manager at work, and her team was responsible for all the guest liaison for the upcoming Diplomatic Corps Reception in a month, which was the biggest, most glamorous event of the year, putting even the state banquet to shame. She was, in her way, a bit like Cynthia Harris: very good at what she did in ways that were hard to replace at short notice in a high-pressure environment. She’d be out on her ear soon enough, once the formalities were over, but he offered to put her on paid leave instantly if Her Majesty required it.

However, she didn’t. She merely requested him to let her know if he discovered anything new, and asked to see a copy of Mrs Lobb’s confession. It was only as he was leaving that the Master realised she hadn’t looked delighted even for a moment. This, too, was a mark of the woman. Despite the fact that he had dealt with the issue for her, one of the victims had accidentally died in the process, and that was hard for all of them to take.

The Queen went upstairs for final fittings with Angela, her chief dresser, for the black coat and dresses she would wear at the end of the week. Afterwards, she caught up on correspondence and took the dogs for another walk in the garden.

Philip had brought up his latest painting to work on, meanwhile. It wouldn’t be long before he retired to the Sandringham Estate – at ninety-six – and she knew how much he would enjoy devoting himself to his canvases. He had never been a fan of the Palace. He would much rather live in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, but, thanks to her, until next year he didn’t get to choose.

She popped in on him in his study when she got back, to see how he was getting on.

He glanced up from his oils, in shirtsleeves, with an ancient cotton jacket thrown over them for protection. ‘Oh, Cabbage, it’s you.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘What was Crabmeat doing here earlier? I passed him outside your study looking about to explode with self-satisfaction.’

‘The Master had some interesting thoughts on who was behind that poison pen campaign.’

Philip looked at her hard. ‘I know you. You think his thoughts were bollocks. Did you tell him?’

‘Not yet. He might be right. He has a confession.’

‘Don’t tell me. Sandy Robertson.’

This was the Queen’s loyal page, who had recently been suspected of spying by MI5.

‘No. A housemaid called Lorna Lobb.’ She explained about Arabella Moore and the theory of revenge.

‘What? Mrs Moore, from the Lady Clerks department? She used to be a secretary in my private office. Damned efficient, always polite, honest to a fault.’ He looked scornful. ‘All I can say is, if it’s her, she’s a bloody Jekyll and Hyde. She’s a lot less useless than your average desk johnnie.’ From Philip, this was praise indeed.

‘I can’t quite see her as a criminal mastermind,’ the Queen agreed.

‘Still, a confession’s a confession,’ he acknowledged. ‘She owned up, did she?’

‘No. She denies everything. It’s Mrs Lobb who’s confessed. She said your Mrs Moore put her up to it.’

He looked at her with frank incredulity. ‘And Crabmeat believes her? Christ. He flew jet fighters, didn’t he? All those G-forces must have addled his brain.’

The Queen wasn’t so sure about the G-forces, but she agreed on the essentials. She also knew something he and the Master did not: Mrs Lobb had not been working directly for the poison pen letter-writer, as the Master so readily assumed.

It was quite clear to her now. This must have been the subject of the conversation she overheard from inside the wardrobe last summer. The voice getting instructions had belonged to the Goonishly-named Spike Milligan. That had become obvious enough after the incident with the bats in the bedroom at Balmoral and she was still sure of it, despite his denials to the chief inspector. He was acting as an intermediary. The voice giving him instructions could have been male or female. She thought more likely male, but it was definitely not that of Arabella Moore, whom the Queen had spoken to many times about guest invitations.

Back at her desk, she picked up the phone and asked Rozie to talk to Mr Milligan.

‘Can you assure him he was overheard, and say it has come to Her Majesty’s attention that he was involved? That ought to do it.’

Rozie promised she would.

At six thirty she managed to sneak in a quick gin and Dubonnet before Chief Inspector Strong made his appearance in her sitting room, to give her the latest progress update. She admired the man for not sending panicked messages after the Master had made his grand announcement about Arabella Moore. Strong seemed to trust that she would wait to hear from him before coming to any conclusions. She liked calm, confident people who expected others to do their jobs properly until proved otherwise. After all, she was one of them herself.

Her equerry showed him in and left them to it. Strong sat down in his usual place, at her invitation.

‘What do you think of this Lobb confession?’ she began.

Strong paused for a moment, while his gentle face turned from pale to puce and gradually back again. ‘Not strictly the way I’d have done it, Your Majesty.’ His voice was tight.

‘I imagine not. I do apologise. The Master’s very enthusiastic.’

‘Isn’t he, ma’am?’

‘But the girl was caught red-handed, I gather.’

‘She was,’ Strong admitted. ‘And it turns out she was in most of the right places at the right times to have done it. My sergeant’s been doing some cross-checking.’

‘Thank you for that.’

‘Just doing our job, ma’am,’ he said pointedly. ‘Mrs Lobb came back to London ahead of some of the staff from Balmoral and wouldn’t have been around to cut up Mrs Harris’s clothes, however. Which I understand she fiercely denies, and which doesn’t form part of her confession.’

‘Yes, I saw that. The Master didn’t mention it.’

Strong’s silence spoke volumes.

‘Tricky,’ the Queen observed.

‘Quite. The Master has a theory that the clothes thing was done by another servant with a grudge. I increasingly tend to lean towards your theory, ma’am, that Mrs Harris was targeting herself.’

‘My lady-in-waiting’s theory,’ she was quick to correct him.

‘Right. It does seem that Mrs Lobb was delivering the notes to Rozie, though, and she could have done it to Mrs Baxter, and possibly Mary van Renen. But once you take Mrs Harris out of the equation – if she’s lying about that – it’s hard to see why Mrs Moore would have tasked her to do any of it.’

‘Oh, I see,’ the Queen said, trying very hard to make it look as if this hadn’t been her first thought.

‘My sergeant’s still researching Mrs Harris, ma’am, to see if we can get to the bottom of that side of it. Meanwhile, he’s spoken to Mary van Renen up in Shropshire. That’s of greater concern right now, assuming the notes weren’t sent by Mrs Moore. The messages to her were full of menace. We’ve followed up with Mary’s Tinder dates and, like her, we don’t think it was them. There’s usually some sort of pattern with a man like that. These men all have good ratings with their other dates, and we questioned several of them. They were willing to give up their devices if required to prove it. We’ve talked to her friends in London, but found nothing suspicious. I believe we come back to the Palace, ma’am, and someone she knew from here.’

‘How unsettling. To think he’s here, I mean. Or she.’

‘I’m sure it must be. And as for your assistant, I haven’t made much progress yet. I’m not convinced by the racist tone of the notes – nasty as it is. If it was, there are other members of your staff who might be targeted. I sense it’s more personal. But I don’t know what’s behind it. Rozie’s popular among the staff that know her.’

‘So I gather.’

Strong’s eyes narrowed. He rubbed his chin. ‘In some ways, she’s the one that most concerns me.’

‘Oh? Why?’

‘Someone doesn’t want her around. Mary van Renen’s home safe with her family, so that’s OK. But Rozie Oshodi – she is around. I’m going to tell her to be careful.’

It wouldn’t be the first time, the Queen thought. She wondered about Rozie in the tunnels. With luck, the girl would be in and out in ten minutes, happy to report on a bolted door and nothing else to see. But if she hadn’t managed to go tonight, it might be better to call the whole thing off and come up with a safer plan.

‘Absolutely,’ she agreed. ‘I will too.’

Chapter 31

Rozie always felt that the Palace changed character as day turned to night. Sometimes, it upped its sparkle for a reception or a banquet. Sleek Mercedes and Bentleys, and sometimes even old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages, arrived to disgorge guests in designer dresses and ‘decorations’ – which meant medals for the men, usually, but could just as well describe the diamonds on their wives. Golden light glowed in the quadrangle and, for those in the know, this was the most sought-after address of the night in London.

At other times, the change was more downbeat. The majority of staff went home, the flood of tradesmen, craftsmen and daily visitors slowed to a trickle, and the place was reclaimed by those who lived there or habitually worked late. The buildings stopped trying to impress and their occupants got on with the task of working as efficiently as they could in a rabbit warren of corridors that ceased to make sense two hundred years ago.

The Queen had a busy schedule for the next few days, so it was after eight when Rozie finally turned off her laptop and stretched her shoulders. The assistants had gone home at six, but Sir Simon was still in his office with the light on. Under normal circumstances, she would have popped her head round the door and said, ‘Go home to your wife!’ And he’d have made some quip back about her not recognising him before ten thirty. But now, with their strained relations, she thought this might come across as too unfriendly. She merely wished him goodnight and he glanced up at her and nodded. The air between them crackled with regret. She hovered in the doorway, trying to find a way through it. He asked her to close the door behind her, and she did.

A few hours earlier she had asked an assistant to procure a powerful torch and a pair of size nine wellingtons. Rozie guessed at the state of the electrics in the basement and was taking no chances: she wanted her feet to be encased in rubber. How the assistant found them, she didn’t ask. You used your initiative in the Private Office. If you succeeded, you took quiet satisfaction in the fact that your boss would have noticed, which they invariably did.

Armed with the boots and torch, along with a spare jacket she borrowed from the security officers at the North Wing front door, she took the nearest flight of stairs down, feeling the air grow colder with each step. She walked under the North Wing until she reached the long, wide corridor running north to south under the West Wing, which housed the boiler room, storerooms and, as she now knew, the accountants. There were various other offices, too. The florists worked nearby, for example, resulting in a thick, earthy smell of vege-tation that might have been unpleasant if it wasn’t for a heady top note of jasmine in the air.

From here, Rozie took the narrow staircase that led down again towards the cellars.

To her left was an unlit corridor lined with trolleys and wooden crates. The wine collection was stored that way, along with various provisions that needed to be kept cool. To her right was a thick steel door marked, ‘OPERATIONS. HAZARDOUS. KEEP OUT’. The space beyond must extend under the kissing trees, she judged. She had never had any reason to ignore the sign. Now, armed with her heavy-duty torch, she did.

When she found the switch inside the door, industrial strip lights buzzed into life. The room ahead was large – about the size of the swimming pool, in fact – and square. Suspended by chains from the ceiling, the lights illuminated a series of metal racks containing crates, pallets, rolled-up rugs, books, boxes of vintage toys, kitchen gadgets from the fifties, a washing mangle, and several pieces of old furniture whose purpose Rozie didn’t even begin to understand.

There was a little room in the far left-hand corner: a small cube carved out by breeze blocks in the larger space. Rozie walked over to it, calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’ She realised her voice was sharper than usual. But there was no reply. The door opened at the push of the handle. Inside was a desk and shelving, stacked with miscellaneous boxes, battered tins of paint and neatly organised containers for screws and nails. It smelled faintly of sandalwood and musk. She searched the desk, where an old mug housed various biros, pencils and rulers. There was a pad of lined yellow paper next to it. Rozie tried out a couple of the pens, which were useless and dry. A rusty wastepaper bin contained a couple of screwed-up sheets of yellow paper. Rozie put them on the desk and smoothed them out. They were written on in pencil – numbers and letters jotted in neat little rows that made no obvious sense. She got out her phone and took pictures, then she re-crumpled the papers and put them back where she’d found them. Notebooks containing similar markings were scattered inside a drawer.

A nearby metal door led to another storage room. This one was long and thin, with an arched, low ceiling and walls lined with glazed tiles, like an old-fashioned Underground station. Rozie sensed that it marked the start of the tunnels. Its shelves held, among other things, at least two dozen hatboxes, several coils of thick rope, three child-size racing cars and four lifesaver rings. When she looked more closely, she saw the rings were marked HMY Britannia. There was another metal door at the end, partly obscured by two old-fashioned Harry Potter-style trunks and a tea chest. Rozie shifted the tea chest to one side and the trunks to the other. One of these was heavier than the other and, out of curiosity, she lifted the lid to find three magnificent blue and white Chinese vases, each half a metre high, nestled neatly among straw.

The metal door behind them opened with a shove. If there had once been a sign on it to warn against going further, there wasn’t now. Beyond was a red-brick tunnel about five metres long and, at the end, yet another door. This one was different: lower, much older, set into a heavy frame. By now she must be under Constitution Hill, Rozie judged, turning on her torch. This was presumably where Prince Philip had required the staff to shut off the tunnels. The air was unusually still, resulting in a quiet that heightened her senses. She was aware of every buzz and flicker in the lights behind her, and the woody, masculine scent that lingered alongside the smell of damp and dirt.

The door itself was worthy of a museum: thick timber, mottled with age and studded with hefty metal bars to hold its hinges. There was a keyhole in an ancient plate below a rusty handle, but no sign of a key. Instead, the door was locked with a more modern hasp, hinged at the wall and held in place with a heavy padlock that fed through a staple attached to a steel plate. Rozie thought she might as well take a photo to show the Boss. She put down the torch, retrieved her phone from a jacket pocket and held it in place with the flash switched on, ready to press the button. But as she pulled the padlock towards her to get a decent picture, she found the lock swinging towards her, almost causing her to lose her balance.

The steel plate that held the staple was not attached to the door at all. Left flat, the mechanism looked sturdy, but if pulled it simply came away at the hinge, padlock and all, leaving the door unlocked. All Rozie had to do was tug on the rusty handle and the whole door swung aside.

The Queen’s instructions had been clear and so was Rozie’s army training: you took instruction from senior officers and did exactly what you were told.

But she was a battle-hardened veteran and every muscle and sinew in her body strained to go forward, into the dark. If you went forward, you made progress. Stop now, and you could only report a problem. The big question was always, ‘Who else do you put at risk?’ But there was no one else to worry about. And Rozie was perfectly capable of looking after herself.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she muttered, picking up the torch and moving on.

The walls around her were brick-lined, wide and low. The ground was laid with uneven stone, patched with planks of wood over bare earth left by missing slabs. The duckboards were marked with irregular dark lines, which she judged to be tyre marks – from a wheelbarrow, perhaps? They looked freshly swept: free from the mud and grime she would have expected after sixty years.

Beside them, the torchlight picked out a steady stream of litter. There was an abandoned beanie, a mouldy leather glove, a snack wrapper from a brand she didn’t recognise. What were Taz bars? Regardless, she was fairly sure they didn’t have them in the fifties, or whenever Prince Philip had made his visit. Fairly sure none of this was supposed to be here at all.

By now she thought she must be under Green Park. The tunnel snaked along with occasional bends, making it impossible to see very far, but St James’s Palace must be ahead and slightly to the right. It was one of the few times in her life Rozie wished she wasn’t just shy of six foot tall. These Tudor guys must have been really short, or maybe they used children. Either way, Prince Philip’s plan would never have worked. She couldn’t see Prince William or Prince Harry crouching down like this to visit secret girlfriends. They’d need decent physio if they did. And the idea of an old-fashioned royal like Princess Margaret being down here in the cold and dark, for a quarter of a mile, to see her sister? No.

The torchlight caught something bright and golden, glimmering on the ground a few feet further on. Rozie was stepping forward to inspect it just as a distant thud made the air reverberate behind her. Jerking up in shock, she banged her head, hard, on the tunnel roof. Dazed, she tried to catch her balance as her mouth filled with the ferrous taste of blood.

Chapter 32

Billy MacLachlan had had worse jobs. Sitting in a pub in Tetbury, pint of ale on the table in front of him, he looked approvingly at the logs that crackled gently in an open fire, the decent list of beers, the decent-looking barmaid and the chalked-up menus of posh pub grub. Once upon a time he and the lads had been pretty scathing about ‘triple-cooked chips’ and half-baked steaks, everything resting on rocket leaves and costing a week’s wages. But you got used to it. The food these days was good. He was very fond of a triple-cooked chip, especially if somebody else was buying. Today he was on expenses from Her Majesty.

‘Now, the pictures. I’m keen to know what happened afterwards.’

The man coming back from the Gents had the look of someone who knew his way around beer and chips, posh or otherwise. His hacking jacket and smart jeans were carefully tailored to accommodate his waistline. He reminded MacLachlan a bit of Humpty Dumpty. The rosy face and receding hairline added to the impression. MacLachlan made a mental note to stick at one pint tonight, even if Her Maj was paying.

‘Have you decided what to order?’ the man asked. His name was Stephen Rochester and he was a Tetbury local and a regular at the pub. He ran a gallery-cum-antique shop in the high street. He’d come highly recommended and, so far, he wasn’t proving a disappointment.

‘Cod and chips and mushy peas,’ MacLachlan said, glancing at the nearest menu. ‘If it’s on, that’s what I’ll have.’

‘Not the duck? It’s very good,’ Rochester suggested.

‘Not the duck.’

‘Or the lamb shank?’

‘You have the lamb shank, Stephen.’ They were on first-name terms by now, although in this case MacLachlan’s name was Charlie. ‘And let me get you some wine. What do we think? The Merlot or the Cabernet Sauvignon?’

They chose a bottle, one of the more expensive on the list, and MacLachlan neglected to mention that he didn’t drink wine any more. It didn’t agree with him – gave him a headache. But if he was entertaining, for whatever reason, he liked to keep his interlocutors loquacious, expansive and well oiled. A good Cabernet could do that. Stephen was on his second glass before he noticed that ‘Charlie’ had stuck to his pale ale.

They were talking about Stephen’s business. ‘Charlie’ had wandered into the shop not long before closing and explained he’d come into some money and he’d need some paintings and the odd stick of furniture to go in his new country home, once he found the right one. ‘To make it look lived-in. You know.’

Stephen Rochester did indeed know and was very happy to oblige. Unlike the rich city-dwellers who were flooding into the Cotswolds – with money to burn, but no love for ‘brown furniture’, such as the Regency mahogany tallboy that ‘Charlie’ had admired as soon as he walked into Stephen’s shop – ‘Charlie’ turned out to be a man who knew his Georgian from his Victorian and asked so many questions about the local area that they’d ended up agreeing to go out for dinner at the pub.

Comfortably installed at a little table by the fire, they chatted about the different Cotswolds towns and villages: which ones were dominated by yoga bunnies in designer leggings, which ones were mostly Airbnbs by now, and which were just about holding onto their character. Stephen was happy to share his expertise. They talked about art, too. ‘Charlie’ was interested – ‘very much as an amateur, you understand. I don’t really know anything. My aunt was keen, mind you. The one I inherited from, God rest her. She had this Renaissance painting – at least, she said it was. She was convinced it was by Caravaggio. Is that how you say it?’

‘It is,’ Stephen acknowledged. ‘That would be very exciting, but unlikely. Caravaggio isn’t Renaissance, by the way.’

‘Oh?’

‘No, he’s the height of Baroque, but don’t let me bore you.’

‘You’re not boring me at all, Stephen,’ ‘Charlie’ assured him. ‘Not at all.’

They finished their dinner and ordered dessert, although MacLachlan picked at his Madagascan Vanilla Panna Cotta with Chocolate Soil and Fresh Basil like a bird. ‘So, if it wasn’t a Caravaggio, how would I know?’

Stephen Rochester happened to be a bit of an expert on the period, which was no surprise because MacLachlan had done his research. Stephen had worked in the local auction houses for years before he set up the gallery, and the Baroque was his specialist subject. He explained about Caravaggio and MacLachlan, who didn’t really care, was impressed with his scholarship.

‘Amazing. You could write a book about it,’ he said, grinning appreciatively.

‘Perhaps I will.’ Stephen was enjoying himself.

MacLachlan topped up Stephen’s glass. ‘What was the most interesting painting you’ve come across, then?’

‘Well, there was one . . .’

Stephen launched into the story of a Peter Lely miniature, followed, when pressed, by another about a Mary Beale portrait of a young girl that had caused quite a stir when it was discovered behind badly installed panelling in a Victorian rectory near Stroud.

At last, MacLachlan felt one step closer to his quarry. ‘Mary Beale, you say? I didn’t know women painted back then. I didn’t think they were allowed to.’

‘Not many did. But Mary was prolific. Her husband was her studio assistant, you know. She was quite the portrait factory.’

‘A woman painter, eh? Back in the – what? Seventeenth century?’

‘Oh, you remind me,’ Stephen said, leaning back in his seat, happy in a well-fed, well-watered haze, ‘about the Gentileschis. I’d almost forgotten.’

‘Oh?’ Bingo. MacLachlan looked politely intrigued.

‘Honestly, tell me to stop if I’m boring on about art, Charlie. All this was twenty years ago. No – thirty!’

‘Not boring at all,’ MacLachlan assured him. ‘Tell me about the gentle-what-was-its.’

Stephen had to pause for a bit to marshal his facts. He explained how there had been a potentially huge discovery of works by a highly respected artist called Artemisia Gentileschi, who was a few years older than Mary Beale, but the same sort of period. Unlike Mary, she was a Continental artist, an Italian. A bit of a genius.

‘There were four paintings. Oils. Dirty and badly varnished but otherwise OK. They’d been hanging in rooms used by one of the old ladies who lived at Hampton Court Palace at the time. Anyway, one of the Royal Collection people finally got permission to see around the place and discovered these priceless pieces dotted about. Well, not priceless, exactly, but Gentileschi is one of the greats and the paintings were possibly the only surviving portraits of her daughter Prudentia, posing as various classical muses. I am boring you.’

‘You’re not, I promise.’

‘It’s not as if the world went mad,’ Stephen admitted, ‘like they’d found a Leonardo or something. Although I wouldn’t put it past them. Artemisia Gentileschi hasn’t got the recognition she deserves, but still, those of us who were working in London at the time, who heard about this on the grapevine, we were agog, you know? Given the time frame, it was possible that the paintings were a royal commission for Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. It would fit with the way the queen’s private apartments in Greenwich were supposed to be decorated. All those interiors are lost. It’s a big gap in the art history of the times, but apparently they were designed on classical themes of art and desire, like these paintings of the muses. It was perfect. If someone could prove the link, once they were cleaned up, it would have been . . . extraordinary.’

MacLachlan looked sympathetic. ‘But I gather from the way you say it that it didn’t turn out that way?’

‘Nope.’ Stephen took a morose gulp of Cabernet. ‘Copies,’ he sniffed. ‘Poor Queen. I mean, not poor Queen, obviously, but you know what I mean. Poor all of us who cared.’

‘They were fakes, then, the paintings?’ MacLachlan suggested.

‘Not exactly. It’s only a fake if you pass it off as the original. When they were cleaned up, these looked like copies that were probably made by someone at court, soon after the originals were painted,’ Stephen explained. ‘Almost like prints, if you like. But by someone not particularly talented, from what I heard. I never saw them.’ He paused for more wine. ‘I did see a couple of the originals, though,’ he added quietly.

MacLachlan, who had already heard this on the art grapevine in London, but wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, looked suitably fascinated.

‘What? How?’

‘At auction about two or three years later.’ Stephen had a faraway look in his eye. ‘The first one was found round here, and I was working in this area by then. Apparently, the owners had heard the royal story, gone hunting about in their attic and . . . whaddaya know? They discovered an original Artemisia Gentileschi painting of Thalia, the muse of comedy. The second one of Erato, I think – the muse of love poetry – showed up in America, but I saw the catalogue. Same story. They were examined by the experts and they were genuine. Amazing how those portraits had lain undiscovered for centuries and then . . . poop! Suddenly up they pop.’

MacLachlan adopted the slightly fuzzy look of a man who scents scandal but is also a little bit out of his depth. ‘What are you suggesting, Stephen?’

Stephen shrugged. ‘I’m just saying. A bit coincidental. A bit neat. Not many people knew the local scene like me, I suppose. It all seemed above board, but the dealer who’d come into the auction house with the first painting? Well, he was someone I wouldn’t recommend to clients, put it that way. And I happened to know the second dealer too, in America, because he’d bought a couple of things from a friend. Same story.’

‘Dodgy dealers, dodgy paintings? Is that it?’

Stephen shook his head. ‘No, Charlie, it isn’t what I’m saying. What I’m saying,’ he spoke slowly, to make himself understood, ‘is that the dealers were dodgy, but the paintings were real.’

‘Charlie’ looked confused.

Stephen managed to lower his voice and sound emphatic. The wine and the rapt attention of his companion had loosened his tongue. ‘I’m saying that quite possibly someone stole the Queen’s paintings, replaced them with copies, and sold one of the originals at auction about three miles from here, and another the following year, in Texas. That’s what I think. I mentioned it to a couple of people. They said I was mad, but d’you know what’s interesting? After that, no more Gentileschis. There had been four portraits altogether. What happened to the other two? I think the man behind it all got scared. Scared of me. When I set up the gallery there were a few clients who’d never work with me. Bigwigs, you know, people who knew my reputation, knew the quality of my pieces. I think he set them against me. Petty revenge.’

‘Fascinating. So the copies were fakes. Tada!’ ‘Charlie’ said.

Stephen looked as if he was about to contradict him, but ‘Charlie’ had just about summed it up. If Stephen was right, the four ‘copies’ now in the Royal Collection had been passed off as paintings made in the seventeenth century, when in fact they’d been recently faked to enable the scam. He nodded. ‘I s’pose so. You could say that.’

MacLachlan offered to get them both a digestif from the bar, and Stephen wasn’t one to say no.

‘Why didn’t you say? To the police, I mean?’ MacLachlan asked when he came back, plonking two cognacs on the table between them.

‘Nah, I couldn’t prove anything,’ Stephen shrugged. ‘It was a feeling I had, that’s all.’

‘Did he get a lot for them?’ MacLachlan asked. ‘The two originals that found their way to auction, I mean.’

‘Depends what you call “a lot”,’ Stephen said. ‘He’d have had to give the dealers their cut, and the people who claimed to be the original owners, I guess, and the forger, of course.’ He stared into his cognac glass. ‘If the paintings had been found at a royal palace . . . who knows what they’d have gone for? As it was, the provenance was shaky. If it wasn’t for the brilliance of the brushwork, they might not have been accepted as genuine. The two I know about sold for five figures each. Even so, that was back in the eighties, when you could get a decent house for thirty grand. If he’d sold all four, he’d have raked it in. I like to think my little feeling cost him the price of a couple of houses. He got too greedy, that was the problem. He should’ve waited longer. But perhaps he sold the others privately. It’s possible. But I kept an eye out. I think I’d know.’

He waited for ‘Charlie’ to ask him who this art world Machiavelli was, who’d stolen art from under the nose of Queen Elizabeth II, but his companion was looking tired by now. The barman called time and ‘Charlie’ rose to his feet unsteadily to settle the bill. As they said goodnight, Stephen was fairly sure he’d remember less than half of the story in the morning.

Back in his comfortable room in a small hotel near the Market House, MacLachlan unpacked his notebook and wrote down their conversation almost word for word.

Chapter 33

Upstairs at the Palace, Sir Simon sat back with his feet up on his desk, on his second call to a colleague in the Cabinet Office, smoothing the way. He was tired, and put every effort not to let it show in his voice. Calm, affable, on top of things . . . that’s what was needed, and indeed expected, from the Private Office. You were supposed to know everything, anticipate the impossible, offend no one, and charm your way out of every awkward situation. He had learned many of these skills in the navy and others in the Foreign Office, but most had come much earlier, when his parents were planning to divorce.

Simon was at prep school then, a little boy of eight, already slightly lost in a big country house full of iron beds and bells, the ever-present smell of cabbage and masters who could slipper you if you misunderstood a rule or stepped on an untied shoelace. For a term and a half, he had longed for nothing but to be back with his mother and his sisters, their menagerie of animals and the gruff sound of his father arriving home after a long day in the City and an ‘infernal’ commute from Waterloo. At home for the Lent half-term, he had heard his parents arguing late at night. His sister Beatty wrote afterwards to tell him his father had moved out. She thought he might be living above a pub in the village, but she wasn’t sure.

For the next eighteen months, every fibre of his being had been dedicated to bringing his parents back together. At school, young Simon put on a brave face, denying the circulating rumours and making sure that – when it all turned out all right in the end – it would seem as if it had always been that way. During holidays and exeat weekends, he and his sisters went to work on their mother, reminding her of happy holidays and helping out with whatever housework they could understand.

With his father, he somehow knew to say nothing about what was happening. On manly fishing trips and long walks in the countryside during exeat weekends, he spent their precious time together listening, allowing this man he had thought of as a mini god to share his insecurities and his misery, always in the third person, always as if they belonged to someone else. He stayed quiet but hopeful, and if at night he resorted to desperate prayers to God to save his family, by day he was a skinny little rock of encouragement.

He didn’t bring his parents back together – luck, finances, and the fact that they were fundamentally suited to each other did that over time. The storm clouds passed. For his tenth birthday, they gave him a golden retriever puppy that he named Nigel. It was the best present in the world, because everyone knew his father was the fan of golden retrievers, but his mother was the one who would end up looking after Nigel when Simon was at school, so it was a compromise between them: a loving pact, by people who had worked out how to fit back together.

After that, Simon’s memories of home consisted mostly of sunshine, hearty meals and soft, warm animal fur. For many years he had thought of the dark days of early prep school as his childhood hell, but now, in his fifties, he realised they had given him strengths that had informed his progress for the rest of his life. He knew nothing lasted forever unless you worked at it, by God; that love is all that really matters; that you cannot flourish if you don’t listen, adapt, learn, hope.

He was listening now – to various concerns the Cabinet Office had about trying to persuade the British public to accept a third-of-a-billion-pound refurbishment bill for a building most of them would never get to see. Quietly, with funny and tragic anecdotes, he reminded his friend across St James’s Park at Number 10 of the real danger that the Palace was in, from floods, fires and rot. He asked, in all humility, for suggested alternative venues for state banquets and investitures, garden parties to reward citizens for their civic contributions, displays of the Royal Collection treasures, balcony appearances when the country needed to come together, the Changing of the Guard . . . What would those alternatives cost? How would they work? The Queen would go wherever she was put, that went without saying. Windsor Castle? Certainly, but what about those balcony appearances? Wouldn’t she become rather invisible? Yes, they would love to cut a hundred million out of the programme. No doubt his colleague was much cleverer than he, and could work out where.

Slowly, slowly, he heard the doubts recede and the arguments for countering them were played back to him from Downing Street. Call over, he poured himself a lukewarm coffee from a stainless steel thermos on the desk, checked his watch, saw that it was nearly ten and prepared to pick up the phone again.

Before he did so, he quickly checked the pundits reporting on the US election. Like most other senior courtiers and government officials, he was gripped by a morbid fascination with what was happening in Washington and around the fifty states. Polls showed Clinton ahead, but for two weeks she had been under investigation, yet again, by the FBI. She’d only had twenty-four hours in the clear. Was it enough to reassure her base? And what about the postal vote? Her opponent was still busy campaigning to the ‘deplorables’ she had inadvertently formed into a Trumpian tribe. Had he been on her speech-writing team, Simon would have counselled against using such a term. Not if you would prefer such people to vote for you instead.

He had loved politics since the age of eleven, when a master at prep school had brought the Magna Carta to life, explaining the delicate thread of democracy that wound its way through English history. Simon could have had a quiet life as an academic historian if he’d wanted. Instead, he’d chosen to be a part of it. Here he was, advising a constitutional monarch. If, right now, he’d rather be glued to his TV screen, analysing the polls and making predictions, well . . . it was his own fault that he was too busy trying to ensure this monarch had a working roof over her head at the time of the next election, and the one after that.

‘Hello, Sarah. I’m sorry to call so late, but I wanted to check if everything’s on track for next Wednesday. Do you have what you need? Of course. Let me take you through it . . .’

By now Rozie was filthy, cold and wet. The ground underneath her boots was half an inch deep in water. Her head ached from the knock, her back was killing her and she frequently bumped her upper spine against bricks held together with rough mortar that scratched at her jacket and caught in her hair. The object she had bent down to see turned out to be a Twix wrapper. Hardly worth it.

The roof became lower still and Rozie decided she had seen enough. She shouldn’t have come this far. Turning round, she made her way back towards Buckingham Palace. The question was, what would she find when she got there? Only now did she truly accept the implication of the thud that had so surprised her. There should be light at the end of the tunnel soon – but there was none.

No fresh breeze down here to cause the door she had left ajar to shut of its own accord. No phone signal. No way to call for help. Nobody waiting for her upstairs.

Rozie’s brain swiftly ran through problems and solutions. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t panic. The Queen knew roughly where she was. If there was an issue, eventually she’d be found.

As she feared, the heavy wooden door was now shut. Rozie was ready to put her shoulder to it and give it everything she had. But in fact it gave way quite easily with a gentle push. She began to walk down the brick-lined passage to the vaulted storeroom. The adrenaline rush made her question her original decision to investigate the tunnels, but given what she’d found . . .

‘One step closer and I’ll kill you.’

A man was silhouetted in the doorway between the cellar rooms. His voice was low and menacing. He was guarding the only way out.

Rozie walked purposefully towards him, stooping slightly under the passage’s rough brick ceiling. The adrenaline still pumped in her veins. The tomb-like darkness had held its terrors, but she fancied her chances against this short, squat opponent, if that’s what it took. She shifted her grip on the torch, so she could use it as a weapon. It was over a foot long and heavy, and she had asked for one like this deliberately, just in case.

‘Drop it,’ the man said.

Rozie did not. She could see now that he was armed too, with something long and sharp, holding it up like a baseball bat. It was a crowbar. She pictured how he would come towards her, how best to use the torch to defend herself, how much damage she could allow herself to do.

‘I said, drop it, asshole.’

Out of the tunnel proper, Rozie drew herself up to her full height. ‘Er, no. And if you attack the Queen’s APS here in the Palace, I wish you luck explaining why.’ Her voice was as calm and steady as she could make it.

‘Shit!’ He lowered the bar so that its tip rested on the floor. ‘I thought you were some kind of thief.’

‘As you can see, I’m not. And watch your bloody language.’

The man in the doorway wore a managerial suit under an open warehouse coat. She could just about make out the hint of curl in his hair and the hint of disdain in his flat, south London voice. She recognised him from the summer – and from the accounts department. This was Mick Clements, the head of Operations. She recognised the woody scent, too: it must be aftershave or deodorant. He had definitely spent time in the makeshift office recently, before her.

‘What are you doing down here?’ she asked.

‘I might ask you the same question.’ Even at this distance, and backlit by the brighter room behind, she could see the rise and fall in his chest. He was afraid – or he had been. But he stood his ground. He still blocked the doorway, with the heavy bar in his hand.

‘Is there a reason I can’t visit?’ She used the full force of her height to intimidate him.

‘People like you don’t belong in places like this.’ He enunciated the words slowly. ‘That sign is on the door back there for your safety. I’m going to have to report you.’

‘You do that.’

‘Hey, hey.’ It was Eric Ferguson, who must have been there all along. He stepped into the doorway next to Mick and reached gently for the crowbar, which he rested against the wall. His smile was placatory. ‘Let’s not get carried away, OK? This is Captain O, Mick. Show her some respect.’

Mick grunted. His voice was low and hard, and he hadn’t taken his eyes off Rozie. ‘What I want to know is, what the hell were you doing in the tunnels? Don’t you know they’re dangerous?’

‘Well, I did wonder,’ she said. ‘I came down looking for something and I thought I’d check them out. If the door wasn’t locked that’s hardly my fault.’

‘And why are you in those boots? If you don’t mind my asking. Ever so politely.’ Mick was staring at her wellies.

‘I’m half dressed for the shindig,’ she said disdainfully. It was the best she could come up with. The shindig was the annual staff party in December, usually a fancy-dress affair, and this year the theme was Heroes. ‘I’m going as the Duke of Wellington.’

Eric snorted with laughter. Mick peered at her, unconvinced.

‘I was looking for some sort of frock coat thing,’ she improvised. ‘I thought there might be one here.’

Eric beamed. ‘You mean the big wicker basket full of costumes we keep available for all the dressing up?’

Rozie nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Not a thing, love. This is a palace, not a theatre, or a fucking nursery school.’

He said it without breaking his smile. Mick sniggered. Rozie decided she’d had enough. ‘Thanks for the advice,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving.’

She strode up to them both, pushing Mick firmly to the side of the doorway with her torch, and forcing Eric to make way beside him. As she approached, she felt the fear and hostility pour off Mick in waves. He had shut her in the tunnels, changed his mind, and still considered knocking her out: she’d seen it on his face. But he had decided the consequences weren’t worth paying for.

‘I’ve got my eye on you, Captain Oshodi,’ he said to her departing back.

No doubt he had. Now, it was mutual.

Sir Simon was still at his desk, on the phone, when he saw Rozie walk past. This struck him as mildly odd, and then, as he thought about it more, very strange indeed. Why was she carrying a massive torch? Why was she even still here?

‘Hello?’ the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff asked over the phone. ‘Are you there, Simon?’

‘Er, I’ll call you back,’ he said. His hackles were up. He didn’t know why exactly, but something was wrong.

When he got to Rozie’s office, she was slumped in the armchair near the window, in stockinged feet. She looked utterly drained.

‘I thought you’d gone home. What happened?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said flatly.

When she spoke, he noticed redness on her teeth. Her lip was bleeding. ‘What happened?’ he repeated.

She didn’t want to tell him. His fear was suddenly of something truly dreadful. If she’d been attacked – assaulted – he wouldn’t let her go through it alone. Funny, he realised: he’d always thought of Rozie as indestructible. He pitied any man who might come up against her. But, right now, he saw a vulnerable young woman. Whatever resentment he still felt towards her melted away. His instinct was to hold her, which was obviously inappropriate, so he stood like a lemon and waited for her to talk to him.

‘I was downstairs,’ she admitted eventually. ‘In the cellars.’

‘What, near the kitchens?’

‘No. The ones underneath. The ones we’re not supposed to use. It was . . . something to do with that picture for the Boss.’

‘The navy’s one from the summer? Really?’

‘Yes.’ Rozie sat up a bit. She looked slightly less queasy. ‘I thought the original might be there. Stupid, really. But two of the Ops men came and found me. Said I was trespassing. That’s all.’ She smiled and shrugged, getting up as if to go.

‘It’s not all,’ he said, motioning her back down. ‘I know you, Rozie. Being shouted at wouldn’t even register. What did they do?’ His gaze fell on her bleeding lip again. ‘You look like you’ve been in a fight. Or . . .?’ He tried to give her the space to talk, to say the unsayable, if that’s what it was. He saw her eyes cloud with confusion, but they brightened again.

‘Oh, Simon, no. They were just a bit threatening, that’s all. And I hit my head on the ceiling and bit my lip. I think they were more scared of me than I was of them. It was nothing.’

He kept scanning her face, looking for signs that she was lying or making excuses to avoid describing something unspeakable, but the longer she talked the more she came back to her old self. She wouldn’t lie if the men had done something terrible, would she? Simon didn’t know. He felt out of his depth, which was rare.

‘I just think you ought to know . . . I’m here,’ he said. How inadequate that sounded.

The smile that spread across her face was slow and genuine, and good to see after such a long time. ‘I do know that,’ she said. ‘I’m OK. Really. Thanks for checking on me.’

He felt he was being dismissed. If it were the Boss, she’d say, That’s very kind.

‘I’ll, er . . . Right. I’ll leave you to it. See you in the morning.’

As he walked the short distance to his office, he wondered about the boots. Why did you wear wellies to go and inspect some cellars? Were they leaking? Oh, God – not something else for the bloody Reservicing budget, surely? Back at his desk, he poured himself another cold coffee and settled with his feet up, phone in hand.

Chapter 34

The Queen did not have any time with Rozie in the morning. She was holding the investiture in the Ballroom, and in the skylit Picture Gallery people were lining up with hooks pinned to their jackets, ready to take the medals she would hang. However, she diligently read the handwritten note that had been included with her boxes. In it, Rozie explained about the hidden hinge, the tunnel in use and the encounter with Mr Clements and his sidekick from Operations afterwards. Rozie didn’t go into detail but the Queen imagined that, alone at night, underground, it had not been pleasant.

As she held the letter, scanning it through her bifocals, she was furious with Rozie for explicitly ignoring instructions and going into the tunnels by herself, guilty that she was secretly pleased her APS had done it, and above all relieved the girl had emerged unscathed. There had been one or two women in the past, the Queen reflected, who had shown the same initiative and grit. ‘Derring-do’, they used to call it. It could get you into all sorts of trouble, but it made solving problems so much easier.

Clements’s behaviour towards her had been unforgiveable. The man should be sacked, and he would be, but if it wasn’t he who was running the Breakages Business, the Queen didn’t want to alert whoever it was by making too much of Rozie’s encounter last night. Rozie was clear in her note that he seemed fearful when he found her. There was no obvious sign of theft of any sort: nothing in the storage rooms that shouldn’t have been there. And yet, he had only reluctantly let her go. It has to be the Breakages Business. I’m sure it’s still operational. The tunnel had signs of being used that day.

It wouldn’t be used any more, the Queen reflected. After a shock like that, they would shut it down immediately. Even now, there would probably be no evidence at either end that it had been in service. Doors would be properly bolted; dust applied to surfaces; duckboards spirited away. Nevertheless, she mentioned casually to Philip that Rozie had been down there and it had reminded her to wonder when was the last time they had done a health and safety inspection? Philip wasn’t sure, but said she was damn right to think about it, and he’d bloody well ask. It had been years since anyone checked, as far as he knew.

As she changed into a silk dress for the investiture, the Queen wondered what exactly Sholto Harvie had been thinking when he gave Rozie the tip-off about the Breakages Business. Should one be grateful? She had the strongest sense that he did it because he had something to hide. And yet, try as she might, she couldn’t make an adequate connection from that to the Gentileschis, to the notes to Mary van Renen, for example, and the body in the swimming pool. She felt certain a clue lay in Cynthia Harris’s former life. Chief Inspector Strong’s report on that was due imminently. Perhaps it would contain enough for her to take decisive action against Clements and whoever he was in cahoots with. She very much hoped so, because Rozie’s underground escapades had exposed her to potential danger. The girl could look after herself, but one didn’t like to think this was something she would need to do.

She was too busy to give it much further thought. After the investiture and various meetings with ambassadors and officials, there was a reception to attend in Cheyne Walk, beside the river in Chelsea, to celebrate Co-operation in Ireland. Her visit in the summer had been deemed a big success. It had been a diplomatic skating pond: how does one greet former terrorists, and indeed, how do they greet a reigning monarch? But everyone had got through it, and it had felt like the positive contribution to history she wanted it to be.

She had been very aware, back in June, that she was treading a path of peace and reconciliation that had been laid by many others before her. So many of them women, she reflected now – with a woman on the brink of becoming the most powerful person in the world. Mothers, daughters, sisters had joined forces in Northern Ireland to condemn the violence and find another way. The stop-start process had been helped from the British side by another renegade woman. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the time, Mo Mowlam, had been a brave and charismatic campaigner too. She died of a brain tumour a few years later and the Queen still missed her. This was the Labour MP who had called for Buckingham Palace to be pulled down and replaced with something more modern. They had joked about it, the two of them.

‘There are times,’ the Queen had admitted, ‘when the soup is perfectly cold and the bill for new carpets arrives, that I don’t disagree with you.’

‘See?’ Mo said, ‘I’d be doing you a favour.’

Now, in a shimmering pink suit, with Philip at her side, the Queen entered the building beside the Thames that had once been home to Thomas More, transplanted brick by brick and stone by stone from one side of London to the other by someone with a greater love of history than common sense. Inside, among canapés and Tudor panelling, the mood was jolly.

The highlight of the reception was the unveiling of a portrait she had sat for in May, commissioned by the charity. After one ninety-minute sitting she had expected something small and neat. Instead, the canvas hiding behind the glossy purple satin curtain was as tall as she was – taller, in fact, balanced on its little stand. She hoped it wasn’t ghastly. Standing so close, Philip would find it hard to restrain himself and now was not the time. Everyone clustered around and she was handed the rope attached to the curtain. Making sure to hide any hint of anxiety, she pulled and the curtain fell.

There were smiles, a couple of cheers, a ripple of applause. She stared hard at the pink and turquoise canvas and breathed a secret sigh of relief.

‘I think it’s got all your wrinkles,’ Philip observed with a snort.

She stood back a little, to get a better view. It was true. Her face was the size of a horse blanket, with every crease and fold acquired over ninety years unflinchingly portrayed. But one was wrinkled – what was the point of denying it? The artist had caught the hair, which was never easy, and done a decent job with the jewellery. Best of all were the mouth and the eyes. She was almost smiling, but not quite. She looked quite wise in it, she thought, rather liking it. She would have liked it even more if he could have made it three foot tall instead of five.

The artist moved towards her.

‘What do you think, Your Majesty?’

‘It’s very big, isn’t it?’ she remarked.

‘They pay by the yard,’ he said, which made her laugh. ‘I like to think it looks as if you’re still talking to me.’

‘It does, a bit. Did I talk a lot?’

‘Oh, just the right amount, ma’am.’

He was being diplomatic. She remembered having a long, wide-ranging conversation while he worked. But the more she looked, the more satisfied she was, especially considering some of the horrors she’d unveiled in her time. He had captured something very few artists managed, which was a sense that she was reflecting on more than the act of being captured on canvas, or being Queen. In fact, she was rarely thinking about either. There was so much to absorb her attention. She was glad that future generations might get a glimpse of her actively contemplating a world beyond one’s own.

Chapter 35

It had been a long day.

The Queen woke up to the news that Hillary Clinton, poised to celebrate her victory under the largest glass ceiling in Manhattan, had admitted defeat and that a rather stunned Donald Trump had been voted in as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Which was not quite what one had been led to expect. Not only that, but Harry had thought to put out a press release – in the form of a tweet, God help him – asking for his new girlfriend’s privacy to be respected by the media. One sympathised, of course one did, but it never paid to take the press on at their own game. They always won. It was only a matter of time.

Philip had a lot to say on both subjects at breakfast.

‘Bloody fool.’ This in relation to his grandson. ‘What is it that model said? The Moss girl. Could have been about you, I always thought. Never something, always something. No, I’ve got it: Never complain, never explain. She could teach the lad a thing or two.’

Everyone would have a lot to say. But with decades of practice – like Kate Moss, who was a friend of Eugenie’s, the Queen seemed to remember – she herself would be sphinx-like and inscrutable. She was not her grandson – and in her experience, anything one said would inevitably be leaped on, taken out of context and almost deliberately misunderstood. Silence was the only safe option. Or rather, saying nothing worth repeating. Unlike her husband, who didn’t always practise what he preached.

Luckily, Philip was soon distracted. They went to open the new Francis Crick Institute in King’s Cross and he was in his element, talking about science. They were given a rather fascinating little lecture about the flu. Quite terrifying, these viruses, if unchecked – and how wonderful to have places like the Institute to stay on top of them. Then there had been the weekly audience with the Prime Minister. Mrs May was already keen to build relations with the new leader of the free world and wondering about booking in a state visit. The Queen observed that it was normally a couple of years before such things were put into the calendar and asked the PM to take it up with Sir Simon. One didn’t want to look too keen. If they weren’t careful, the UK might seem rather desperate, which wasn’t the impression one wanted to give at all.

At a pub in Pimlico, Rozie was on her third glass of Chardonnay. This had not been her favourite day. Her head still pounded with a dull ache from the crack it had got last night. If she closed her eyes for too long, all she could see was Mick Clements in the storeroom with the crowbar. Not a pretty sight.

At times like this, it was useful to know an equerry with benefits. She thought of him now: six foot three, military bearing, neck like a tree trunk, strawberry-blond hair and eyes the colour of the shallows near his parents’ place in St Barts. She’d called him at lunch and he’d suggested a drink after work at this pub on Pimlico Green, walking distance from the Palace but far enough away that you weren’t likely to bump into half the Household at the bar – although that turned out to be a miscalculation. A drink wasn’t exactly what she had in mind, but that, too, seemed like a good idea.

After three glasses, she wasn’t sure if the wine was making the pounding in her head better or worse. Either way, the blue-eyed strawberry blond still hadn’t showed. She couldn’t blame him. Anything might have cropped up at work: she’d let down more friends in cocktail bars than she cared to remember. She’d give him one more glass, then wend her way sadly home.

She’d just ordered it when she spotted a balding head above a broad-shouldered jacket among a group of men at the far end of the bar. She might not have recognised him, if not for the fact that as soon as he happened to catch her eye, he went white as a sheet. She concentrated for a moment, thinking back to the staff records she had recently been examining.

This was Spike Milligan. The Boss had tasked her with challenging the Palace footman about being involved in the poison pen campaign, along with Lorna Lobb. Rozie had tried to track him down, but so far he had evaded her. Now she held his eye and saw his Adam’s apple bob. The slight nod she gave him said, ‘We can do this quietly, or I can come right over and we can do it in front of your mates. You choose.’ He seemed to crumple slightly. After a couple of muttered words, he headed for the door at the back of the room.

Rozie followed him.

The door led to a narrow corridor with the toilets to one side and the kitchen at the far end. There was also a staircase to a function room above. She motioned to it and they stood awkwardly halfway up. Though Rozie was on the lower step, it was clear she was in charge. Milligan’s eyes darted around, looking anywhere but at her. His face was ashen. One of his fingers beat an unconscious tattoo on the bannister. But he jutted out his jaw and said, ‘I dunno why you’re interested in me, Captain Oshodi.’

‘How could you?’ Rozie said crisply. ‘You haven’t answered my messages.’

‘Look, I’m not stupid. I assume it’s something to do with the letters business. I already told the police everything I know. Which is nothing.’

‘You were overheard talking about them.’

‘Who by?’

‘Never mind. But,’ Rozie lowered her voice to a menacing hiss, ‘HM herself is aware of your involvement. You’d better explain yourself now or it’ll go badly.’

The footman pursed his lips for a moment and finally looked her in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, right? About what happened to you. But it’s got nothing to do with me.’

Rozie’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean, “what happened to me”?’

He swallowed again and panic flickered across his face. But someone came out of the function room at the top of the stairs and walked down past them. It gave him time to think.

‘That Lobb woman – that’s her name, isn’t it? She was seen trying to drop something in your bag. People talk, you know.’

Rozie cocked her head to one side. ‘So you mean what didn’t happen to me.’

She was convinced that he was lying – or rather, that he knew about the letters she had already received, which were a tightly contained secret shared only with the Queen and the police. This meant he had been involved in delivering them, as the Boss suspected.

Rozie had been sure, when given this task, that she could manage it dispassionately: ‘find, strike, destroy, suppress’. But her heart hammered. They faced each other in silence for a short while, Milligan scared but obstinate, and Rozie fighting to manage the roiling fury and disgust that boiled inside her.

She hadn’t expected the encounter to go like this. Normally the Boss’s magic dust did its trick instantly: you asked, they answered. And yet here she was, accusing Milligan of something she was sure he was guilty of, and he was prepared to brazen it out.

Whatever he was scared of, it was more than the displeasure of Her Majesty.

He swallowed again. ‘Like I say, I’m sorry if . . . whatever. There are some bad people out there. But I can’t help you.’

He enunciated the last four words clearly and slowly, and she knew he wouldn’t change his mind. She wondered, briefly, how many broken bones it would take before he did. But she wasn’t that kind of girl, and it wasn’t that kind of job. Breathe and let go. She couldn’t even tell him to fuck off – he wasn’t obviously threatening her, as Mick Clements had.

‘This isn’t over.’

She stood aside, so he could squeeze past her down the stairs. He did so fast, without another word, and by the time she entered the bar area again, he’d gone.

Breathe and let go. She rolled her shoulders, tilted her head and decided she needed a massage, a run . . . something to relax.

She was about to fetch her coat from the seat where she’d left it when she spotted a strawberry-blond head moving purposefully through the crowd.

‘Hey! You stayed. Sorry I’m late.’

White teeth flashed in a sweetly lopsided smile. The equerry pulled in for the kiss-on-each-cheek that you could do in public without raising an eyebrow if you were posh. Rozie felt a whole new set of chemicals flood her body.

He looked at the empty wine glass on the nearby table and assumed it was hers.

‘Fancy another?’

She absolutely did.

Chapter 36

This weekend there was no trip to Windsor. Instead, on Saturday evening, the family showed up en masse at the Albert Hall for the Festival of Remembrance. The Queen and Philip were accompanied by all the children, her cousins and William and Catherine. In fact, almost a full complement of royals except for Harry, who was otherwise engaged. The media were now obsessed by the absence of his new girlfriend at the rugby. Sure enough, whatever they did or didn’t do, the press would have their say.

But the event at the Albert Hall was uplifting as always, though it marked the centenary of the Battle of the Somme and twenty-five years since the first Gulf War. There was a marvellous, moving piece to honour the ATA girls who had flown Spitfires to their bases during the war. The round auditorium was filled with uniformed serving personnel and veterans, who always sang with a lustiness particular to the armed services, she thought. It was always good to celebrate with the living.

Tomorrow would be devoted to the dead.

Sunday dawned dull and overcast, with a bitter chill. Her mother would have called it ‘dreich’. Only the Scots could truly describe bad weather. Nevertheless, it brightened up in time for the Queen to lead the laying of the wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph to mark Remembrance Day, in front of a silent crowd.

The moment was bittersweet, because she and Sir Simon had discussed the proposal that this might be the last time she would perform this essential task in person. Charles could do a perfectly decent job of it for her, and really it wouldn’t do for an aged monarch to break a hip while stepping backwards on a multi level, rain-slicked stone platform in November. She understood the logistics – but her heart would always want to be there, doing the right thing, paying her respects as she was doing now.

On the balcony at the Foreign Office, overlooking the ceremony, Camilla, Catherine and Sophie stood together, all in black. For them, as for the vast majority watching on TV today, or lining the street to see the parade – or not watching at all, perhaps – most of the wars and sacrifice they were remembering today were distant stories, or an old-fashioned news report. But for the Queen and for those lined up in Whitehall they were vivid, lived experience. Though she had always been kept safe, she had lost men she had loved: friends and uncles, and ultimately her father, who smoking and the stress of the war had driven to an early grave. She had grieved with wives and girlfriends, sons and daughters, and now husbands and boyfriends in the later wars. Every military life was given in her father’s service and then hers, and she never forgot it. Each one mattered. With so many gone, it was difficult to keep one’s eyes entirely dry.

The mood was still upon her later that afternoon, when the family had gone and the Palace was quiet again. She was on her way to change out of her black dress when her Private Secretary caught up with her.

‘I just wanted to let you know about the tunnels, ma’am,’ Sir Simon said. ‘The Keeper mentioned that the Duke had asked him to get them checked out. He wants you to know that Security went down to have a look and the door’s shut tight with an outsize rusty padlock. You’d need bolt cutters to open it. We have nothing to fear from Health and Safety.’

‘Isn’t that a relief?’

She looked quizzically at the manila folder tucked under his arm.

‘I thought you might like to read this later.’ He held it out. ‘It’s the latest update from the chief inspector. I can leave it on your desk if you—’

‘Thank you. I’ll take it now.’

‘I’ve added today’s note at the top, ma’am.’ Sir Simon positively bristled with efficiency. ‘It makes very depressing reading.’

‘Oh? You’ve read it?’

‘Just a skim through, to keep myself up to speed. Strong’s sergeant has found more background on Mrs Harris. It seems she was always difficult, regularly getting into trouble and making bad decisions. She had a rough start in life, so perhaps that explains it. The chief inspector seems to think she might have written her own poison pen letters. Were you aware of that?’

‘I was, actually.’

‘I must say I find it hard to imagine, but he makes a good case for it. It’s all in the notes. I can summarise them, if you like.’

‘Thank you, Simon, but no. I’ll read them myself.’

After he’d left, she permitted herself a little sigh of frustration. It was Rozie’s day off and he was trying to help. Sir Simon hadn’t got to be as good as he was without casting a critical eye over anything he deemed important. In this, she recognised a fellow spirit, but she didn’t like the thought of him rummaging around in Rozie’s files.

The Queen continued up to her bedroom to change, but found herself increasingly absorbed by the note in the manila folder that now rested on her dressing table. This was the report on Cynthia she had been waiting for.

DS Highgate’s findings were certainly upsetting, given what had happened in the end. Cynthia Butterfield and her mother had been abandoned by Cynthia’s father, who had set up with another woman when the girl was three. A second unhappy and possibly violent marriage had ended in divorce, and her mother had then lived as a bit of a recluse. Overcoming these early obstacles, the young Cynthia had left Brighton for Edinburgh, then London to study art history, and started a strong career.

Sir Simon mentioned ‘bad decisions’. The report said that Cynthia’s work as a curator had come under scrutiny in the summer of 1986. The personnel notes were sparse, but it seemed she was accused of making ‘basic mistakes’. That summer, she had left the Royal Collection to join the Works Department. She was offered the job by Sidney Smirke, its head, now known to be occasionally violent, and a drunk. At that time, she became the only woman in a ‘very macho’ department and after a few months she transferred to Housekeeping.

Sir Simon had drawn from all of this that Cynthia Harris was ‘difficult’. But the Queen thought of the date. The Gentileschis had been discovered in 1986. She could well imagine that Sholto Harvie did not want a keen assistant looking over his shoulder. He must have been responsible for pointing out those ‘basic mistakes’.

Had Cynthia made any mistakes at all? the Queen wondered. Or had she simply been told she had, by a popular and dynamic senior member of staff? And if she protested her innocence, who would believe her?

The thing was, where Sir Simon saw ‘difficulty’ and ‘trouble’, the Queen saw strength and perseverance in the face of increasingly unpleasant odds. DS Highgate had also conducted a recent interview with the person to whom she’d left all her personal possessions in her will. This woman – a Miss Helen Fisher – described a university room-mate who had become a friend for life. The Cynthia of those first days in London was confident and chic, basing her style on Louise Brooks, the dark-haired jazz age film star. She had loved to travel and had developed an abiding passion for great art. This was the character whose hopes had been dashed, her potential lost.

Nevertheless, the enduring friendship between these two women rang out through the clipped report. The Queen made a mental note to get Lady Caroline to write to Miss Fisher and express her condolences. She had been told that Mrs Harris did not have any close family still living, but that didn’t mean that there was nobody to mourn her. Although it seemed there was nobody to mourn her here.

The Queen rose from her dressing table. Still wearing her black dress and with Willow and the dorgis at her heels, she descended the little staircase to the ground floor of the North Wing, where a corridor led to the north-west pavilion and the swimming pool. The footman who stood guarding the entrance looked very surprised to see her, but quickly hid it. She was grateful for his presence, as she realised she had absolutely no idea what the door code would be. Philip, who swam regularly, would know it, presumably.

‘Your Majesty.’ The footman bowed slightly and let her in, preceded by the dogs.

Beyond the tall, glass windows with their Georgian panes, the sky was dark, or as dark as central London ever got, bathed in its eerie orange street light glow. The pavilion itself was atmospherically lit with several spotlights just below the skylit roof, while inset bulbs under the water cast rippling reflections around the room. The dogs happily padded around on the tiles, but she called them to her. Their oblivious general curiosity seemed inappropriate somehow.

It must have been just about there, near the door to the changing rooms towards the shallow end, that the body had lain all night.

‘Exsanguination.’

The word had leaped out at her from the first police report. The process of the blood flowing out of the body. Enough to cause death. Her equerry had told her – because she asked – that it could take the loss of between half and two-thirds of a person’s blood to kill them. It was the sort of thing that soldiers knew. How heartening, in a way, that one could perhaps survive with only half one’s blood still in the body. But Cynthia Harris had not survived, of course.

Standing here, in the rippling light, with the hum of the filter and the sloshes and plops of little waves, the Queen was aware that these were the last sights and sounds Cynthia had known before she lost consciousness. She felt the housekeeper’s presence, or rather her absence, very keenly.

Memories came back to her in quick succession: the swish of chic, bobbed hair, once almost black, now faded to almost white; the harmonious composition of any room whenever she had finished with it, which nobody else could match; the flash of joy on her face – fully explained now – when a painting had been reframed at her suggestion and they had jointly surveyed the happy result on a guest room wall.

The Queen felt a wave of sympathy for the woman. She was more convinced than ever of a different story to the one Sir Simon saw. This was not ‘difficult’. It was . . . there was a phrase for it. It was on the tip of her tongue. She called out to the footman:

‘What’s it called when an employer makes your job so unpleasant that you can’t do it?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Constructive dismissal, ma’am.’

‘That’s it! Thank you.’

There had been times in her reign when it felt as if the tabloid press were trying to do as much to her. But she was a queen, and Cynthia Harris was a curator. So why not simply get a different curatorial job elsewhere? The woman described by Miss Fisher adored her work.

The Queen looked across to the spot where the body had lain. Instead of an embittered woman in late middle age, she saw the university graduate with no family support, who liked silent film stars and dreamed of rising up in the art world. She also saw the shadow of the young woman’s boss, Sholto. The Queen knew from her personal experience how charismatic he could be. If he had wanted to prevent Cynthia from getting another decent job, he could probably have done so. In the tight-knit London art world, the word of the Deputy Surveyor could make or break a young career.

Why would he want to break it?

It seemed harsh punishment if all he needed to do was get Cynthia out of the way while he had the fake Gentileschi copies made and spirited the four originals out of the building. She was increasingly certain that was what Sholto had done – rolling them up like carpets and simply driving them out of Stable Yard under everyone’s noses.

She parked the thought of his treatment of his assistant. Sholto had never struck her as remotely vicious or vindictive. But then, of course, he had never struck her as criminal either. Yet Daniel Blake, the young conservator he had hired, had died. One couldn’t put anything past him, however eloquent he was on the subject of Leonardo da Vinci.

With the dogs beside her, she walked along the pool’s edge to the patch of tiles where Mrs Harris had collapsed. Ignoring her protesting knee, she bent over to inspect the grouting. It was far from pristine after several years of wear, but it was impossible to make out specific stains any more. She assumed the Housekeeping team had been extra diligent with bleach. Still, the woman had bled to death here, all alone. The Queen said a little prayer for her, hoping she had lost consciousness quickly, at least, and had not been afraid.

Sholto Harvie’s shadow seemed to haunt this place. Everything came back to him. Every note reinforced her theory – and yet he had not done it. He was not here. He wasn’t even in the country. If he had wanted to create a perfect alibi, he couldn’t have done a better job.

The answer must lie in the Breakages Business – which Rozie had demonstrated so clearly was still going on. Who would have thought a chocolate bar wrapper would be such comprehensive proof of dark deeds underground?

That wrapper now sat in a sealed envelope (she hoped it was sealed) in Rozie’s desk, in case they needed it. Meanwhile, there was no easy proof that the tunnels had been used. As she expected, they had acted fast to hide all trace of that secret hinge, and she couldn’t move against them until she was sure of her ground. The question still remained: who were they, exactly?

She was working on it. Unless she found something soon, she would have to take her suspicions to the proper authorities.

They think it was an accident, she said to the rippling shade on the tiles in front of her. But her original presentiment remained, that even if Cynthia had died alone, the exsanguination had not begun that way.

Chapter 37

The following evening, Rozie felt much better. She was sitting in the billiards room of the Chelsea Arts Club, ignoring the half-hearted game going on nearby and focusing on the elegant woman who nursed a glass of champagne in front of her.

Rozie had heard stories of the Chelsea Arts Club. She knew of its famous balls and secret garden and had pictured something posh and well upholstered, like Claridge’s perhaps. But it turned out that artists didn’t want Michelin stars, marble floors and silk furnishings – they wanted (and could afford) cheap wine, café tables and somewhere friendly to relax. The white walls were hung with paintings for sale. The rabbit warren of little rooms was full of people in jeans, lounging in armchairs or laughing over candlelit dinners. Rozie’s host, Eleanor Walker, was one of the smartest people there.

Eleanor wore a silk shirt and lots of gold jewellery. She explained that a friend was a jewellery designer and ‘I simply love her stuff, can’t get enough of it’. There were rings on most of her fingers, her ears were adorned with punkish gold spikes, and three chunky necklaces were hung with charms. All of which surprised Rozie, because Eleanor was in her sixties. She had briefly been a model in her youth. That bit didn’t surprise Rozie at all.

They were here to talk about Sholto Harvie. Eleanor was Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood’s aunt, and the artist had cheerfully put Rozie in touch with her yesterday. ‘Oh God yes, she knows all about Sholto. Get her drunk. She’s great company. And she’ll love an evening out.’

They talked for ten minutes about the Palace and Rozie did her party trick of sounding entertaining while saying nothing of any value whatsoever. Eventually, she brought up the subject of the ex-Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Her excuse was that she was helping to collect anecdotes for a book about the Royal Collection. Eleanor’s features re-arranged themselves from curious and delighted to something more wary and disdainful. They reminded Rozie of someone else for a minute, but she couldn’t think who.

‘Have you met Sholto?’ Eleanor asked.

‘Yes, I have,’ Rozie said. ‘I stayed with him, actually.’

‘You liked him?’

‘Very much.’

‘Of course you did!’ Eleanor’s smile was disarming, but knowing. ‘Everyone loves Sholto. He’s just so . . . lovable.’

‘Go on,’ Rozie said, cautiously. She sensed honesty and scorn. She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Eleanor rested her chin in a cupped hand and gazed at the bubbles rising in her glass. ‘He’s cultivated that image since childhood. You see, Sholto loves things. Beautiful things. He adores them. He covets them and cares for them and obsesses over them. He always did, even as a child. His mother always used to tell a story that at seven, he knew how to tell marble from alabaster.’

‘Is there a difference?’

Eleanor laughed. ‘Lavinia could tell you. Anyway, his parents were moderately well off. They had enough money to send him to boarding school and of course, once he was at Shadwell’s he made sure to befriend anyone who had more than him. Sholto learned very fast that what rich people love, more than anything, is entertainment. Because, you see, they’re so terribly bored. If they’ve made the money, or inherited it, what else is there to do? So Sholto became the party piece, the clown. He knew everyone who mattered across three counties. He was a gossip and a flirt, especially with the mothers. They adored that, of course. He was witty and well read, could cook divinely and deworm a recalcitrant dog. By seventeen, he was the most wanted party guest in the South of England.’

‘Wasn’t that a good thing?’ Rozie asked.

Eleanor’s face hardened. ‘No, it wasn’t. Because none of it was real. Sholto didn’t want friendship, he wanted access. Close proximity to your Gainsboroughs and your Fabergé and your daughters.’

She eyed Rozie coolly across the table. Eleanor herself was all angles, high-cheeked and loose-limbed, dressed in faded, flared jeans and a man’s jacket over the shirt. Rozie felt slightly wrong-footed by her shrewd, appraising gaze.

‘I was in my last year at school,’ she said, ‘when I met Sholto at a London party and brought him down for the weekend. He was the same age as me: seventeen. I was the fourth child out of five and we lived in the grounds of my grandfather’s house. A stately home, I suppose you’d call it. I was shy and biddable and loved horses and dogs. I wasn’t sure what to do with boys. I was used to the look on my friends’ faces when they saw Booke Place for the first time – but Sholto took it to the extreme. He fell in love with the estate,’ she concluded with a shrug. ‘With the situation, the architecture and everything in it. Including me, because I happened to be in it. He was obsessed. He was also a kleptomaniac.’

See what you find, the Queen had said. Rozie leaned in a little further. ‘Oh?’

‘He started off with small things: mementos of his stay. My mother was cross when a silver ashtray disappeared during his first weekend. They all assumed it had been misplaced by a cleaning lady, but I found it in Sholto’s jacket pocket weeks later. There was a rather exquisite silver hummingbird that my grandfather had brought back from Geneva years before. A Fabergé egg. This was two years later. By now I was working in a little art gallery in Mayfair and Sholto was studying art at the Courtauld. He’d taken my virginity and I’d assumed wedding bells, though nothing was said. It was all very bohemian. He cooked me supper, very well, on two gas rings in his student flat. I found the bird and the egg when I was looking in his handkerchief drawer for something to use as napkins. Later, I discovered he’d also taken a portrait of my mother. At least, it disappeared that Christmas, and where else would it have gone?’

Rozie remembered a beautiful picture of a pale young woman – all angles, too – in a fifties evening dress, that hung in his dining room. Was it a sign of what was to come?

‘He tried to take me, too.’ Eleanor leaned back in her chair, examining her strong hands, adorned with little rings. ‘I was madly in love. He knew what my parents thought of him and made plans to run off with me to Gretna Green and marry me the day he graduated from art school. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like an idiot, I told my younger brother, and of course he told my mother. Sholto came from what my parents called “trade” – which meant his father was a doctor and his mother’s family were engineers. They bought their own furniture; Sholto needed to work for a living. Of course I didn’t care – I loved that. Salt of the earth. I thought I was a socialist, but I was just a dupe. Sholto wanted beautiful things, and I was one of them. But my grandfather bought him off with a thousand pounds. He’d been prepared to go much higher.’

‘Did they know about the bird and the egg?’ Rozie asked, to try and take the sting out of the ‘thousand pounds’.

‘And the portrait? No, I didn’t tell them. They were being so snobbish. But it wasn’t only that. Once they heard about Sholto’s plan, my grandfather paid a detective to find out more about him. Of course, they didn’t tell me at the time. Sholto loved to hang out with disreputable people. Aristocrats in the West End, drug dealers in the East End. Pimps. Petty criminals. He liked them. It was the seventies and art school was all about rebellion. He didn’t take the drugs, but he liked the danger. I think he thought it made him cool. Anyway, it didn’t make him a perfect suitor. I thought it was my grandfather who broke my heart, but . . .’ She made a dismissive gesture with her beringed fingers to suggest she didn’t think so now.

‘Did he stay in touch?’ Rozie asked.

‘Of course he didn’t. He bought a Ducati, slept with two of my friends and went off to India with Lydia Munro, whose family weren’t as clued up as mine. He gave her crabs – God knows where he picked them up – and came back solo. I always wondered what would happen to him.’ Eleanor drained her glass, her stacked diamond rings flashing in the light. ‘Bizarrely, he stayed in touch with my brother for a while. Rupert was too polite to shun him, and Sholto was too crude to stay away. I assumed he’d end up in prison, but he worked for the Queen and retired to the Cotswolds. I saw his cottage in House & Garden. I must say, I searched the pictures for the bird and the egg, but I didn’t find them. Did you?’

‘I didn’t see them,’ Rozie said truthfully, keeping quiet about the portrait. ‘And what about his time at the Royal Collection?’ she asked, aware of her cover story.

‘Oh, you didn’t come here to ask me about that, did you?’ Eleanor smiled her disbelief. ‘What the hell would I know about that? Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I assume he stole the family silver. The Queen should count herself lucky he didn’t run off with Princess Margaret. I bet he tried.’

Standing in Old Church Street afterwards, waiting for a cab, Rozie suddenly remembered who Eleanor had reminded her of, the moment she brought up Sholto: it was Lulu Arantes, who must have heard about him from Uncle Max. Lulu had been spot on about Cynthia Harris. She really ought to trust her more.

Chapter 38

Billy MacLachlan, too, had been busy. Back from Tetbury, he had visited one or two of his stomping grounds as a young detective, and reinserted himself into his old world as a royal protection officer. There were several networks for ex-royal servants, and for professional purposes Billy had kept up with more of them than he might have done otherwise – being a man very happy with a book and a crossword, most of the time. But he occasionally still golfed with ex-butlers, drank with ex-footmen, fished with ghillies and wine-tasted with sommeliers. They were in various stages of health and decrepitude, but they all had one thing in common: a love of gossip. There was a big pre-Christmas party at the Palace for old retainers coming up soon. On the pretext of making plans for this booze-up, Billy got to work.

After two days of nosing around, he finished his report for the Boss. He delivered it to the Queen and Rozie together as they all took a tour of the gardens at lunchtime. He sensed the Queen was getting antsy. She’d actually called him yesterday to ask about progress, which wasn’t something she normally did.

‘Do you know what a fence is, ma’am?’ he asked, as they headed towards the lake.

The Queen looked slightly bewildered. She glanced at the wall beside Constitution Hill and then away again. ‘I’m not sure I—’

‘Oh, right, sorry. I mean, in the criminal sense.’

‘Ah. I see. Isn’t that someone who handles stolen goods?’

‘On the nose, ma’am!’ he beamed. ‘Well then, you’re with me. I’ve been talking to a man by the name of Frank in Bethnal Green. He has an interesting tale to tell. My suggestion that a few Palace items might have been half-inched in years gone by came as no surprise to him.’

The Queen looked resigned. ‘I see. People can’t help themselves. Or rather, they can. Guests have stolen our loo rolls, you know. Quite prestigious ones. Guests, I mean. I’m not sure you can have prestigious loo rolls.’

‘They’ve stolen a lot more than that,’ MacLachlan said. ‘Of course, it’s nothing new. You know about William Fortnum in the eighteenth century?’

‘The man who started Fortnum & Mason? Who was a footman for Queen Anne?’

‘Yes, him.’

‘Indeed I do,’ she said, smiling at the name. ‘A very enterprising man. He started off selling half-used Palace candles to the ladies-in-waiting. You can see his point. The queen liked fresh ones to be lit each day and there were thousands. It must have seemed a pity to waste them.’

‘He was quite the salesman,’ MacLachlan agreed. ‘And it worked out OK.’ He was picturing the store that stood seven storeys high on a corner of Piccadilly, with its lavish windows and a musical clock his little granddaughter was very fond of. ‘The thing is, Fortnum wasn’t alone. The palaces have always produced their entrepreneurs, shall we say. Some more savoury than others. So . . . The Breakages Business. Sir James suggested there might have been a little racket going on in the eighties as a one-off thing. But I know it was still going in the nineteen nineties for sure, when a man called Theodore Vesty was running it, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have kept going after that. It’s all rumour – nothing you could bring charges for. As I understand it, it worked two ways. There was the simple version, which was just smuggling things out that wouldn’t be missed: old curtains that were being upgraded, a small proportion of the baby clothes that got sent every time someone got pregnant. Never a large proportion, ma’am – that was the thing. Nothing to raise eyebrows unduly. Nothing to make nervous underlings go to the authorities.’

‘Hmm.’ The Queen nodded grimly.

Rozie remembered the similar way Sholto Harvie had described the Breakages Business to her.

‘Palace records were duly adjusted,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘They fenced the goods through people like my mate Frank. But I also looked into that Whitehall mandarin you told me about at the MOD, the one with the corner office – Roger Fox, his name was. He was a procurement manager in the eighties and early nineties who took early retirement for his health. That was the official story, but unofficially they caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. He was a crook through and through, basically. He may well have helped them out with finding willing buyers, no questions asked. He knew Vesty and, more to the point, Vesty’s predecessor, Sidney Smirke, was his brother-in-law.’

‘What?’ The Queen stopped in her tracks.

‘I thought you might be interested, ma’am. A nice little family business. Not hard to imagine your little picture going walkies from his storerooms to Fox’s office, if it wasn’t properly labelled during the refurbishment. The thing is, if it was usually hanging outside your bedroom, in your private apartments, I’m guessing most of the men in the Works Department wouldn’t have seen it there so it wouldn’t ring any bells. They must have assumed it was just general decoration and fair game. So it wasn’t handed over to the Royal Collection and was miraculously “lost”. That was the way they usually worked it, but only with things that didn’t matter. That time they made a mistake.’

‘Cynthia Harris would have known about it,’ the Queen said.

‘Even if she was with Sidney at the time, I doubt she was in on it. This was very much all the queen’s men, ma’am. Sidney didn’t tolerate women and she left soon after. But she might have guessed what must have happened if Rozie had had the chance to ask her. And it wasn’t just you being defrauded, ma’am,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘Suppliers were, too. In a different scam, they were forced to resupply goods that were delivered but never officially received. It’s hard to argue with Buckingham Palace. I mean, it can be done, but they’d have picked on small suppliers who wouldn’t dare.’

‘They used my name to threaten and defraud people?’

‘Er, yes, pretty much. It took a fine network to pull it off and I’m guessing that when they didn’t have everyone in place, they didn’t run it. You need two or three people who are responsible for taking in deliveries and signing them off. At least one of them has to be fairly high up. Another needs to be fairly junior, so it looks normal for him to be carting stuff down to the cellars, where the tunnel starts, so it can be spirited away. And obviously you need someone at St James’s Palace to receive the goods and get them out. Smuggling stuff in to the palaces would be pretty tough with all the security checks. Smuggling out? A child could do it, as long as it wouldn’t be missed.’

‘But what about receipts and invoices?’ Rozie asked. ‘There would be a paperwork trail. Someone in Finance would notice.’

‘Which is why you need accomplices there too. You pay them off. They look away. If you poke about a bit, I’m told there’s been an odd history of managers in the accounting team that looks after the property side over the last few years. They come and go. Some leave after hardly any time. I’m guessing the honest ones are put under pressure to move on. Maybe they’re accused of something, or their lives are made difficult.’

‘Constructive dismissal . . .’ the Queen said thoughtfully.

‘That’s it, ma’am. You keep the ones you can manipulate, shift the ones you can’t. Theo Vesty was a popular man in his day. He could get someone in with a good word, I imagine, and get them out again just as easy.’

‘Was it an accountant who killed Mrs Harris?’ the Queen wondered aloud. One never thought of accountants as being murderous types. Perhaps one should.

Rozie was thinking furiously. ‘I was down there! In their office, the day we finalised the Reservicing Programme. That’s the team you’re talking about, Billy. There are four of them, but only two were there at the time, along with Mick Clements and his sidekick from Operations. They were celebrating and I ruined it. I was asking about some of the assumptions built into the financing model and—’

She looked from one face to the other. Not everyone found Excel spreadsheet modelling as compelling as she did.

‘Sorry. Carry on, Billy. But I know who you mean. I think they thought they’d got away with something.’

‘And you were announcing they hadn’t?’ MacLachlan asked.

‘Without meaning to.’

‘I bet their little scam was worth thousands, or would have been.’

‘Ultimately, millions. And it was Mary van Renen who spotted it first. Perhaps they were onto her. It would certainly be enough to give them a motive to keep Cynthia quiet, if she had the slightest suspicion.’

MacLachlan nodded. ‘Worth checking where they were the night she died. Do accountants ever sleep in the Palace?’

‘I can’t imagine why they would,’ the Queen remarked.

‘I’d look into it myself,’ he began. ‘Security keep a record. But I don’t want to stick my head above the parapet, ma’am.’

She nodded in agreement. ‘Thanks for your discretion, Billy. I’d rather you stayed out of this. I know Chief Inspector Strong made a list of overnight guests that night. It’s in the file, isn’t it, Rozie?’

‘It is,’ Rozie confirmed.

‘There are a couple of porters you might want to check too,’ MacLachlan added to Rozie. ‘I’ll give you their names. I can’t see them being criminal masterminds, but they’ve been spending more lavishly than their pay packets suggest. Watches, phones, the odd new car . . .’

‘Stop that!’ the Queen commanded, her voice ringing with authority. Candy emerged from a bush, looking apologetic. The Queen turned back to MacLachlan. ‘I’m so sorry. Do go on. You were talking about criminal masterminds.’

He shrugged. ‘Hopefully Strong’s list will help narrow things down. There’s those we’ve mentioned – Clements, the accountants and the porters – none of whom I’d put in that category at first glance. Plus maybe a security officer or two, though I’m afraid I can’t give you names.’

‘Oh?’ The Queen turned her sharp, blue gaze on him, frowning.

‘Yeah. Bit weird. Came from some gossip on the golf course. One of the old boys, ex-soldier, said he’d been having a drink with some of the current lads at the pub after work – someone’s birthday – and they got on to battlefield injuries. Not in the best of taste, ma’am, but I asked about it for the sake of duty, you know.’

‘I can imagine,’ she agreed.

‘Apparently a big group of them sat round and it got gory. They were egging each other on, sharing ugly ways to die. Quick ways, slow ways. One or two seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge. Ankle-slashing came into it.’

‘And not one of them thought to mention it? When somebody actually died that way in the north-west pavilion?’

‘This was after Mrs Harris died, ma’am. It sounded like the manner of her death inspired the conversation. Sadly, my contact couldn’t remember who said what because there was a big group and he didn’t know everyone. It certainly didn’t make anyone suspicious.’

‘Cynthia Harris had nobody to fight her corner,’ the Queen mused. ‘And if her death was deliberate, I suppose anyone might assume that it had been orchestrated by Mrs Moore, who had reason to hate her the most. She hardly strikes one as an ankle-slasher. Arabella Moore is very popular, I understand.’

‘Very much so,’ Rozie agreed.

‘We don’t like to think of our heroes as being villains, after all.’

‘Could she have done it?’ MacLachlan asked. He had no problem thinking of heroes as villains or vice versa. He knew some women who would make excellent ankle-slashers.

‘No,’ the Queen said. ‘When DCI Strong drew up his list, I distinctly remember him telling me that Mrs Moore was at home with her family that night. He checked, because she was a suspect for the poison pen letters. Her husband and three children can all vouch for her. By the way, did you manage to talk to Spike Milligan about the notes, Rozie? Could he shed any light on the affair?’

‘I’m afraid not, ma’am,’ Rozie said. ‘I mean, I managed to speak to him, but he swore he didn’t know what I was talking about. The poor man looked terrified.’

‘Of you?’

‘Partly.’

‘You can be rather frightening.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. I was trying. But he was more worried about something else. I didn’t scare him into saying anything useful. He was definitely lying to me, but I had nothing specific to accuse him of. I said he’d been overheard, but I couldn’t exactly say who by.’

‘Who did overhear him?’ MacLachlan asked.

‘We don’t need to talk about that right now,’ the Queen said briskly. ‘How irritating.’ She paused, thinking.

Rozie said, ‘So for now, we come back to Mick Clements.’ She was remembering the murderous look in the man’s eye when he found her in the cellars. He would have gone for her, she was fairly certain, if Eric Ferguson hadn’t pulled him back.

‘We do,’ the Queen said. ‘And he was one of the people who sent you on a wild goose chase in the summer, wasn’t he, Rozie?’

She nodded. ‘By sending me off to the old manager with dementia, yes.’

‘Because you had started pulling on a thread,’ the Queen continued. For a moment, it all made sense. But then it didn’t. At worst, Mrs Harris might have told Rozie about the crimes of the nineteen eighties – if she even knew, for which they had no proof – but surely Clements could have distanced himself from those? He might have tried to threaten her into silence, but to go to all the effort and risk of actually killing her? He was impulsive – Rozie had seen that. Was that all it took? Could he have got away with it if it was?

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

MacLachlan was looking at her with some concern. She realised she had been staring at a spot in the distance without speaking for some time.

‘Perfectly fine, thank you.’ She felt close, but not quite there yet. She had a murderer in mind, and a victim. But they refused to meet. ‘It’s all deeply frustrating,’ she admitted.

‘We’ll work it out, ma’am. There’s the pensioners’ party in a couple of days. I don’t normally go, but I’ll pitch up this time and see what I can winkle out of the old-timers.’

‘Thank you, Billy. Of course, there’s always the possibility there was never a murder at all.’

‘I think we agree that’s unlikely,’ MacLachlan said, somewhat unreassuringly, as they tramped back to the boot room.

The Queen went off to get ready for her weekly audience with the Prime Minister. She gave herself seven days to prove to her own satisfaction that someone from Billy’s list could have, and indeed would have, wanted to silence Cynthia Harris enough to kill her that night. If she hadn’t worked it out by then, she would hand the whole thing over to Chief Inspector Strong, just as she had admonished the Master for not doing with his poison pen investigation.

The whole panoply of the press would descend upon them like a marauding horde. They would be besieged and no doubt accused of a cover-up. She sighed. Sometimes the punishment for doing the right thing could be daunting. But some things were too important to be left to amateurs, regardless of the consequences. She had indulged herself enough.