The Hawk Is Dead

77

Tuesday 28 November 2023

In contrast to the classic stately home feel of the wing of Buckingham Palace they were in, the men’s washroom was a surprise to Roy Grace. It looked like it belonged in a modern five-star hotel. A long row of oval basins, in a black-and-white veined marbled effect, and each with a gilded oval mirror above. Each had quality liquid-soap dispensers, free-standing, as if in the knowledge that only respectful people came here, and respectful people did not steal soap.

As the three detectives washed their hands, Mosse, busily looking at his reflection in the mirror and making tiny adjustments to his facial hair said, ‘Roy, I’m glad of this opportunity to clear the air between us. Not just because cooperating is the sensible way forward, but I think you need to be aware of something.’

Grace frowned. ‘I do?’

Mosse shot an irritated glance at Glenn Branson, as if wishing him out of the room. Then he lowered his voice. ‘I’ve just been informed of an ACC vacancy coming up in Sussex Police. I’m going to apply for it and I’ve been told I’ve a good chance of getting it.’

‘Really?’ Grace tried to hide the dismay in his voice. ‘Well, that would be great, Greg.’

‘I was thinking, perhaps — if you wouldn’t mind — you could put in a good word for me, with your Chief?’

‘Of course, I’d be delighted.’

Raising his voice above the whirr of the electric hand-dryer, Mosse said, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t applied for the role yourself.’

‘It’s because I love my job. My rank is the highest rank where it’s still possible to be a hands-on detective. Go any higher and you become desk-bound. That’s not what I joined up for.’

‘You’re not ambitious to become a Chief Constable one day?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m ambitious to solve murders.’

‘Well, maybe if I get the job, I could at some point trade roles with your current boss, ACC Nigel Downing. He might like to have a different responsibility from Major Crime — to broaden his portfolio and next promotion chances. Be fun if we worked together, don’t you think?’

‘I’m sure,’ Grace tried to reply, quietly, but the two words were trapped, like a silver medal, in his gullet.

78

Tuesday 28 November 2023

Rose Cadoret shut the door to Sir Jason’s office. The meeting with the Keeper of the Privy Purse had been short and to the point as he had to dash to the airport for his flight to Amsterdam. As she walked along the corridor and up the stairs, she recalled what she had told Jon Smoke — and only partly in jest — that the room she was now entering was the place she would want to be when the zombies attacked. It was from here that she would make her last stand against them.

The Indian Room. The domain of The King’s Armourer. It was also the room from which the then recently abdicated Duke of Windsor — formerly King Edward VIII — watched the coronation of his brother, King George VI.

Located on the north-east corner of the Principal Corridor of Buckingham Palace, next to the Chinese Dining Room, the Indian Room had tall windows with crimson drapes, giving views across the front courtyard and Green Park, and a magnificent vaulted ceiling. The walls were lined with mostly empty, magnificent inlaid walnut display cases. These were currently in the process of being filled with over three hundred of the most beautiful, lethal and indestructible swords and daggers ever made.

All the blades were different. Some were curved, some wide, some narrow, some with serrated edges, and many with engraved inscriptions. All of them were ornately jewelled but that didn’t detract, in Rose’s view, from the purpose of each of these weapons — which was to kill other human beings in hand-to-hand combat. Many were designed to inflict even more catastrophic damage to the internal organs when being withdrawn from the human torso they had just penetrated, than the entry wound itself.

One of Rose’s first tasks when she had joined the Royal Collection team was to help pack away the contents of the Indian Room into wooden boxes for safe keeping, while the entire floor underwent the renovations. Now she was helping to put everything back up, and ticking each of the six hundred items off on the inventory checklist she had commenced for Lorraine McKnight. And at the moment she was on her own in here.

That inventory was a job that would take the twenty members of the Royal Collection Trust to whom Lorraine had delegated the task many months. Rose would be long gone before then. Long before any of the items the three of them had taken were declared missing.

And besides, who would miss them, really, anyway? Just a relative handful of items worth a few dozen million pounds — a paltry sum when the entire Royal Collection was worth untold billions.

Four years ago, when she’d begun the task of packing up the swords, daggers and armour in here, she had gazed around the display cases, imagining how some of the items had been used, and the wounds they might have inflicted. Nothing in here was purely ornamental. Everything was for maiming and killing. Slicing off heads and limbs, filleting and disembowelling victims. All the fun of the fair!

Almost every single item here had been presented to the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, during his 1875 tour of India. Swords and guns made a good diplomatic gift in those days — they showed off your nation’s power and its technology. Back then the Indian nation was the world leader in sword and dagger technology, through the manufacturing technique of watered crucible steel. It made an Indian weapon the one you’d want to be holding in a sword-fight, because nothing was going to break it. Nothing. And it would be so sharp, you could have shaved with it.

She knelt close to a tiger skin on the carpet and lifted RCIN 11288 — a sword in its scabbard — out of a box. As she did so, she again winced in pain and had to take a break for a few seconds. Then she slid out the heavy, curved sword, with the blade engraved, and almost gasped out loud at its sheer beauty.

It had been a Coronation gift to King Edward VII from the Maharaja of Jaipur, and was decorated with over seven hundred diamonds, in gold settings backed with silver foil, with a total weight of two thousand carats. The scabbard and hilt were gold, enamelled in blue, green and red.

She ran her forefinger along the side of the blade, very carefully.

Rose had so many favourites in here. Among them a Katar, inventory number RCIN 11408, a punch dagger with a thickened armour-piercing tip and velvet hilt. But her favourite of all was RCIN 11289, the Ibrahim dagger. She knelt, stifling another jab of pain from her rib, and lifted it out of the box where it had been stored for the past four years. Then she removed the dagger from its scabbard and held it up. It made a distinct clack-clacking sound as she did so. She loved that sound.

And she loved the shape of this dagger. It flowed, like a jet fighter, a gleaming arc from the jewelled hilt, curving down then upwards to the armoured tip. It was utterly wonderful. And what she loved about it best of all was the groove, cut in sections along the centre of its blade, each containing rows of tiny pearls that rolled along, clack-clacking into each other. They were not just decorative, they were there for a sinister purpose. With good reason they were called ‘The Tears of Allah’ or ‘The Tears of the Afflicted’.

She stood up in the empty room and slashed at an imaginary opponent, the pearls clack-clacking, unable to stop herself crying out, as her rib felt like it had just pierced her midriff. Then, her eyes watering from the pain, she looked at the blade. Imagined it slicing through an enemy’s tunic and then his belly, with no resistance, like a hot knife through butter. She could see his eyes wide with shock and pain, hear his grunt as she twisted it, ripping through his liver and intestines. But most of all she loved the thought that, as he sagged to his knees in agony, haemorrhaging blood internally, light dimming in his eyes, he would be completely unaware that the priceless pearls that had just rolled through his guts and were not there solely for ornamental purposes were now ripping out parts of his vital organs as the dagger was withdrawn.

As she stepped forward and slashed again, she heard a polite cough, and spun round, to see the lean, elegantly suited figure of the humourless Deputy Keeper of the Privy Purse, Michael Innes, standing in the doorway. There was a distinctly disapproving expression on his face.

‘Planning someone’s demise, Rose? Don’t you think we’ve had a high enough body count in the Royal Household for one week?’ His snide voice really irritated her.

‘With respect, sir, it is actually one week and a day ago.’ She smiled, unable to hold back her cheeky reply.

‘Not really a laughing matter, is it?’

‘Not really, no, sir.’

‘Their Majesties are extremely upset — and understandably worried. The Lord Chamberlain has suggested they decamp to Scotland where they can be away from all this and in safety.’

‘That sounds a sensible decision, sir,’ she said.

He nodded, then asked, ‘Inventory check going all right?’

‘It will be a long process.’

‘Sir Jason is very concerned — he tells me he had a sleepless night. Lorraine McKnight phoned him late at his home and reported to him the number of items unaccounted for. Appalling — how can this have happened? You do realize quite how serious this is? We’re not talking a couple of trinkets that have fallen through the cracks — this is part of our nation’s heritage — and a significant part of its wealth.’

‘I’m sure they will all turn up, Sir Michael. Things have been a bit chaotic. I don’t think some of the workmen here quite appreciate the importance of all the items in the Royal Collection. The way some of them have been handled is frankly alarming.’

‘It shouldn’t be, Rose,’ he said, coldly and levelly. ‘The Royal Collection Trust team are paid to look after all the items. If any of the workmen here have mishandled them, this is your team’s fault, not theirs. Perhaps if you took your job a little more seriously rather than playing with daggers, there might be fewer items missing.’

He spun on the heels of his black spit-and-polished Oxfords and strode off.

Rose gave him two fingers behind his back. ‘Wanker!’ she whispered under her breath.

Then she slid the knife back into its scabbard, lifted it up and placed it carefully back in its rightful position in the cabinet. Having done that, she stood back and looked around at the swords and daggers she’d returned to their places in the cabinets, so far. And smiled. Could there be any museum in the world that had a collection quite as beautiful as in here?

This room was truly a hymn to killing.

Smoke had told her she was weird. Maybe she was, but he was one to talk. Her wartime buddy who’d had her back. Friend. Co-conspirator. And now big problem. But conversations with her boss had cleared the way forward and she knew what she had to do.

Smoke and Lorraine McKnight. Two big problems. One would have been eliminated last night if...

If she’d not screwed up.

If that stupid, blind old bat hadn’t sent her flying.

She had planned to try again today. But when she’d woken this morning she felt still shaken up by the accident — cycling was out of the question today. Instead she’d gone to work by Uber, and she felt every damned pothole in the road, in that crappy little electric Prius.

She glanced at her watch. It was coming up to 2.20 p.m. For some days she had considered the unguarded lift entrance up on the footmen’s floor to be the perfect way to get rid of a problem. But right now, she needed to sort two problems.

Both were threats. Smoke because he was a loose cannon. McKnight because of her insistence on an inventory check. Which Rose could manage for a while. But a limited while.

The lift could only be used once.

Which of the two did she need to get rid of the most urgently?

It boiled down to maths. She had to split all proceeds with the others. Smoke, with his erratic behaviour, posed a big risk. With Lorraine McKnight she just had to keep obfuscating until she disappeared — and the plans for that were all in place.

Smoke first was the best plan. Followed by a fast exit.

She ran a finger down the blade of the Maharaja of Jaipur’s sword again. This time she drew blood, but only a small drop. She kissed it away.

You are right, Mr Smoke. Sorry, Lance Corporal Smoke. About what you said. About me being weird. Perhaps, you’re just about to find out exactly how weird.